The legs and arm disappeared under the furnace and a head emerged from behind it. “Sorry,” he said. His face was freckled, too, and he was wearing Coke-bottle-thick glasses. “I thought you were that mail person.”
“Flip,” I said. “No. She delivered the box to my office by mistake.”
“Figures.” He pulled himself out from under the furnace and stood up. “I really am sorry,” he said, dusting himself off. “I don’t usually act that rude to people who are trying to deliver things. It’s just that Flip…”
“I know,” I said, nodding sympathetically.
He pushed his hand through his sandy hair. “The last time she delivered a box to me she set it on top of one of the monitors, and it fell off and broke a video camera.”
“That sounds like Flip,” I said, but I wasn’t really listening. I was looking at him.
When you spend as much time as I do analyzing fads and fashions, you get so you can spot them at first sight: ecohippie, jogger, Wall Street M.B.A., urban terrorist. Dr. O’Reilly wasn’t any of them. He was about my age and about my height. He was wearing a lab coat and corduroy pants that had been washed so often the wale was completely worn off on the knees. They’d shrunk, too, halfway up his ankles, and there was a pale line where they’d been let down.
The effect, especially with the Coke-bottle glasses, should have been science geek, but it wasn’t. For one thing, there were the freckles. For another, he was wearing a pair of once-white canvas sneakers with holes in the toes and frayed seams. Science geeks wear black shoes and white socks. He wasn’t even wearing a pocket protector, though he should have been. There were two splotches of ballpoint ink and a puddle of Magic Marker on the breast pocket of the lab coat, and one of the patch pockets was out at the bottom. And there was something else, something I couldn’t put my finger on, that made it impossible for me to categorize him.
I squinted at him, trying to figure out exactly what it was, so long he looked at me curiously. “I took the box to Dr. Turnbull’s office,” I said hastily, “but she’s gone home.”
“She had a grant meeting today,” he said. “She’s very good at getting grants.”
“The most important quality for a scientist these days,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, smiling wryly. “Wish I had it.”
“I’m Sandra Foster,” I said, sticking out my hand. “Sociology.”
He wiped his hand on his corduroys and shook my hand. “Bennett O’Reilly.”
And that was odd, too. He was my age. His name should be Matt or Mike or, God forbid, Troy. Bennett.
I was staring again. I said, “And you’re a biologist?”
“Chaos theory.”
“Isn’t that an oxymoron?” I said.
He grinned. “The way I did it, yes. Which is why my project lost its funding and I had to come to work for HiTek.”
Maybe that accounted for the oddness, and corduroys and canvas sneakers were what chaos theorists were wearing these days. No, Dr. Applegate, over in Chem, had been in chaos, and he dressed like everybody else in R D: flannel shirt, baseball cap, jeans, Nikes.
And nearly everybody at HiTek’s working out of their field. Science has its fads and crazes, like anything else: string theory, eugenics, mesmerism. Chaos theory had been big for a couple of years, in spite of Utah and cold fusion, or maybe because of it, but both of them had been replaced by genetic engineering. If Dr. O’Reilly wanted grant money, he needed to give up chaos and build a better mouse.
He was stooping over the box. “I don’t have a refrigerator. I’ll have to set it outside on the porch.” He picked it up, grunting a little. “Jeez, it’s heavy. Flip probably delivered it to you on purpose so she wouldn’t have to carry it all the way down here.” He boosted it up with his corduroy knee. “Well, on behalf of Dr. Turnbull and all of Flip’s other victims, thanks,” he said, and headed into the tangle of equipment.
A clear exit line, and, speaking of grants, I still had half those hair-bobbing clippings to sort into piles before I went home. But I was still trying to put my finger on what it was that was so unusual about him. I followed him through the maze of stuff.
“Is Flip responsible for this?” I said, squeezing between two stacks of boxes.
“No,” he said. “I’m setting up my new project.” He stepped over a tangle of cords.
“Which is?” I brushed aside a hanging plastic net.
“Information diffusion.” He opened a door and stepped outside onto a porch. “It should keep cold enough out here,” he said, setting it down.
“Definitely,” I said, hugging my arms against a chilly October wind. The porch faced a large, enclosed paddock, fenced in on all sides by high walls and overhead with wire netting. There was a gate at the back.
“It’s used for large-animal experiments,” Dr. O’Reilly said. “I’d hoped I’d have the monkeys by July so they could be outside, but the paperwork’s taken longer than I expected.”
“Monkeys?”
“The project’s studying information diffusion patterns in a troop of macaques. You teach a new skill to one of the macaques and then document its spread through the troop. I’m working with the rate of utilitarian versus nonutilitarian skills. I teach one of the macaques a nonutilitarian skill with a low ability threshold and multiple skill levels—”
“Like the Hula Hoop,” I said.
He set the box down just outside the door and stood up. “The Hula Hoop?”
“The Hula Hoop, miniature golf, the twist. All fads have a low ability threshold. That’s why you never see speed chess becoming a fad. Or fencing.”
He pushed his Coke-bottle glasses up on his nose.
“I’m working on a project on fads. What causes them and where they come from,” I said.
“Where do they come from?”
“I have no idea. And if I don’t get back to work, I never will.” I stuck out my hand again. “Nice to have met you, Dr. O’Reilly.” I started back through the maze.
He followed me, saying thoughtfully, “I never thought of teaching them to do a Hula Hoop.”
I was going to say I didn’t think there’d be room in here, but it was almost six, and I at least had to get my piles up off the floor and into file folders before I went home.
I told Dr. O’Reilly goodbye and went back up to Sociology. Flip was standing in the hall, her hands on the hips of her leather skirt.
“I came back and you’d left,” she said, making it sound like I’d left her sinking in quicksand.
“I was down in Bio,” I said.
“I had to come all the way back from Personnel,” she said, tossing her hair. “You said to come back.”
“I gave up on you and delivered the package myself,” I said, waiting for her to protest and say delivering the mail was her job. I should have known better. That would have meant admitting she was actually responsible for something.
“I looked all over your office for it,” she said virtuously. “While I was waiting for you, I picked up all that stuff you left on the floor and threw it in the trash.”
The old curiosity shop [1840–41]
Book fad caused by serialization of Dickens’s story about a little girl and her hapless grandfather, who are thrown out of their shop and forced to wander through England. Interest in the book was so great that people in America thronged the pier waiting for the ship from England to bring the next installment and, unable to wait for the ship to dock, shouted to the passengers aboard, “Did Little Nell die?” She did, and her death reduced readers of all ages, sexes, and degrees of toughness to agonies of grief. Cowboys and miners in the West sobbed openly over the last pages and an Irish member of Parliament threw the book out of a train and burst into tears.