She said, "Don't rub it in, and I'll have a shot of that." I shared my
Haig and Haig with her, and we drank to the newly departed bottom of
the world.
* * * * *
My secretary tried to give me a list of people who had phoned and a
stack of angry telegrams about back-orders, but I waved her away.
"Dolores," I said, "there must have been a boy guinea pig loose in
that pen. It's just too fantastic!"
"Are you accusing me of turning one loose just to get off the hook
myself?" she snapped.
"What you've got, excuses won't cure," I told her, "but we've got to
get facts. My God, if you're right--"
"We've sworn everyone to secrecy," she said. "There's a $10,000 bonus
posted for each employee who knows about this. Payable when the
statute of limitations runs out on possible litigation."
"You can't swear the public to secrecy," I said.
"Think a minute," she said, coldly. "The married women don't need
excuses, and the single girls--who'll believe them? Half of them or
better, have guilty consciences anyway. The rest? They're in the same
boat I was--without a labful of guinea pigs to back them up."
"But--how did it happen in the first place?"
"Bob has been consulting the biologist we retained. He keeps asking
the same question. He says parthenogenesis in higher lifeforms is
virtually impossible. Bob keeps pointing at the little pigs, and
they're going round and round. They're examining the other eleven test
pens now, but there's no question in my mind. I have a personal stake
in this experiment, and I was very careful to supervise the
segregation of males and females."
My sanity returned in one glorious rush. _There was the bugger
factor!_ _Dolores, herself._
In her eagerness to clear her own skirts, Dolores had tampered with
the integrity of the experiment. Probably, she had arranged for
artificial insemination, just to be sure. The tip-off was the hundred
percent pregnancy of one whole test-batch. Ten out of ten. Even if one
buck had slipped in inadvertently, and someone was covering up the
mistake, why you wouldn't expect anything like a 100% "take".
"Dolores," I said, "you are a naughty girl in more ways than one."
She got up and refilled her glass shaking her head. "The
ever-suspicious male," she said. "Don't you understand? I'm not
trying to dodge my responsibility for my condition. The whole mess is
my fault from beginning to end. But what kind of a heel will I be if
we get clearance from the AEC and start shipping out Atummyc products
again--knowing what I do? What's more, if we let the stuff float
around indefinitely, someone is going to run comprehensive tests on
it, not just allergy test patches like they're doing at the government
labs right now."
"Yeah," I said, "so we all bury the hottest promotion that ever hit
the cosmetics industry and live happily ever after."
She hit the deck and threw her whiskey glass at me, which did nothing
to convince me that she wasn't telling the tallest tale of the
century--to be conservative.
We sat and glared at each other for a few minutes. Finally she said,
"You're going to get proof, and damned good proof any minute now."
"How so?" Nothing this experiment revealed would be valid to me, I
figured, now that I was convinced she had deliberately fouled it up.
"Bob and the biologist should be up here any minute. I told them I'd
wait in your office. I know something you don't, I'm just waiting for
them to verify it."
She was much too confident, and I began to get worried again. We
waited for ten minutes, fifteen, twenty. I picked up the phone and
dialed the lab.
The woman assistant answered and said that the two men were on the way
up right now. I asked, "What have they been doing down there?"
She said, "They've been doing Caesarian sections on the animals in
test-pen M-four."
"Caesarian sections?" I repeated. She affirmed it, and Dolores Donet
got a tight, little, humorless smile on her face. I hung up and said,
"They're on their way up, and what's so funny?"
She said, "You know what I think? I think you've been using Atummyc
products on you."
"So what?" I demanded. "I was responsible for this campaign, too. I've
been waiting for a rash to develop almost as long as you have."
She said, "When Bob comes in, look at his complexion. All three of us
have been guinea pigs, I guess."
"I still don't see what's so damned amusing."
She said, "You still don't tumble, eh? All right, I'll spell it out.
Caesarians performed on test batch M-four."
"So?"
"The 'M' stands for male," she said.
She timed it just right. The hall door opened and Bob trailed in with
a dazed look. The biologist was half holding him up. His white
lab-smock was freshly blood-stained, and his eyes were blank and
unseeing.
But for all his distress, he was still a good looking young fellow.
His skin had that lovely, radiant, atomic look--just like mine.
... THE END
* * * * *