"Connie Willis - Bellweather" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

"Management went to another seminar," she said. "Which means a sensitivity exercise, a new acronym, and more
paperwork for us. I think I'll call in sick. Brittany's birthday's in two weeks, and I need to get the party decorations. Wh
these days in birthday parties? Circus? Wild West?"

"Power Rangers," I said. "Do you think they might reorganize the departments?" The last seminar Management ha
gone to, they'd created Flip's job as part of CRAM (Communications Reform Activation Management). Maybe this tim
they'd eliminate interdepartmental assistants, and I could go back to making my own copies, delivering my own message
and fetching my own mail. All of which I was doing now.

"I hate the Power Rangers," Gina said. "Explain to me how they ever got to be so popular."

She went back to her lab, and I went back to work on my bobbed hair. It was easy to see how it had become
popular. No long hair to put up with combs and pins and pompadour puffs, no having to wash it and wait a week for it
dry. The nurses who'd served in World War I had had to cut their hair off because of lice, and had liked the freedom an
lightness short hair gave them. And there were obvious advantages when it came to the other fads of the day: bicycling a
lawn tennis.

So why hadn't it become a fad in 1918? Why had it waited another four years and then suddenly, for no apparent
reason, hit so big that barber shops were swamped and hairpin companies went bankrupt overnight? In 1921, hair-bobb
was still unusual enough to make front-page news and get women fired. By 1925, it was so common every graduation p
and advertisement and magazine illustration showed short hair, and the only hats being sold were bell-shaped cloches, w
were too snug to fit over long hair. What had happened in the interim? What was the trigger?

I spent the rest of the day re-sorting the clippings. You'd think magazine pages from the 1920s would have turned
yellowish and rough, but they hadn't. They'd slid like eels out onto the tile floor, fanning out across and under each other
mixing with the newspaper clippings and obliterating their categories. Some of the paper clips had even come off.

I did the re-sorting on the floor. One of the lab tables was full of clippings about pogs that Flip was supposed to h
taken to be copied and hadn't, and the other one had all my jitterbug data on it. And neither one was big enough for the
number of piles I needed, some of which overlapped: entire article devoted to hair-bobbing, reference within article dev
to flappers, pointed reference, casual reference, disapproving reference, humorous reference, shocked and horrified
reference, illustration in advertisement, adoption by middle-aged women, adoption by children, adoption by the elderly,
items by date, news items by state, urban reference, rural reference, disparaging reference, reference indicating complet
acceptance, first signs of waning of fad, fad declared over.

By 4:55 the floor of my whole lab was covered with piles and Flip still wasn't back. Stepping carefully among the
I went over and looked at the box again. Biology was clear on the other side of the complex, but there was nothing for i
box said PERISHABLE, and even though irresponsibility is the hottest trend of the nineties, it hasn't worked its way thro
the whole society yet. I picked up the box and took it down to Dr. Turnbull.

It weighed a ton. By the time I'd maneuvered it down two flights and along four corridors, the reasons why
irresponsibility had caught on had become very clear to me. At least I was getting to see a part of the building I ordinaril
never in. I wasn't even exactly sure where Bio was except that it was down on the ground floor. But I must be heading i
right direction. There was moisture in the air and a faint sound of zoo. I followed the sound down yet another staircase a
into a long corridor. Dr. Turnbull's office was, of course, at the very end of it.

The door was shut. I shifted the box in my arms, knocked and waited. No answer. I shifted the box again, proppi
against the wall with my hip, and tried the knob. The door was locked.

The last thing I wanted to do was lug this box all the way back up to my office and then try to find a refrigerator. I