Bellwether

Catastrophes can sometimes lead to scientific breakthroughs. A contaminated culture and a near drowning led to the discovery of penicillin, ruined photographic plates to the discovery of X rays. Take Mendeleev. His whole life was a series of catastrophes: He lived in Siberia, his father went blind, and the glass factory his mother started to make ends meet after his father died burned to the ground. But it was that fire that made his mother move to St. Petersburg, where Mendeleev was able to study with Bunsen and, eventually, come up with the periodic table of the elements.

Or take James Christy. He had a more minor catastrophe to deal with: a broken Star Scan machine. He’d just taken a picture of Pluto and was getting ready to throw it away because of a clearly wrong bulge at the edge of the planet when the Star Scan (obviously made by the same company as HiTek’s copy machines) crashed.

Instead of throwing the photographic plate away, Christy had to call the repairman, who asked Christy to wait in case he needed help. Christy stood around for a while and then took another, harder look at the bulge and decided to check some of the earlier photographs. The very first one he found was marked “Pluto image. Elongated. Plate no good. Reject.” He compared it to the one in his hand. The plates looked the same, and Christy realized he was looking not at ruined pictures, but at a moon of Pluto.

On the whole, though, catastrophes are just catastrophes. Like this one.

Management cares about only one thing. Paperwork. They will forgive almost anything else—cost overruns, gross incompetence, criminal indictments—as long as the paperwork’s filled out properly. And in on time.

“You gave your funding allocation form to Flip?” I said, and was instantly sorry.

He went even paler. “I know. Stupid, huh?”

“Your monkeys,” I said.

“My ex-monkeys. I will not be teaching them the Hula Hoop.” He went over to the stack I’d just been through and started through it.

“I’ve already been through those,” I said. “It’s not in there. Did you tell Management Flip lost it?”

“Yes,” he said, picking up the papers on top of the copier. “Management said Flip says she turned in all the applications people gave her.”

“And they believed her?” I said. Well, of course they believed her. They’d believed her when she said she needed an assistant. “Is anybody else’s form missing?”

“No,” he said grimly. “Of the three people stupid enough to let Flip turn their forms in, I’m the only one whose form she lost.”

“Maybe…” I said.

“I already asked them. I can’t redo it and turn it in late.” He set down the stack, picked it up, and started through it again.

“Look,” I said, taking it from him. “Let’s take this in an orderly fashion. You go through these piles.” I set it next to the stack I’d gone through. “Stacks we’ve looked through on this side of the room.” I handed him one of the worktable stacks. “Stuff we haven’t on this side. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said, and I thought a little of his color came back. He picked up the top of the stack.

I started through the recycling bin, into which somebody (very probably Flip) had dropped a half-full can of Coke. I grabbed a sticky armful of papers, sat down on the floor, and began pulling them apart. It wasn’t in the first armload. I bent over the bin and grabbed a second, hoping the Coke hadn’t trickled all the way to the bottom. It had.

“I knew better than to give it to Flip,” Bennett said, starting on another stack, “but I was working on my chaos theory data, and she told me she was supposed to take them up to Management.”

“We’ll find it,” I said, prying a Coke-gummed page free from the wad. Halfway through the papers I gave a yelp.

“Did you find it?” he said hopefully.

“No. Sorry.” I showed him the sticky pages. “It’s the marcel wave notes I was looking for. I gave them to Flip to copy.”

The color went completely out of his face, freckles and all. “She threw the application away,” he said.

“No, she didn’t,” I said, trying not to think about all those crumpled hair-bobbing clippings in my wastebasket the day I met Bennett. “It’s here somewhere.”

It wasn’t. We finished the stacks and went through them even though it was obvious the form wasn’t there.

“Could she have left it in your lab?” I said when I reached the bottom of the last stack. “Maybe she never made it out of there with it.”

He shook his head. “I’ve already been through the whole place. Twice,” he said, digging through the wastebasket. “What about your lab? She delivered that package to you. Maybe—”

I hated having to disappoint him. “I just ransacked it. Looking for these.” I held up my marcel wave clippings. “It could be in somebody else’s lab, though.” I got up stiffly. “What about Flip? Did you ask her what she did with it? What am I thinking? This is Flip we’re talking about.”

He nodded. “She said, ‘What funding form?’ ”

“All right,” I said. “We need a plan of attack. You take the cafeteria, and I’ll take the staff lounge.”

“The cafeteria?”

“Yes, you know Flip,” I said. “She probably misdelivered it. Like that package the day I met you,” and I felt there was a clue there, something significant not to where his funding form might be, but to something else. The thing that had triggered hair-bobbing? No, that wasn’t it. I stood there, trying to hold the feeling.

“What is it?” Bennett said. “Do you think you know where it is?”

It was gone. “No. Sorry. I was just thinking about something else. I’ll meet you at the recycling bin over in Chem. Don’t worry. We’ll find it,” I said cheerfully, but I didn’t have much hope that we actually would. Knowing Flip, she could have left it anywhere. HiTek was huge. It could be in anybody’s lab. Or down in Supply with Desiderata, the patron saint of lost objects. Or out in the parking lot. “Meet you at the recycling bin.”

I started up to the staff lounge and then had a better idea. I went to find Shirl. She was in Alicia’s lab, typing Niebnitz Grant data into the computer.

“Flip lost Dr. O’Reilly’s funding form,” I said without preamble.

I had somehow hoped she would say, “I know right where it is,” but she didn’t. She said, “Oh, dear,” and looked genuinely upset. “If he leaves, that—” She stopped. “What can I do to help?”

“Look in here,” I said. “Bennett’s in here a lot, and anyplace you can think of where she might have put it.”

“But the deadline’s past, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, angry that she was pointing out the thought I’d been trying to ignore, that Management, sticklers for deadlines that they were, would refuse to accept it even if we did find it, sticky with Coke and obviously mislaid. “I’ll be up in the staff lounge,” I said, and went up to look through the mailboxes.

It wasn’t there, or in the stack of old memos on the staff table, or in the microwave. Or in Alicia’s lab. “I looked all through it,” Shirl said, sticking her head in. “What day did Dr. O’Reilly give it to Flip?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was due on Monday.”

She shook her head grimly. “That’s what I was afraid of. The trash comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

I was sorry I’d brought her into this. I went down to the recycling bin. Bennett was almost all the way inside it, his legs dangling in midair. He came up with a fistful of papers and an apple core.

I took half the papers, and we went through them. No funding form.

“All right,” I said, trying to sound upbeat. “If it’s not in here, it’s in one of the labs. What shall we start with? Chem or Physics?”

“It’s no use,” Bennett said wearily. He sank back against the bin. “It’s not here, and I’m not here for much longer.”

“Isn’t there some way to do the project without funding?” I said. “You’ve got the habitat and the computer and cameras and everything. Couldn’t you substitute lab rats or something?”

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.”

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 resume. 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 toy stores.”

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 gets 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 passé.” 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.”

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—”

“We’ll have plenty of time,” I said. “This is Management, remember?”

Wrong again. Friday Management called me on the white carpet again and told me the permissions had all been gotten, the live-animal approvals approved. “Can you have the sheep here by Monday?”

“I’ll need to see if the owner can arrange it,” I said, hoping Billy Ray couldn’t.

He could, and did, though he didn’t bring them down himself. He was attending a virtual ranching meeting in Lander. He sent instead Miguel, who had a nose ring, Aussie hat, headphones, and no intention of unloading the sheep.

“Where do you want them?” he said in a tone that made me peer under the brim of the Aussie hat to see if he had an i on his forehead.

We showed him the paddock gate, and he sighed heavily, backed the truck more or less up to it, and then stood against the truck’s cab looking put-upon.

“Aren’t you going to unload them?” Ben said finally.

“Billy Ray told me to deliver them,” Miguel said. “He didn’t say anything about unloading them.”

“You should meet our mail clerk,” I said. “You’re obviously made for each other.”

He tipped the Aussie hat forward warily. “Where does she live?”

Bennett had gone around to the back of the truck and was lifting the bar that held the door shut. “You don’t suppose they’ll all come rushing out at once and trample us, do you?” he said.

No. The thirty or so sheep stood on the edge of the truck bed, bleating and looking terrified.

“Come on,” Ben said coaxingly. “Do you think it’s too far for them to jump?”

“They jumped off a cliff in Far from the Madding Crowd,” I said. “How can it be too far?”

Nevertheless, Ben went to get a piece of plywood for a makeshift ramp, and I went to see if Dr. Riez, who had done an equine experiment before he turned to flatworms, had a halter we could borrow.

It took him forever to find a halter, and I figured by the time I got back to the lab it would no longer be needed, but the sheep were still huddled in the back of the truck.

Ben was looking frustrated, and Miguel, up by the front of the truck, was swaying to some unheard rhythm.

“They won’t come,” Ben said. “I’ve tried calling and coaxing and whistling.”

I handed him the halter.

“Maybe if we can get one down the ramp,” he said, “they’ll all follow.” He took the halter and went up the ramp. “Get out of the way in case they all make a mad dash.”

He reached to slip the halter over the nearest sheep’s head, and there was a mad dash, all right. To the rear of the truck.

“Maybe you could pick one up and carry it off,” I said, thinking of the cover of one of the angel books. It showed a barefoot angel carrying a lost lamb. “A small one.”

