Bellwether

It’s almost impossible to pinpoint the beginning of a fad. By the time it starts to look like one, its origins are far in the past, and trying to trace them back is exponentially harder than, say, looking for the source of the Nile.

In the first place, there’s probably more than one source, and in the second, you’re dealing with human behavior. All Speke and Burton had to deal with were crocodiles, rapids, and the tsetse fly. In the third, we know something about how rivers work, like, they flow downhill. Fads seem to spring full-blown out of nowhere and for no good reason. Witness bungee-jumping. And Lava lamps.

Scientific discoveries are the same way. People like to think of science as rational and reasonable, following step by step from hypothesis to experiment to conclusion. Dr. Chin, last year’s winner of the Niebnitz Grant, wrote, “The process of scientific discovery is the logical extension of observation by experimentation.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. The process is exactly like any other human endeavor—messy, haphazard, misdirected, and heavily influenced by chance. Look at Alexander Fleming who discovered penicillin when a spore drifted in the window of his lab and contaminated one of his cultures.

Or Roentgen. He was working with a cathode-ray tube surrounded by sheets of black cardboard when he caught a glimpse of light from the other side of his lab. A sheet of paper coated with barium platinocyanide was fluorescing, even though it was shut off from the tube. Curious, he stuck his hand between the tube and the screen. And saw the shadow of the bones of his hand.

Look at Galvani, who was studying the nervous systems of frogs when he discovered electrical currents. Or Messier. He wasn’t looking for galaxies when he discovered them. He was looking for comets. He only mapped them because he was trying to get rid of a nuisance.

None of which makes Dr. Chin any the less deserving of the Niebnitz Grant’s million-dollar endowment. It isn’t necessary to understand how something works to do it. Take driving. And starting fads. And falling in love.

What was I talking about? Oh, yes, how scientific discoveries come about. Usually the chain of events leading up to them, like that leading up to a fad, follows a course too convoluted and chaotic to follow. But I know exactly where one started and who started it.

It was in October. Monday the second. Nine o’clock in the morning. I was in the stats lab at HiTek, struggling with a box of clippings on hair-bobbing. I’m Sandra Foster, by the way, and I work in R D at HiTek. I had spent all weekend going through yellowed newspapers and 1920s copies of The Saturday Evening Post and The Delineator, trudging upstream to the beginnings of the fad of hair-bobbing, looking for what had caused every woman in America to suddenly chop off her “crowning glory,” despite social pressure, threatening sermons, and four thousand years of long hair.

I had clipped endless news items; highlighted references, magazine articles, and advertisements; dated them; and organized them into categories. Flip had stolen my stapler, I had run out of paper clips, and Desiderata hadn’t been able to find any more, so I had had to settle for stacking them, in order, in the box, which I was now trying to maneuver into my lab.

The box was heavy and had been made by the same people who manufacture paper sacks for the supermarket, so when I’d dumped it just outside the lab so I could unlock the door, it had developed a major rip down one side. I was half-wrestling, half-dragging it over next to one of the lab tables so I could lift the stacks of clippings out when the whole side started to give way.

An avalanche of magazine pages and newspaper stories began to spill out through the side before I could get it pushed back in place, and I grabbed for them and the box as Flip opened the door and slouched in, looking disgusted. She was wearing black lipstick, a black halter, and a black leather micro-skirt and was carrying a box about the size of mine.

“I’m not supposed to have to deliver packages,” she said. “You’re supposed to pick them up in the mail room.”

“I didn’t know I had a package,” I said, trying to hold the box together with one hand and reach a roll of duct tape in the middle of the lab table with the other. “Just set it down anywhere.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re supposed to get a notice saying you have a package.”

Yes, well, and you were probably supposed to deliver it, I thought, which explains why I never got it. “Could you reach me that duct tape?” I said.

“Employees aren’t supposed to ask interdepartmental assistants to run personal errands or make coffee,” Flip said.

“Handing me a roll of tape is not a personal errand,” I said.

Flip sighed. “I’m supposed to be delivering the interdepartmental mail.” She tossed her hair. She had shaved her head the week before but had left a long hank along the front and down one side expressly for flipping when she feels put-upon.

Flip is my punishment for having tried to get her predecessor, Desiderata, fired. Desiderata was mindless, clueless, and completely without initiative. She misdelivered the mail, wrote down messages wrong, and spent all her free time examining her split ends. After two months and a wrong phone call that cost me a government grant, I went to Management and demanded she be fired and somebody, anybody else be hired, on the grounds that nobody could possibly be worse than Desiderata. I was wrong.

Management moved Desiderata to Supply (nobody ever gets fired at HiTek except scientists and even we don’t get pink slips. Our projects just get canceled for lack of funding) and hired Flip, who has a nose ring, a tattoo of a snowy owl, and the habit of sighing and rolling her eyes when you ask her to do anything at all. I am afraid to get her fired. There is no telling who they might hire next.

Flip sighed loudly. “This package is really heavy.”

“Then set it down,” I said, stretching to reach the tape. It was just out of reach. I inched the hand holding the side of the box shut higher and leaned farther across the lab table. My fingertips just touched the tape.

“It’s breakable,” Flip said, coming over to me, and dropped the box. I grabbed to catch it with both hands. It thunked down on the table, the side gave way on my box, and the clippings poured out of the box and across the floor.

“Next time you’re going to have to pick it up yourself,” Flip said, walking on the clippings toward the door.

I shook the box, listening for broken sounds. There weren’t any, and when I looked at the top, it didn’t say FRAGILE anywhere. It said PERISHABLE. It also said DR. ALICIA TURNBULL.

“This isn’t mine,” I said, but Flip was already out the door. I waded through a sea of clippings and called to her. “This isn’t my package. It’s for Dr. Turnbull in Bio.”

She sighed.

“You need to take this to Dr. Turnbull.”

She rolled her eyes. “I have to deliver the rest of the interdepartmental mail first,” she said, tossing her hank of hair. She slouched on down the hall, dropping two pieces of said departmental mail as she went.

“Make sure you come back and get it as soon as you’re done with the mail,” I shouted after her down the hall. “It’s perishable,” I shouted, and then, remembering that illiteracy is a hot trend these days and perishable is a four-syllable word, “That means it’ll spoil.”

Her shaved head didn’t even turn, but one of the doors halfway down the hall opened, and Gina leaned out. “What did she do now?” she asked.

“Duct tape now qualifies as a personal errand,” I said.

