Bellwether

Rivers are not just wide streams. They are drainage basins for dozens, sometimes hundreds of tributaries. The Lena River in Siberia, for example, drains an area of over a million square miles, including the Karenga, the Olekma, the Vitim, and the Aldan rivers, and a thousand smaller streams and brooks, some of which follow such distant, convoluted courses it would never occur to you they connected to the Lena, thousands of miles away.

The events leading up to a scientific breakthrough are frequently not only random but far afield from science. Take the measles. Einstein had them when he was four and his father was only trying to amuse a sick little boy when he gave him a pocket compass to play with. And the keys to the universe.

Fleming’s life is a whole system of coincidences, beginning with his father, who was a groundskeeper on the Churchill estate. When ten-year-old Winston fell in the lake, Fleming’s father jumped in and rescued him. The grateful family rewarded him by sending his son Alexander to medical school.

Take Penzias and Wilson. Robert Dicke, at Princeton University, talked to P.J.E. Peebles about calculating how hot the Big Bang was. He did, realized it was hot enough to be detectable as a residue of radiation, and told Peter G. Roll and David T. Wilkinson that they should look for microwaves.

Peebles (are you following this?) gave a talk at Johns Hopkins in which he mentioned Roll and Wilkinson’s project. Ken Turner of the Carnegie Institute heard the lecture and mentioned it to Bernard Burke at MIT, a friend of Penzias. (Still with me?)

When Penzias called Burke on something else altogether (his daughter’s birthday party probably), he told Burke about their impossible background noise. And Burke told him to call Wilkinson and Roll.

During the next week several things happened:

I fed flagpole-sitting and mah-jongg data into the computer, Management declared HiTek a smoke-free building, Gina’s daughter, Brittany, turned five, and Dr. Turnbull, of all people, came to see me.

She was wearing a po-mo pink silk campshirt and pink jeans and a friendly smile. The jeans and campshirt meant she was following HiTek’s dressing-down edict. I had no idea what the smile meant.

“Dr. Foster,” she said, turning it on me full force, “just the person I wanted to see.”

“If you’re looking for a package, Dr. Turnbull,” I said warily, “Flip hasn’t been here yet.”

She laughed, a merry, tinkling laugh I wouldn’t have thought she was capable of. “Call me Alicia,” she said. “No package. I just thought I’d drop by and chat with you. You know, so we could get to know each other better. We’ve really only talked a couple of times.”

Once, I thought, and you yelled at me. What are you really here for?

“So,” she said, sitting on one of the lab tables and crossing her legs. “Where did you go to school?”

“Getting to know you” at HiTek usually consists of “So, are you dating anybody?” or, in the case of Elaine, “Are you into high-impact aerobics?” but maybe this was Alicia’s idea of small talk. “I got my doctorate at Baylor.”

She smiled yet more brightly. “It was in sociology, wasn’t it?”

“And stats,” I said.

“A double major,” she said approvingly. “Was that where you did your undergrad work?”

She couldn’t be an industry spy. We worked for the same industry. And all this was up in Personnel’s records anyway. “No,” I said. “Where’d you do your graduate work?”

End of conversation. “Indiana,” she said, as if I’d asked for something that was none of my business, and slid her pink rear off the table, but she didn’t leave. She stood looking around the lab at the piles of data.

“You have so much stuff in here,” she said, examining one of the untidy piles.

Maybe Management had sent her to spy on Workplace Organization. “I plan to get things straightened up as soon as I finish my funding forms,” I said.

She wandered over to look at the flagpole-sitting piles. “I’ve already turned mine in.”

Of course.

“And messiness is good. Susan Holyrood and Dan Twofeathers’s labs were both messy. R. C. Mendez says it’s a creativity indicator.”

I had no idea who any of these people were or what was going on here. Something, obviously. Maybe Management had sent her to look for signs of smoking. Alicia had forgotten all about the friendly smile and was circling the lab like a shark.

“Bennett told me you’re working on fads source analysis. Why did you decide to work with fads?”

“Everybody else was doing it.”

“Really?” she said eagerly. “Who are the other scientists?”

“That was a joke,” I said lamely, and set about the hopeless task of trying to explain it. “You know, fads, something people do just because everybody else is doing it?”

“Oh, I get it,” she said, which meant she didn’t, but she seemed more bemused than offended. “Wittiness can be a creativity indicator, too, can’t it? What do you think the most important quality for a scientist is?”

“Luck,” I said.

Now she did look offended. “Luck?”

“And good assistants,” I said. “Look at Roy Plunkett. His assistant’s using a silver gasket on the tank of chlorofluorocarbons was what led to the discovery of Teflon. Or Becquerel. He had the good luck to hire a young Polish girl to help him with his radiation therapy. Her name was Marie Curie.”

“That’s very interesting,” she said. “Where did you say you did your undergrad work?”

“University of Oregon,” I said.

“How old were you when you got your doctorate?”

We were back to the third degree. “Twenty-six.”

“How old are you now?”

“Thirty-one,” I said, and that was apparently the right answer because she turned the brights back on. “Did you grow up in Oregon?”

“No,” I said. “Nebraska.”

This, on the other hand, was not. Alicia switched off the smile, said, “I have a lot of work to do,” and left without a backward glance. Whatever she’d wanted, apparently witty and messy weren’t enough.

I sat there staring at the screen wondering what that had been all about, and Flip came in wearing an assortment of duct tape and a pair of backless clogs.

She should have used some of the duct tape on the clogs. They slopped off her feet with every step, and she had to half-shuffle her way down the hall to me. The clogs and the duct tape were both the bilious electric blue she’d worn the other day.

“What do you call that color?” I asked.

“Cerenkhov blue.”

Of course. After the bluish radiation in nuclear reactors. How appropriate. In fairness, though, I had to admit it wasn’t the first time a faddish color had been given a wretched name. Back in Louis XVI’s day, color names had been downright nauseating. Sewerage, arsenic, smallpox, and Sick Spaniard had all been hit names for yellow-green.

Flip handed me a piece of paper. “You need to sign this,” she said.

It was a petition to declare the staff lounge a nonsmoking area. “Where will people be allowed to smoke if they can’t smoke in the lounge?” I said.