Ben nodded. He handed me the halter and went up the ramp, moving slowly so he wouldn’t scare them. “Shh, shh,” he said softly to a little ewe. “I won’t hurt you. Shh, shh.”

The sheep didn’t move. Ben knelt and got his arms under the front and back legs and hoisted the animal up. He started for the ramp.

The angel had clearly doped the sheep with chloroform before picking it up. The ewe kicked out with four hooves in four different directions, flailing madly and bringing its muzzle hard up against Ben’s chin. He staggered and the ewe twisted itself around and kicked him in the stomach. Ben dropped it with a thud, and it dived into the middle of the truck, bleating hysterically.

The rest of the sheep followed. “Are you all right?” I said.

“No,” he said, testing his jaw. “What happened to ‘little lamb, so meek and mild’?”

“Blake had obviously never actually met a sheep,” I said, helping him down the ramp and over to the water trough. “What now?”

He leaned against the water trough, breathing heavily. “Eventually they have to get thirsty,” he said, gingerly touching his chin. “I say we wait ’em out.”

Miguel bopped over to us. “I haven’t got all day, you know!” he shouted over whatever was blaring in his headphones, and went back to the front of the truck.

“I’ll go call Billy Ray,” I said, and did. His cellular phone was out of range.

“Maybe if we sneak up on them with the halter,” Ben said when I got back.

We tried that. Also getting behind them and pushing, threatening Miguel, and several long spells of leaning against the water trough, breathing hard.

“Well, there’s certainly information diffusion going on,” Ben said, nursing his arm. “They’ve all decided not to get off the truck.”

Alicia came over. “I’ve got a profile of the optimum Niebnitz Grant candidate,” she said to Ben, ignoring me. “And I’ve found another Niebnitz. An industrialist. Who made his fortune in ore refining and founded several charities. I’m looking into their committee’s selection criteria.” She added, still to Ben, “I want you to come see the profile.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “You obviously won’t miss anything. I’ll go try Billy Ray again.”

I did. He said, “What you have to do is—” and went out of range again.

I went back out to the paddock. The sheep were out of the truck, grazing on the dry grass. “What did you do?” Ben said, coming up behind me.

“Nothing,” I said. “Miguel must have gotten tired of waiting,” but he was still up by the front of the truck, grooving to Groupthink or whatever it was he was listening to.

I looked at the sheep. They were grazing peacefully, wandering happily around the paddock as if they’d always belonged there. Even when Miguel, still wearing his headphones, revved up the truck and drove off, they didn’t panic. One of them close to the fence looked up at me with a thoughtful, intelligent gaze.

This is going to work, I thought.

The sheep stared at me for a moment longer, dropped its head to graze, and promptly got it stuck in the fence.

Over the next few days it became apparent that there was almost no information diffusion in a flock of sheep. There were also hardly any fads.

“I want to watch them for a few days,” Ben said. “We need to establish what their normal information diffusion patterns are.”

We watched. The sheep grazed on the dry grass, took a step or two, grazed some more, walked a little farther, grazed some more. They would have looked almost like a pastoral painting if it hadn’t been for their long, vacuous faces, and their wool.

I don’t know who started the myth that sheep are fluffy and white. They were more the color of an old mop and just as matted with dirt.

They grazed some more. Periodically one of them would leave off chewing and totter around the perimeter of the paddock, looking for a cliff to fall off of, and then go back to grazing. Once one of them threw up. Some of them grazed along the fence. When they got to the corner they stayed there, unable to figure out how to turn it, and kept grazing, eating the grass right down to the dirt. Then, for lack of better ideas, they ate the dirt.

“Are you sure sheep are a higher mammal?” Ben asked, leaning with his chin on his hands on the fence, watching them.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I had no idea sheep were this stupid.”

“Well, actually, a simple behavior structure may work to our advantage,” he said. “The problem with macaques is they’re smart. Their behavior’s complicated, with a lot of things going on simultaneously—dominance, familial interaction, grooming, communication, learning, attention structure. There are so many factors operating simultaneously the problem is trying to separate the information diffusion from the other behaviors. With fewer behaviors, it will be easier to see the information diffusion.”

If there is any, I thought, watching the sheep.

One of them walked a step, grazed, walked two more steps, and then apparently forgot what it was doing and gazed vacantly into space.

Flip slouched by, wearing a waitress uniform with red piping on the collar and “Don’s Diner” embroidered in red on the pocket, and carrying a paper.

“Did you get a job?” Ben asked hopefully.

Roll. Sigh. Toss. “No-o-o-o.”

“Then why are you wearing a uniform?” I asked.

“It’s not a uniform. It’s a dress designed to look like a uniform. Because of how I have to do all the work around here. It’s a statement. You have to sign this,” she said, handing me the paper and leaning over the gate. “Are these the sheep?”

The paper was a petition to ban smoking in the parking lot.

Ben said, “One person smoking one cigarette a day in a three-acre parking lot does not produce secondhand smoke in sufficient concentration to worry about.”

Flip tossed her hair, her hair wraps swinging wildly. “Not secondhand smoke,” she said disgustedly. “Air pollution.”

She slouched away, and we went back to observing. At least the lack of activity gave us plenty of time to set up our observation programs and review the literature.

There wasn’t much. A biologist at William and Mary had observed a flock of five hundred and concluded that they had “a strong herd instinct,” and a researcher in Indiana had identified five separate forms of sheep communication (the baas were listed phonetically), but no one had done active learning experiments. They had just done what we were doing: watch them chew, totter, mill, and throw up.

We had a lot of time to talk about hair-bobbing and chaos theory. “The amazing thing is that chaotic systems don’t always stay chaotic,” Ben said, leaning on the gate. “Sometimes they spontaneously reorganize themselves into an orderly structure.”

“They suddenly become less chaotic?” I said, wishing that would happen at HiTek.

“No, that’s the thing. They become more and more chaotic, until they reach some sort of chaotic critical mass. When that happens, they spontaneously reorganize themselves at a higher equilibrium level. It’s called self-organized criticality.”

We seemed well on the way to it. Management issued memos, the sheep got their heads stuck in the fence, the gate, and under the feed dispenser, and Flip came periodically to hang on the gate between the paddock and the lab, flip the latch monotonously up and down, and look lovesick.

By the third day it was obvious the sheep weren’t going to start any fads. Or learn how to push a button to get feed. Ben had set up the apparatus the morning after we got the sheep and demonstrated it several times, getting down on all fours and pressing his nose against the wide flat button. Feed pellets clattered down each time, and Ben stuck his head into the trough and made chewing noises. The sheep watched impassively.

“We’re going to have to force one of them to do it,” I said. We’d watched the videotapes from the day they arrived and seen how they’d gotten off the truck. The sheep had jostled and backed until one was finally pushed off onto the ramp. The others had immediately tumbled after it in a rush. “If we can teach one of them, we know the others will follow it.”

Ben went resignedly to get the halter. “Which one?”

“Not that one,” I said, pointing at the sheep that had thrown up. I looked at them, sizing them up for alertness and intelligence. There didn’t appear to be much. “That one, I guess.”

Ben nodded, and we started toward it with the halter. It chewed thoughtfully a moment and then bolted into the far corner. The entire flock followed, leaping over each other in their eagerness to reach the wall.

“ ‘And out of the houses the rats came tumbling,’ ” I murmured.

“Well, at least they’re all in one corner,” Ben said. “I should be able to get the halter on one of them.”

Nope, although he was able to grab a handful of wool and hold on nearly halfway across the paddock.

“I think you’re scaring them,” Flip said from the gate. She had been hanging on it half the morning, morosely flipping the latch up and down and telling us about Darrell the dentist.

“They’re scaring me,” Ben said, brushing off his corduroy pants, “so we’re even.”

“Maybe we should try coaxing them,” I said. I squatted down. “Come here,” I said in the childish voice people use with dogs. “Come on. I won’t hurt you.”

The sheep gazed at me from the corner, chewing impassively.

“What do shepherds do when they lead their flocks?” Ben asked.

I tried to remember from pictures. “I don’t know. They just walk ahead of them, and the sheep follow them.”

We tried that. We also tried sneaking up on both sides of a sheep and coming at the flock from the opposite side, on the off-chance they would run the other way and one of them would accidentally collide with the button.

“Maybe they don’t like those feed pellet things,” Flip said.

“She’s right, you know,” I said, and Ben stared at me in disbelief. “We need to know more about their eating habits and their abilities. I’ll call Billy Ray and see what they do like.”

I got Billy Ray’s voice mail. “Press one if you want the ranchhouse, press two if you want the barn, press three if you want the sheep camp.” Billy Ray wasn’t at any of the three. He was on his way to Casper.

I went back to the lab, told Bennett and Flip I was going to the library, and drove in.

Flip’s clone was at the desk, wearing a duct tape headband and an i brand.

“Do you have any books on sheep?” I asked her.

“How do you spell that?”

“With two es.” She still looked blank. “S. H.”

“The Sheik of Araby,” she read from the screen, “Middle-Eastern Sheiks and—”

“Sheep,” I said. “With a p.”

“Oh.” She typed it in, backspacing several times. “The Mystery of the Missing Sheep,” she read. “Six Silly Sheep Go Shopping, The Black Sheep Syndrome…”

“Books about sheep,” I said. “How to raise them and train them.”

