Bellwether (6 page)

Mankind, of course,

always has been and always will be, under the yoke of the

butterflies in the matter of social rites,

dress, entertainment, and the expenditure which these things involve.

miniature golf (1927—31)—–
Recreation fad of small golf courses with eighteen very short holes complicated by windmills, waterfalls, and tiny sand traps. Its popularity was easily explainable. It was a cheap place to take a Depression date, had a low skill threshold with multiple achievement levels, and let you pretend for a couple of hours that you were part of the refined country-club set. Over forty thousand courses sprang up across the country, and at its height it was so popular it was even a threat to the movies, and the studios forbade their actors to be seen playing miniature golf. Died from overexposure.

The source of the Colorado River doesn’t look like one either. It’s in a glacier field up in the Green River Mountains, and what it looks like is tundra and snow and rock.

But even in deepest winter there’s some melting, a drop here, a trickle there, a little film of water forming at the grubby edges of the glacier and spilling over onto the frozen ground. Falling and freezing, collecting, converging, so slowly you can’t see it.

Scientific research is like that, too. “Eureka!”s like the one Archimedes had when he stepped in a bathtub and suddenly realized the answer to the problem of testing metals’ density are few and far between, and mostly it’s just trying and failing and trying something else, feeding in data and eliminating variables and staring at the results, trying to figure out where you went wrong.

Take Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. Their goal was to measure the absolute intensity of radio signals from space, but first they had to get rid of the background noise in their detector.

They moved their detector to the country to get rid of city noise, radar stations, and atmospheric noise, which helped, but there was still background noise.

They tried to think what might be causing it. Birds? They went up on the roof and looked at the horn-shaped antenna. Sure enough, pigeons were nesting inside it, leaving droppings that might be causing the problem.

They evicted the pigeons, cleaned the antenna, and sealed every possible joint and crack (probably with duct tape). There was still background noise.

All right. So what else could it be? Streams of electrons from nuclear testing? If it was, the noise should be diminishing, since atomic tests had been banned in 1963. They ran dozens of tests on the intensity to see if it was. It wasn’t.

And it seemed to be the same no matter which part of the heavens were overhead, which made no sense at all.

They tested and retested, taped and retaped, scraped off pigeon droppings, and despaired of ever getting to the point where they could perform their experiment on radio signal intensity for nearly five years before they realized what they had wasn’t background noise at all. It was microwaves, the resounding echo of the Big Bang.

Friday Flip brought the new funding application. It was sixty-eight pages long and poorly stapled. Three pages fell out of it as Flip slouched in the door and two more as she handed it to me. “Thank you, Flip,” I said, and smiled at her.

The night before I had read the last two thirds of
Pippa Passes
, during which Pippa had talked two murderously adulterous lovers into killing themselves, convinced a deceived young student to choose love over revenge, and reformed assorted ne’er-do-wells. And all just by chirping, “The year’s at the spring,/And day’s at the morn.” Think what she could have accomplished if she’d had a library card.

“You can change the world,” Browning was clearly saying. “By being perky and signaling before turning left, one person can have a positive effect on society,” and it was obvious from “The Pied Piper” that he understood how trends worked.

I hadn’t noticed any of these effects, but then neither had Pippa, who had presumably gone back to work at the silk factory the next day without any notion of all the good she’d done. I could see her at the staff meeting Management had called to introduce their new management system, PESTO. Right after the sensitivity exercise her coworker would lean over and whisper, “So, Pippa, what did you do on your day off?” and Pippa would shrug and say, “Nothing much. You know, hung out.”

So I might be having more of an effect on literacy and left-turn signaling than I’d realized, and, by being pleasant and polite, could stop the downward trend to rudeness.

Of course, Browning had never met Flip. But it was worth a try, and I had the comfort of knowing I couldn’t possibly make things worse.

So, even though Flip had made no effort to pick up the spilled pages and was, in fact, standing on one of them, I smiled at her and said, “How are you this morning?”