“They shouldn’t smoke. It causes cancer,” she said righteously. “I think people who smoke shouldn’t be allowed to have jobs.” She tossed her hank of hair. “And they should have to live someplace where their secondhand smoke can’t hurt the rest of us.”

“Really, Herr Goebbels,” I said, forgetting that ignorance is the biggest trend of all, and handed the petition back to her.

“Second-secondhand smoke is dangerous,” she said huffily.

“So is meanness.” I turned back to the computer.

“How much does a crown cost?” she said.

It seemed to be my day for questions out of left field. “A crown?” I said, bewildered. “You mean, like a tiara?”

“No-o-o,” she said. “A crown.”

I tried to picture a crown on top of Flip’s hank of hair, with her hair wrap hanging down one side, and failed. But whatever she was talking about, I’d better pay attention because it was likely to be the next big fad. Flip might be incompetent, insubordinate, and generally insufferable, but she was right there on the cutting edge of fashion.

“A crown,” I said. “Made out of gold?” I pantomimed placing one on my head. “With points?”

“Points?” she said, outraged. “It better not have points. A crown.”

“I’m sorry, Flip,” I said. “I don’t know—”

“You’re a scientist,” she said. “You’re supposed to know scientific terms.”

I wondered if crown had become a scientific term the way duct tape had become a personal errand.

“A crown!” she said, sighed enormously, and clopped out of the lab and down the hall.

It was my day for encounters I couldn’t make heads or tails of, and that included my hair-bobbing data. I was sorry I’d ever gotten the idea of including the other fads of the day. There were way too many of them, and none of them made any sense.

Peanut-pushing, for instance, and flagpole-sitting, and painting knees with rouge. College kids had painted old Model T’s with clever slogans like “Banana oil” and “Oh, you kid!”, middle-aged housewives had dressed up like Chinese maidens and played mah-jongg, and fads had seemed to come out of the woodwork, superseding each other in months and sometimes weeks. The black bottom replaced mah-jongg, which had replaced King Tut, and the whole thing was so chaotic it was impossible to sort out.

Crossword puzzles were the only fad that was halfway reasonable, and even that was a puzzle. The fad had started in the fall of 1924, well after hair-bobbing, but crossword puzzles had been around since the 1800s, and the New York World had published a weekly crossword since 1913.

And reasonable, on closer examination, wasn’t really the word. A minister had passed out crosswords during church that, on being solved, revealed the scripture lesson. Women had worn dresses decorated with black-and-white squares, and hats and stockings to match, and Broadway put on a revue called “Puzzles of 1925.” People had cited crosswords as the cause of their divorces, secretaries wore pocket dictionaries around their wrists like bracelets, doctors warned of eyestrain, and in Budapest a writer left a suicide note in the form of a crossword puzzle, a puzzle, by the way, which the police never solved, probably because they were already consumed with the next fad: the Charleston.

Bennett stuck his head in the door. “Have you got a minute? I need to ask you a question.” He came in. He had changed his checked shirt for a faded plaid one that was neither madras nor Ivy League, and he was carrying a copy of the simplified funding form.

“A two-letter word for an Egyptian sun god?” I said. “It’s Ra.”

He grinned. “No, I was just wondering if Flip had brought you a copy of the memo Management said they’d send around. Explaining the simplified funding form?”

“Yes and no,” I said. “I had to get one from Gina.” I fished it out from a pile of twenties books.

“Great,” he said, “I’ll go make a copy and bring this back.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “You can keep it.”

“You finished filling out your funding forms?”

“No,” I said. “Read the memo.”

He looked at it. “ ‘Page nineteen, Question forty-four-C. To find the primary extensional funding formula, multiply the departmental needs analysis by the fiscal base quotient, unless the project involves calibrated structuring, in which case the quotient should be calculated according to Section W-A of the accompanying instructions.’ ” He turned the paper over. “Where are the accompanying instructions?”

“No one knows,” I said.

He handed the memo back to me. “Maybe I don’t have to go to France to study chaos. Maybe I could study it right here,” he said, shaking his head. “Thanks,” and he started to leave.

“Speaking of which,” I said, “how’s your information diffusion project coming?”

“The lab’s all ready,” he said. “I can get the macaques as soon as I finish this stupid funding form, which should be in about”—he pulled a calculator out of his threadbare pants and punched in numbers—“six thousand years from now.”

Flip slouched in and handed us each a stapled stack of papers.

“What’s this?” Bennett said. “The accompanying instructions?”

“No-o-o,” Flip said, tossing her head. “It’s the FDA report on the health hazards of smoking.”

Tuesday I met the new assistant interdepartmental communications liaison. I’d decided I couldn’t wait any longer for the accompanying instructions and was working on the funding forms when I noticed that the bottom of page 28 read, “List all,” and the top of the next page read, “to the diversification quotient.” I looked at the page number. It read “42.”

I went down to see if Gina had the missing pages. She was sitting in a tangle of sacks, wrapping paper, and ribbons. “You are coming to Brittany’s party, aren’t you?” she said. “You have to come. There are going to be six five-year-olds and six mothers, and I don’t know which is worse.”

“I’ll be there,” I promised, and asked her about the missing pages. “There are missing pages?” she said. “My funding form’s at home. When am I going to be able to fill out missing pages? I’ve still got to go buy plates and cups and decorations and fix the refreshments.”

I escaped and went back to the lab. A gray-haired woman was sitting at the computer, rapidly typing in numbers.

“Sorry,” she said as soon as I came in the room. “Flip said I could use your computer, but I don’t want to get in your way.” She began rapidly touching keys to save the file.

“Are you Flip’s new assistant?” I asked, looking at her curiously. She was thin, with tan, leathery skin, like Billy Ray would have after another thirty years of riding the range.

“Shirl Creets,” she said, shaking my hand. She had a grip like Billy Ray’s, and her fingers were stained a yellowish brown, which explained how Sarah and Elaine had known she was a smoker “just by looking at her.”

“Flip was using Dr. Turnbull’s computer,” she said, and her voice was hoarse, too, “and she told me to come up here and use yours, that you wouldn’t mind. I’ll be off this as soon as I save the file. I haven’t been smoking,” she added.

“You can smoke if you want,” I said. “And you can use the computer. I’ve got to go over to Personnel anyway and pick up a different funding allocation form. This one’s missing pages.”

“I’ll go get it for you,” Shirl said, getting up immediately and taking the form from me. “Which pages is it missing?”