Gina came down the hall. “Did you get one of these?” she said, handing me a blue flyer. It was a meeting announcement. Wednesday. Cafeteria. All HiTek staff, including R D. “Flip was supposed to deliver one to every office,” she said.

“What’s the meeting about?”

“Management went to another seminar,” she said. “Which means a sensitivity exercise, a new acronym, and more paperwork for us. I think I’ll call in sick. Brittany’s birthday’s in two weeks, and I need to get the party decorations. What’s in these days in birthday parties? Circus? Wild West?”

“Power Rangers,” I said. “Do you think they might reorganize the departments?” The last seminar Management had gone to, they’d created Flip’s job as part of CRAM (Communications Reform Activation Management). Maybe this time they’d eliminate interdepartmental assistants, and I could go back to making my own copies, delivering my own messages, and fetching my own mail. All of which I was doing now.

“I hate the Power Rangers,” Gina said. “Explain to me how they ever got to be so popular.”

She went back to her lab, and I went back to work on my bobbed hair. It was easy to see how it had become popular. No long hair to put up with combs and pins and pompadour puffs, no having to wash it and wait a week for it to dry. The nurses who’d served in World War I had had to cut their hair off because of lice, and had liked the freedom and the lightness short hair gave them. And there were obvious advantages when it came to the other fads of the day: bicycling and lawn tennis.

So why hadn’t it become a fad in 1918? Why had it waited another four years and then suddenly, for no apparent reason, hit so big that barber shops were swamped and hairpin companies went bankrupt overnight? In 1921, hair-bobbing was still unusual enough to make front-page news and get women fired. By 1925, it was so common every graduation picture and advertisement and magazine illustration showed short hair, and the only hats being sold were bell-shaped cloches, which were too snug to fit over long hair. What had happened in the interim? What was the trigger?

I spent the rest of the day re-sorting the clippings. You’d think magazine pages from the 1920s would have turned yellowish and rough, but they hadn’t. They’d slid like eels out onto the tile floor, fanning out across and under each other, mixing with the newspaper clippings and obliterating their categories. Some of the paper clips had even come off.

I did the re-sorting on the floor. One of the lab tables was full of clippings about pogs that Flip was supposed to have taken to be copied and hadn’t, and the other one had all my jitterbug data on it. And neither one was big enough for the number of piles I needed, some of which overlapped: entire article devoted to hair-bobbing, reference within article devoted to flappers, pointed reference, casual reference, disapproving reference, humorous reference, shocked and horrified reference, illustration in advertisement, adoption by middle-aged women, adoption by children, adoption by the elderly, news items by date, news items by state, urban reference, rural reference, disparaging reference, reference indicating complete acceptance, first signs of waning of fad, fad declared over.

By 4:55 the floor of my whole lab was covered with piles and Flip still wasn’t back. Stepping carefully among the piles, I went over and looked at the box again. Biology was clear on the other side of the complex, but there was nothing for it. The box said PERISHABLE, and even though irresponsibility is the hottest trend of the nineties, it hasn’t worked its way through the whole society yet. I picked up the box and took it down to Dr. Turnbull.

It weighed a ton. By the time I’d maneuvered it down two flights and along four corridors, the reasons why irresponsibility had caught on had become very clear to me. At least I was getting to see a part of the building I ordinarily was never in. I wasn’t even exactly sure where Bio was except that it was down on the ground floor. But I must be heading in the right direction. There was moisture in the air and a faint sound of zoo. I followed the sound down yet another staircase and into a long corridor. Dr. Turnbull’s office was, of course, at the very end of it.

The door was shut. I shifted the box in my arms, knocked and waited. No answer. I shifted the box again, propping it against the wall with my hip, and tried the knob. The door was locked.

The last thing I wanted to do was lug this box all the way back up to my office and then try to find a refrigerator. I looked down the hall at the line of doors. They were all closed, and, presumably, locked, but there was a line of light under the middle one on the left.

I repositioned the box, which was getting heavier by the minute, lugged it down to the light, and knocked on the door. No answer, but when I tried the knob, the door opened onto a jungle of video cameras, computer equipment, opened boxes, and trailing wires.

“Hello,” I said. “Anybody here?”

There was a muffled grunt, which I hoped wasn’t from an inmate of the zoo. I glanced at the nameplate on the door. “Dr. O’Reilly?” I said.

“Yeah?” a man’s voice from under what looked like a furnace said.

I walked around to the side of it and could see two brown corduroy legs sticking out from under it, surrounded by a litter of tools. “I’ve got a box here for Dr. Turnbull,” I said to the legs. “She’s not in her office. Could you take it for her?”

“Just set it down,” the voice said impatiently.

I looked around for somewhere to set it that wasn’t covered with video equipment and coils of chicken wire.

“Not on the equipment,” the legs said sharply. “On the floor. Carefully.”

I pushed aside a rope and two modems and set the box down. I squatted down next to the legs and said, “It’s marked ‘perishable.’ You need to put it in the refrigerator.”

“All right,” he snapped. A freckled arm in a wrinkled white sleeve appeared, patting the floor around the base of the box.

There was a roll of duct tape lying just out of his reach. “Duct tape?” I said, putting it in his hand.

His hand closed around it and then just stayed there.

“You didn’t want the duct tape?” I looked around to see what else he might have wanted. “Pliers? Phillips screwdriver?”

The legs and arm disappeared under the furnace and a head emerged from behind it. “Sorry,” he said. His face was freckled, too, and he was wearing Coke-bottle-thick glasses. “I thought you were that mail person.”

“Flip,” I said. “No. She delivered the box to my office by mistake.”

“Figures.” He pulled himself out from under the furnace and stood up. “I really am sorry,” he said, dusting himself off. “I don’t usually act that rude to people who are trying to deliver things. It’s just that Flip…”

“I know,” I said, nodding sympathetically.

He pushed his hand through his sandy hair. “The last time she delivered a box to me she set it on top of one of the monitors, and it fell off and broke a video camera.”

“That sounds like Flip,” I said, but I wasn’t really listening. I was looking at him.

When you spend as much time as I do analyzing fads and fashions, you get so you can spot them at first sight: ecohippie, jogger, Wall Street M.B.A., urban terrorist. Dr. O’Reilly wasn’t any of them. He was about my age and about my height. He was wearing a lab coat and corduroy pants that had been washed so often the wale was completely worn off on the knees. They’d shrunk, too, halfway up his ankles, and there was a pale line where they’d been let down.