She rolled her eyes. “You didn’t say that.”

I finally managed to get a call number out of her and checked out Sheep Raising for Fun and Profit; Tales of an Australian Shepherd; Dorothy Sayers’s Nine Tailors, which I seemed to remember had some sheep in it; Sheep Management and Care; and, remembering Billy Ray’s sheep mange, Common Sheep Diseases, and took them up to be checked out.

“I show an overdue book for you,” she said. “Complete Words by Robert Browning.”

“Works,” I said. “Complete Works. We went through this last time. I checked it in.”

“I don’t show a return,” she said. “I show a fine of sixteen fifty. It shows you checked it out last March. Books can’t be checked out when outstanding fines exceed five dollars.”

“I checked the book in,” I said, and slapped down twenty dollars.

“Plus you have to pay the replacement cost of the book,” she said. “That’s fifty-five ninety-five.”

I know when I am licked. I wrote her a check and took the books back to Ben, and we started through them.

They were not encouraging. “In hot weather sheep will bunch together and smother to death,” Sheep Raising for Fun, Etc. said, and “Sheep occasionally roll over on their backs and aren’t able to right themselves.”

“Listen to this,” Ben said. “ ‘When frightened, sheep may run into trees or other obstacles.’ ”

There was nothing about skills except “Keeping sheep inside a fence is a lot easier than getting them back in,” but there was a lot of information about handling them that we could have used earlier.

You were never supposed to touch a sheep on the face or scratch it behind the ears, and the Australian shepherd advised ominously, “Throwing your hat on the ground and stomping on it doesn’t do anything except ruin your hat.”

“ ‘A sheep fears being trapped more than anything else,’ ” I read to Ben.

“Now you tell me,” he said.

And some of the advice apparently wasn’t all that reliable. “Sit quietly,” Sheep Management said, “and the sheep will get curious and come to see what you’re doing.”

They didn’t, but the Australian shepherd had a practical method for getting a sheep to go where you wanted.

“ ‘Get down on one knee beside the sheep,’ ” I read from the book.

Ben complied.

“ ‘Place one hand on dock,’ ” I read. “That’s the tail area.”

“On the tail?”

“No. Slightly to the rear of the hips.”

Shirl came out of the lab onto the porch, lit a cigarette, and then came over to the fence to watch us.

“ ‘Place the other hand under the chin,’ ” I read. “ ‘When you hold the sheep this way, he can’t twist away from you, and he can’t go forward or back.’ ”

“So far so good,” Ben said.

“Now, ‘Hold the chin firmly and squeeze the dock gently to make the sheep go forward.’ ” I lowered the book and watched. “You stop it by pushing on the hand that’s under the chin.”

“Okay,” Ben said, getting up off his knee. “Here goes.”

He gave the woolly rear of the sheep a gentle squeeze. The sheep didn’t move.

Shirl took a long, coughing drag on her cigarette and shook her head.

“What are we doing wrong?” Ben said.

“That depends,” she said. “What are you trying to do?”

“Well, eventually I want to teach a sheep to push a button to get feed,” he said. “For now I’d settle for getting a sheep on the same side of the paddock as the feed trough.”

He had been holding on to the sheep and squeezing the whole time he’d been talking, but the sheep was apparently operating on some sort of delayed mechanism. It took two docile steps forward and began to buck.

“Don’t let go of the chin,” I said, which was easier said than done. We both grabbed for the neck. I dropped the book and got a handful of wool. Ben got kicked in the arm. The sheep gave a mighty lunge and took off for the middle of the flock.

“They do that,” Shirl said, blowing smoke. “Whenever they’ve been separated from the flock, they dive straight back into the middle of it. Group instinct reasserting itself. Thinking for itself is too frightening.”

We both went over to the fence. “You know about sheep?” Ben said.

She nodded, puffing on her cigarette. “I know they’re the orneriest, stubbornest, dumbest critters on the planet.”

“We already figured that out,” Ben said.

“How do you know about sheep?” I asked.

“I was raised on a sheep ranch in Montana.”

Ben gave a sigh of relief, and I said, “Can you tell us what to do? We can’t get these sheep to do anything.”

She took a long drag on her cigarette. “You need a bellwether,” she said.

“A bellwether?” Ben said. “What’s that? A special kind of halter?”

She shook her head. “A leader.”

“Like a sheepdog?” I said.

“No. A dog can harry and guide and keep the sheep in line, but it can’t make them follow. A bellwether’s a sheep.”

“A special breed?” Ben asked.

“Nope. Same breed. Same sheep, only it’s got something that makes the rest of the flock follow it. Usually it’s an old ewe, and some people think it’s something to do with hormones; other people think it’s something in their looks. A teacher of mine said they’re born with some kind of leadership ability.”

“Attention structure,” Ben said. “Dominant male monkeys have it.”

“What do you think?” I said.

“Me?” she said, looking at the smoke from her cigarette twisting upward. “I think a bellwether’s the same as any other sheep, only more so. A little hungrier, a little faster, a little greedier. It wants to get to the feed first, to shelter, to a mate, so it’s always out there in front.” She stopped to take a drag on her cigarette. “Not a lot. If it was a long way in front, the flock’d have to strike out on their own to follow, and that’d mean thinking for themselves. Just a little bit, so they don’t even know they’re being led. And the bellwether doesn’t know it’s leading.”

She dropped her cigarette in the grass and stubbed it out. “If you teach a bellwether to push a button, the rest of the flock’ll do it, too.”

“Where can we get one?” Ben said eagerly.

“Where’d you get your sheep?” Shirl said. “The flock probably had one, and you just didn’t get it in this batch. These weren’t the whole flock, were they?”

“No,” I said. “Billy Ray has two hundred head.”

She nodded. “A flock that big almost always has a bellwether.”

I looked at Ben. “I’ll call Billy Ray,” I said.

“Good idea,” he said, but he seemed to have lost his enthusiasm.

“What’s the matter?” I said. “Don’t you think a bellwether’s a good idea? Are you afraid it’ll interfere with your experiment?”

“What experiment? No, no, it’s a good idea. Attention structure and its effect on learning rate is one of the variables I wanted to study. Go ahead and call him.”

“Okay,” I said, and went into the lab. As I opened the door, the hall door slammed shut. I walked through the habitat and looked down the hall.

Flip, wearing overalls and Cerenkhov-blue-and-white saddle oxfords, was just disappearing into the stairwell. She must have been bringing us the mail. I was surprised she hadn’t come out into the paddock and asked us if we thought she was captivating.

I went back in the lab. She’d left the mail on Ben’s desk. Two packages for Dr. Ravenwood over in Physics, and a letter from Gina to Bell Laboratories.

Billy Ray brought the bellwether down himself. “I put it down in the paddock,” he said when he came into the stats lab. “The gal down there said to just put it in with the rest of the flock.”

He must mean Alicia. She’d spent all afternoon huddled with Ben, discussing the Niebnitz profile, which was why I’d come up to the stats lab to feed in twenties data. I wondered why Ben wasn’t there.

“Pretty?” I said. “Corporate type? Wears a lot of pink?”

“The bellwether?” he said.

“No, the person you talked to. Dark hair? Clipboard?”

“Nope,” he said. “Tattoo on her forehead.”

“Brand,” I said absently. “Maybe we’d better go check on the bellwether.”

“She’ll be fine,” he said. “I brought her down myself so I could take you to that dinner we missed out on last week.”

“Oh, good,” I said. This would give me a chance to get some ideas of low-threshold skills we could teach the sheep. “I’ll get my coat.”

“Great,” he said, beaming. “There’s this great new place I want to take you to.”

“Prairie?” I said.

“No, it’s a Siberian restaurant. Siberian is supposed to be the hot new cuisine.”

I hoped he meant hot in the sense of warm. It was freezing outside in the parking lot, and there was a bitter wind. I was glad Shirl didn’t have to stand out there to have a cigarette.

Billy Ray led me to his truck and helped me in. As he started to pull out of the parking lot, I put my hand on his arm. “Wait,” I said, remembering what Flip had done to my clippings. “Maybe we should check to make sure the bellwether’s all right before we leave. What did she say exactly? The girl who was down there in the lab. She wasn’t out in the paddock, was she?”

“Nope,” he said. “I was looking for somebody to give the bellwether to, and she came in with some letters and said they were in Dr. Turnbull’s lab and to just leave the bellwether in the paddock, so I did. She’s fine. Got right off the truck and started grazing.”

Which must mean she was really a bellwether. Things were looking up.

“She wasn’t still there when you left, was she?” I said. “The girl, not the bellwether.”

“Nope. She asked me whether I thought she had a good sense of humor, and when I said I didn’t know, I hadn’t heard her say anything funny, she kind of sighed and rolled her eyes and left.”

“Good,” I said. It was five-thirty already. Flip wouldn’t have stayed a minute past five, and she usually left early, so the chances she would have come back to the lab to work mischief were practically nonexistent. And Ben was still there; he’d come back from Alicia’s lab to check on things before he went home. If he wasn’t too enamored of Alicia and the Niebnitz Grant to remember he had a flock of sheep.

“This place is great,” Billy Ray said. “We’ll have to stand in line an hour to get in.”

“Sounds great,” I said. “Let’s go.”