“Twenty-nine through forty-one,” I said, “and maybe some at the end, I don’t know. Mine only goes up to page sixty-eight. But you don’t have to—”

“What are assistants for? Do you want me to make an extra copy so you can do a rough draft?”

“That would be nice, thank you,” I said, in shock, and sat down at the computer.

I had been nice to Flip, and look what it had gotten me. I took it back that Browning knew anything about trends, Pied Piper or no Pied Piper.

The data Shirl had been typing in were still there. It was some kind of table. “Carbanks—48, Twofeathers—34,” it read. “Holyrood—61, Chin—39.” I wondered what project Alicia was working on now.

Shirl was back in five minutes flat, with a stack of neatly collated and stapled sheafs. “I put copies of the missing pages in your original, and made you two extra copies just in case.” She set them gently down on the lab table and handed me another thick sheaf. “While I was in the copy room, I found these clippings. Flip didn’t know who they belonged to. I thought they might be yours.”

She held up a stack of clippings on dance marathons, neatly paper-clipped to a set of copies.

“I assumed you wanted copies,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said, astounded. “I don’t suppose you could talk Flip into assigning you to me?”

“I doubt it,” she said. “She seems to like you.” She set the clippings on the lab table and began straightening the top of it. She fished the chaos theory book out of the mess.

“Mandelbrot diagrams,” she said interestedly. “Is that what you’re researching?”

“No,” I said. “Fad origins. I was just reading that out of curiosity. They are connected, though. Fads are a facet of the chaotic system of society, with a number of variables contributing to them.”

She stacked Brave New World and All’s Well that Ends Well on top of the chaos theory book without comment and picked up Flappers, Flivvers, and Flagpole-Sitters. “What made you choose fads?” she said disapprovingly.

“You don’t like fads?”

“I just think there are more direct ways of influencing society than starting a fad. I had a physics teacher who used to say, ‘Pay no attention to what other people are doing. Do what you want, and you can change the world.’ ”

“Oh, I don’t want to discover how to start them,” I said. “I suppose HiTek does, and that’s why they keep funding the project, although if the mechanism is as complex as it’s beginning to look, they’ll never be able to isolate the critical variable, at which point they’ll probably stop funding me.” I looked at the dance marathon notes. “What I want to do is understand what causes them.”

“Why?” she said curiously.

“Because I just want to understand. Why do people act the way they do? Why do they all suddenly decide to play the same game or wear the same clothes or believe the same thing? In the 1920s smoking was a fad. Now it’s antismoking. Why? Is it instinctive behavior or societal influences? Or something in the air? The Salem witch trials were caused by fear and greed, but they’re always around, and we don’t burn witches all the time, so there must be something else going on.

“I just don’t understand what,” I said. “And it doesn’t look like I will anytime soon. I don’t seem to be getting anywhere. You don’t happen to know what caused hair-bobbing, do you?”

“It’s going slowly?” she said.

“Slow isn’t the word,” I said. I gestured with the marathon dancing copies. “I feel like I’m in a dance marathon contest. Most of the time it’s not dancing at all, it’s just putting one foot in front of the other, trying to hang on and stay awake. Trying to remember why you signed up in the first place.”

“My physics teacher used to say that science was one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” she said.

“And fifty percent filling out nonsimplified funding forms,” I said. I picked up one of the extra copies. “I’d better take one of these over to Gina.”

“I’ve already taken one to Dr. Damati,” she said. “Oh, and I need to get back there. I promised her I’d wrap Brittany’s presents for her.”

“You’re sure you can’t persuade Flip?” I said.

After she left, I started work on page 29, but it didn’t make any more sense than when it had been missing, and I was starting to feel vaguely itch again. I took one of the extra copies and went down to Bio to Bennett’s lab.

Alicia was there, head to head with Bennett at the computer, but he looked up immediately and smiled at me.

“Hi,” he said. “Come on in.”

“No, that’s okay. I didn’t mean to interrupt,” I said, smiling at Alicia. She didn’t smile back. “I just wanted to bring you a complete funding form.” I handed him the funding form. “There were pages missing in the ones Flip passed out.”

“Incompetent,” he said. “Incorrigible. Incapacitating.”

Alicia was actively glaring at me.

“Intruding,” I said. “Which is what I’m doing on your meeting. I’ll talk to you later.” I headed for the door.

“No, wait,” he said. “You’ll be interested in this. Dr. Turnbull was just telling me about her project.” He looked at Alicia. “Tell Dr. Foster what you’ve been doing.”

“I’ve taken the data on all the previous Niebnitz Grant winners: scientific discipline, project area, educational background—”

That explained the third degree I’d gotten from her yesterday. She had been trying to determine if I fit the profile, and from the look she was giving me, I must not have even placed.

“—age, gender, ethnic group, political affiliation.” She scrolled through several screens, and I recognized a chart like the one Shirl had just been working on. “I’m running regressions to determine the relevant characteristics and then analyzing those to construct a profile of the typical Niebnitz Grant recipient and the criteria the Niebnitz Grant Committee uses to make their choices.”

The committee’s criteria were originality of thought and creativity, I thought. Assuming there is a committee.

“I haven’t completed the regressions yet, but some patterns are emerging.” She called up a spreadsheet. “The grant is given at a median interval of one point nine years apart, but the closest two grants have ever been given is one point two years, which means the grant won’t be given until May at the earliest.”

It didn’t mean any such thing, and I would have said so, but she was into it now.

“Distribution of the awards follows a cyclical pattern, with academic institutions, research labs, and commercial corporations alternating, the next one being a corporation, which gives us an advantage, and”—she switched to a different spreadsheet—“there is a definite bias toward scientists west of the Mississippi, which is also an advantage, and a bias toward the biological sciences. I haven’t determined the specific area yet, but I should have that part of the profile by tomorrow.”

All of which sounded suspiciously like science on demand. I looked at Bennett to see what he thought about all this, but he was watching the screen intently, abstractedly, as if he’d forgotten we were there.

Well, of course he was interested. Why wouldn’t he be? If he could win the Niebnitz Grant, he could go back to the Loue River to work on chaos theory and forget all about forms and Flip and the uncertainties of funding.

Except science doesn’t work like that. You can’t handicap significant breakthroughs like they were a horse race.