The effect, especially with the Coke-bottle glasses, should have been science geek, but it wasn’t. For one thing, there were the freckles. For another, he was wearing a pair of once-white canvas sneakers with holes in the toes and frayed seams. Science geeks wear black shoes and white socks. He wasn’t even wearing a pocket protector, though he should have been. There were two splotches of ballpoint ink and a puddle of Magic Marker on the breast pocket of the lab coat, and one of the patch pockets was out at the bottom. And there was something else, something I couldn’t put my finger on, that made it impossible for me to categorize him.

I squinted at him, trying to figure out exactly what it was, so long he looked at me curiously. “I took the box to Dr. Turnbull’s office,” I said hastily, “but she’s gone home.”

“She had a grant meeting today,” he said. “She’s very good at getting grants.”

“The most important quality for a scientist these days,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, smiling wryly. “Wish I had it.”

“I’m Sandra Foster,” I said, sticking out my hand. “Sociology.”

He wiped his hand on his corduroys and shook my hand. “Bennett O’Reilly.”

And that was odd, too. He was my age. His name should be Matt or Mike or, God forbid, Troy. Bennett.

I was staring again. I said, “And you’re a biologist?”

“Chaos theory.”

“Isn’t that an oxymoron?” I said.

He grinned. “The way I did it, yes. Which is why my project lost its funding and I had to come to work for HiTek.”

Maybe that accounted for the oddness, and corduroys and canvas sneakers were what chaos theorists were wearing these days. No, Dr. Applegate, over in Chem, had been in chaos, and he dressed like everybody else in R D: flannel shirt, baseball cap, jeans, Nikes.

And nearly everybody at HiTek’s working out of their field. Science has its fads and crazes, like anything else: string theory, eugenics, mesmerism. Chaos theory had been big for a couple of years, in spite of Utah and cold fusion, or maybe because of it, but both of them had been replaced by genetic engineering. If Dr. O’Reilly wanted grant money, he needed to give up chaos and build a better mouse.

He was stooping over the box. “I don’t have a refrigerator. I’ll have to set it outside on the porch.” He picked it up, grunting a little. “Jeez, it’s heavy. Flip probably delivered it to you on purpose so she wouldn’t have to carry it all the way down here.” He boosted it up with his corduroy knee. “Well, on behalf of Dr. Turnbull and all of Flip’s other victims, thanks,” he said, and headed into the tangle of equipment.

A clear exit line, and, speaking of grants, I still had half those hair-bobbing clippings to sort into piles before I went home. But I was still trying to put my finger on what it was that was so unusual about him. I followed him through the maze of stuff.

“Is Flip responsible for this?” I said, squeezing between two stacks of boxes.

“No,” he said. “I’m setting up my new project.” He stepped over a tangle of cords.

“Which is?” I brushed aside a hanging plastic net.

“Information diffusion.” He opened a door and stepped outside onto a porch. “It should keep cold enough out here,” he said, setting it down.

“Definitely,” I said, hugging my arms against a chilly October wind. The porch faced a large, enclosed paddock, fenced in on all sides by high walls and overhead with wire netting. There was a gate at the back.

“It’s used for large-animal experiments,” Dr. O’Reilly said. “I’d hoped I’d have the monkeys by July so they could be outside, but the paperwork’s taken longer than I expected.”

“Monkeys?”

“The project’s studying information diffusion patterns in a troop of macaques. You teach a new skill to one of the macaques and then document its spread through the troop. I’m working with the rate of utilitarian versus nonutilitarian skills. I teach one of the macaques a nonutilitarian skill with a low ability threshold and multiple skill levels—”

“Like the Hula Hoop,” I said.

He set the box down just outside the door and stood up. “The Hula Hoop?”

“The Hula Hoop, miniature golf, the twist. All fads have a low ability threshold. That’s why you never see speed chess becoming a fad. Or fencing.”

He pushed his Coke-bottle glasses up on his nose.

“I’m working on a project on fads. What causes them and where they come from,” I said.

“Where do they come from?”

“I have no idea. And if I don’t get back to work, I never will.” I stuck out my hand again. “Nice to have met you, Dr. O’Reilly.” I started back through the maze.

He followed me, saying thoughtfully, “I never thought of teaching them to do a Hula Hoop.”

I was going to say I didn’t think there’d be room in here, but it was almost six, and I at least had to get my piles up off the floor and into file folders before I went home.

I told Dr. O’Reilly goodbye and went back up to Sociology. Flip was standing in the hall, her hands on the hips of her leather skirt.

“I came back and you’d left,” she said, making it sound like I’d left her sinking in quicksand.

“I was down in Bio,” I said.

“I had to come all the way back from Personnel,” she said, tossing her hair. “You said to come back.”

“I gave up on you and delivered the package myself,” I said, waiting for her to protest and say delivering the mail was her job. I should have known better. That would have meant admitting she was actually responsible for something.

“I looked all over your office for it,” she said virtuously. “While I was waiting for you, I picked up all that stuff you left on the floor and threw it in the trash.”

The source of the Thames doesn’t look like it. It looks like a pasture, and not even a soggy pasture. Not a single water plant grows there. If it weren’t for an old well, filled up with stones, it would be impossible to even locate the spot. Cows, not being interested in stones, wander lazily across and around the source, munching buttercups and Queen Anne’s lace, unaware that anything significant is beginning beneath their feet.

Science is even less obvious. It starts with an apple falling, a teakettle boiling. Alex Fleming, taking a last glance around his lab as he left for a long weekend, wouldn’t have seen anything significant in the window left half open, in the sooty air from Paddington Station drifting in. Getting ready to gather up his notes, to tell his assistant to leave everything alone, to lock the door, he wouldn’t have noticed that one of the petri dishes’ lids had slid a fraction of an inch to the side. His mind would have already been on his vacation, on the errands he had to run, on going home.

So was mine. The only thing I was aware of was that Flip had thoughtfully crumpled each clipping into a wad before stuffing them into the trash can, and that there was no way I could get them all smoothed out tonight, and, as a result, I was not only oblivious to the first event in a chain of events that was going to lead to a scientific discovery, but I was about to miss the second one, too. And the third.

I set the trash can on the lab table on top of my jitterbug research, sealed the top with duct tape, stuck on a sign that said “Do not touch. This means you, Flip,” and went out to my car. Halfway out of the parking lot I thought about Flip’s ability to read, turned around, and went back to my office to get the trash can.

