Bellwether (19 page)

“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 Une 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.”

virtual pets (fall 1994—spring 1996)—–
Japanese computer game fad featuring a programmed pet. The puppy or kitten grows when fed and played with, learns tricks (the dogs, presumably, not the cats), and runs away if neglected. Caused by the Japanese love of animals and an overpopulation problem that makes having pets impractical.

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 non-smokers (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.”