But this wouldn’t be the first time somebody’d convinced himself of something that wasn’t true where money was involved. Take the stock market fad of the late twenties. Or the Dutch tulip craze of the 1600s. In 1634, the prices of tulips that were fancier or prettier or rarer than others started going up, and suddenly everybody—merchants, princes, peasants, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives—was buying and selling bulbs like mad. Prices skyrocketed, speculators made fortunes overnight, and people hocked their wooden shoes and the dike to buy a bulb that might cost as much as twelve annual incomes. And then for no reason, the market collapsed, and it was just like October 29, 1929, only with no skyscraper windows for Dutch stockholders to fling themselves out of.

Not to mention chain letters, pyramid schemes, and the Florida land boom.

“The other factor that needs to be considered is the name of the grant,” Alicia was saying. “Niebnitz may refer either to Ludwig Niebnitz, who was an obscure eighteenth-century botanist, or to Karl Niebnitz von Drull, who lived in fifteenth-century Bavaria. If it’s Ludwig, that would account for the biological bias. Von Drull was more famous. His area was alchemy.”

“I have to go,” I said, standing up. “If I’m going to switch my fads project to changing lead into gold, I’ll need to get busy,” and I walked out.

Bennett followed me out into the hall. “Thanks for bringing the funding form.”

“We have to stick together against the forces of Flip,” I said. “Have you met her new assistant?”

“Yeah, she’s great,” he said. “I wonder whatever possessed her to take a job like this?”

“NIEBNITZ may also be an acronym,” Alicia said from the doorway. “In which case—”

I took my leave and went back up to my lab.

Flip was there, typing something on my computer. “How would you describe me?” she asked.

I looked around the lab. It was spotless. Shirl had cleaned off the lab tables and put all my clippings in folders. In alphabetical order.

Inescapable, I thought. Impacted. “Inextricable,” I said.

“That sounds good,” she said. “Does it have two ks or one?”

Wednesday I went to the birthday party. I’d arranged to leave early and was putting on my coat when Flip slouched in, wearing a laced bodice and duct-tape-decorated jeans, and handed me a piece of paper.

“I don’t have time for any petitions,” I said.

“It’s not a petition,” she said, tossing her hair. “It’s a memo about the funding forms.”

The memo said the funding forms were due on the twenty-third, which I already knew.

“You’re supposed to turn the form in to me.”

I nodded and handed it back to her. “Take this down to Dr. O’Reilly’s lab,” I said, pulling on my gloves.

She sighed. “He’s never there. He’s always in Dr. Turnbull’s lab.”

“Then take it to Dr. Turnbull’s lab.”

“They’re always together. He’s completely raved about her, you know.”

No, I thought, I didn’t know that.

“They’re always sitting at the computer together. I don’t know what she sees in him. He’s completely swarb,” Flip said, picking at the duct tape on the back of her hand. “Maybe she can make him not so fashion-impaired.”

And if she does, I thought irritatedly, there goes his nonfadness, and I’ll never figure out why he was immune to them.

“What does sophisticated mean?” Flip asked.

“Cosmopolitan,” I said, “but you’re not,” and left for the party. The weather had turned colder. We usually get one big snowstorm in October, and it looked like the weather was gearing up for it.

Gina was nearly hysterical by the time I got there. “You won’t believe what Brittany decided she wanted after I said she couldn’t have Barney,” she said, pointing to the decorations, which were a pink that bore no relation to postmodern.

“Barbie!” Brittany shouted. She was wearing a Little Mermaid dress and bright pink hair wraps. “Did you bring me a present?”

The other little girls were all wearing Pocahontas pinafores except for a sweet little blonde named Peyton, who was wearing a Lion King jumper and light-up sneakers.

“Are you married?” Peyton’s mother said to me.

“No,” I said.

She shook her head. “So many guys have intimacy issues these days. Peyton, we’re not opening presents yet.”

“Are you dating anyone?” Lindsay’s mother said.

“We’re going to open presents later, Brittany,” Gina said. “First we’re all going to play a game. Bethany, it’s Brittany’s birthday.”

She attempted a game involving balloons with pink Barbies on them and then gave up and let Brittany open her presents.

“Open Sandy’s first,” Gina said, handing her the book. “No, Caitlin, these are Brittany’s presents.”

Brittany ripped the paper off Toads and Diamonds and looked at it blankly.

“That was my favorite fairy tale when I was little,” I said. “It’s about a girl who meets a good fairy, only she doesn’t know it because the fairy’s in disguise—” but Brittany had already tossed it aside and was ripping open a Barbie doll in a glittery dress.

“Totally Hair Barbie!” she shrieked.

“Mine,” Peyton said, and made a grab that left Brittany holding nothing but Barbie’s arm.

“She broke Totally Hair Barbie!” Brittany wailed.

Peyton’s mother stood up and said calmly, “Peyton, I think you need a time-out.”

I thought Peyton needed a good swat, or at least to have Totally Hair Barbie taken away from her and given back to Brittany, but instead her mother led her to the door of Gina’s bedroom. “You can come out when you’re in control of your feelings,” she said to Peyton, who looked like she was in control to me.

“I can’t believe you’re still using time-outs,” Chelsea’s mother said. “Everybody’s using holding now.”

“Holding?” I asked.

“You hold the child immobile on your lap until the negative behavior stops. It produces a feeling of interceptive safety.”

“Really,” I said, looking toward the bedroom door. I would have hated trying to hold Peyton against her will.

“Holding’s been totally abandoned,” Lindsay’s mother said. “We use EE.”

“EE?” I said.

“Esteem Enhancement,” Lindsay’s mother said. “EE addresses the positive peripheral behavior no matter how negative the primary behavior is.”

“Positive peripheral behavior?” Gina said dubiously.

“When Peyton took the Barbie away from Brittany just now,” Lindsay’s mother said, obviously delighted to explain, “you would have said, ‘My, Peyton, what an assertive grip you have.’ ”

Brittany opened Swim ’n’ Dive Barbie, Stick ’n’ Peel Barbie, Barbie’s City Nights cycle, and an elaborately coiffed and veiled Barbie in a wedding dress. “Romantic Bride Barbie,” Brittany said, transported.

“Can we have cake now?” Lindsay said, and Peyton must have had her little ear to the door because she opened it, looking not particularly contrite, said, “I feel better about myself now,” and climbed up to the table.

