Bellwether by Connie Willis Read Free Book Online Page B

standing on one of them, I smiled at her and said, “How are you this morning?”
    “Oh, just great” she said sarcastically. “Perfectly fine.” She flopped down onto the hair-bobbing clippings on my lab table. “You will not believe what they expect me to do now!”
    A little work? I thought uncharitably, and then remembered I was supposed to be following in Pippa’s footsteps. “Who’s they?” I said, bending to pick up the spilled pages.
    “Management” she said, rolling her eyes. She was wearing a pair of neon-yellow tights, a tie-dyed T-shirt, and a very peculiar down vest. It was short and bunched oddly around the neck and armpits. “You know how I’m supposed to get a new job title and an assistant?”
    “Yes,” I said, continuing to smile. “Did you? Get a new job title?”
    “Ye-es,” she said. “I’m the interdepartmental communications liaison. But for my assistant, they expect me to be on a search committee. After work.”
    Along the bottom of the vest there was a row of snaps, a style I had never seen before. She’s wearing it upside down, I thought.
    “The whole point was I was overworked. That’s why I have to have an assistant, isn’t it? Hello?”
    Wearing clothing some other way than was intended is an ever-popular variety of fad—untied shoelaces, backward baseball caps, ties for belts, slips for dresses—and one that can’t be put down to merchandising because it doesn’t cost anything. It’s not new, either. High school girls in 1955 took to wearing their cardigan sweaters backward, and their mothers had worn unbuckled galoshes with short skirts and raccoon coats in the 1920s. The metal buckles had jangled and flapped, which is how the name flapper came about. Or, since there doesn’t seem to be agreement on the source of anything where fads are concerned, they were named for the chicken like flapping of their arms when they did the Charleston. But the Charleston didn’t hit till 1923, and the word flapper had been used as early as 1920.
    “Well,” Flip said. “Do you want to hear this or not?”
    It was no wonder Pippa had just gone singing past her clients’ windows. If she’d had to put up with them, she wouldn’t have been half as cheerful. I forced an interested expression. “Who else is on the committee?”
    “I don’t know. I told you, I don’t have time to go to these things.”
    “But don’t you want to make sure you get a good assistant?”
    “Not if I have to stay after work,” she said, irritably pulling clippings out from under her. “Your office is a mess. Don’t you ever clean it?”
    “‘The lark’s on the wing;/The snail’s on the thorn,’” I said.
    “What?”
    So Browning was wrong. “I’d love to talk,” I said, “but I’d better get started on this funding form.”
    She didn’t show any signs of moving. She was looking aimlessly through the clippings.
    “I need you to make a copy of each of those. Now. Before you go to your search committee meeting.”
    Still nothing. I got a pencil, stuck the extra pages into the application, and tried to focus on the simplified funding form.
    I never worry much about getting funding. It’s true there are fads in both science and industry, but greed is always in style. HiTek would like nothing more than to know what causes fads so they could invent the next one. And stats projects are cheap. The only funding I was requesting was for a computer with more memory capacity. Which didn’t mean I could forget about the funding form. It wouldn’t matter if your project was a sure-fire method for turning lead into gold, if you don’t have the forms filled out and turned in on time, Management will cancel you like a shot.
    Project goals, experimental method, projected results, matrix analysis ranking. Matrix analysis ranking?
    I flipped the page over to see if there were instructions, and the page came out altogether. There weren’t any instructions, there or at the end of the application.