The phone was ringing when I opened the door. “Howdy,” Billy Ray said when I picked it up. “Guess where I am.”

“In Wyoming?” I said. Billy Ray was a rancher from Laramie I’d gone out with a while back when I was researching line dancing.

“In Montana,” he said. “Halfway between Lodge Grass and Billings.” Which meant he was calling me on his cellular phone. “I’m on my way to look at some Targhees,” he said. “They’re the hottest thing going.”

I assumed they were also cows. During my line dancing phase, the hottest thing going had been Aberdeen Longhorns. Billy Ray is a very nice guy and a walking compendium of country-western fads. Two birds with one stone.

“I’m going to be in Denver this Saturday,” he said through the stutter that meant his cellular phone was starting to get out of range. “For a seminar on computerized ranching.”

I wondered idly what its acronym would be. Computerized Operational Wrangling?

“So I wondered if we could grab us some dinner. There’s a new prairie place in Boulder.”

And prairie was the latest thing in cuisine. “Sorry,” I said, looking at the trash can on my lab table. “I’ve had a setback. I’m going to have to work this weekend.”

“You should just feed everything onto your computer and let it do the work. I’ve got my whole ranch on my PC.”

“I know,” I said, wishing it were that simple.

“You need to get yourself one of those text scanners,” Billy Ray said, the hum becoming more insistent. “That way you don’t even have to type it in.”

I wondered if a text scanner could read crumpled.

The hum was becoming a crackle. “Well, maybe next time,” he sort of said, and passed into cellular oblivion.

I put down my noncellular phone and picked up the trash can. Under it, half buried in my jitterbug research, were the library books I should have taken back two days ago. I piled them on top of the stretched duct tape, which held, and carried them and the trash can out to the car and drove to the library.

Since I spend my working days studying trends, many of which are downright disgusting, I feel it’s my duty after work to encourage the trends I’d like to see catch on, like signaling before you change lanes, and chocolate cheesecake. And reading.

Also, libraries are great places to observe trends in best-sellers, and library management. And librarian attire.

“What’s on the reserve list this week, Lorraine?” I asked the librarian at the desk. She was wearing a black-and-white-mottled sweatshirt with the logo UDDERLY FANTASTIC on it, and a pair of black-and-white Holstein cow earrings.

“Led On by Fate,” she said. “Still. The reserve list’s a foot long. You are”—she counted down her computer screen—“fifth in line. You were sixth, but Mrs. Roxbury canceled.”

“Really?” I said, interested. Book fads don’t usually die out until the sequel comes out, at which point the readers realize they’ve been had. Witness Oliver’s Story and Slow Waltz at Cedar Bend. Which is why the Gone with the Wind trend managed to last nearly six years, resulting in thousands of unhappy little boys having to live down the name of Rhett, or even worse, Ashley. If Margaret Mitchell’d come out with Slow Waltz at Tara Bend it would have been all over. Which reminded me, I should check to see if there’d been any dropoff in Gone with the Wind’s popularity since the publication of Scarlett.

“Don’t get your hopes up about Fate,” Lorraine said. “Mrs. Roxbury only canceled because she said she couldn’t bear to wait for it and bought her own copy.” She shook her head, and her cows swung back and forth. “What do people see in it?”

Yes, well, and what did they see in Little Lord Fauntleroy back in the 1890s, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s sickly sweet tale of a little boy with long curls who inherited an English castle? Whatever it was, it made the novel into a best-seller and then a hit play and a movie starring Mary Pickford (she already had the long curls), started a style of velvet suits, and became the bane of an earlier generation of little boys whose mothers inflicted lace collars, curlers, and the name Cedric on them and who would have been delighted to have only been named Ashley.

“What else is on the reserve list?”

“The new John Grisham, the new Stephen King, Angels from Above, Brushed by an Angel’s Wing, Heavenly Encounters of the Third Kind, Angels Beside You, Angels, Angels Everywhere, Putting Your Guardian Angel to Work for You, and Angels in the Boardroom.”

None of those counted. The Grisham and the Stephen King were only best-sellers, and the angel fad had been around for over a year.

“Do you want me to put you on the list for any of those?” Lorraine asked. “Angels in the Boardroom is great.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “Nothing new, huh?”

She frowned. “I thought there was something…” She checked her computer screen. “The novelization of Little Women,” she said, “but that wasn’t it.”

I thanked her and went over to the stacks. I picked out F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” and a couple of mysteries, which always have simple, solvable problems like “How did the murderer get into the locked room?” instead of hard ones like “What causes trends?” and “What did I do to deserve Flip?” and then went over to the eight hundreds.

One of the nastier trends in library management in recent years is the notion that libraries should be “responsive to their patrons.” This means having dozens of copies of The Bridges of Madison County and Danielle Steel, and a consequent shortage of shelf space, to cope with which librarians have taken to purging books that haven’t been checked out lately.

“Why are you throwing out Dickens?” I’d asked Lorraine last year at the library book sale, brandishing a copy of Bleak House at her. “You can’t throw out Dickens.”

“Nobody checked it out,” she’d said. “If no one checks a book out for a year, it gets taken off the shelves.” She had been wearing a sweatshirt that said A TEDDY BEAR IS FOREVER, and a pair of plush teddy bear earrings. “Obviously nobody read it.”

“And nobody ever will because it won’t be there for them to check out,” I’d said. “Bleak House is a wonderful book.”

“Then this is your chance to buy it,” she’d said.

Well, and this was a trend like any other, and as a sociologist I should note it with interest and try to determine its origins. I didn’t. Instead, I started checking out books. All my favorites, which I’d never checked out because I had copies at home, and all the classics, and everything with an old cloth binding that somebody might want to read someday when the current trends of sentimentality and schlock are over.

Today I checked out The Wrong Box, in honor of the day’s events, and since I’d first seen Dr. O’Reilly with his legs sticking out from under a large object, The Wizard of Oz, and then went over to the Bs to look for Bennett. The Old Wives’ Tale wasn’t there (it had probably ended up in the book sale already), but right next to Beckett was Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, which meant The Old Wives’ Tale might just be misshelved.

I started down the shelves, looking for something chubby, clothbound, and untouched. Borges; Wuthering Heights, which I had already checked out this year; Rupert Brooke. And Robert Browning. The Complete Works. It wasn’t Arnold Bennett, but it was both clothbound and fat, and it still had an old-fashioned pocket and checkout card in it. I grabbed it and the Borges and took them to the checkout desk.

