Pilsky's accident




  Jones and Snavely have come into my office three times before with
that look on their faces - "It wasn't our fault."  Each time has cost
the company over ten million dollars.  The first time was the steroids,
archaic stuff, but some idiot in a branch plant was making and selling
them.  He'd even cleaned them up a little so that there were no side
effects.  The advertising alone ran to twelve mill.
  The next was the diet pills that didn't do anything at all.  Just a
little oversight on someone's part, and when we got the real thing on
the market they sank like a rock.  We still make them, and the demand
grows every year, a little.  We estimate that we lost a hundred a year
over that one, and that's millions of dollars.  Still, we have no
overweight secretaries.
  The third was the diabetes medication which made the urine of the
user poisonous to parrots.  By the time we noticed that nobody had sued
us we were down a large fortune in legal fees.  Fortunately the founder
(then my boss) found another law firm willing to take them on on a
contingency basis, and the two firms are still circling each other like
injured wolves.  We haven't seen a cent of our money back, and we
certainly never will.
  So I asked exactly what catastrophe was rearing up out of the
primordial ooze, and Jones started as usual, "Well, about eighteen
months ago -"
  Now this is an improvement over the early days, when he would have
started with a time about twenty years ago, although it hasn't brought
him to the point any more quickly.  Eventually we'll be able to design
and manufacture a new substance in ten minutes, and Jones will be
saying "Well, about half an hour ago -"
  So I allowed myself an uncharacteristic flash of bad temper.  "Skip
the history.  What went wrong?"
  Snavely cut in.  "It was a fluke.  The discovery.  There is a hormone
that teenaged girls have that puts fat on their breasts.  That's why
they get them.  We stumbled on it, and we synthesized it."
  This didn't seem very promising, and after the nineties anything to
do with breasts makes me think of lawyers.  Still, the stuff hadn't
gone to market, so this must be a lost research money type of thing
rather than a customers with green feathers type.  "So you can give
teenaged girls breasts?"
  "Well, yes, but that's not really it.  When women have babies they
use up the fat, and it doesn't all get replaced, so their breasts
shrink."
  This was looking up.  "So women can take this to make their breasts
nice after they have a baby."
  Jones smiled.  "It works all the time.  Any woman who takes it gets
fatter breasts.  And the other stuff, milk ducts and so on, just fills
in around it.  We have a drug that gives women big tits, just like the
old silicone implants did, but it's safe."
  "If it's safe, why are you here."
  Snavely sighed, and Jones took over.  "Well, we synthesized it, as we
always do, and tried it out on rats, and it worked, and then on
monkeys."
  "And it worked?"
  "Perfectly.  Although a monkey with big tits is pretty unsettling."
  "And?"
  "We tried it on some of our people, and it worked beautifully.  You
remember Leila, the good looking secretary in accounting?"
  "The one with the big - oh."
  "Yeah, she didn't get married, she quit to be a stripper.  And
several of the others did get married, and a few still work here and
every woman in the place is begging for the stuff."
  "Go on."
  "So we cut up some of the safe e. coli and produced a strain that can
make the stuff."
  Something made all the hair on the back of my neck stand up at this,
but it was strictly standard procedure so far.  "And?"
  "Well, you remember Pilsky, the summer intern who caused the fire
with the jello?"
  "Yes.  We eventually moved him to accounting, didn't we?"
  "After the paint stripper incident, and the incident with the
chickens."
  "I hadn't heard of those."
  "Well, there is a certain loyalty in the research wing.  We really
tried, you know, but he just wasn't a research man.  The accountants
love him..."
  "So what did Mr. Pilsky do?"
  "He inadvertently contaminated the culture with wild e. coli, and we
believe that they were able to exchange genes with the damaged ones in
the safe culture to give them a full set.  This meant that we had a
viable culture of coliform bacteria that could survive in the wild."
  "And so?"
  "Well, as you know, e. coli is a normal intestinal bacterium.
Foreign strains cause stomach upsets, Montezuma's revenge, that sort of
thing for a few days, then they settle down and you're ok."
  "So this thing can live in your guts and it produces a drug that
gives you bigger breasts.  What does it do to men?"
  "Fortunately nothing, but it can live in them just as well as in
women."
  I was beginning to feel lawyers staring at me.  "And the drug can be
absorbed through the digestive tract."
  "Yes, that was one of the advantages, it could be an over the counter
medication."
  "But do we still have a market for it?"
  "Well, we think that it may have contaminated the water in the
building supply."
  "And so some of our people are now little drug factories?"
  "Yes, but it's worse than that.  They have the runs for a few days,
and that contaminates the sewage.  Eventually it will spread and
intermingle with the wild types.  With modern travel it could show up
anywhere, although countries with poor public sanitation will probably
be affected first.  And us, of course, since it started here."