“No cake,” Gina said. “Too much cholesterol. Frozen yogurt and Snapple,” and all the little girls came running as if they’d heard the Pied Piper’s flute.

The mothers and I picked up wrapping paper and ribbon, checking carefully for stray Barbie high heels and microscopic accessories. Danielle’s mother smoothed down Romantic Bride Barbie’s net overskirt. “I wonder if Lisa’d like a dress like this,” she said. “She’s trying to talk Eric into getting married sometime this summer.”

“Are you going to be her matron of honor?” Chelsea’s mother asked. “What colors is she going to have?”

“She hasn’t decided. Black and white is really in, but she already did that the last time she got married.”

“Postmodern pink,” I said. “It’s the new color for spring.”

“I look washed out in pink,” Danielle’s mother said. “And she’s still got to talk him into it. He says, why can’t they just live together?”

Lindsay’s mother picked up Romantic Bride Barbie and began fluffing up her bouffant sleeves. “I always said I’d never get married again, after that jerk Matt,” she said. “But I don’t know, lately I’ve been feeling sort of… I don’t know…”

Itch? I thought.

The phone rang, and Gina went into the bedroom to get it, and everybody else adjourned to the kitchen.

There was a shriek from the kitchen, and everybody went in to enhance esteem. I picked up Romantic Bride Barbie and looked at the pink net rosebuds and white satin flounces, marveling. Barbie’s a fad that should have lasted, at the most, for two seasons. Even the Shirley Temple doll had only been a fad for three.

Instead, Barbie’s well into her thirties and more of a fad than ever, even in these days of feminism and non-gender-biased child-rearing. She’d be the perfect thing to study for what causes fads, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Barbie’s one of those fads whose popularity makes you lose all faith in the human race.

Gina came out of the bedroom. “It’s for you,” she said, looking speculatively at me. “You can take it in the bedroom.”

I put down Romantic Bride Barbie and stood up.

“It’s my birthday!” Brittany shrieked.

“My, Peyton,” Lindsay’s mother said, “what a creative thing to do with your frozen yogurt.”

Gina hurried into the kitchen, and I went into the bedroom.

It was done in violets, with a purple cordless phone. I picked it up.

“Howdy,” Billy Ray said. “Guess where I’m calling from?”

“How did you find out I was here?”

“I called HiTek, and your assistant told me.”

“Flip gave you the number?” I said. “Correctly?”

“I don’t know what her name was. Raspy voice. Coughed a lot.”

Shirl. She must be putting some more of Alicia’s data on my computer.

“Well, so, listen, I’m on my way through the Rockies right now and—hang on. Tunnel coming up. Call you back as soon as I’m through it.” There was a hum, and a click.

I hung up the phone and sat there on Gina’s violet-covered bed, wondering how Billy Ray ever got any ranching done when he was never at the ranch, and pondering the appeal of Barbie.

Part of it must be that she’s been able to incorporate other fads over the years. In the mid-sixties, Barbie had ironed hair and Carnaby Street clothes, in the seventies granny dresses, in the eighties leotards and leg warmers.

Nowadays there are astronaut Barbies and management Barbies, and even a doctor, though it’s hard to imagine Barbie making it through junior high, let alone medical school.

Billy Ray had apparently forgotten all about me, and so had Peyton’s mother. She opened the door, said, “…and I want you to stay in timeout until you’ve decided to relate to your peers,” and ushered in a frozen yogurt-covered Peyton.

Neither of them saw me, especially not Peyton, who flung herself against the door, red-faced and whimpering, and then, when it was apparent that wasn’t going to work, dropped to her hands and knees next to the bed and pulled out a tablet and crayons.

She sat down cross-legged in the middle of the floor, opened the box of crayons, selected a pink one, and began to draw.

“Hi,” I said, and was happy to see her jump a foot. “What are you doing?”

“You’re not supposed to talk in a time-out,” she said righteously.

You’re not supposed to color either, I thought, wishing Billy Ray would remember he was calling me back.

She selected a green crayon and bent over the tablet, drawing earnestly. I moved the phone around to the other side of the bed so I could see the picture.

“What are you drawing?” I asked. “A butterfly?”

She rolled her eyes. “No-o-o,” she said. “It’s a story.”

“A story?” I said, tilting my head around to see it better. “About what?”

“About Barbie.” She sighed, a dead ringer for Flip, and chose a bright blue crayon.

Why do only the awful things become fads? I thought. Eye-rolling and Barbie and bread pudding. Why never chocolate cheesecake or thinking for yourself?

I looked more closely at the picture. It looked more like a Mandelbrot diagram than a story. It appeared to be some sort of map, or maybe a diagram, with many lines of tiny lavender stars and pink zigzag symbols intersecting across the paper. Peyton had obviously been working on it during a number of time-outs.

“What’s this?” I said, pointing at a row of purple zigzags.

“See,” she said, bringing the tablet and the crayons up onto my lap, “Barbie went to her Malibu Beach House.” She drew a scalloped blue line above the zigzags. “It’s very far. They had to go in her Jaguar.”

“And that’s this line?” I said, pointing at the blue scallops.

“No-o-o,” she said, irritated at all these interruptions. “That’s to show what she was wearing. See, when she goes to the Malibu Beach House she wears her blue hat. So they all got to the Malibu Beach House,” she said, walking her crayon like a doll across the paper, “and Barbie said, ‘Let’s go swimming,’ and I said, ‘Okay, let’s,’ and…” There was a pause while Peyton found an orange crayon. “And Barbie said, ‘Let’s go!’ and we went swimming.” She began drawing a row of rapid sideways zigzags.

“Is that her swimming suit?” I asked.

“No-o-o,” she said. “That’s Barbie.”

Barbie? I thought, wondering what the symbolism of the zigzags was. Of course. Barbie’s high heels.

“So the next day,” Peyton said, selecting yellow orange and drawing spiky suns, “Barbie said, ‘Let’s go shopping,’ and I said, ‘Okay, let’s,’ and she said, ‘Let’s ride our mopeds,’ and I said—”

Billy Ray came out of his tunnel, and I got the phone switched on almost before it rang. “So you’re on your way to Denver?” I said.