“I remembered what else was on the reserve list,” Lorraine said. “New book. Guide to the Fairies.” “What is it, a children’s book?”

“No.” She took it off the reserve shelf. “It’s about the presence of fairies in our daily lives.”

She handed it to me. It had a picture of a fairy peeking out from behind a computer on the cover, and it fit one of the criteria for a book fad: It was only 80 pages long. The Bridges of Madison County was 192 pages, Jonathan Livingston Seagull was 93, and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, a huge fad back in 1934, was only 84.

It was also drivel. The chapter titles were “How to Get in Touch with Your Inner Fairy,” “How Fairies Can Help Us Get Ahead in the Corporate World,” and “Why You Shouldn’t Pay Attention to Unbelievers.” “You’d better put me on the list,” I said. I handed her the Browning. “This hasn’t been checked out in nearly a year,” she said. “Really?” I said. “Well, it is now.” And took my Borges, Browning, and Baum and went to get some dinner at the Earth Mother.

The Earth Mother has okay food and iced tea so good I order it all year round. Plus, it’s a great place to study fads. Not only is its menu trendy (currently free-range vegetarian), but so are its waiters. Also, there’s a stand outside with all the alternative newspapers.

I gathered them up and went inside. The door and entryway were jammed with people waiting to get in. Their iced tea must be becoming a trend. I presented myself to the waitress, who had a prison-style haircut, jogging shorts, and Tevas.

That’s another trend, waitresses dressed to look as little as possible like waitresses, probably so you can’t find them when you want your check. “Name and number in your party?” the waitress said. She was holding a tablet with at least twenty names.

“One, Foster,” I said. “I’ll take smoking or nonsmoking, whichever’s quicker.”

She looked outraged. “We don’t have a smoking section,” she said. “Don’t you know what smoking can do to you?”

Usually get you seated quicker, I thought, but since she looked ready to cross out my name, I said, “I don’t smoke. I was just willing to sit with people who do.”

“Secondhand smoke is just as deadly,” she said, and put an X next to my name that probably meant I would be seated right after hell froze over. “I’ll call you,” she said, rolling her eyes, and I certainly hoped that wasn’t a trend.

I sat down on the bench next to the door and started through the papers. They were full of animal rights articles and tattoo removal ads. I turned to the personals. The personals aren’t a fad. They were, in the late eighties, and then, like a lot of fads, instead of dying out, they settled into a small but permanent niche in society.

That happens to lots of fads: CBs were so popular for a few months that “Breaker, breaker” became a catchphrase and everyone had handles like “Red Hot Mama,” and then went back to being used by truckers and speeding motorists. Bicycles, Monopoly, crossword puzzles, all were crazes that have settled into the mainstream. The personals took up residence in the alternative newspapers.

There can be trends within trends, though, and the personals go through fads of their own. Unusual varieties of sex was big for a while. Now it’s outdoor activities.

The waitress, looking vastly disapproving, said, “Foster party of one,” and led me to a table right in front of the kitchen. “We banned smoking two years ago,” she said, and slapped down a menu.

I picked it up, glanced at it to see if they still had the sprouts and sun-dried tomatoes croissant, and settled down to the personals again. Jogging was out, and mountain biking and kayaking were in. And angels. One of the ads was headed HEAVENLY MESSENGER and another one said “Are your angels telling you to call me? Mine told me to write this ad,” which I found unlikely.

Soul work was also in, and spirituality, and slashes. “S/DWF wanted,” and “Into Eastern/Native American/personal growth,” and “Seeking fun/possible life partner.” Well, aren’t we all?

A waiter appeared, also in jogging shorts, Tevas, and snit. He had apparently seen the X. I said, before he could lecture me on the dangers of nicotine, “I’ll have the sprouts croissant and iced tea.”

“We don’t have that anymore.”

“Sprouts?”

“Tea.” He flipped the menu open and pointed to the right-hand page. “Our beverages are right here.”

They certainly were. The entire page was devoted to them: espresso, cappuccino, caffè latte, caffè mocha, caffè cacao. But no tea. “I liked your iced tea,” I said.

“No one drinks tea anymore,” he said.

Because you took it off the menu, I thought, wondering if they’d used the same principle as the library, and I should have come here more often, or ordered more than one when I did come, and saved it from the ax. Also feeling guilty because I’d apparently missed the start of a trend, or at least a new stage in one.

The espresso trend’s actually been around for several years, mostly on the West Coast and in Seattle, where it started. A lot of fads have come out of Seattle recently—garage bands, the grunge look, caffè latte. Before that, fads usually started in L.A., and before that, New York. Lately, Boulder’s shown signs of becoming the next trend center, but the spread of espresso to Boulder probably has more to do with bottom lines than the scientific laws of fads, but I still wished I’d been around to watch it happen and see if I could spot the trigger.

“I’ll have a caffè latte,” I said.

“Single or double?”

“Double.”

“Tall or short?”

“Tall.”

“Chocolate or cinnamon on top?”

“Chocolate.”

“Semisweet or dark?”

I’d been wrong when I told Dr. O’Reilly all fads had to have a low ability threshold.

After several more exchanges, concerning whether I wanted cubed sugar versus brown and nonfat versus two percent, he left, and I went back to the personals.

Honesty was out, as usual. The men were all “tall, handsome, and financially secure,” and the women were all “gorgeous, slender, and sensitive.” The G/Bs were all “attractive, sophisticated, and caring.” Everyone had a “terrific sense of humor,” which I also found unlikely. All of them were seeking sensitive, intelligent, ecological, romantic, articulate NSs.

NS. What was NS? Nordic skiing? Native American Shamanism? Natural sex? No sex? And here was NSO. No sexual orgasms? I flipped back to the translation guide. Of course. Nonsmoker only.

The buxom, handsome, caring people who place these things seem frequently to have confused the personals with the L. L. Bean catalog: I’d like Item D2481 in passion red. Size, small. And they frequently specify color, shape, and no pets. But the number of nonsmokings seemed to have radically increased since the last time I’d done a count. I got a red pen out of my purse and started to circle them.

By the time my sandwich and complex latte had arrived, the page was covered in red. I ate my sandwich and sipped my latte and circled. The nonsmoking trend started way back in the late seventies, and so far it had followed the typical pattern for aversion trends, but I wondered if it was starting to reach another, more volatile level. “Any race, religion, political party, sexual preference okay,” one of the ads read. “NO SMOKERS.” In caps.