“Oh, just
great”
she said sarcastically. “Perfectly
fine.”
She flopped down onto the hair-bobbing clippings on my lab table. “You will not
believe
what they expect me to do now!”

A little work? I thought uncharitably, and then remembered I was supposed to be following in Pippa’s footsteps. “Who’s they?” I said, bending to pick up the spilled pages.

“Management”
she said, rolling her eyes. She was wearing a pair of neon-yellow tights, a tie-dyed T-shirt, and a very peculiar down vest. It was short and bunched oddly around the neck and armpits. “You know how I’m supposed to get a new job title and an assistant?”

“Yes,” I said, continuing to smile. “Did you? Get a new job title?”

“Ye-es,”
she said. “I’m the interdepartmental communications liaison. But for my assistant, they expect me to be on a
search
committee.
After
work.”

Along the bottom of the vest there was a row of snaps, a style I had never seen before. She’s wearing it upside down, I thought.

“The whole
point
was I was overworked. That’s why I have to have an assistant, isn’t it? Hello?”

Wearing clothing some other way than was intended is an ever-popular variety of fad—untied shoelaces, backward baseball caps, ties for belts, slips for dresses—and one that can’t be put down to merchandising because it doesn’t cost anything. It’s not new, either. High school girls in 1955 took to wearing their cardigan sweaters backward, and their mothers had worn unbuckled galoshes with short skirts and raccoon coats in the 1920s. The metal buckles had jangled and flapped, which is how the name
flapper
came about. Or, since there doesn’t seem to be agreement on the source of anything where fads are concerned, they were named for the chicken like flapping of their arms when they did the Charleston. But the Charleston didn’t hit till 1923, and the word
flapper
had been used as early as 1920.

“Well,”
Flip said. “Do you want to hear this or not?”

It was no wonder Pippa had just gone singing past her clients’ windows. If she’d had to put up with them, she wouldn’t have been half as cheerful. I forced an interested expression. “Who else is on the committee?”

“I don’t know. I told you, I don’t have time to go to these things.”

“But don’t you want to make sure you get a good assistant?”

“Not if I have to stay after work,” she said, irritably pulling clippings out from under her. “Your office is a mess. Don’t you ever clean it?”

“‘The lark’s on the wing;/The snail’s on the thorn,’” I said.

So Browning was wrong. “I’d love to talk,” I said, “but I’d better get started on this funding form.”

She didn’t show any signs of moving. She was looking aimlessly through the clippings.

“I need you to make a copy of each of those. Now. Before you go to your search committee meeting.”

Still nothing. I got a pencil, stuck the extra pages into the application, and tried to focus on the simplified funding form.

I never worry much about getting funding. It’s true there are fads in both science and industry, but greed is always in style. HiTek would like nothing more than to know what causes fads so they could invent the next one. And stats projects are cheap. The only funding I was requesting was for a computer with more memory capacity. Which didn’t mean I could forget about the funding form. It wouldn’t matter if your project was a sure-fire method for turning lead into gold, if you don’t have the forms filled out
and
turned in on time, Management will cancel you like a shot.

Project goals, experimental method, projected results, matrix analysis ranking. Matrix analysis ranking?

I flipped the page over to see if there were instructions, and the page came out altogether. There weren’t any instructions, there or at the end of the application. “Were there instructions included with the form?” I asked Flip.

“How would I know?” she said, getting up. “What’s this?” She stuck one of the clippings under my nose, an ad of a bobbed blonde standing next to a Hupmobile.

“The car?”

“No-o-o,” she said, letting her breath out in a big sigh. “Her
hair.”

“A bob,” I said, and leaned closer to see if the hair was cut in an Eton bob or a shingle. It was crimped in even rows down the sides of her head. “A marcel wave,” I said. “It was a permanent wave done with a special electrical metal-and-wires apparatus that was about as much fun as going to the dentist,” but Flip had already lost interest.

