Free Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison

theory.
    The shark is one of the few life forms that has come down to the present virtually unchanged from the Devonian. So few: the cockroach, the horseshoe crab, the nautilus, the coelecanth–probably older than the dinosaurs. The shark.
    When we were still aquatic creatures…there was the shark. And even today, in the blood that boils through us, the blood whose constituency is the same as sea water, in the blood and somewhere deep in our racial memory, there is still the remembrance of the shark. Of swimming away from that inexorable eating machine, of crawling up onto the land to be safe from it, of vowing never to return to the warm seas where the teeth can reach us.
    When we see the shark, we understand that that is one of the dreadful furies that drove us to become human beings. Natural enemy from beyond the curtain of time, from beneath the killing darkness. Natural enemies.
    Perhaps I can explain how I knew, that next day, that Netta Bernstein and I were blood enemies.
    The moment I walked into the conference room and saw her sitting next to Sloan–a clipboard fat with charts lying on the table in front of her–I knew she was lying in wait for me. The teeth, the warm seas, the eating machines that had followed us onto the land. And in that instant, I now realize, I first decided to kill her.
    You have to understand how it is with a major toy company, how it works in the corporate way; otherwise it doesn’t make sense…the killing of Netta Bernstein.
    Fighting my way to the top at the MyToy Corporation had been the commitment of ten years of my life. It wouldn’t have been any different at Mattel or Marx or Fisher-Price or Ideal or Hasbro or Kenner or Mego or Playskool or even Creative Playthings. The race is always to make The Big Breakthrough, to come up with the new toy that sweeps the field before the competition can work up a knockoff imitation. Barbie, G.I. Joe, Hot Wheels, they made millions for one man and one company because they were The Big Breakthroughs. In an industry where sixty percent of each year’s product is brand-new, has to be brand-new because the kids have a saturation/boredom threshold that is not to be believed, it is the guy with The Big Breakthrough who gets to be Vice President of Product Planning, at $50,000 a year.
    I was Director of Marketing Research. Gumball, Destruction Derby, Change-A-Face, those had been my weapons in the fight toward the $50,000 plateau. MyToy was one of the big five and I’d been on the rise for ten years.
    But the last four ideas I’d hawked to top management had either been rejected or been put into production and bombed. The fashion-doll line had been too sophisticated–and the recession had hit; there was backlash against opulence, conspicuous consumption; and the feminist movement had come out strong against what they called “training little girls to be empty-headed clotheshorses.” Dinosaur had been too impractical to produce at a reasonable per-unit cost. Pretesting had shown that kids rejected Peggy Puffin as being “ugly,” even though parents found the packaging attractive; they’d buy it, but the kids wouldn’t play with it. And the lousy sales reports on Mother’s Helper had verified a negative transference; old learning habits had generally inhibited learning new techniques. It was what the president of MyToy, Sloan, had called “disastrously counterproductive.” And I’d begun to smell the ambivalence about me. Then the doubts. Then the veiled antagonisms. The dismissals, the offhand rejections of trial balloons I’d floated. And now there was even open hostility. I was at the crunch point.
    Everything was tied up in the two new projects I’d worked out with R&D. The Can-Do Chipper and the Little Miss Goodie Two-Shoes doll. Research & Development had gotten the approval to put them into preliminary design, both aimed at preschool development markets, and Netta Bernstein had tested them in the MyToy play therapy