And “Must be adventurous, daring, nonsmoking risk-taker” and “Me: Successful but tired of being alone. You: Compassionate, caring, nonsmoking, childless.” And my favorite: “Desperately seeking someone who marches to the beat of a different drummer, flouts convention, doesn’t care what’s in or out. Smokers need not apply.”

Someone was standing over me. The waiter, probably, wanting to give me a nicotine patch. I looked up.

“I didn’t know you came here,” Flip said, rolling her eyes.

“I didn’t know you came here either,” I said. And now that I do I never will again, I thought. Especially since they don’t serve iced tea anymore.

“The personals, huh?” she said, craning around to look at what I’d marked. “They’re okay, I guess, if you’re desperate.”

I am, I thought, wondering wildly if she’d stopped on the way in to empty the trash and had I locked the car?

“I don’t need artificial aids. I have Brine,” she said, pointing at a guy with a shaved head, bower boots, and studs in his nose, eyebrows, and lower lip, but I wasn’t looking at him. I was looking at her extended arm, which had three wide gray armlets around it at wrist, mid-forearm, and just below the elbow. Duct tape.

Which explained her remark about it being a personal errand this afternoon. If this is the latest fad, I thought, I quit. “I have to go,” I said, scooping up my newspapers and purse, and looking frantically around for my waiter, who I couldn’t find since he was dressed like everybody else. I put down a twenty and practically ran for the exit.

“She doesn’t appreciate me at all,” I heard Flip telling Brine as I fled. “She could at least have thanked me for cleaning up her office.”

I had locked my car, and, driving home, I began to feel almost cheerful about the duct tape armbands. Flip would, after all, have to take them off. I also thought about Brine and about Billy Ray, who wears a Stetson and boot-cut jeans and a pager, and about what an accomplishment Dr. O’Reilly’s unstylishness really was.

Almost everything is in style for men these days: bomber jackets, bicycle pants, dashikis, GQ suits, jeans that are too big, tank shirts that are too small, deck shoes, hiking boots, Birkenstocks. And now with the addition of grunge’s faded flannel shirts and thermal underwear, it’s hard to find anything that looks bad enough to not be in style. But Dr. O’Reilly had managed it.

His hair was too long and his pants were too short, but it was more than that. One of the garage bands has a drummer who wears pedal pushers and braids onstage, and he looks like the ultimate in trendiness. And it wasn’t his glasses. Look at Elton John. Look at Buddy Holly.

It was something else, something that had been nagging at me all evening. Maybe I should go back down to Bio and ask him if I could study him. Maybe if I followed him around while he taught his monkeys to Hula Hoop or whatever it was he was going to do, I could figure out how he managed to be trend-free. And by studying a nontrend, get some clue to its opposite. Or maybe I should go home, iron my clippings, and try to figure out what caused two million women to suddenly pick up their scissors in unison and whack off their Little Lord Fauntleroy curls.

I didn’t do either one. Instead, I went home and read Browning. I read “The Pied Piper,” a poem which, oddly enough, was about fads, and started Pippa Passes, a long poem about an Italian factory girl in Asolo who only got one day a year off (clearly she worked for the Italian branch of HiTek) and who spent it wandering past windows singing, among other things, “The lark’s on the wing;/The snail’s on the thorn,” and inspiring everybody who heard her.

I wished she’d show up outside my window and inspire me, but it didn’t seem likely. Inspiration was going to have to come the way it usually did in science, uncrumpling all those clippings and feeding the data into the computer. By experimenting and failing and trying again.

I was wrong. Inspiration had already happened. I just didn’t know it yet.

Wednesday we had the all-staff meeting. I was nearly late to it. I’d been down in Supply, trying to wrestle a box of paper clips out of Desiderata, who didn’t know where (or what) they were, and, as a result, every table in the cafeteria was filled when I got there.

Gina waved to me from across the room and pointed at an empty chair next to her, and I slid into it just as Management said, “We at HiTek never stop striving for excellence.”

“What’s going on?” I whispered to Gina.

“Management is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt they don’t have enough to do,” she murmured back. “So they’ve invented a new acronym. They’re working up to it right now.”

“…principle of our exciting new management program is Initiative.” He printed a large capital I on a flipchart with a Magic Marker. “Initiative is the cornerstone of a good company.”

I looked around the room, trying to spot Dr. O’Reilly. Flip was slouched against the back wall, her arms swathed in duct tape, looking sullen.

“The cornerstone of Initiative is Resources,” Management said. He printed an R in front of the I. “And what is HiTek’s most valuable resource? You!”

I finally spotted Dr. O’Reilly standing near the trays and the silverware with his hands in his pockets. He looked a little more presentable today, but not much. He’d put a brown polyester blazer on that wasn’t the same brown as his corduroy pants and a brown-and-white-checked shirt that didn’t match either one.

“Resources and Initiative are worthless unless they’re guided,” Management said, sticking a G in front of the R and I. “Guided Resource Initiative Management,” he said triumphantly, pointing to each letter in turn. “GRIM.”

“Truer words,” Gina muttered.

“The cornerstone of GRIM is Staff Input.” Management wrote SI on the flipchart. “I want you to divide into brainstorming groups and list five objectives.” He wrote a large 5 on the flipchart.

I looked over at Dr. O’Reilly, still standing by the silverware, wondering if I should invite him to join our brainstorming group, but Gina’d already grabbed Sarah from Chemistry and a woman from Personnel named Elaine who was wearing a sweatband and bicycle pants.

“Five objectives,” Management said, and Elaine immediately got out a notebook and numbered a page from one to five, “for enhancing the work environment at HiTek.”

“Fire Flip,” I said.

“Do you know what she did to me the other day?” Sarah said. “She filed all my lab charts under L for lab.”

“Should I write that down?” Elaine said.

“No,” Gina said, “but I want you all to write this down. Brittany’s birthday is on the eighteenth and you’re all invited. Two o’clock. Presents, cake, and no Power Rangers. I put my foot down. You can have any kind of party you want, I told Brittany, but not Power Rangers.”

Dr. O’Reilly had finally sat down at a table in the middle of the room and had taken off his jacket. It wasn’t an improvement. All it meant was that you could see his tie, which was seriously out of style.

“Have you ever seen the Power Rangers?” Gina was saying.

“I can’t come,” Sarah said. “I’m running in a ten-K race with Paul Ottermeyer.”

“In Safety? I thought you were going with Ted,” Gina said.