It was actually an hour and twenty minutes, and during the last half hour the wind picked up and it started to snow. Billy Ray gave me his sheepskin-lined jacket to put over my shoulders. He was wearing a band-collared shirt and cavalry pants. He’d let his hair grow out, and he had on yellow leather riding gloves. The Brad Pitt look. When I kept shivering, he let me wear the gloves, too.

“You’ll love this place,” he said. “Siberian food is supposed to be great. I’m really glad we were able to get together. There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about.”

“I wanted to talk to you, too,” I said through stiff lips. “What kinds of tricks can you teach sheep?”

“Tricks?” he said blankly. “Like what?”

“You know, like learning to associate a color with a treat or running a maze. Preferably something with a low ability threshold and a number of skill levels.”

“Teach sheep?” he repeated. There was a long pause while the wind howled around us. “They’re pretty good at getting out of fences they’re supposed to stay inside of.”

That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll get on the Internet and see if anybody on there’s ever taught a sheep a trick.” He took off his hat, in spite of the snow, and turned it between his hands. “I told you I had something I wanted to talk to you about. I’ve had a lot of time to think lately, driving to Durango and everything, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the ranching life. It’s a lonely life, out there on the range all the time, never seeing anybody, never going anywhere.”

Except to Lodge Grass and Lander and Durango, I thought.

“And lately I’ve been wondering if it’s all worth it and what am I doing it for. And I’ve been thinking about you.”

“Barbara Rose,” the Siberian waiter said.

“That’s us,” I said. I gave Billy Ray his coat and gloves back, and he put his hat on, and we followed the waiter to our table. It had a samovar in the middle of it, and I warmed my hands over it.

“I think I told you the other day I was feeling at loose ends and kind of dissatisfied,” he said after we had our menus.

“Itch,” I said.

“That’s a good word for it. I’ve been itchy, all right, and while I was driving back from Lodgepole I finally figured out what I was itching for.” He took my hand.

“What?” I said.

“You.”

I yanked my hand back involuntarily, and he said, “Now, I know this is kind of a surprise to you. It was a surprise to me. I was driving through the Rockies, feeling out of sorts and like nothing mattered, and I thought, I’ll call Sandy, and after I got done talking to you, I got to thinking, Maybe we should get married.”

“Married?” I squeaked.

“Now I want to say right up front that whatever your answer is, you can have the sheep for as long as you want. No strings attached. And I know you’ve got a career that you don’t want to give up. I’ve got that figured out. We wouldn’t have to get married till after you’ve got this hair-bobbing thing done, and then we could set you up on the ranch with faxes and a modem and e-mail. You’d never even know you weren’t right there at HiTek.”

Except Flip wouldn’t be there, I thought irrelevantly, or Alicia. And I wouldn’t have to go to meetings and do sensitivity exercises. But married!

“Now, you don’t have to give me your answer right away,” Billy Ray went on. “Take all the time you want. I’ve had a couple of thousand miles to think about it. You can let me know after we have dessert. Till then, I’ll leave you alone.”

He picked up a red menu with a large Russian bear on it and began reading through it, and I sat and stared at him, trying to take this in. Married. He wanted me to marry him.

And, well, why not? He was a nice guy who was willing to drive hundreds of miles to see me, and I was, as I had told Alicia, thirty-one, and where was I going to meet anybody else? In the personals, with their athletic, caring NSs who weren’t even willing to walk across the street to date somebody?

Billy Ray had been willing to drive all the way down from someplace on the off chance of taking me to dinner. And he’d loaned me a flock of sheep and a bellwether. And his gloves. Where was I going to meet anybody that nice? Nobody at HiTek was going to propose to me, that was for sure.

“What do you want?” Billy Ray asked me. “I think I’m going to have the potato dumplings.”

I had borscht flavored with basil (which I hadn’t remembered as being big in Siberian cuisine) and potato dumplings and tried to think. What did I want?

To find out where hair-bobbing came from, I thought, and knew that was about as likely as winning the Niebnitz Grant. In spite of Feynman’s theory that working in a totally different field sparked scientific discovery, I was no closer to finding the source of fads than before. Maybe what I needed was to get away from HiTek altogether, out in the fresh air, on an isolated Wyoming ranch.

“Far from the madding crowd,” I murmured.

“What?” Billy Ray said.

“Nothing,” I said, and he went back to his dinner.

I watched him eat his dumplings. He really did look a little like Brad Pitt. He was awfully trendy, but maybe that would be an advantage for my project, and we wouldn’t have to get married right away. He’d said I could wait until after I finished the project. And, unlike Flip’s dentist, he wouldn’t mind my being geographically incompatible while I worked on it.

Flip and her dentist, I thought, wondering uneasily if this was just another fad. That article had said marriage was in, and all the little girls were crazy for Romantic Bride Barbie. Lindsay’s mother was thinking of getting married again in spite of that jerk Matt, Sarah was trying to talk Ted into proposing, and Bennett was letting Alicia pick out his ties. What if they were all part of a commitment fad?

I was being unfair to Billy Ray. He was in love with what was trendy, he might even stand in line in a blizzard for an hour and a half, but he wouldn’t marry someone because marriage was in. And what if it was a trend? Fads aren’t all bad. Look at recycling and the civil rights movement. And the waltz. And, anyway, what was wrong with going along with a trend once in a while?

“Time for dessert,” Billy Ray said, looking at me from under the brim of his hat.

He motioned the waitress over, and she rattled off the usual suspects: crème brûlée, tiramisu, bread pudding.

“No chocolate cheesecake?” I said.

She rolled her eyes.

“What do you want?” Billy Ray said.

“Give me a minute,” I said, breathing hard. “You go ahead.”

Billy Ray smiled at the waitress. “I’ll have the bread pudding,” he said.

“Bread pudding?” I said.

The waitress said helpfully, “It’s our most popular dessert.”

“I thought you didn’t like bread pudding,” I said.

He looked up blankly. “When did I say that?”

“At that prairie cuisine place you took me to. The Kansas Rose. You had the tiramisu.”

“Nobody eats tiramisu anymore,” he said. “I love bread pudding.”

Ben met me in the parking lot the next morning. “Where’s the bellwether?” he said.

“Isn’t it in with the other sheep?” I scrambled out of the car. I knew I shouldn’t have trusted Flip. “Billy Ray said he put it in the paddock.”

“Well, if it’s there, it looks just like all the other sheep.”

He was right. It did. We did a quick count, and there was one more than usual, but which one was the bellwether was anybody’s guess. “What did it look like when your friend put it in the paddock?”

“I wasn’t down here,” I said, looking at the sheep, trying to detect one that looked different. “I knew I should have come down to check on it, but we were going out to dinner and—”

“Yeah,” he said, cutting me off. “We’d better find Shirl.”

Shirl was nowhere to be found. I looked in the copy room and in Supply, where Desiderata was examining her split ends, which were lying on the counter in front of her.

“What happened to you, Desiderata?” I said, looking at her hacked-off hair.

“I couldn’t get the duct tape off,” she said forlornly, holding up one of the still-wrapped hair strands. “It was worse than the rubber cement that time.”

I winced. “Have you seen Shirl?”

“She’s probably off smoking somewhere,” she said disapprovingly. “Do you know how bad second-secondhand smoke is for you?”

“Almost as bad as duct tape,” I said, and went down to Alicia’s lab in case Shirl was feeding in stats for her.

She wasn’t, but Alicia, wearing a po-mo pink silk blouse and palazzo pants, was. “None of the Niebnitz Grant winners was a smoker,” she said when I asked her if she’d seen Shirl.

I thought about explaining that, given the percentage of nonsmokers in the general population and the tiny number of Niebnitz Grant recipients, the likelihood of their being nonsmokers (or anything else) was statistically insignificant, but the bellwether was still unidentified.

“Do you know where Shirl might be?” I said.

“I sent her up to Management with a report,” she said.

But she wasn’t there either. I went back down to the lab. Bennett hadn’t found her either. “We’re on our own,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “It’s a bellwether, so it’s a leader. So we put out some hay and see what happens.”

We did.

Nothing happened. The sheep near Ben scattered when he forked the hay in and then went on grazing. One of them wandered over to the water trough and got its head stuck between it and the wall and stood there bleating.

“Maybe he brought the wrong sheep,” Ben said.

“Do you have the videotapes from last night?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said and brightened. “Your friend’s bringing the bellwether will be on it.”

It was. Billy Ray let down the back of the truck, and the bellwether trotted meekly down the ramp and into the midst of the flock, and it was a simple matter of following its progress frame by frame right up to the present moment.

Or it would have been, if Flip hadn’t gotten in the way. She completely blocked the view of the flock for at least ten minutes, and when she finally moved off to the side, the flock was in a completely different configuration.

“She wanted to know if Billy Ray thought she had a sense of humor,” I said.

“Of course,” Ben said. “What now?”

“Back it up,” I said. “And freeze-frame it just before the bellwether gets off the truck. Maybe it’s got some distinguishing characteristics.”

He rewound, and we stared at the frame. The bellwether looked exactly the same as the other ewes. If she had any distinguishing characteristics, they were visible only to sheep.

“It looks a little cross-eyed,” Ben said finally, pointing at the screen. “See?”

We spent the next half hour working our way through the flock, taking ewes by the chin and looking into their eyes. They were all a little cross-eyed and so vacant-looking they should have had an i stamped on their long, dirty-white foreheads for impenetrable.