“Nope. Other direction. Durango. Conference on teleconferences. I got to thinking about you and thought I’d call. Do you ever get to hankering for something besides what you’re doing?”

“Yes,” I said fervently, reading the names of the crayons Peyton had discarded. Periwinkle. Screamin’ green. Cerulean blue.

“—so Barbie said, ‘Hi, Ken,’ and Ken said, ‘Hi, Barbie, want to go on a date?’ ” Peyton said, busily drawing lines.

“Me too,” Billy Ray said. “I’ve been thinking, is this really what I want?”

“Didn’t the sheep work out?”

“The Targhees? No, they’re doing fine. It’s this whole ranching thing. It’s so isolated.”

Except for the fax and the net and the cell phone, I thought.

“…so Barbie said, ‘I don’t want to be in time-out,’ ” Peyton said, wielding a black crayon. “ ‘Okay,’ Barbie’s mom said, ‘you don’t have to.’ ”

“Do you ever get to feeling…,” Billy Ray said, “…kinda… I don’t know what to call it…”

I do, I thought. Itch. And does that mean this unsettled, dissatisfied feeling is some sort of fad, too, like tattoos and violets? And if so, how did it get started?

I sat up straighter on the bed. “When exactly did you start having this feeling?” I asked him, but there was already an ominous hum from the cell phone.

“Another tunnel,” Billy Ray said. “We’ll talk about it some more when I get back. I’ve got something I want to—” and the phone went dead.

Lindsay’s mother had talked about feeling itch, and so had Flip, that day in the coffeehouse, and I had felt so vaguely longing I’d gone out with Billy Ray. Had I spread the feeling on to him, like some kind of virus, and was that how fads spread, by infection?

“Your turn,” Peyton said, holding out a neon-red crayon. Radical red.

“Okay,” I said, taking the crayon. “So Barbie decided to go to…” I drew a line of radical red high heels across the blue scallops. “…the barbershop. ‘I want my hair bobbed,’ she said to the barber.” I started a line of aquamarine scissors. “And the barber said, ‘Why?’ And Barbie said, ‘Because everybody else is doing it.’ So the barber chopped off Barbie’s hair and—”

“No-o,” Peyton said, grabbing the aquamarine away from me and handing me laser lemon. “This is Cut ’n’ Curl Barbie.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay. So the barber said, ‘But somebody had to do it first, and they couldn’t do it because everybody else was doing it, so why did they’—”

There was a sound at the door, and Peyton snatched the laser lemon out of my hand, flipped the tablet shut, stowed them both under the bed with amazing speed, and was sitting on the edge of it with her hands folded in her lap when her mother opened the door.

“Peyton, we’re watching a video now. Do—” she said, and stopped when she saw me. “You didn’t talk to Peyton while she was in her timeout, did you?”

“Not a word,” I said.

She turned back to Peyton. “Do you think you can exhibit positive peer behavior now?”

Peyton nodded wisely and tore out of the room, her mother following. I put the phone back on the nightstand and started after her, and then stopped and recovered the tablet from its hiding place and looked at it again.

It was a map, in spite of what Peyton had said. A combination map and diagram and picture, with an amazing amount of information packed onto one page: location, time elapsed, outfits worn. An amazing amount of data.

And it intersected in interesting ways, the lines crossing and recrossing to form elaborate intersections, radical red changing to lavender and orange in overlay. Barbie only rode her moped in the lower half of the picture, and there was a solid knot of stars in one corner. A statistical anomaly?

I wondered if a diagram-map-story like this would work for my twenties data. I’d tried maps and statistical charts and computational models, but never all three together, color-coded for date and vector and incidence. If I put it all together, what kinds of patterns would emerge?

There was a shriek from the living room. “It’s my birthday!” Brittany wailed.

I tucked the tablet back under the bed.

“My, Peyton,” Lindsay’s mother said. “What a creative way to show your need for attention.”

Thursday the weather got worse. It was spitting snow when I got to work, and by lunch it was a full-blown blizzard. Flip had managed to break both copy machines, so I gathered up my flagpole-sitting clippings to be copied at Kinko’s, but as I walked out to my car I decided they could wait, and I scuttled back to the building, my head down against the snow. And practically ran into Shirl.

She was huddled next to a minivan, smoking a cigarette. She had a brown mitten on the hand that wasn’t holding the cigarette, her coat collar was turned up, a muffler was wrapped around her chin, and she was shivering.

“Shirl!” I shouted against the wind. “What are you doing out here?”

She clumsily fished a piece of paper out of her coat pocket with her mittened hand and handed it to me. It was a memo declaring the entire building smoke-free.

“Flip,” I said, shaking snow off the already wet memo. “She’s behind this.” I crumpled the memo up and threw it on the ground. “Don’t you have a car?” I said.

She shook her head, shivering. “I get a ride to work.”

“You can sit in my car,” I said, and thought of a better place. “Come on.” I took hold of her arm. “I know someplace you can smoke.”

“The whole building’s been declared off-limits to smoking,” she said, resisting.

“This place isn’t in the building,” I said.

She stubbed out her cigarette. “This is a kind thing to do for an old lady,” she said, and we both scuttled back to the building through the driving snow.

We stopped inside the door to shake the snow off and take off our hats. Her leathery face was bright red with cold.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said, unwrapping her muffler.

“When you’ve spent as much time studying fads as I have, you develop a hearty dislike for them,” I said. “Especially aversion fads. They seem to bring out the worst in people. And it’s the principle of the thing. Next it might be chocolate cheesecake. Or reading. Come on.”

I led her down the hall. “This place won’t be warm, but it’ll be out of the wind, and you won’t get snowed on, at least. And this antismoking fad should be dying out by spring. It’s reaching the extreme stage that inevitably produces a backlash.”

“Prohibition lasted thirteen years.”

“The law did. The fad didn’t. McCarthyism only lasted four.” I started down the stairs to Bio.

“Where exactly is this place?” Shirl asked.

“It’s Dr. O’Reilly’s lab,” I said. “It’s got a porch out back with an overhang.”

“And you’re sure he won’t mind?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “He never pays any attention to what other people think.”

“He sounds like an extraordinary young man,” Shirl said, and I thought, He really is.

He didn’t fit any of the usual patterns. He certainly wasn’t a rebel, refusing to go along with fads to assert his individuality. Rebellion can be a fad, too, as witness Hell’s Angels and peace symbols. And yet he wasn’t oblivious either. He was funny and intelligent and observant.

