The Irresistible Perfume
A Fragrance Too Alluring to Escape

What happens when scientific curiosity produces something no one should ever use?Professor William Makepeace Potts is a quiet chemist with little interest in romance, pleasure, or social life. He spends his days mixing compounds and measuring their effects with the careful precision of a man who believes the laboratory is the only place worth living. When he perfects a perfume of unprecedented strength, he considers it merely an experimental proof of concept—an oddity to be handed off to others for practical applications.Unfortunately, the perfume does exactly what no one anticipated.When the formula falls into the hands of Maribel Mitchell—once a flamboyant stage performer and never a woman to resist excitement—the scent becomes part of a reckless scheme to stir up trouble. What begins as a mischievous plan to push the sheltered professor toward romance quickly proves far more dangerous. The fragrance does not simply attract attention. It compels it. Anyone who smells it loses all restraint.Before long, crowds are chasing a single unfortunate woman through city streets, factories begin emptying of workers, and a criminal mastermind realizes the perfume could halt wartime production across the country. What started as a laboratory curiosity becomes a national crisis—and the only people who know the truth must find a way to stop it before the damage spreads.Meanwhile, the one man who should be most affected remains completely untouched by the scent. And that strange immunity may be the only hope of setting everything right again.Harold Lawlor wrote a small number of humorous fantasy and science-fiction stories during the 1940s and 1950s for pulp adventure magazines. “The Irresistible Perfume” appeared in Fantastic Adventures, a magazine published by Ziff-Davis that specialized in light fantasy, supernatural tales, and playful science fiction.