“There’s got to be a better way to do this,” I said after a deceptively scrawny ewe had mashed me against the fence and nearly broken both my legs. “Let’s try the videotapes again.”

“Last night’s?”

“No, this morning’s. And keep a tape running. I’ll be right back.”

I ran up to the stats lab, keeping an eye out for Shirl on the way, but there was no sign of her. I grabbed the disk my vector programs were on and then started rummaging through my fad collection.

It had occurred to me on the way upstairs that if we did manage to identify the bellwether, we needed something to mark it with. I pulled out the length of po-mo pink ribbon I’d bought in Boulder and ran back down to the lab.

The sheep were gathered around the hay, chewing steadily on it with their large square teeth. “Did you see who led them to it?” I asked Ben.

He shook his head. “They all just seemed to gravitate toward it at once. Look.” He switched on the videotape and showed me.

He was right. On the monitor, the sheep wandered aimlessly through the paddock, stopping to graze with every other step, paying no attention to each other or the hay, until, apparently by accident, they were all standing with their forefeet in the hay, taking casual mouthfuls.

“Okay,” I said, sitting down at the computer. “Hook the tape in, and I’ll see if I can isolate the bellwether. You’re still taping?”

He nodded. “Continuous and backup.”

“Good,” I said. I rewound to ten frames before Ben had forked out the hay, froze the frame, and made a diagram of it, assigning a different colored point to each of the sheep, and did the same thing for the next twenty frames to establish a vector. Then I started experimenting to see how many frames I could skip without losing track of which sheep was which.

Forty. They grazed for a little over two minutes and then took an average of three steps before they stopped and ate some more. I started through at forty, lost track of three sheep within two tries, cut back to thirty, and worked my way forward.

When I had ten points for every sheep, I fed in an analysis program to calculate proximities and mean direction, and continued plotting vectors.

On the screen the movement was still random, determined by length of grass or wind direction or whatever it was in their tiny little thought processes that makes sheep move one way or the other.

There was one vector headed toward the hay, and I isolated it and traced it through the next hundred frames, but it was only a matted ewe determined to wedge itself into a corner. I went back to tracing all the vectors.

Still nothing on the screen, but in the numbers above it, a pattern started to emerge. Cerulean blue. I followed it forward, unconvinced. The sheep looked like she was grazing in a rough circle, but the proximities showed her moving erratically but steadily toward the hay.

I isolated her vector and watched her on the videotape. She looked completely ordinary and totally unaware of the hay. She walked a couple of steps, grazed, walked another step, turning slightly, grazed again, ending up always a little closer to the hay, and from halfway through the frames, the regression showed the rest of the flock following her.

I wanted to be sure. “Ben,” I said. “Cover up the water trough and put a pan of water in the back gate. Wait, let me hook this up to the tape so I can trace it as it happens. Okay,” I said after a minute. “Walk along the side so you don’t block the camera.”

I watched on the monitor as he maneuvered a sheet of plywood onto the trough, carried a pan out, and filled it with the hose, watching the sheep sharply to see if any of them noticed.

They didn’t.

They stayed right by the hay. There was a brief flutter of activity as Ben carried the hose back and lifted the latch on the gate, and then the sheep went back to business as usual.

I tracked cerulean blue in real time, watching the numbers. “I’ve got her,” I said to Bennett.

He came and looked over my shoulder. “Are you sure? She doesn’t look too bright.”

“If she was, the others wouldn’t follow her,” I said.

“I looked for you upstairs,” Flip said, “but you weren’t there.”

“We’re busy, Flip,” I said without taking my eyes off the screen.

“I’ll get the slip halter and a collar,” Ben said. “You direct me.”

“It’ll just take a minute,” Flip said. “I want you to look at something.”

“It’ll have to wait,” I said, my eyes still fixed on the screen. After a minute, Ben appeared in the picture, holding the collar and halter.

“Which one?” he shouted.

“Go left,” I shouted back. “Three, no four sheep. Okay. Now toward the west wall.”

“This is about Darrell, isn’t it?” Flip said. “He was in a newspaper. Anybody who read it had a right to answer it.”

“Left one more,” I shouted. “No, not that one. The one in front of it. Okay, now, don’t scare it. Put your hand on its hindquarters.”

“Besides,” Flip said, “it said ‘sophisticated and elegant.’ Scientists aren’t elegant, except Dr. Turnbull.”

“Careful,” I shouted. “Don’t spook it.” I started out to help him.

Flip blocked my way. “All I want is for you to look at something. It’ll only take a minute.”

“Hurry,” Ben called. “I can’t hold her.”

“I don’t have a minute,” I said and brushed past Flip, praying that Ben hadn’t lost the bellwether. He still had her, but just barely. He was hanging on to her tail with both hands, and was still holding the halter and the collar. There was no way he could let go to give them to me. I pulled the ribbon out of my pocket, wrapped it around the bellwether’s straining neck, and tied it in a knot. “Okay,” I said, spreading my feet apart, “you can let go.”

The rebound nearly knocked me down, and the bellwether immediately began pulling away from me and the not-nearly-strong-enough ribbon, but Ben was already slipping the halter on.

He handed it to me to hold and got the collar on, just as the ribbon gave way with a loud rip. He grabbed on to the halter, and we both held on like two kids flying a wayward kite. “The… collar’s… on,” he said, panting.

But you couldn’t see it. It was completely swallowed up in the bellwether’s thick wool. “Hold her a minute,” I said, and looped what was left of the ribbon under the collar. “Hold still,” I said, tying it in a big, floppy bow. “Po-mo pink is the color for fall.” I adjusted the ends. “There, you’re the height of fashion.”

Apparently she agreed. She stopped struggling and stood still. Ben knelt beside me and took the halter off. “We make a great team,” he said, grinning at me.

“We do,” I said.

“Well,” Flip said from the gate. She clicked the latch up and down. “Do you have a minute now?”

Ben rolled his eyes.

“Yes,” I said, laughing. I stood up. “I have a minute. What is it you wanted me to look at?”

But it was obvious, now that I looked at her. She had dyed her hair—hank, hair wraps, even the fuzz of her shaved skull—a brilliant, bilious Cerenkhov blue.

“Well?” Flip said. “Do you think he’ll like it?”

“I don’t know, Flip,” I said. “Dentists tend to be kind of conservative.”

“I know,” she said, rolling her eyes. “That’s why I dyed it blue. Blue’s a conservative color.” She tossed her blue hank. “You’re no help,” she said, and stomped out.

I turned back to Ben and the bellwether, who was still standing perfectly still. “What next?”

Ben squatted next to the bellwether and took her chin in his hand. “We’re going to teach you low-threshold skills,” he said, “and you’re going to teach your friends. Got it?”

The bellwether chewed thoughtfully.

“What would you suggest, Dr. Foster? Scrabble, Ping-Pong?” He turned back to the bellwether. “How’d you like to start a chain letter?”

“I think we’d better stick to pushing a button to open a feed trough,” I said. “As you say, she doesn’t look too bright.”

He turned her head to one side and then the other, frowning. “She looks like Flip.” He grinned at me. “All right, Trivial Pursuit it is. But first, I’ve got to go get some peanut butter. Sheep Management and Care says sheep love peanut butter,” and left.

I tied a double knot in the bellwether’s bow and then leaned on the gate and watched them. Their movements looked as random and directionless as ever. They grazed and took a step and grazed again, and so did she, indistinguishable from the rest of them except for her pallid pink bow, unnoticed and unnoticing. And leading.

She tore a piece of grass, chewed on it, took two steps, and stared blankly into space for a long minute, thinking about what? Having her nose pierced? The hot new exercise fad for fall?

“Here you are,” Shirl said, carrying a stack of papers and looking irate. “You’re not engaged to that Billy Ray person, are you? Because if you are, that changes my entire—” She stopped. “Well, are you?”

“No,” I said. “Who told you I was?”

“Flip,” she said disgustedly. She set down the papers and lit a cigarette. “She told Sarah you were getting married and moving to Nevada.”

“Wyoming,” I said, “but I’m not.”

“Good,” Shirl said, taking an emphatic drag on the cigarette. “You’re a very talented scientist with a very bright future. With your ability, good things are going to happen to you very shortly, and you have no business throwing it all away.”

“I’m not,” I said, and made an effort to change the subject. “Did you want to see me about something?”

“Yes,” she said, gesturing toward the paddock. “When the bellwether gets here, be sure you mark it before you put it in with the other sheep so you can tell which one it is. And there’s an all-staff meeting tomorrow.” She picked up the memos and handed one to me. “Two o’clock.”

“Not another meeting,” I said.

She stubbed out her cigarette and left, and I went back to leaning on the fence, watching the sheep. They were grazing peacefully, the bellwether in the middle of them, indistinguishable except for her pink bow.

I should move the feeding trough out to the paddock and check the circuits, so it’d be ready when Ben got back, I thought, but I went back in to the computer, traced vectors for a while, and then sat and looked at the screen, watching them move, watching the bellwether move among them, and thinking about Robert Browning and bobbed hair.

The bellwether could definitely make the flock do what she wanted. Getting the bellwether to do what we wanted her to do was another matter. She watched as we smeared peanut butter on the button she was supposed to push and then led the entire flock into a smothering jam-up in the back corner.

