"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.