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

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 abou
height. He was wearing a lab coat and corduroy pants that had been washed so often the wale was completely worn off
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, th
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
been. There were two splotches of ballpoint ink and a puddle of Magic Marker on the breast pocket of the lab coat, an
of the patch pockets was out at the bottom. And there was something else, something I couldn't put my finger on, that m
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 wear
these days. No, Dr. Applegate, over in Chem, had been in chaos, and he dressed like everybody else in R&D: flannel s
baseball cap, jeans, Nikes.

And nearly everybody at HiTek's working out of their field. Science has its fads and crazes, like anything else: strin
theory, eugenics, mesmerism. Chaos theory had been big for a couple of years, in spite of Utah and cold fusion, or may
because of it, but both of them had been replaced by genetic engineering. If Dr. O'Reilly wanted grant money, he neede
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, tha
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 wen