We tried again. Ben coaxed her with a rotten apple, which Sheep Raising for Fun and Profit had sworn they liked, and she trotted after him over to the trough. “Good girl,” he said, and bent over to give her the apple, and she butted him smartly in the stomach and knocked the wind out of him.

We tried decayed lettuce next and then fresh broccoli, neither of which produced any results—“At least it didn’t butt you,” I said—and then gave up for the night.

When I got to work the next morning with a bag full of cabbage and kiwi fruit (Tales of an Australian Shepherd), Ben was smearing molasses on the button.

“Well, there’s definitely been information diffusion,” he said. “Three other sheep have already butted me this morning.”

We led the bellwether over to the trough using the chin-rump-halter method and a squirt gun, which Sheep Management and Care had suggested. “It’s supposed to keep them from butting.”

It didn’t.

I helped him up. “Tales of an Australian Shepherd said only the rams butt, not the ewes.” I dusted him off. “It’s enough to make you lose faith in literature.”

“No,” he said, holding his stomach. “The poet had it right. ‘The sheep is a perilous beast.’ ”

On the fifth try we got her to lick the molasses. Pellets obligingly chattered into the trough. The bellwether gazed interestedly at it for a long minute, during which Ben looked at me and crossed his fingers, and then she bucked, catching me smartly on both ankles and making me let go of the halter. She dived headlong into the flock, scattering it wildly. One of the ewes ran straight into Ben’s leg.

“Look on the bright side,” I said, nursing my ankles. “There’s an all-staff meeting at two o’clock.”

Ben limped over and retrieved the halter, which had come off. “They’re supposed to like peanuts.”

The bellwether didn’t like peanuts, or celery or hat-stomping. She did, however, like bolting and backing and trying to shake her collar off. At a quarter to one Ben looked at his watch and said, “Almost time for the meeting,” and I didn’t even contradict him.

I limped to the stats lab, washed off what lanolin and dirt I could and went up to the meeting, hoping Management would think I was making a sterling effort to dress down.

Sarah met me at the door of the cafeteria. “Isn’t it exciting?” she said, sticking her left hand in my face. “Ted asked me to marry him!”

Commitment-Aversion Ted? I thought. The one who had severe intimacy issues and a naughty inner child?

“We went ice-climbing, and he hammered his piton in and said, ‘Here, I know you’ve been wanting this,’ and handed a ring to me. I didn’t even make him. It was so romantic!

“Gina, look!” she said, charging toward her next victim. “Isn’t it exciting?”

I went on into the cafeteria. Management was standing at the front of the room next to Flip. He was wearing jeans with a crease in them. She was wearing Cerenkhov blue toreador pants and a slouch hat that was pulled down over her ears. They were both wearing T-shirts with the letters SHAM across the front.

“Oh, no,” I murmured, wondering what this would mean to our project, “not another acronym.”

“Systemized Hierarchial Advancement Management,” Ben said, sliding into the chair next to me. “It’s the management style nine percent of the companies whose scientists won the Niebnitz Grant were using.”

“Which translates to how many?”

“One. And they’d only been using it three days.”

“Does this mean we’ll have to reapply for funding for our project?”

He shook his head. “I asked Shirl. They don’t have the new funding forms printed yet.”

“We’ve got a lot on the agenda today,” Management boomed, “so let’s get started. First, there’ve been some problems with Supply, and to rectify that we’ve instituted a new streamlined procurement form. The workplace message facilitation director”—he nodded at Flip, who was holding a massive stack of binders—“will pass those out.”

“The workplace message facilitation director?” I muttered.

“Just be glad they didn’t make her a vice president.”

“Secondly,” Management said, “I’ve got some excellent news to share with you regarding the Niebnitz Grant. Dr. Alicia Turnbull has been working with us on a game plan that we’re going to implement today. But first I want all of you to choose a partner—”

Ben grabbed my hand.

“—and stand facing each other.”

We stood and I put my hands up, palms facing out. “If we have to say three things we like about sheep, I’m quitting.”

“All right, HiTekkers,” Management said, “now I want you to give your partners a big hug.”

“The next big trend at HiTek will be sexual harassment,” I said lightly, and Ben took me in his arms.

“Come on, now,” Management said. “Not everybody’s participating. Big hug.”

Ben’s arms in the faded plaid sleeves pulled me close, enfolded me. My hands, caught up in that palms-out silliness, went around his neck. My heart began to pound.

“A hug says, ‘Thank you for working with me,’ ” Management said. “A hug says, ‘I appreciate your personness.’ ”

My cheek was against Ben’s ear. He smelled faintly of sheep. I could feel his heart pounding, the warmth of his breath on my neck. My breath caught, like a hiccuping engine, and stalled.

“All right now, HiTekkers,” Management said. “I want you to look at your partner—still hugging, don’t let go—and tell him or her how much he or she means to you.”

Ben raised his head, his mouth grazing my hair, and looked at me. His gray eyes, behind his thick glasses, were serious.

“I—” I said, and jerked out of his embrace.

“Where are you going?” Ben said.

“I have to—I just thought of something that ties into my hair-bobbing theory,” I said desperately. “I’ve got to put it on the computer before I forget. About marathon dancing.”

“Wait,” he said, and grabbed my hand. “I thought marathon dancing wasn’t until the thirties.”

“It started in 1927,” I said, and wrenched out of his grasp.

“But wasn’t that still after the hair-bobbing craze?” he said, but I was already out the door and halfway up the stairs.

Significant breakthroughs have been triggered by all sorts of things—apples, frog legs, photographic plates, finches—but mine must be the only one ever triggered by one of Management’s idiotic sensitivity exercises.

I didn’t stop till I was inside the stats lab. I hugged my arms to my chest and leaned against the door, panting and murmuring, over and over again, “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

I was supposed to be such an expert at spotting trends, but it had taken me weeks to see where this one was leading. And all that time I’d thought it was his immunity to fads I was interested in. I’d taken notes on his cloth sneakers and ties. I’d even seriously considered Billy Ray’s proposal. And all that time—

There was somebody coming down the hall. I hastily sat down in front of the computer, pulled up a program, and sat there, staring blindly at it.

“Busy?” Gina said, coming in.

“Yes,” I said.

“Oh,” and her expression plainly said, “You don’t look busy.” “I couldn’t find you after the meeting. I took a bathroom break right before they started the sensitivity exercise, and when I got back, you were gone. I just wanted to bring you the list of toy stores I’ve already tried so you don’t waste your time on them.”

“Right,” I said. “I’ll go this weekend.”

“Oh, no hurry. Bethany’s birthday isn’t for another two weeks, but it makes me kind of nervous that Toys “R” Us was out of it. That’s where Chelsea’s mother found the one for Brittany, and she said it was the only place she could find one.” She frowned. “Are you okay? You look like somebody who got sent to her room for a time-out.”

A time-out. You’ll just have to sit here quietly until you can get control of your feelings, young lady.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I should have listened to your advice and taken a bathroom break, that’s all.”

She nodded. “Those sensitivity exercises’ll do you in. Well, I’ll let you get back to work. Or whatever.” She patted me on the shoulder.

“And I’ll deliver Romantic Bride Barbie. You don’t have to worry. I’ll find it,” I said, and started sorting blindly through a stack of clippings. As soon as she was gone I shut the door, and then went back and sat down at the computer and stared at the screen.

The file I’d called up was my hair-bobbing model. It sat there, with its crisscrossing colored lines and that anomalous cluster in Marydale, Ohio, like a reproach.

How could I hope to understand what had motivated women to cut their hair seventy years ago when I didn’t even understand what motivated me?

I hadn’t even had a clue. Until Ben put his arms around me and pulled me close, I’d honestly thought I was trying to salvage his project because I couldn’t stand Flip. I’d even thought the reason I was irritated with Alicia was because she was trying to produce science-on-demand. And all the time—

I heard a noise in the hall and put my hands on the keyboard. I needed to look busy so no one else would come talk to me.

I stared at the model, with its intersecting patterns, its crisscrossing curves, every event impacting on every other, iterating and reiterating and leading inevitably to an outcome.

Like my downfall. And maybe what I should be doing was drawing that, graphing the events and interactions that had led me to this pass. I called up the paintbox and an empty file and started trying to reconstruct the whole debacle.

I had borrowed Billy Ray’s sheep. No, it had started before that, with Management and GRIM. Management had ordered a new funding form, and Ben’s had gotten lost, and I had suggested we work together. And Management had said yes because they wanted one of HiTek’s scientists to win the Niebnitz Grant.

I started drawing in the connecting lines, from Management’s meetings to the funding forms to Shirl, the new assistant, who had brought me extra copies of the missing pages, which I’d taken down to Ben, to Alicia, who wanted to collaborate with Bennett to win the Niebnitz Grant. And back to Management and GRIM. And Flip.

“You left the meeting early,” Flip said reprovingly, opening the door. She still had on the pulled-down hat, but she’d abandoned the SHAM T-shirt and was wearing a see-through dress over a bodysuit that appeared to be made of Cerenkhov blue duct tape.

“You didn’t get your streamlined supply procurement processing form,” she said, and handed me a binder. “And I wanted to ask you a question.”

“I’m busy, Flip,” I said.

“It’ll only take a minute” she said. “I know you’re still mad about my answering the personal ad, but you’re the only one I can ask. Desiderata and Shirl are both really nevved at me.”

I wonder why, I thought. “I am really busy, Flip.”