I tried to explain that to Shirl as we went downstairs to Bio. “It isn’t that he doesn’t care what other people think. It’s just that he doesn’t see what it has to do with him.”

“My physics teacher used to say Diogenes shouldn’t have wasted his time looking for an honest man,” Shirl said, “he should have been looking for somebody who thought for himself.”

I started down Bio’s hall, and it suddenly occurred to me that Alicia might be in the lab. “Wait here a sec,” I said to Shirl, and peeked in the door. “Bennett?”

He was hunched over his desk, practically hidden by papers.

“Can Shirl smoke out on the porch?” I said.

“Sure,” he said without looking up.

I went out and got Shirl.

“You can smoke in here if you want,” Bennett said when we came in.

“No, she can’t. HiTek’s made the whole building nonsmoking,” I said. “I told her she could smoke out on the porch.”

“Sure,” he said, standing up. “Feel free to come down here anytime. I’m always here.”

“Oh?” Shirl said. “You work on your project even during lunch?”

He told her he didn’t have a project to work on and he had to wait for his funding to be approved before he could get his macaques, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was looking at what he was wearing.

Flip had been right about Bennett. He was wearing a white shirt and a Cerenkhov blue tie.

“I’ve been working on this chaos thing,” he said, straightening the tie.

“Did Alicia decide chaos theory was the optimum project to win the Niebnitz Grant?” I said, and couldn’t keep the sharpness out of my voice.

“No,” he said, frowning at me. “When she was talking about variables the other day, it gave me an idea about why my prediction rate didn’t improve. So I refigured the data.”

“And did it help?” I said.

“No,” he said, looking abstracted, the way he had when Alicia’d been talking. “The more work I do on it, the more I think maybe Verhoest was right, and there is an outside force acting on the system.” He said to Shirl, “You’re probably not interested in this. Here, let me show you where the porch is.” He led her through the habitat to the back door. “When my macaques come, you’ll have to go around the side.” He opened the door, and snow and wind whirled in. “Are you sure you don’t want to smoke inside? You could stand in the door. Leave the door open at least so there’s some heat.”

“I was born in Montana,” she said, wrapping her muffler around her neck as she went out. “This is a mild summer breeze,” but I noticed she left the door open.

Bennett came back in, rubbing his arms. “Brr, it’s freezing out there. What’s the matter with people? Sending an old lady out in the snow in the name of moral righteousness. I suppose Flip was behind it.”

“Flip is behind everything.” I looked at the littered desk. “I guess I’d better let you get back to work. Thanks for letting Shirl smoke down here.”

“No, wait,” he said. “I had a couple of things I wanted to ask you about the funding form.” He scrabbled through the stuff on his desk and came up with the form. He flipped through pages, looking. “Page fifty-one, section eight. What does Documentation Scatter Method mean?”

“You’re supposed to put down ALR-Augmented,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“I have no idea. It’s what Gina told me to put.”

He penciled it in, shaking his head. “These funding forms are going to be the death of me. I could have done the project in the time it’s taken me to fill out this form. HiTek wants us to win the Niebnitz Grant, to make scientific breakthroughs. But name me one scientist who ever made a significant breakthrough while filling out a funding form. Or attending a meeting.”

“Mendeleev,” Shirl said.

We both turned around. Shirl was standing inside the door, shaking snow off her hat. “Mendeleev was on his way to a cheesemaking conference when he solved the problem of the periodic chart,” she said.

“That’s right, he was,” Bennett said. “He stepped on the train and the solution came to him, just like that.”

“Like Poincaré,” I said. “Only he stepped on a bus.”

“And discovered Fuchsian functions,” Bennett said.

“Kekulé was on a bus, too, wasn’t he, when he discovered the benzene ring,” Shirl said thoughtfully. “In Ghent.”

“He was,” I said, surprised. “How do you know so much about science, Shirl?”

“I have to make copies of so many scientific reports, I figured I might as well read them,” she said. “Didn’t Einstein look at the town clock from a bus while he was working on relativity?”

“A bus,” I said. “Maybe that’s what you and I need, Bennett. We take a bus someplace and suddenly everything’s clear—you know what’s wrong with your chaos data and I know what caused hair-bobbing.”

“That sounds like a great idea,” Bennett said. “Let’s—”

“Oh, good, you’re here, Bennett,” Alicia said. “I need to talk to you about the grant profile. Shirl, make five copies of this.” She dumped a stack of papers into Shirl’s arms. “Collated and stapled. And this time don’t put them on my desk. Put them in my mailbox.” She turned back to Bennett. “I need you to help me come up with additional relevant factors.”

“Transportation,” I said, and started for the door. “And cheese.”

During the next few days, nothing much happened. The simplified funding allocation forms were due on the twenty-third, and, after donating yet another weekend to filling them out, I gave mine to Flip to deliver and then thought better of it and took it up to Paperwork myself.

The weather turned nice again, Elaine tried to talk me into going white-water rafting with her to relieve stress, Sarah told me her boyfriend, Ted, was experiencing attachment aversion, Gina asked me if I knew where to find Romantic Bride Barbie for Bethany (who had decided she wanted one just like Brittany’s and whose birthday was in November), and I got three overdue notices for Browning, The Complete Works.

In between, I finished entering all my King Tut and black bottom data and started drawing a Barbie picture. I didn’t have a box of sixty-four crayons, but there was a paintbox on the computer. I called it up, along with my statistical and differential equations programs, and started coding the correlations and plotting the relationships to each other. I graphed skirt lengths in cerulean blue, cigarette sales in gray, plotted lavender regressions for Isadora Duncan and yellow ones for temps above eighty-five. White for Irene Castle, radical red for references to rouge, brown for “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.”

Flip came in periodically to hand me petitions and ask me questions like, “If you had a fairy godmother, what would she look like?”

“An old lady,” I said, thinking of Toads and Diamonds, “or a bird, or something ugly, like a toad. Fairy godmothers disguise themselves so they can tell if you’re deserving of help by whether you’re nice to them. What do you need one for?”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re not supposed to ask interdepartmental communications liaisons personal questions. If they’re in disguise, how do you know to be nice to them?”

