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 complexi