“It’ll only take a minute.” She pulled a stool over next to the computer and perched on it. “How far should somebody go when they’re really unbalanced about somebody?”

This was just what I needed, to discuss the sex life of a person with a pierced nose and duct tape underwear.

“I mean, if you thought you’d never see him again, do you think it’s stupid to do something really swarb?”

I had talked Ben into combining our projects. I had borrowed a flock of sheep. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

“It’s about my hair,” she said, and pulled off her hat. “I cut it off.”

She certainly had. Her hair was chopped to within an inch of her blue scalp. For a second I thought she’d had the same problem with the duct tape as Desiderata, but her flipping hank had been hacked off, too. She looked like a very cold plucked chicken.

I felt a sudden pang of empathy for her, in love with a dentist, of all people, who didn’t know she existed, who was probably already engaged.

“So what I wondered,” she said, “was whether it looks okay like this or whether I should add another brand.” She pointed to her right temple, just below the scalped area.

“Of what?” I said faintly.

She sighed. “Of a strip of duct tape, of course.”

Of course.

“I think it depends on how you’re going to let your hair grow out,” I said, hoping she was going to.

Apparently she was, because she put her hat back on again and said, “So you don’t, then? Think it would be stupid?”

She apparently didn’t expect an answer because she was already halfway out the door.

“Flip,” I said, “would you do me a favor? Would you go down to Bio and tell Dr. O’Reilly I’m leaving early, and I’ll talk to him tomorrow?”

“Bio is clear on the other side of the building,” she said, outraged. “Anyway, I doubt if he’s down there. When I left the meeting, he was talking to Dr. Turnbull. Like always. I bet he wishes he’d had her for a partner for that hug thing.”

“I’m really busy, Flip,” I said, and started typing to prove it. Flip. This was all Flip’s fault. She had lost Bennett’s funding forms and stolen my personal ads, which is why I’d been in the copy room when Bennett came in.

“Did you know Dr. Patton got engaged?” Flip said conversationally. “To that guy who didn’t want to get married?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’ll bet Dr. O’Reilly and Dr. Turnbull get married pretty soon.”

I continued to type doggedly, and after a while Flip got bored and slouched off, but I didn’t stop. I hadn’t been kidding when I said this mess was all Flip’s fault. She hadn’t just lost the funding forms and stolen the personals. She had started the whole thing. If she hadn’t delivered Dr. Turnbull’s package to me in the first place, I would never even have met Ben. I never even got down to Bio, and at that first meeting he’d been clear on the other side of the room.

I kept adding lines, tracing the interconnecting events. She had thrown away six weeks’ worth of research and stolen my stapler. And she’d left pages out of the funding forms. I’d had to take the missing pages to Ben. The prints of her Mary Janes and backless clogs were all over the place, making mischief.

She was like some Iago. Or some evil guardian angel. “Always there, right there beside you, wherever you go,” was what Angels, Angels Everywhere had said. And it was true. She was everywhere, like some awful anti-Pippa, wandering past unsuspecting windows and wreaking havoc wherever she went.

I added more lines. Flip raising her hand and getting an assistant, Flip spearheading the antismoking campaign that had made me suggest the paddock to Shirl, who had told us about the bellwether. Flip getting me depressed that day in Boulder. If it hadn’t been for her talking about feeling itch, I would never have gone out with Billy Ray, I would never have known Targhees were sheep, and I would never have come up with the idea of borrowing them.

And Ben would be off somewhere in France, studying chaos theory, I thought bleakly. I knew none of this was Flip’s fault. I was the one who’d made up excuses to see Ben, to talk to him, from that very first day when I’d followed him out on the porch.

Flip wasn’t the source. She might have precipitated things, but the outcome was my fault. I had been following the oldest trend of all. Right over the cliff.

Flip was back, standing and looking interestedly over my shoulder.

“I’m still busy, Flip,” I said.

She tossed her nonexistent hank. “Dr. O’Reilly left. I bet he went out on a date with Dr. Turnbull.”

A ghastly unlosable guardian angel. “Don’t you have someplace you need to go?” I said.

“That’s what I came to tell you,” she said. “Bye.”

And left. I pondered the screen, wondering how to graph that little encounter, but she was already back.

“Are there hats in Texas?” she said.

“Ten-gallon ones,” I said.

She left again, this time apparently for good. I added a few more lines to my graph, and then just sat there and stared at the crisscrossing curves, the neatly plotted regressions.

“Seven o’clock,” Gina said, sticking her head in the door. She had her coat on. “You can come out of time-out now.”

I smiled. “Thanks, Mom,” I said, but I didn’t leave. I waited till I was sure everybody was gone and then went down and hung over the gate, watching the sheep as they moved and grazed and moved again, occasionally bleating, occasionally lost, impelled by bellwethers they didn’t recognize, by instincts they didn’t know they had.

For the next two days I kept clear of the lab and Ben, straightening up my lab and entering miles of data about mah-jongg and Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic.

This is ridiculous, I told myself on Thursday. You’re not Peyton. You have to see him sometime. Grow up.

But when I got down to the lab, Alicia was there, leaning over the gate. Ben had the bellwether by her po-mo pink bow and was explaining the principle of attention structure. He was wearing his blue tie.

“This has real possibilities,” Alicia was saying. “Thirty-one percent of all projects the Niebnitz Grant recipients were working on at the time of the award were cross-discipline collaborations. The thing is getting the right collaboration. The committee is obviously going for gender balance, which you’re okay on, but chaos theory and statistics are both math-based disciplines. You need a biologist.”

“Do you need me?” I said. They both looked up.

“If not, I have some research I need to do at the library.”

“No, go ahead,” Ben said. “The bellwether’s not in the mood to learn anything this morning.” He rubbed his knee. “She’s already butted me twice. While you’re at the library, see if they’ve got anything on how to get a leader to follow.”

“I will,” I said, and started down the hall.

“Wait,” Ben said, sprinting to catch up with me. “I wanted to talk to you. Did you have a breakthrough? With the dance marathon thing?”

Yes, I thought, looking at him forlornly. A breakthrough. “No,” I said. “I thought there was a connection, but there wasn’t,” and I went to Boulder to look for Romantic Bride Barbie.

Gina had given me a list of toy stores, with the ones she’d already tried crossed off, which didn’t leave all that many. I started at the top, determined to work my way down.

I had only thought I understood the Barbie fad. Not even Brittany’s birthday party had prepared me for what I actually found.

There were Fashion Bright Barbies, Costume Ball Barbies, Bubble Angel Barbies, Sunflower Barbies, and even a Locket Surprise Barbie, whose plastic chest opened up to dispense lip gloss and rouge. There were multicultural Barbies, Barbies that lit up, remote-control Barbies, Barbies whose hair you could bob.

Barbie had a Porsche, a Jaguar, a Corvette, a Mustang, a speedboat, an RV, and a horse. Also a beauty bath, a Fun Fridge, a health spa, and a McDonald’s. Not to mention the Barbie jewelry boxes, lunchboxes, workout tapes, audiotapes, videotapes, and pink nail polish.

But no Romantic Bride Barbie. The Toy Palace had Country Bride Barbie, with a pink-checked gingham sash and a bouquet of daisies. Toys “R” Us had a Dream Wedding Barbie and Barbie’s Wedding Fantasy, both of which I seriously considered in spite of Gina’s injunctions.

The Cabbage Patch had four full aisles of Barbies and a clerk with an i stamped on her forehead. “We have Troll Barbie,” she said, when I asked her about Romantic Bride. “And Pocahontas.”

I made it through four toy stores and three discount stores and then drove over to the Caffe Krakatoa to see if there were any Barbies listed in the personals.

It was now calling itself Kepler’s Quark, a bad sign.

“Don’t tell me. You don’t have latte anymore,” I said to the waiter, who was wearing a black turtleneck, black jeans, and sunglasses.

“Caffeine’s bad for you,” he said, handing me the menu, which had grown to ten pages. “I’d suggest a smart drink.”

“Isn’t that an oxymoron?” I said. “Believing a beverage can increase your IQ?”

He tossed his head, revealing an i on his forehead.

Of course.

“Smart drinks are nonalcoholic beverages with neurotransmitters to enhance memory and alertness and increase brain function,” he said. “I’d suggest the Brain Blast, which increases your math skills, or the Get Up and Van Gogh, which enhances your artistic ability.”

“I’ll have the Reality Check,” I said, hoping it would enhance my ability to face facts.

I tried reading the personals, but they were too depressing: “To the blonde who eats lunch every day at Jane’s Java Joint, you don’t know me but I’m hopelessly in love with you. Please reply.”

I switched to the articles.

A “harmonic bonding” therapist was offering duct tape soul alignments.

Two men in New York City had been arrested for operating the hot new fad, a “smoking speakeasy.”

Po-mo pink had fizzled as a fad. A fashion designer was quoted as saying, “There’s no accounting for the public’s taste.”

Truer words, I thought, and it was time I faced that, too. I was never going to discover the source of the hair-bobbing fad, no matter how much data I fed into my computer model. No matter how many different colored lines I drew.

Because it didn’t have anything to do with suffrage or World War I or the weather. And even if I could ask Bernice and Irene and the rest of them why they’d done it, it still wouldn’t help. Because they wouldn’t know.