“Ted has intimacy issues,” Sarah said. “And until he learns to deal with them, there’s no point in our trying to have a committed relationship.”

“So you’re settling for a ten-K race?” Gina said.

“You should try stair-walking,” Elaine from Personnel said. “It gives you a much better full-body workout than running.”

I leaned my chin on my hand and considered Dr. O’Reilly’s tie. Ties are a lot like the rest of men’s clothes. Almost everything’s in. That wasn’t true until recently. Each era had its own fashion in ties. Striped cravats were in in the 1860s and lavender ties in the 1890s. Bow ties were big in the twenties, hand-painted hula dancers in the forties, neon daisies in the sixties, and anything that wasn’t in was out. But now all of the above are in, along with bolos, bandannas, and the ever-popular no tie at all. Bennett’s tie wasn’t any of those—it was just ugly.

“What are you looking at?” Gina asked.

“Dr. O’Reilly,” I said, wondering if he was old enough to have bought the tie new.

“The geek down in Bio?” Elaine said, craning her neck.

“Bad tie,” Gina said.

“And those glasses,” Sarah said. “They’re so thick you can’t even tell what color his eyes are!”

“Gray,” I said, but Elaine and Sarah had gone back to discussing stair-walking.

“The best stairs are up on campus,” Elaine said. “The engineering building. Sixty-eight steps, but it’s gotten pretty crowded. So I usually do the ones over on Clover.”

“Ted lives on Iris,” Sarah said. “He’s got to acknowledge his male warrior spirit, or he’ll never be able to embrace his female side.”

“All right, fellow workers,” Management said. “Do you have your five objectives? Flip, would you collect them?”

Elaine looked stricken. Gina snatched the list from her and wrote rapidly:

“How did you do that?” I said admiringly.

“Those are the five things I always write down,” she said and handed the list to Flip as she slouched past.

“Before we go any further,” Management said, “I want you all to stand up.”

“Bathroom break,” Gina murmured.

“We’re going to do a sensitivity exercise,” Management said. “Everybody find a partner.”

I turned. Sarah and Elaine had already claimed each other, and Gina was nowhere to be seen. I hesitated, wondering if I could make it all the way over to Dr. O’Reilly in time, and saw a woman in a chic haircut and a red power suit moving purposefully through the crowd to me.

“I’m Dr. Alicia Turnbull,” she said.

“Oh, right,” I said, smiling. “Did you get your box okay?”

“Everybody got a partner?” Management boomed. “Now, face each other and raise both hands, palms outward.”

We did. “You’re all under arrest,” I joked.

Dr. Turnbull raised an eyebrow.

“Okay, fellow workers,” Management said, “now place your palms flat against the palms of your partner’s hands.”

Silliness has always been a dominant trend in America, but it has only recently invaded the workplace, although it has its origins in the efficiency experts of the twenties. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, the founders of the Cheaper by the Dozen clan, who clearly did not spend all their time in the factory (twelve children, count ’em, twelve), popularized the ideas of motion study, psychology in the workplace, and the outside expert, and American business has been in decline ever since.

“Now, look deep in your partner’s eyes,” Management said, “and tell him or her three things you like about him or her. Okay. One.”

“Where do they come up with this stuff?” I said, looking deep in Dr. Turnbull’s eyes.

“Studies have shown sensitivity training significantly improves corporate workplace relations,” she said frostily.

“Fine,” I said. “You go first.”

“That package clearly said ‘perishable’ on it,” she said, pressing her palms against mine. “You should have delivered it to me immediately.”

“You weren’t there.”

“Then you should have found out where I was.”

“Two,” Management said.

“That package contained valuable cultures. They could have spoiled.”

She seemed to have lost sight of an important point here. “Flip was the one who was supposed to have delivered it to you.”

“Then what was it doing in your office?”

“Three,” Management said.

“Next time I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a message on my e-mail,” she said. “Well? Aren’t you going to tell me three things you like about me? It’s your turn.”

I like it that you work in Bio and that it’s clear on the other end of the complex, I thought. “I like your suit,” I said, “even though shoulder pads are terribly passé. And so is red. Too threatening. Feminine is what’s in.”

“Don’t you feel better about yourself?” Management said, beaming. “Don’t you feel closer to your fellow worker?”

Too close, in fact. I beat a hasty retreat back to my table and Gina. “Where did you go?” I demanded.

“To the bathroom,” she said. “Meeting Survival Rule Number One. Always be out going to the bathroom during sensitivity exercises.”

“Before we go any further,” Management said, and I braced myself to make a break for the bathroom in case of another sensitivity exercise, but Management was moving right along to the increased paperwork portion of our program, which turned out to be procurement forms.

“We’ve had some complaints about Supply,” Management said, “so we’ve instituted a new policy that will increase efficiency in that department. Instead of the old departmental supply forms, you’ll use a new interdepartmental form. We’ve also restructured the funding allocation procedure. One of the most revolutionary aspects of GRIM is the way it streamlines funding. All applications for project funding will be handled by a central Allocations Review Committee, including projects which were previously approved. All forms are due Monday the twenty-third. All applications must be filed on the new simplified funding allocation application forms.”

Which, if the stack of papers Flip was holding in her duct-taped arms as she passed among the crowd was any indication, were longer than the old funding application forms, and they were thirty-two pages.

“While the interdepartmental assistant’s distributing the forms, I want to hear your input. What else can we do to make HiTek a better place?”

Eliminate staff meetings, I thought, but didn’t say it. I may not be as well versed as Gina is in Meeting Survival, but I do know enough not to raise my hand. All it does is get you put on a committee.

Apparently everybody else knew it, too.

“Staff Input is the cornerstone of HiTek,” he said.

Still nothing.

“Anybody?” Management said, looking GRIM. He brightened. “Ah, at last, someone who’s not afraid to stand out in a crowd.”

Everybody turned to look.

It was Flip. “The interdepartmental assistant has way too many duties,” she said, flipping her hank of hair.

“You see,” Management said, pointing at her. “That’s the kind of problem-solving attitude that GRIM is all about. What solution do you suggest?”

“A different job title,” Flip said. “And an assistant.”

I looked across the room at Dr. O’Reilly. He had his head in his hands.

“Okay. Other ideas?”

Forty hands shot up. I looked at the waving hands and thought about the Pied Piper and his rats. And about hair-bobbing. Most hair fads are a clear case of follow-the-Piper. Bo Derek, Dorothy Hamill, Jackie Kennedy, had all started hairstyle fads, and they were by no means the first. Madame de Pompadour had been responsible for those enormous powdered wigs with sailing ships and famous artillery battles in them, and Veronica Lake for millions of American women being unable to see out of one eye.

