Bellwether (20 page)

“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.

mood rings (1975)—–
Jewelry fad consisting of a ring set with a large “stone” that was actually a temperature-sensitive liquid crystal. Mood rings supposedly reflected the wearer’s mood and revealed his or her thoughts. Blue meant tranquillity; red meant crabbiness; black meant depression and doom. Since the ring actually responded to temperature, and after a while not even that, no one achieved the ideal “bliss” purple without a high fever, and everyone eventually sank into gloom and despair as their rings went permanently black. Superseded by Pet Rocks, which didn’t respond to anything.

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 Hierarchical 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
bis
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.

hair wreaths (1870—90)—–
Ghoulish Victorian handicraft fad in which the hair of a deceased loved one (or assortment of loved ones, preferably with different-colored hair) was made into flowers. The hair (obtained somehow or other) was braided and woven into bouquets and wreaths, and placed under a glass dome, or framed and hung on the wall. Supplanted by the suffrage movement, croquet, and Elinor Glyn. The hair wreath fad may have been a contributing factor in the hair-bobbing fad of the 1920s.

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.