Bellwether (16 page)

He shook his head. “They’re too independent. I need an animal with a strong herd instinct.”

What about “The Pied Piper”? I thought.

“And even lab rats cost money,” he said.

“What about the pound?” I said. “They’ve probably got cats. No, not cats. Dogs. Dogs have pack behavior, and the pound has lots of dogs.”

He was looking almost as disgusted as Flip. “I thought you were an expert on fads. Haven’t you ever heard of animal rights?”

“But you’re not going to do anything to them. You’re just going to observe them,” I said, but he was right. I’d forgotten about the animal rights movement. They’d never let us use animals from the pound. “What about the other Bio projects? Maybe you could borrow some of their lab animals.”

“Dr. Kelly’s working with nematodes, and Dr. Riez is working with flatworms.”

And Dr. Turnbull’s working on ways to win the Niebnitz Grant, I thought.

“Besides,” he said, “even if I had animals, I couldn’t feed them. I didn’t get my funding form in on time, remember? It’s okay,” he said at the look on my face. “This’ll give me a chance to go back to chaos theory.”

For which there isn’t any funding, I thought, even if you do turn in the forms.

“Well,” he said, standing up. “I’d better go start typing my resume.”

He looked at me seriously. “Thanks again for helping me. I mean it.” He started down the hall.

“Don’t give up yet,” I said. “I’ll think of something.” This from someone who couldn’t figure out what had caused the angels fad, let alone hair-bobbing.

He shook his head. “We’re up against Flip here. It’s bigger than both of us.”

chain letters (spring 1935)—–
Moneymaking fad which involved sending a dime to the name at the top of a list, adding your name to the bottom, and sending five copies of the letter to friends, who, hopefully, were as gullible as you were. Caused by greed and a lack of understanding of statistics, the fad sprang up in Denver, deluging the post office with nearly a hundred thousand letters a day. It lasted three weeks in Denver, then moved on to Springfield, where dollar and five-dollar chains circulated for a frenzied two weeks before the inevitable collapse. Mutated into Circle of Gold (1978), which passed the letters in person, and various pyramid schemes.

I watched him go and then went back up to my lab. Flip was there on my computer. “How do you spell
adorable?”
she asked.

It took all my willpower not to shake her till her
i
rattled.
“What
did you do with Dr. O’Reilly’s funding form?”

She tossed her assortment of hair appendages. “I
told
Desiderata you’d take it out on me for stealing your boyfriend. Which is not fair. You already have that cow guy.”

“Sheep,” I corrected automatically, and then gaped at her. Sheep.

“Telling an interdepartmental communications liaison who they can write letters to is harassment,” she said, but I didn’t hear her. I was punching in Billy Ray’s number.

“Boy, am I glad to hear your voice,” Billy Ray said. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately.”

“Could I borrow some sheep?” I said, not listening to him either.

“Sure,” he said. “What for?”

“A learning experiment.”

“How many do you need?”

“How many does it take before they act like a flock?”

“Three. When do you want them?”

He really was a very nice guy. “A couple of weeks,” I said. “I’m not sure. I need to check some things out first. Like how big a flock we can have in the paddock.” And I need to get Bennett to agree. And Management.

“Drawing a circle doesn’t make somebody somebody’s
property”
Flip said.

I ran back down to Bio. Bennett wasn’t typing up his résumé. He was sitting on a rock in the middle of the habitat, looking depressed.

“Ben,” I said, “I have a proposition for you.”

He almost smiled. “Thanks, but—”

“Listen,” I said, “and don’t say no till you hear the whole thing. I want us to combine our projects. No, wait, hear me out. I asked for funding for a higher-memory-capacity computer, but I could use yours. Flip’s always on mine anyway. And then we could use my funding to buy the food and supplies.”

“That still doesn’t solve the problem of the macaques. Unless you asked for an awfully expensive computer.”

“I have a friend who has a sheep ranch in Wyoming,” I said.

“Yeah, I know,” he said.