So it was logical that hair-bobbing had been started by somebody, only who? Isadora Duncan had bobbed her hair in the early 1900s, and several suffragettes had bobbed theirs (and put on men’s clothes) long before that, but neither had attracted any followers to speak of.

The suffragettes were obviously ahead of their time (and rather fearsomely formidable). Isadora, who leaped around the stage in skimpy chiffon tunics and bare feet, was too weird.

The obvious person was the ballroom dancer Irene Castle. She and her husband, Vernon (more miserable little boys), had set several dancing trends: the one-step, the hesitation waltz, the tango, the turkey trot, and, of course, the Castle Walk.

Irene was pretty, and almost everything she wore had become a fad, from white satin shoes to little Dutch caps. In 1913, at the height of their popularity, she’d had her hair cut short while she was in the hospital after an appendectomy, and she’d kept it short after she got better and had worn it with a wide band that clearly foreshadowed the flappers.

She was a known fashion-setter, and she’d definitely had followers. But if she was the source, why had it taken so long to catch on? When Bo Derek’s corn-rowed hair hit movie screens in 1979, it was only a week before corn-rowed women started showing up everywhere. If Irene was the source, why hadn’t hair-bobbing become a fad in 1913? Why had it waited for nine years and a world war to become a fad?

Maybe the movies were the key. No, Mary Pickford hadn’t cut off her long curls until 1928. Had Irene and Vernon Castle done a silent film in, say, 1921?

Management was still calling on waving hands.

“I think we should have an espresso cart in the building,” Dr. Apple-gate said.

“I think we should have a workout room,” Elaine said.

“And some more stairs.”

This could go on all day, and I wanted to check and see what movies had come out in 1922. I stood up, as unobtrusively as possible, snatched a form from Flip, who had skipped our table, and ducked out the back, leafing through the form to see how long it was.

Wonder of wonders, it was actually shorter than the original. Only twenty-two pages. And the type was only slightly smaller than—I crashed into someone and looked up.

It was Dr. O’Reilly, who must have been doing the same thing. “Sorry,” he said. “I was thinking about this funding reapplication thing.” He raised both hands, still holding the funding form in the right one, and faced his palms out. “Tell your partner three things you don’t like about Management.”

“Can it be more than three?” I said. “I suppose this means you won’t get your macaques right away, Dr. O’Reilly.”

“Call me Bennett,” he said. “Flip’s the only one with a title. I was supposed to get them this week. Now I’ll have to wait till the twentieth. How about you? Does this affect your Hula Hoop project?”

“Hair-bobbing,” I said. “The only effect is that I won’t have any time to work on it because I’ll be filling out this stupid form. I wish Management would find something to think about besides making up new forms.”

“Shh,” someone said fiercely from the door.

We moved farther down the hall, out of range.

“Paperwork is the cornerstone of Management,” Bennett whispered. “They think reducing everything to forms is the key to scientific discovery. Unfortunately science doesn’t work that way. Look at Newton. Look at Archimedes.”

“Management would never have approved the funding for an orchard,” I agreed, “or a bathtub.”

“Or a river,” Bennett said. “Which is why we lost our chaos theory funding and I had to come to work for GRIM.”

“What were you working on?” I asked.

“The Loue. It’s a river in France. It has its source in a grotto, which means it’s a small, contained system with a comparatively limited number of variables. The systems scientists have tried to study before were huge—weather, the human body, rivers. They had thousands, even millions of variables, which made them impossible to predict, so we found…”

Up close his tie was even more nondescript than from a distance. It appeared to have some sort of pattern, though what exactly I couldn’t make out. Not paisley (which had been popular in 1988), or polka dots (1970). It wasn’t a nonpattern either.

“…and measured the air temperature, water temperature, dimensions of the grotto, makeup of the water, plant life along the banks—” he said and stopped. “You’re probably busy and don’t have time to listen to all this.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ve got to go back to my office, but I’ll walk you as far as the stairs.”

“Okay, well, so my idea was that by precisely measuring every factor in a chaotic system, I could isolate the causes of chaos.”

“Flip,” I said. “The cause of chaos.”

He laughed. “The other causes of chaos. I know talking about the causes of chaos sounds like a contradiction in terms, since chaotic systems are supposed to be systems where ordinary cause and effect break down. They’re nonlinear, which means there are so many factors, operating in such an interconnected way, that they’re impossible to predict.”

Like fads, I thought.

“But there are laws governing them. We’ve mathematically defined some of them: entropy, interior instabilities, and iteration, which is—”

“The butterfly effect,” I said.

“Right. A tiny variable feeds back into the system and then the feedback feeds back, until it influences the system all out of proportion to its size.”

I nodded. “A butterfly flapping its wings in L.A. can cause a typhoon in Hong Kong. Or an all-staff meeting at HiTek.”

He looked delighted. “You know something about chaos?”

“Only from personal experience,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “it does seem to be the order of the day around here. Well, so, anyway, my project was to calculate the effects of iteration and entropy and see if they accounted for chaos or if there was another factor involved.”

“Was there?”

He looked thoughtful. “Chaos theorists think the Heisenberg uncertainty principle means that chaotic systems are inherently unpredictable. Verhoest believes that prediction is possible, but he’s proposed there’s another force driving chaos, an X factor that’s influencing its behavior.”

“Moths,” I said.

“What?”

“Or locusts. Something other than butterflies.”

“Oh. Right. But he’s wrong. My theory is that iteration can account for everything that goes on in a chaotic system, once all the factors are known and properly measured. I never got the chance to find out. We were only able to do two runs before I got my funding cut. They didn’t show an increase in predictability, which means either I was wrong or I didn’t have all the variables.” He stopped, his hand on a door handle, and I realized we were standing outside his door. I had apparently walked him all the way down to Bio.

“Well,” I said, wishing I had more time to analyze his tie, “I guess I’d better get back to work. I’ve got to brace myself for Flip’s new assistant. And fill out my funding allocation form.” I looked at it ruefully. “At least it’s short.”

He peered blankly at me through his thick glasses.

“Only twenty-two pages,” I said, holding it up.

“The funding forms aren’t printed up yet,” he said. “We’re supposed to get them tomorrow.” He pointed at the form I was holding. “That’s the new simplified supply procurement form. For ordering paper clips.”