“I was born in Montana,” she said, wrapping her muffler around her neck as she went out. “This is a mild summer breeze,” but I noticed she left the door open.
Bennett came back in, rubbing his arms. “Brr, it’s freezing out there. What’s the matter with people? Sending an old lady out in the snow in the name of moral righteousness. I suppose Flip was behind it.”
“Flip is behind everything.” I looked at the littered desk. “I guess I’d better let you get back to work. Thanks for letting Shirl smoke down here.”
“No, wait,” he said. “I had a couple of things I wanted to ask you about the funding form.” He scrabbled through the stuff on his desk and came up with the form. He flipped through pages, looking. “Page fifty-one, section eight. What does Documentation Scatter Method mean?”
“You’re supposed to put down ALR-Augmented,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“I have no idea. It’s what Gina told me to put.”
He penciled it in, shaking his head. “These funding forms are going to be the death of me. I could have done the project in the time it’s taken me to fill out this form. HiTek wants us to win the Niebnitz Grant, to make scientific breakthroughs. But name me one scientist who ever made a significant breakthrough while filling out a funding form. Or attending a meeting.”
“Mendeleev,” Shirl said.
We both turned around. Shirl was standing inside the door, shaking snow off her hat. “Mendeleev was on his way to a cheesemaking conference when he solved the problem of the periodic chart,” she said.
“That’s right, he was,” Bennett said. “He stepped on the train and the solution came to him, just like that.”
“Like Poincaré,” I said. “Only he stepped on a bus.”
“And discovered Fuchsian functions,” Bennett said.
“Kekulé was on a bus, too, wasn’t he, when he discovered the benzene ring,” Shirl said thoughtfully. “In Ghent.”
“He was,” I said, surprised. “How do you know so much about science, Shirl?”
“I have to make copies of so many scientific reports, I figured I might as well read them,” she said. “Didn’t Einstein look at the town clock from a bus while he was working on relativity?”
“A bus,” I said. “Maybe that’s what you and I need, Bennett. We take a bus someplace and suddenly everything’s clear—you know what’s wrong with your chaos data and I know what caused hair-bobbing.”
“That sounds like a great idea,” Bennett said. “Let’s—”
“Oh, good, you’re here, Bennett,” Alicia said. “I need to talk to you about the grant profile. Shirl, make five copies of this.” She dumped a stack of papers into Shirl’s arms. “Collated and stapled. And this time don’t put them on my desk. Put them in my mailbox.” She turned back to Bennett. “I need you to help me come up with additional relevant factors.”
“Transportation,” I said, and started for the door. “And cheese.”
Ironing hair [1965–68]
Hair fad inspired by Joan Baez, Mary Travers, and other folksingers. Part of the hippie fad, the lank look of long straight hair was harder to obtain than the male’s general shagginess. Beauty parlors gave “antiperms,” but the preferred method among teenagers was laying their heads on the ironing board and pressing their locks with a clothes iron. The ironing was done a few inches at a time by a friend (who hopefully knew what she was doing), and college girls lined up in dorms to take their turns.
During the next few days, nothing much happened. The simplified funding allocation forms were due on the twenty-third, and, after donating yet another weekend to filling them out, I gave mine to Flip to deliver and then thought better of it and took it up to Paperwork myself.
The weather turned nice again, Elaine tried to talk me into going white-water rafting with her to relieve stress, Sarah told me her boyfriend, Ted, was experiencing attachment aversion, Gina asked me if I knew where to find Romantic Bride Barbie for Bethany (who had decided she wanted one just like Brittany’s and whose birthday was in November), and I got three overdue notices for Browning, The Complete Works.
In between, I finished entering all my King Tut and black bottom data and started drawing a Barbie picture. I didn’t have a box of sixty-four crayons, but there was a paintbox on the computer. I called it up, along with my statistical and differential equations programs, and started coding the correlations and plotting the relationships to each other. I graphed skirt lengths in cerulean blue, cigarette sales in gray, plotted lavender regressions for Isadora Duncan and yellow ones for temps above eighty-five. White for Irene Castle, radical red for references to rouge, brown for “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.”
Flip came in periodically to hand me petitions and ask me questions like, “If you had a fairy godmother, what would she look like?”
“An old lady,” I said, thinking of Toads and Diamonds, “or a bird, or something ugly, like a toad. Fairy godmothers disguise themselves so they can tell if you’re deserving of help by whether you’re nice to them. What do you need one for?”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re not supposed to ask interdepartmental communications liaisons personal questions. If they’re in disguise, how do you know to be nice to them?”
“You’re supposed to be nice in general—” I said and realized it was hopeless. “What’s the petition for?”
“It’s to make HiTek give us dental insurance, of course,” she said.
Of course.
“You don’t think it’s my assistant, do you?” Flip said. “She’s an old lady.”
I handed her back the petition. “I doubt very much that Shirl is your fairy godmother in disguise.”
“Good,” she said. “There’s no way I’m going to be nice to somebody who smokes.”
I didn’t see Bennett, who was busy preparing for the arrival of his macaques, or Shirl, who was doing all Flip’s work, but I did see Alicia. She came up to the lab, wearing po-mo pink, and demanded to borrow my computer.
“Flip’s using mine,” she said irately, “and when I told her to get off, she refused. Have you ever met anyone who was that rude?”
That was a tough one. “How’s the search for the Philosopher’s Stone going?” I said.
“I’ve definitely eliminated circumstantial predisposition as a criterion,” she said, shifting my data to the lab table. “Only two Niebnitz Grant recipients have ever made a significant scientific breakthrough subsequent to their winning of the award. And I’ve narrowed down the project approach to a cross-discipline-designed experiment, but I still haven’t determined the personal profile. I’m still evaluating the variables.” She popped my disk out and shoved her own in.
“Have you taken disease into account?” I said.
She looked irritated. “Disease?”
“Diseases have played a big part in scientific breakthroughs. Einstein’s measles, Mendeleev’s lung trouble, Darwin’s hypochondria. The bubonic plague. They closed down Cambridge because of it, and Newton had to go back home to the apple orchard.”