“He’s willing to loan us as many sheep as we need, no cost, we just have to feed them.” He looked like he was getting set to refuse, and I hurried on. “I know sheep don’t have the social organization of macaques, but they do have a very strong following instinct. What one of them does, they all want to do. And they withstand cold, so they can be outside.”

He was looking at me seriously through his thick glasses.

“I know it’s not the project you wanted to do, but it would be something. It would keep you from leaving HiTek, and it’ll probably only be a few months till Management comes up with a new acronym and a new funding procedure, and you can put in for your macaques again.”

“I don’t know anything about sheep.”

“We can do all the background research while we’re waiting for the paperwork to go through.”

“And what do you get out of it, Sandy?” Ben said. “Sheep have their hair bobbed for them.”

I couldn’t very well tell him I thought his immunity to fads was part of the key to where fads came from. “A computer I can run these new diagrams I thought of on,” I said. “And a different perspective. I’m not getting anywhere with my hair-bobbing project. Richard Feynman said if you’re stuck on a scientific problem, you should work on something else for a while. It gives you a different angle on the problem. He took up the bongo drums. And a lot of scientists make their most significant scientific breakthroughs when they’re working outside their own field. Look at Alfred Wegener, who discovered continental drift. He was a meteorologist, not a geologist. And Joseph Black, who discovered carbon dioxide, wasn’t a chemist. He was a doctor. Einstein was a patent official. Working outside their fields makes scientists see connections they never would have seen before.”

“Umm,” Ben said. “And there definitely is a connection between sheep and people who follow fads.”

“Right, Who knows? Maybe the sheep will start a fad.”

“Flagpole-sitting?”

“The crossword puzzle. A three-letter word for a lab animal.
Ewe.”
I smiled at him. “And even if they don’t, it’ll be a positive relief to work with them. Except for Mary and her little lamb, sheep have never been a fad. So what do you think?”

He smiled sadly. “I think Management will never go for it.”

“But if they did?”

“If they did, I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than work with you. But they won’t. And even if they did, it’ll take months to fill out all the paperwork, let alone wait for it to go through.”

“Then it would give us
both
a different perspective. Remember Mendeleev and the cheesemaking conference.”

“How do you suggest we go about telling Management your proposition?” he said.

“You leave that part to me. You go to work on adapting the project to work with sheep. I’ll go talk to an expert,” I said, and went up to see Gina.

She was addressing bright pink Barbie invitations. “I still can’t find a Romantic Bride Barbie anywhere. I’ve called five different toystores.”

I told her what had happened.

She shook her head sadly. “Too bad. I always liked him—even if he didn’t have any fashion sense.”

“I need your help,” I said. I told her about combining the projects.

“So he gels your funding and Billy Ray’s sheep,” she said. “What do you get out of it?”

“A minor victory over Flip and the forces of chaos,” I said. “It isn’t fair for him to lose his funding just because Flip is incompetent.”

She gave me a long, considering look, and then shook her head. “Management’ll never go for it First, it’s live-animal research, which is controversial. Management hates controversy. Second, it’s something innovative, which means Management will hate it on principle.”

“I thought one of the keystones of GRIM was innovation.”

“Are you kidding? If it’s new, Management doesn’t have a form for it, and Management loves forms almost as much as they hate controversy. Sorry,” she said. “I know you like him.” She went back to addressing envelopes.

“If you’ll help me, I’ll find Romantic Barbie for you,” I said.

She looked up from the invitations. “It has to be Romantic Bride Barbie. Not Country Bride Barbie or Wedding Fantasy Barbie.”

I nodded. “Is it a deal?”

“I can’t guarantee Management will go for it even if I help you,” she said, shoving the invitations to the side and handing me a notepad and pencil. “All right, tell me what you were going to tell Management.”

“Well, I thought I’d start by explaining what happened to the funding form—”

“Wrong,” she said. “They’ll know what you’re up to in a minute. You tell them you’ve been working on this joint project thing since the meeting before last, when they said how important staff input and interaction were. Use words like
optimize
and
patterning systems.”

