my lipstick
department, and I didn't have time to chase the powder thing like I
should have--since it was my name on the whole damned project.

So I wrote off the money and turned to other things.

We were just hitting the market with Madame Elaine Templeton's
"Kissmet" when the first smell of smoke came my way. The pixie came
into my office one morning and congratulated me.

"You're a genius!" she said.

"Like the Kissmet campaign, do you?" I said pleased.

"It stinks," she said holding her nose. "But Atummyc Bath Powder will
pull you out of the hole."

"Oh, that," I said. "When does it go to market?"

"Done went--a month ago."

"What? Why you haven't had time to get it out of the lab yet. Using a
foreign substance, you should have had an exhaustive series of allergy
skin tests on a thousand women before--"

"I've been using it for two months myself," she said. "And look at me!
See any rashes?"

I focussed my eyes for the first time, and what I saw made me wonder
if I were losing my memory. The pixie had been a pretty little French
pastry from the first, but now she positively glowed. Her skin even
had that "radiant atomic look", right out of our corny, low-budget ad
copy.

"What--have you done to yourself, fallen in love?"

"With Atummyc After Bath Powder," she said smugly. "And so have the
ladies. The distributors are all reordering."

Well, these drug sundries houses have some sharp salesmen out, and I
figured the bath powder must have caught them needing something to
promote. It was a break. If we got the $25,000 back it wouldn't hurt
my alibi a bit, in case the Kissmet production failed to click.

Three days later the old man called me from the New York branch of our
agency. "Big distributor here is hollering about the low budget we've
given to this Atummyc Bath Powder thing," he said. "He tells me his
men have punched it hard and he thinks it's catching on pretty big.
Maybe you better talk the Madame out of a few extra dollars."

"The Old Hag's in Europe," I told him, "and I'm damned if I'll rob the
Kissmet Lipstick deal any more. It's mostly spent anyway."

The old man didn't like it. When you get the distributors on your side
it pays to back them up, but I was too nervous about the wobbly first
returns we were getting on the Kissmet campaign to consider taking
away any of the unspent budget and throwing it into the bath powder
deal.

The next day I stared at an order from a west coast who