“I think if they’re going to make you stay after work or make you do extra jobs they should pay you overtime. Like stapling all these funding forms and delivering them to everybody. Some of them were supposed to go all the way down to Bio.”

“Did you deliver one to Dr. O’Reilly?” I said, remembering her habit of dumping packages on closer offices.

“Of
course.
He didn’t even thank me. What a swarb!”

“Swarb?” I said. Fads in language are impossible to keep up with, and I don’t even try from a research standpoint, but I know most of the slang because that’s how fads are described. But I’d never heard this one.

“You don’t know what
swarb
means?” she said, in a tone that made me wish Pippa had gone around Italy slapping people. “No hots. No cutes. Cyber-ugg. Swarb.” She flailed her duct-taped arms, trying to think of the word.
“Completely
fashion-impaired,” she said, and flounced out in her duct tape and upside-down down. Without the clippings.

coffeehouse (1450—1554)—–
Middle Eastern fad that originated in Aden, then spread to Mecca and throughout Persia and Turkey. Men sat cross-legged on rugs and sipped thick, black, bitter coffee from tiny cups while listening to poets. The coffeehouses eventually became more popular than mosques and were banned by the religious authorities, who claimed they were frequented by people “of low costume and very little industry.” Spread to London (1652), Paris (1669), Boston (1675), Seattle (1985).

Saturday morning the library called and told me my name had come up on the reserve list for
Led On by Fate
, so I went to Boulder to pick it up and buy a birthday present for Brittany.

“You can have
Angels, Angels Everywhere
, too, if you want,” Lorraine told me at the library. She was wearing a sweatshirt with a dalmatian on it and red fireplug earrings. “We
finally
got two more copies now that nobody wants them.”

I leafed through it while she swiped
Led On by Fate
with the light pen.

“Your guardian angel goes with you everywhere,” it said. “It’s always there, right beside you, wherever you go.” There was a line drawing of an angel with large wings looming over a woman in a grocery checkout line. “You can ignore them, you can even pretend they don’t exist, but that won’t make them go away.”

Until the fad’s over, I thought.

I checked out
Led On by Fate
and a book on chaos theory and Mandelbrot diagrams so I’d have a pretext for going down to Bio to see what Dr. O’Reilly was wearing, and went over to the Pearl Street Mall.

Lorraine was right. The bookstore had
Angel in My Condo
and
The Cherubim Cookbook
on a sale rack, and
The Angel Calendar
was marked fifty percent off. There was a big display up front for
Faerie Encounters of the Fourth Kind.

I went upstairs to the kids’ section and more fairies:
The Flower Fairies
(which had been a fad once before, back in the 1910s);
Fairies, Fairies Everywhere; More Fairies, Fairies Everywhere;
and
The Land of Faerie Fun.
Also Batman books,
Lion King
books, Power Rangers books, and Barbie books.

I finally managed to find a hardback copy of
Toads and Diamonds
, which I’d loved as a kid. It had a fairy in it, but not like those in
Fairies, Fairies, Etc.
, with lavender wings and bluebells for hats. It was about a girl who helps an ugly old woman who turns out to be a good fairy in disguise. Inner values versus shallow appearances. My kind of moral.

I bought it and went out into the mall. It was a beautiful Indian summer day, balmy and blue-skied. The Pearl Street Mall on a Saturday’s a great place to analyze trends, since, one, there are hordes of people, and two, Boulder’s almost terminally hip. The rest of the state calls it the People’s Republic of Boulder, and it’s got every possible kind of New Ager and falafel stand and street musician.

There are even fads in street music. Guitars were out and bongos were in again. (The first time was in 1958, at the height of the Beat movement. Very low ability threshold.) Flip’s buzzcut-and-swag was very in, and so was the buzzcut-and-message. And duct tape. I saw two people with strips around their sleeves and one with dreadlocks and a bowler had a wide band of duct tape wrapped around his neck like the ones the French had worn during the
à la victime
fad after the Revolution.