“You’re supposed to be nice in general—” I said and realized it was hopeless. “What’s the petition for?”

“It’s to make HiTek give us dental insurance, of course,” she said.

Of course.

“You don’t think it’s my assistant, do you?” Flip said. “She’s an old lady.”

I handed her back the petition. “I doubt very much that Shirl is your fairy godmother in disguise.”

“Good,” she said. “There’s no way I’m going to be nice to somebody who smokes.”

I didn’t see Bennett, who was busy preparing for the arrival of his macaques, or Shirl, who was doing all Flip’s work, but I did see Alicia. She came up to the lab, wearing po-mo pink, and demanded to borrow my computer.

“Flip’s using mine,” she said irately, “and when I told her to get off, she refused. Have you ever met anyone who was that rude?”

That was a tough one. “How’s the search for the Philosopher’s Stone going?” I said.

“I’ve definitely eliminated circumstantial predisposition as a criterion,” she said, shifting my data to the lab table. “Only two Niebnitz Grant recipients have ever made a significant scientific breakthrough subsequent to their winning of the award. And I’ve narrowed down the project approach to a cross-discipline-designed experiment, but I still haven’t determined the personal profile. I’m still evaluating the variables.” She popped my disk out and shoved her own in.

“Have you taken disease into account?” I said.

She looked irritated. “Disease?”

“Diseases have played a big part in scientific breakthroughs. Einstein’s measles, Mendeleev’s lung trouble, Darwin’s hypochondria. The bubonic plague. They closed down Cambridge because of it, and Newton had to go back home to the apple orchard.”

“I hardly see—”

“And what about their shooting skills?”

“If you’re trying to be funny—”

“Fleming’s rifle-shooting skills were why St. Mary’s wanted him to stay on after he graduated as a surgeon. They needed him for the hospital rifle team, only there wasn’t an opening in surgery, so they offered him a job in microbiology.”

“And what exactly does Fleming have to do with the Niebnitz Grant?”

“He was circumstantially predisposed to significant scientific breakthroughs. What about their exercise habits? James Watt solved the steam engine problem while he was taking a walk, and William Rowan Hamilton—”

Alicia snatched up her papers and ejected her disk. “I’ll use someone else’s computer,” she said. “It may interest you to know that statistically, fad research has absolutely no chance at all.”

Yes, well, I knew that. Particularly the way it was going right now. Not only did my diagram not look nearly as good as Peyton’s, but no butterfly outlines had appeared. Except the Marydale, Ohio, one, which was not only still there, but had been reinforced by the rolled-down stockings and crossword puzzle data.

But there was nothing for it but to keep slogging through the crocodile-and tsetse fly-infested tributaries. I calculated prediction intervals on Couéism and the crossword puzzle, and then started feeding in the related hairstyle data.

I couldn’t find the clippings on the marcel wave. I’d given them to Flip a week and a half ago, along with the angel data and the personal ads. And hadn’t seen any of it since.

I sorted through the stacks next to the computer on the off chance she’d brought it back and just dumped it somewhere, and then tracked Flip down in Supply, making long strands of Desiderata’s hair into hair wraps.

“The other day I gave you a bunch of stuff to copy,” I said to Flip. “There were some articles about angels and a bunch of clippings about hair-bobbing. What did you do with them?”

Flip rolled her eyes. “How would I know?”

“Because I gave them to you to copy. Because I need them, and they’re not in my lab. There were some clippings about marcel waves,” I persisted. “Remember? The wavy hairdo you liked?” I made a series of crimping motions next to my hair, hoping she’d remember, but she was wrapping Desiderata’s wrappers with duct tape. “There was a page of personal ads, too.”

That clearly rang a bell. She and Desiderata exchanged looks, and she said, “So now you’re accusing me of stealing?”

“Stealing?” I said blankly. Angel articles and marcel wave clippings?

“They’re public, you know. Anybody can write in.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. Public?

“Just because you circled him doesn’t mean he’s yours.” She yanked on Desiderata’s hair. Desiderata yelped. “Besides, you already have that rodeo guy.”

The personals, I thought, the light dawning. We’re talking about the personal ads. Which explained her asking me about elegant and sophisticated. “You answered one of the personal ads?” I said.

“Like you didn’t know. Like you and Darrell didn’t have a big laugh over it,” she said, and flung down the duct tape and ran out of the room.

I looked at Desiderata, who was trailing a long ragged end of duct tape from the hair wrap. “What was that all about?” I said.

“He lives on Valmont,” she said.

“And?” I said, wishing I understood at least something that was said to me.

“Flip lives south of Baseline.”

I was still looking blank.

Desiderata sighed. “Don’t you get it? She’s geographically incompatible.”

She also has an i on her forehead, I thought, which somebody looking for elegant and sophisticated must have found daunting. “His name’s Darrell?” I asked.

Desiderata nodded, trying to wind the end of the duct tape around her hair. “He’s a dentist.”

The crown, I thought. Of course.

“I think he’s totally swarb, but Flip really likes him.”

It was hard to imagine Flip liking anyone, and we were getting off the main issue. She had taken the personal ads, and done what with the rest of the articles? “You don’t know where she might have put my marcel wave clippings, do you?”

“Gosh, no,” Desiderata said. “Did you look in your lab?”

I gave up and went down to the copy room to try to find them myself. Flip apparently never copied anything. There were huge piles on both sides of the copier, on top of the copier lid, and on every flat surface in the room, including two waist-high piles on the floor, stacked in layers like sedimentary rock formations.

I sat down cross-legged on the floor and started through them: memos, reports, a hundred copies of a sensitivity exercise that started with “List five things you like about HiTek,” a letter marked URGENT and dated July 6, 1988.

I found some notes I’d taken on Pet Rocks and the receipt from somebody’s paycheck, but no marcel waves. I scooted over and started on the next stack.

“Sandy,” a man’s voice said from the door.

I looked up. Bennett was standing there. Something was clearly wrong. His sandy hair was awry and his face was gray under his freckles.

“What is it?” I said, scrambling to my feet.

He gestured, a little wildly, at the sheaf of papers in my hand. “You didn’t find my funding allocation application in there, did you?”

“Your funding allocation form?” I said bewilderedly. “It had to be turned in Monday.”

“I know,” he said, raking his hand through his hair. “I did turn it in. I gave it to Flip.”