Bellwether

  “Cool, huh?” Billy Ray said, opening his sunflower-shaped menu. “Everybody says prairie’s going to be the next big fad.”

  “I thought shearling was,” I muttered, picking up the menu. Prairie cuisine wasn’t so much hot as substantial—chicken-fried steak, cream gravy, corn on the cob, all served family-style.

  “Something to drink?” a waiter in buckskin and a knotted sunflower bandanna asked.

  I looked at the menu. They had espresso, cappuccino, and caffè latte, also very big in prairie days. No iced tea.

  “Iced tea’s the Kansas state beverage,” I told the waiter. “How can you not have it?”

  He’d apparently been taking lessons from Flip. He rolled his eyes, sighed expertly, and said, “Iced tea is outré.”

  A word never uttered on the prairie, I thought, but Billy Ray was already ordering meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and cappuccino for both of us.

  “So, tell me about this thing you’re researching that’s got you working weekends.”

  I did. “The problem is I’ve got causes coming out my ears,” I said, after I’d explained what I’d been doing. “Female equality, bicycling, a French fashion designer named Poiret, World War One, and Coco Chanel, who singed her hair off when a heater exploded. Unfortunately, none of them seems to be the main source.”

  Our dinner arrived, on brown earthenware platters decorated with sunflowers. The coleslaw was garnished with fresh basil, which I didn’t remember as being big on the prairie either, and the meat loaf was garnished with lemon slices.

  Billy Ray told me about the merits of sheep-raising while we ate. Sheep were healthy, profitable, no trouble to herd, and you could graze them anywhere, all of which I would have been more inclined to believe if he hadn’t told me the same thing about raising longhorns six months ago.

  “Dessert?” the waiter said, and brought over the pastry cart.

  I figured a prairie dessert would probably be gooseberry pie or maybe canned peaches, but it was the usual suspects: crème brûlée, tiramisu, “and our newest dessert, bread pudding.”

  Well, that sounded like a Kansas dessert, all right, the sort of thing you were reduced to eating after the cow died and the grasshoppers ate up the crops.

  “I’ll have the tiramisu,” I said.

  “Me too,” Billy Ray said. “I’ve always hated bread pudding. It’s like eating leftovers.”

  “Everybody raves about our bread pudding,” the waiter said reproachfully. “It’s our most popular dessert.”

  The bad thing about studying trends is that you can’t ever turn it off. You sit there across from your date eating tiramisu, and instead of thinking what a nice guy he is, you find yourself thinking about trends in desserts and how they always seem to be gooey and calorie-laden in direct proportion to the obsession with dieting.

  Take tiramisu, which has chocolate and whipped cream and two kinds of cheese. And burnt-sugar cake, which was big in the forties, in spite of wartime rationing.

  Pineapple upside-down cake was a fad in the twenties, a dessert I hope doesn’t make a comeback anytime soon; chiffon cake in the fifties; chocolate fondue in the sixties.

  I wondered if Bennett was immune to food trends, too, and what his ideas on bread pudding and chocolate cheesecake were.

  “You thinking about hair-bobbing again?” Billy Ray said. “Maybe you’re looking at too many things. This conference I’m at says you’ve got to ruff.”

  “Niff?”

  “NYF. Narrow Your Focus. Eliminate all the peripherals and focus in on the core variables. This hair-bobbing thing can only have one cause, right? You’ve got to narrow your focus to the likeliest possibilities and concentrate on those. It works, too. I tried it on a case of sheep mange. You’re sure you won’t come to my workshop with me?”

  “I have to go to the library,” I said.

  “You should get the book. Five Steps to Focusing on Success.”

  After dinner Billy Ray went off to niff, and I went over to the library to see about Browning. Lorraine wasn’t there. A girl wearing duct tape, hair wraps, and a sullen expression was. “It’s three weeks overdue,” she said.

  “That’s impossible,” I said. “I only checked it out last week. And I checked it in. On Monday.” After I’d tried Pippa on Flip and decided Browning didn’t know what he was talking about. I’d checked in Browning and checked out Othello, that other story about undue influences.

  She sighed. “Our computer shows it as still checked out. Have you looked around at home?”

  “Is Lorraine here?” I asked.

  She rolled her eyes. “No-0-0-0.”

  I decided it was the better part of valor to wait until she was and went over to the stacks to look for Browning myself.

  The Complete Works wasn’t there, and I couldn’t remember the name of the book Billy Ray had suggested. I pulled out two books by Willa Cather, who knew what prairie cooking had actually been like, and Far from the Madding Crowd, which I remembered as having sheep in it, and then wandered around, trying to remember the name of Billy Ray’s book and hoping for inspiration.

  Libraries have been responsible for a lot of significant scientific breakthroughs. Darwin was reading Malthus for recreation (which should tell you something about Darwin), and Alfred Wegener was wandering around the Marburg University library, idly spinning the globe and browsing through scientific papers, when he got the idea of continental drift. But nothing came to me, not even the name of Billy Ray’s book. I went over to the business section to see if I would remember the name of the book when I saw it.

  Something about narrowing the focus, eliminating all the peripherals. “It can only have one cause, right?” Billy Ray had said.

  Wrong. In a linear system it might, but hair-bobbing wasn’t like sheep mange. It was like one of Bennett’s chaotic systems. There were dozens of variables, and all of them were important. They fed into each other, iterating and reiterating, crossing and colliding, affecting each other in ways no one would expect. Maybe the problem wasn’t that I had too many causes, but that I didn’t have enough. I went over to the nine hundreds and checked out Those Crazy Twenties; Flappers, Flivvers, and Flagpole-Sitters; and The 1920’s: A Sociological Study, and as many other books on the twenties as I could carry, and took them up to the desk.

  “I show an overdue book for you,” the girl said. “It’s four weeks overdue.”

  I went home, excited for the first time that I was on the right track, and started work on the new variables.

  The twenties had been awash in fads: jazz, hip flasks, rolled-down stockings, dance crazes, raccoon coats, mahjongg, running marathons, dance marathons, kissing marathons, Stutz Bearcats, flagpole-sitting, tree-sitting, crossword puzzles. And somewhere in all those rouged knees and rain slickers and rocking-chair derbies was the trigger that had set off the hair-bobbing craze.

  I worked until very late and then went to bed with Far from the Madding Crowd. I was right. It was about sheep. And fads. In Chapter Five one of the sheep fell over a cliff, and the others followed, plummeting one after the other onto the rocks below.

  “Please your honors,” said he, “I’m able,

  By means of a secret charm, to draw

  All creatures living beneath the sun,

  That creep or fly or run,

  After me so as you never saw!”

  robert browning

  diorama wigs (1750—60)—–Hair fad of the court of Louis XVI inspired by Madame de Pompadour, who was fond of dressing her hair in unusual ways. Hair was draped over a frame stuffed with cotton wool or straw and cemented with a paste that hardened, and the hair was powdered and decorated with pearls and flowers. The fad rapidly got out of hand. Frames grew as high as three feet tall, and the decorations became elaborate and men pictorial. Hairdos had waterfalls, cupids, and scenes from novels. Naval battles, complete with ships and smoke, were waged on top of women’s heads, and one widow, overcome with mourning for her dead husband, had his tombstone erected in h
er hair. Died out with the advent of the French Revolution and the resultant shortage of heads to put wigs on.

  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 camp shirt 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 k?”

  “Luck,” I said.

  Now she did look offended. “Lack?”

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

  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.