At one time or another, all of Grandma’s grandchildren got their mouths washed with the lie soap--all but me. Why I was spared, I’ve often wondered. It wasn’t for lack of provocation, that’s certain. I’ve thought perhaps Grandma had an intuitive grasp of scientific method, and kept me as a control. Or ... well, so far as I know, Grandma was the only one of the family in her generation who possessed the secret of the lie soap, and she didn’t pass it on to any of her children, who were all sober, truthful, financially unsuccessful citizens. But I’m pretty sure that Grandma herself never got the lie soap treatment as a child. I grew up, and summers on the farm receded into memory. I went to college, specialized in chemistry, and emerged with rosy visions of science remaking the world. I fell then, naturally into a research job with Gorley and Gorley, who at that time were one of the bigger companies making chemicals, synthetics, cleansers, pharmaceuticals and the like. The laboratories which I shared with a number of other young and not-so-young research men were magnificent, their chrome-and-porcelain splendor making the university labs where we’d studied seem small and dingy by comparison. Here I had the facilities and--assigned work being light at the time--the spare time to follow up a project of which I’d become enamored in school--a line on antibiotic synthesis. I almost lived in that lab for some weeks, at the end of which time I had sufficient promising results to make up a summary of them, together with an urgent request for materials needed to carry the investigation through to a successful conclusion. I submitted this report to the Coordinator, a fussy, harassed little man, who nervously promised to call it to the attention of the front office, and assigned me to work on the problem of producing a red detergent powder that would not make pink suds. Time went by, and nothing happened. Naturally I reminded the Coordinator, but he assured me that the matter had merely slipped his mind. To make a sad story short, I finally found out how things worked. Communications between the research department and the front office, i.e. the sales department, went only one way. When the latter had decided just what sort of epoch-making miracle of modern science the buying public was ripe for, word would come down, and if we happened to have such a miracle on hand, well and good. Otherwise, we could produce it, or a reasonable faсsimile thereof, in time for the scheduled start of the advertising campaign. It was O’Brien who first explained this system in full to me. O’Brien was an Assistant Sales Manager and an advertising man from way back. But he was also a human being. “Over there with your test tubes, kid,” he said bluntly. “You’re playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Sometimes you hit, oftener you miss. But you’re never quite sure in advance. Right?” I had to admit he had hit on a pretty fair description of scientific research in general.