They were as benighted and blind as I had been, moved by feelings they weren’t aware of, by forces they didn’t understand. Right straight into the river.

My smart drink came. It was chartreuse, a color that had been a fad in the late twenties. “What’s in it?” I said.

He sighed, a heavy sigh like someone out of Dostoyevsky. “Tyrosine, L-phenylalanine, and synergistic cofactors,” he said. “And pineapple juice.”

I took a sip of it. I didn’t feel any smarter. “Why did you get your forehead branded?” I said.

Apparently he hadn’t finished his smart drink. He stared at me blankly.

“Your i brand?” I said, pointing at it. “Why did you decide to have it done?”

“Everybody has them,” he said, and slouched off.

I wondered if he had gotten the brand to please his girlfriend or if he was rebelling against anti-intellectualism or his parents, or in love with somebody who didn’t know he was alive.

I sipped my drink and kept reading. I didn’t feel any smarter. Bantam Books had paid an eight-figure advance for Getting in Touch with Your Inner Fairy Godmother. Cerenkhov blue was the “cool/hot” color for winter, and men and women were smoking cigars in L.A., inspired by Rush Limbaugh or David Letterman or forces they didn’t understand. Like sheep. Like rats.

None of which solved the problem of how I was going to go on working with Bennett. Or of where I was going to find Romantic Bride Barbie.

I went over to the library and checked out Anna Karenina and Cyrano de Bergerac and got the Denver phone book from the reference section. I copied down all the toy stores that weren’t on Gina’s list and all the department and discount stores, explained to Flip’s clone that I had already paid the fine on Browning’s Complete Works, and set out again, marking off stores as I went.

I eventually found Romantic Bride Barbie at a Target in Aurora—wedged in behind Barbie’s Horse Stable Club—and took it up to the checkout.

The clerk was trying to make change for the man in front of me.

“It’s eighteen seventy-eight,” she said.

“I know,” the man said. “I gave you a twenty-dollar bill and then after you rang it up as eighteen seventy-eight, I gave you three cents. You owe me a dollar and a quarter.”

She flipped her hair back, irritably, revealing an i.

Give up, I thought. It’s no use.

“The register says one twenty-two,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “That’s why I gave you the three cents. Twenty-two plus three makes a quarter.”

“A quarter of what?”

I set Romantic Bride Barbie on the end of the counter. I read the tabloid headlines and looked at the impulse items on the rack next to the counter. Duct tape in several widths, and bubble packs of Barbie high heels in assorted colors.

“All right, fine,” the man said. “Give me back the three cents and give me one twenty-two.”

I picked up a pack of high heels. “New! Cerenkhov blue,” it read. I set it down next to the duct tape and as I did, I felt a strange sensation, as if I were on the verge of something important, like the final side of a Rubik’s cube clicking into place.

“This doesn’t have a price on it,” the checkout clerk said. She was holding Romantic Bride Barbie. “I can’t sell anything that doesn’t have a price on it.”

“It’s thirty-eight ninety-nine,” I said. “The manager said to ring it up under Miscellaneous.”

“Oh,” she said, and rang it up.

This is a fad I could actually learn to like, I thought, smiling at her i. Forewarned is forearmed.

“That’ll be forty-one thirty-three,” she said. I stood there, wallet in hand, looking at the boxes of crayons, trying to recapture the feeling I’d had. Something about Cerenkhov blue, and duct tape, or—

Whatever it was, it was gone. I hoped it hadn’t been the cure for cholera.

“Forty-one thirty-three,” the clerk said.

I carefully counted out the exact change and left with Romantic Bride Barbie. On the way out, I stepped on something and looked down. It was a penny. Farther on there were two more. They looked like they had been flung down with some force.

Gina couldn’t believe I’d found Romantic Bride Barbie. She hugged me twice. “You’re wonderful. You’re a miracle worker!”

“Not quite,” I said, trying to smile. “I don’t seem to be having any luck finding the source of hair-bobbing.”

“Speaking of which,” she said, still admiring Romantic Bride Barbie, “Dr. O’Reilly was up here before, looking for you. He looked worried.”

What’s Flip lost now? I wondered, the bellwether? and started down to Bio. Halfway there, I ran into Ben. He grabbed my arm. “We were supposed to be in Management’s office ten minutes ago.”

“Why? What’s this about?” I asked, trying to keep up. “Are we in trouble?”

Well, of course we were in trouble. The only time anybody got to see the inside of Management’s office, Staff Input notwithstanding, was when they were getting transferred to Supply. Or having their funding cut.

“I hope it isn’t the animal-rights activists,” Ben said, coming to a stop outside Management’s door. “Do you think I should have worn a jacket?”

“No,” I said, remembering his jackets. “Maybe it’s something minor. Maybe we didn’t dress down enough.”

The secretary in the outer office told us to go right in. “It’s not something minor,” Ben whispered, and reached for the doorknob.

“Maybe we’re not in trouble,” I said. “Maybe Management’s going to commend us for cross-disciplinary cooperation.”

He opened the door. Management was standing behind his desk with his arms folded.

“I don’t think so,” Ben murmured, and we went in.

Management told us to sit down, another bad sign. One of SHAM’s Eight Efficiency Enhancers was “Holding meetings standing up encourages succinctness.”

We sat.

Management remained standing. “An extremely serious matter has come to my attention concerning you and your project.”

It is the animal-rights activists, I thought, and braced myself for what he was going to say next.

“The assistant workplace message facilitator was observed smoking in the area of the animal compound. She says she had permission to do so. Is that true?”

Smoking. This was about Shirl’s smoking.

“Who gave her this permission?” Management demanded.

“I did,” we both said. “It was my idea,” I said. “I asked Dr. O’Reilly if it was all right.”

“Are you aware that the HiTek building is a smoke-free zone?”

“It was outside,” I said, and then remembered Berkeley. “I didn’t think she should have to stand out in the middle of a blizzard to smoke.”

“I didn’t either,” Ben said. “She didn’t smoke inside. Just in the paddock.”

Management looked even grimmer. “Are you aware of HiTek’s guidelines for live-animal research?”

“Yes,” Ben said, looking bewildered. “We followed the—”

“Live animals are required to have a healthy environment,” Management said. “Are you aware of the dangers of atmospheric carcinogens, the FDA’s report on the dangers of secondhand smoke? It can cause lung cancer, emphysema, high blood pressure and heart attacks.”

Ben looked even more confused. “She didn’t smoke anywhere near us, and it was outside. It—”

“Live animals are required to have a healthy environment,” Management said. “Would you call smoke a healthy environment?”

Never underestimate the power of an aversion trend, I thought. The last one in this country ended in wholesale accusations of communist leanings, ruined reputations, destroyed careers.

“ ‘…out of the houses the rats came tumbling,’ ” I murmured.

“What?” Management said, glaring at me.

“Nothing.”

“Do you know what the effects of secondhand smoke on sheep are?” Management said.

No, I thought, and you don’t either. You’re just following the flock.

“Your blatant disregard for the health of the sheep has clearly made the project ineligible for serious consideration as a grant contender.”

“She only smoked one cigarette a day,” Ben said. “The compound where the sheep are is a hundred feet by eighty. The density of the smoke from a single cigarette would be less than one part per billion.”

Give it up, Ben, I thought. Aversion trends have nothing to do with scientific logic, and we’ve not only exposed sheep to secondhand smoke, HiTek thinks we’ve jeopardized its chances of winning its heart’s desire, the Niebnitz Grant.

I looked at Management. HiTek’s actually going to fire somebody, I thought, and it’s us.

I was wrong.

“Dr. Foster, you were the one who obtained the sheep, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, resisting the urge to add “sir.” “From a rancher in Wyoming.”

“And is he aware that you intended exposing his sheep to harmful carcinogens?”

“No, but he won’t object,” I said, and then remembered the bread pudding. I had never asked him his views on smoking, but I knew what they were: whatever everyone else thought.

“As I recall, this project was your idea, too, Dr. Foster,” Management said. “It was your idea to use sheep, in spite of Management’s objections.”

“She was only trying to help me save my project,” Ben said, but Management wasn’t listening.

“Dr. O’Reilly,” he said, “this unfortunate situation is clearly not your fault. The project will have to be terminated, I’m afraid, but Dr. Turnbull is in need of a colleague for the project she is working on, and she specifically requested you.”

“What project?” Ben said.

“That hasn’t been decided yet,” Management said. “She is looking into several possibilities. Whatever, I’m sure it will be an excellent project to be involved with. We feel it has a seventy-eight percent chance of winning the Niebnitz Grant.” He turned back to me. “Dr. Foster, I’ll hold you responsible for returning the sheep to their owner immediately.”

The secretary came in. “I’m sorry to interrupt, Mr.—”

“A reprimand will be placed in your file, Dr. Foster,” Management said, ignoring her, “and there will be a serious reexamination of your project at the next funding allocation period. In the meantime—”

“Sir, you need to come out here,” the secretary said.

“I’m in the middle of a meeting,” Management cut in. “I want a full report detailing your progress in trends research,” he said to me.

“Now wait a minute,” Ben said. “Dr. Foster was only—”

The secretary said, “Excuse me, Mr.—”

“What is it, Ms. Shepard?” Management said.

“The sheep—”

“Has the owner called to complain?” he said, shooting me a venomous glance.

“No, sir. It’s the sheep. They’re in the hall.”