  I shut my eyes and thought for a minute.  "So how big do the breasts
get?"
  "Well, we don't know.  But there probably isn't an upper limit.  I
mean, how much fat can a girl accumulate?  She could probably go on a
strict diet, but when one is growing..."
  "So we need an epidemiologist, a specialist in public hygiene, and a
good lawyer."
  "Or we can hush this thing up.  We never announced the project and
there were only a few people working on it.  Everything went so
smoothly.  At first..."
  "At first.  But the results will show up around here first, and we
are a drug manufacturer."
  "Well," said Jones, "there is a way."
  "Yes."
  "We could, you know, send peole out with samples to, er, contaminate
the groundwater in other cities, countries..."
  Snavely added "Yes, and we could tip the media off to the first
infections in, say Africa, pick a country where there is a poor sewage
system, then explain how it could spread to here."
  I could feel myself being sucked into the centre of a whirlpool,
Jones always one step ahead of reason and one step behind reality,
spreading this thing further and further, leaving a spreading trail of
disasters and swelling breasts and evidence pointing right back at us,
the water spiralling faster and faster until it sucked us down out of
sight.
  And then another image superimposed itself, insidiously, on the first
one, Jones pouring a test tube of clear broth into a puddle as cattle
walked through it, rain carrying millions of microbes into rivers,
young native girls fresh from the pages of National Geographic walking
along dusty roads with baskets on their heads, laughing happily, hugely
swollen breasts swaying in the sun.
  And in California, public water supplies being compromised, teenaged
girls buying ever larger tee shirts to cover stupendous wobbling
bosoms, tall Swedish blondes busting out of crisp white blouses,
rosy-cheeked English ladies peering over mountainous busts, secretaries
typing letters as growing breasts swelled down to rest solidly on
keyboards.
  "Alright, I want a plan drawn up, and I want this underway by
tomorrow.  Snavely, start culturing this stuff.  Jones, draw up a plan
on a map, and decide where to infect.  I want a list of every employee
who's going on holiday in the next month, and I want them infected
before they go.  Better yet, see if you can get at the water supplies
in the airports.  Get the guys together who are working on this, and
see if they have any ideas."
  I thought for a minute.  "And see which of our girls have been sick
since this happened, and give them a month off, and pay their airfare
to wherever they want to go."
  So...it was done, just like that.
  The remarkable thing is that we never did get caught.  Jones spread
his bacteria all over the globe, from Canada to Ethiopia, Japan to
Switzerland, and slowly, so slowly that it was nearly a year before
anyone was really sure that anything was happening, breasts began to
swell, clothes began to tighten, and women began, at first, to show off
deepening cleavage.  After a while there was a panicky covering-up of
bustlines, but by that time they were too prominent to conceal.  The
new bacteria spread everywhere, and within eighteen months there wasn't
an area of the world that wasn't contaminated.  And breasts swelled.
  Five years later they still are, slowly but inexorably.  Beth, my
secretary is a skinny twenty year old with a merely enormous bust, two
huge, firm peaks that she supports in an industrial looking bra and
then hides in a tight shirt - but then there is no point in showing off
when you are painfully flat-chested.
  Beth has been raised on carefully washed and cooked food, antibiotics
and cultures of carefully grown wild type e-coli, and the attempt to
preserve her in the natural state has been fairly successful.  It is
hard to tell her that in an earlier age she would have been embarrassed
by the sheer size of the things.  I think that someday she will
accidentally fall off her regimen and grow a truly glorious rack.
Until then she is a good and consciencious secretary, and one who I can
ogle shamelessly since she will never believe that anyone could bother
looking at a set of tits barely larger than the owner's head.
  Her predecessor, Anne, ate herself into a pair of breasts so huge
that she became a legend within the company, and eventually into a
shape where taking care of her own needs was as much as she could
handle without the added complication of a job.
  And now there are plump girls left, but no really huge ones, because
their breasts are always waiting to absorb all the food they can get.
And there is no unemployment, with half of the female population unable
to take on a job which requires them not to have such huge breasts that
the area immediately in front of them is a complete mystery.  Beth
says wistfully that a girl isn't really busty if she can do up her own
blouse.
  And there are finally all the breasts you could ever want to look at.
And so, it being sunny, I am going to the beach to watch the
sunbathers.  Some of the new bikinis are amazing, especially if the
wearer is trying to kid herself about what she can still slip into.
And if I spot a really cute girl, I may even use the question that has
replaced the weather as the front line of conversation and perhaps even
brought chivalry back into the world: "Hi, can I help you to get up?"