Well, we were all very sorry for her, because she was unmarried, and that sort of thing is always clumsy. At that moment, however, none of us believed the connection between her condition and Atummion.
Being a distant relative of the Madame, she was humored to the extent that we had the lab get some guinea pigs and douse them with Elaine Templeton"s After Bath Powder, and they even professed to make a daily check on them.
Meanwhile, production ground to a halt on all Atummion-labelled products, which was everything, I think, but the eyebrow pencils.
With every drug-store and department store in the country screaming to have their orders filled, it was a delicate matter and took a lot of string-pulling to keep the thing off the front-pages. It wasn"t the beautician"s open charges that bothered us, because everyone knew they were just disgruntled. But if it leaked out that the AEC was disturbed enough to cut off our fission products, every radio, newspaper and TV commentator in the business would soon make mince-meat of us over the fact that Atummion had not been adequately tested before marketing.
And this was so right!
We took our chances and submitted honest samples to the Bureau of Weights and Measures and the Pure Food and Drug labs. And held our breath.
The morning the first report came back in our favor there was great rejoicing, but that afternoon our own testing lab sent up a man to see Jennings, and he called me instantly.
"Sanford, get up here at once. The guinea pigs just threw five litters of babies!"
"Congratulations," I told him. "That happens with guinea pigs, I understand."
"You _don"t_ understand," he thundered at me. "This was test group F-six, all females, and every one has reached maturity since we bought and segregated them."
"There must be some mistake," I said.
"There better be," he told me.
I went to his office and together we picked up the Madame from her penthouse suite. She followed us into the elevator reluctantly.
"Absurd, absurd!" was all she could say.
We watched the lab man check the ten adult pigs one by one. Even as inexpert as I am in such matters, it was evident that all ten were females, and the five which had not yet partic.i.p.ated in blessed events were but hours from becoming mothers.
We went our separate ways stunned. Back in my office I pulled out a list of our big wholesale accounts where the Atummion products had been shipped by the carloads. The warehouses were distributed in every state of the union.
Then I ran my eye down the list of products which contained the devilish Atummion. There were thirty-eight, in all, including a complete line of men"s toiletries, shaving lotion, shampoo, deodorant and body-dusting powder. I thanked G.o.d that men didn"t have ovaries.
Dolores Donet--that was the pixie"s name--opened my door and deposited herself gingerly in a chair opposite me.
I said, "You look radiant."
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 G.o.d, 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 b.u.g.g.e.r 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 d.a.m.ned 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 a.s.sistant 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 d.a.m.ned 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.