“Mandelbrot diagrams,” she said interestedly. “Is that what you’re researching?”
“No,” I said. “Fad origins. I was just reading that out of curiosity. They are connected, though. Fads are a facet of the chaotic system of society, with a number of variables contributing to them.”
She stacked Brave New World and All’s Well that Ends Well on top of the chaos theory book without comment and picked up Flappers, Flivvers, and Flagpole-Sitters. “What made you choose fads?” she said disapprovingly.
“You don’t like fads?”
“I just think there are more direct ways of influencing society than starting a fad. I had a physics teacher who used to say, ‘Pay no attention to what other people are doing. Do what you want, and you can change the world.’ ”
“Oh, I don’t want to discover how to start them,” I said. “I suppose HiTek does, and that’s why they keep funding the project, although if the mechanism is as complex as it’s beginning to look, they’ll never be able to isolate the critical variable, at which point they’ll probably stop funding me.” I looked at the dance marathon notes. “What I want to do is understand what causes them.”
“Why?” she said curiously.
“Because I just want to understand. Why do people act the way they do? Why do they all suddenly decide to play the same game or wear the same clothes or believe the same thing? In the 1920s smoking was a fad. Now it’s antismoking. Why? Is it instinctive behavior or societal influences? Or something in the air? The Salem witch trials were caused by fear and greed, but they’re always around, and we don’t burn witches all the time, so there must be something else going on.
“I just don’t understand what,” I said. “And it doesn’t look like I will anytime soon. I don’t seem to be getting anywhere. You don’t happen to know what caused hair-bobbing, do you?”
“It’s going slowly?” she said.
“Slow isn’t the word,” I said. I gestured with the marathon dancing copies. “I feel like I’m in a dance marathon contest. Most of the time it’s not dancing at all, it’s just putting one foot in front of the other, trying to hang on and stay awake. Trying to remember why you signed up in the first place.”
“My physics teacher used to say that science was one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” she said.
“And fifty percent filling out nonsimplified funding forms,” I said. I picked up one of the extra copies. “I’d better take one of these over to Gina.”
“I’ve already taken one to Dr. Damati,” she said. “Oh, and I need to get back there. I promised her I’d wrap Brittany’s presents for her.”
“You’re sure you can’t persuade Flip?” I said.
After she left, I started work on page 29, but it didn’t make any more sense than when it had been missing, and I was starting to feel vaguely itch again. I took one of the extra copies and went down to Bio to Bennett’s lab.
Alicia was there, head to head with Bennett at the computer, but he looked up immediately and smiled at me.
“Hi,” he said. “Come on in.”
“No, that’s okay. I didn’t mean to interrupt,” I said, smiling at Alicia. She didn’t smile back. “I just wanted to bring you a complete funding form.” I handed him the funding form. “There were pages missing in the ones Flip passed out.”
“Incompetent,” he said. “Incorrigible. Incapacitating.”
Alicia was actively glaring at me.
“Intruding,” I said. “Which is what I’m doing on your meeting. I’ll talk to you later.” I headed for the door.
“No, wait,” he said. “You’ll be interested in this. Dr. Turnbull was just telling me about her project.” He looked at Alicia. “Tell Dr. Foster what you’ve been doing.”
“I’ve taken the data on all the previous Niebnitz Grant winners: scientific discipline, project area, educational background—”
That explained the third degree I’d gotten from her yesterday. She had been trying to determine if I fit the profile, and from the look she was giving me, I must not have even placed.
“—age, gender, ethnic group, political affiliation.” She scrolled through several screens, and I recognized a chart like the one Shirl had just been working on. “I’m running regressions to determine the relevant characteristics and then analyzing those to construct a profile of the typical Niebnitz Grant recipient and the criteria the Niebnitz Grant Committee uses to make their choices.”
The committee’s criteria were originality of thought and creativity, I thought. Assuming there is a committee.
“I haven’t completed the regressions yet, but some patterns are emerging.” She called up a spreadsheet. “The grant is given at a median interval of one point nine years apart, but the closest two grants have ever been given is one point two years, which means the grant won’t be given until May at the earliest.”
It didn’t mean any such thing, and I would have said so, but she was into it now.
“Distribution of the awards follows a cyclical pattern, with academic institutions, research labs, and commercial corporations alternating, the next one being a corporation, which gives us an advantage, and”—she switched to a different spreadsheet—“there is a definite bias toward scientists west of the Mississippi, which is also an advantage, and a bias toward the biological sciences. I haven’t determined the specific area yet, but I should have that part of the profile by tomorrow.”
All of which sounded suspiciously like science on demand. I looked at Bennett to see what he thought about all this, but he was watching the screen intently, abstractedly, as if he’d forgotten we were there.
Well, of course he was interested. Why wouldn’t he be? If he could win the Niebnitz Grant, he could go back to the Loue River to work on chaos theory and forget all about forms and Flip and the uncertainties of funding.
Except science doesn’t work like that. You can’t handicap significant breakthroughs like they were a horse race.
But this wouldn’t be the first time somebody’d convinced himself of something that wasn’t true where money was involved. Take the stock market fad of the late twenties. Or the Dutch tulip craze of the 1600s. In 1634, the prices of tulips that were fancier or prettier or rarer than others started going up, and suddenly everybody—merchants, princes, peasants, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives—was buying and selling bulbs like mad. Prices skyrocketed, speculators made fortunes overnight, and people hocked their wooden shoes and the dike to buy a bulb that might cost as much as twelve annual incomes. And then for no reason, the market collapsed, and it was just like October 29, 1929, only with no skyscraper windows for Dutch stockholders to fling themselves out of.
Not to mention chain letters, pyramid schemes, and the Florida land boom.
“The other factor that needs to be considered is the name of the grant,” Alicia was saying. “Niebnitz may refer either to Ludwig Niebnitz, who was an obscure eighteenth-century botanist, or to Karl Niebnitz von Drull, who lived in fifteenth-century Bavaria. If it’s Ludwig, that would account for the biological bias. Von Drull was more famous. His area was alchemy.”
“I have to go,” I said, standing up. “If I’m going to switch my fads project to changing lead into gold, I’ll need to get busy,” and I walked out.
Bennett followed me out into the hall. “Thanks for bringing the funding form.”