“Okay,” I said, taking notes.

“Tell them any number of scientific breakthroughs have been made by scientists working together. Crick and Watson, Penzias and Wilson, Gilbert and Sullivan—”

I looked up from my notes. “Gilbert and Sullivan weren’t scientists.”

“Management won’t know that. And they might recognize the name. You’ll need a two-page prospectus of the project goals. Put anything you think they’ll think is a problem on the second page. They never read the second page.”

“You
mean an outline of the project?” I said, scribbling. “Explaining the experimental method we’re going to use and describing the connection between trends analysis and information diffusion research?”

“No,” she said, and turned around to her computer. “Never mind, I’ll write it for you.” She began typing rapidly. “You tell them integrated cross-discipline teaming projects are the latest thing at MIT. Tell them single-person projects are passe.” She hit PRINT, and a sheet started scrolling through the printer.

“And pay attention to Management’s body language. If he taps his forefinger on the desk, you’re in trouble.”

She handed me the prospectus. It looked suspiciously like her five all-purpose objectives, which meant it would probably work.

“And don’t wear that.” She pointed at my skirt and lab coat. “You’re supposed to be dressing down.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Do you think this’ll do it?”

“When it’s live-animal research?” she said. “Are you kidding? Romantic Bride Barbie is the one with the pink net roses,” she said. “Oh, and Bethany wants a brunette one.”

mah-jongg (1922—24)—–
American game fad inspired by the ancient Chinese tiles game. As played by Americans, it was a sort of cross between rummy and dominoes involving building walls and then breaking them down, and “catching the moon from the bottom of the sea.” There were enthusiastic calls of “Pung!” and “Chow!” and much clattering of ivory tiles. Players dressed up in Oriental robes (sometimes, if the players were unclear on the concept of China, these were Japanese kimonos) and served tea. Although superseded by the crossword puzzle craze and contract bridge, mah-jongg continued to be popular among Jewish matrons until the 1960s.

I had failed to include all the variables. It was true that Management values paperwork more than anything. Except for the Niebnitz Grant.

I had hardly started into my spiel in Management’s white-carpeted office when Management’s eyes lit up, and he said, “This would be a cross-discipline project?”

“Yes,” I said. “Trends analysis combined with learning vectors in higher mammals. And there are certain aspects of chaos theory—”

“Chaos theory?” he said, tapping his forefinger on his expensive teak desk.

“Only in the sense that these are nonlinear systems which require a designed experiment,” I said hastily. “The emphasis is primarily on information diffusion in higher mammals, of which human trends are a subset.”

“Designed experiment?” he said eagerly.

“Yes. The practical value to HiTek would be better understanding of how information spreads through human societies and—”

“What was your original field?” he cut in.

“Statistics,” I said. “The advantages of using sheep over macaques are—” and never got to finish because Management was already standing up and shaking my hand.

“This is exactly the kind of project that GRIM is all about. Interfacing scientific disciplines, implementing initiative and cooperation to create new workplace paradigms.”

He actually talks in acronyms, I thought wonderingly, and almost missed what he said next.

“—exactly the kind of project the Niebnitz Grant Committee is looking for. I want this project implemented immediately. How soon can you have it up and running?”

“I—it—” I stammered. “There’s some background research we’ll need to do on sheep behavior. And there are the live-animal regulations that have to be—”

He waved an airy hand. “It’ll be our problem to deal with that. I want you and Dr. O’Reilly to concentrate on that divergent thinking and scientific sensibility. I expect great things.” He shook my hand enthusiastically. “HiTek is going to do everything we can to cut right through the red tape and get this project on line immediately.”

And did.

Permissions were typed up, paperwork waived, and live-animal approvals filed for almost before I could get down to Bio and tell Bennett they’d approved the project.

“What does ‘on line immediately’ mean?” he said worriedly. “We haven’t done any background research on sheep behavior, how they interact, what skills they’re capable of learning, what they eat—”