Free Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison Page A

facilities.
    MyToy was the only major toy company in America to maintain a full-time staff of child and research psychologists. Netta headed the team. The prototypes had been sent to her for live evaluation with test kids. The reports filled that clipboard. Fifty thou filled that clipboard. And I knew she was out to get me.
    Sloan wouldn’t look at me. I went down the length of the conference table, took an empty seat between Dixon and Schwann; I was bracketed by cost accountants, a pair of minor sales potential vassals. The seat on the right hand of Brian Sloan, God of MyToy, the seat I’d held for almost ten years, was occupied by Ostlander, the hungry little turncoat from Ideal who’d come over, bringing with him design secrets worth a fortune. Not The Big Breakthrough, but enough knockoff data to pay his way to the other side.
    And on the left hand of God sat Netta Bernstein.
    My future lay before her fastened tight in the clipboard. Her tests with the kids would make or break me. And the night before last she had said she loved me. And the day before she had told me to go away. And today I smelled the killing darkness of the Devonian seas.
    The first hour was marking time. Sales reports, prospectus for third-quarter production, a presentation about the proposed Lexington, Kentucky, plant site, odds and ends. Then Sloan said we’d hear Netta’s test results on the new designs. She never looked at me.
    “I’ll begin with the big dolls for preschoolers,” she said, releasing the clip and removing the first batch of reports. “They all reach or exceed the expectations projected by prelim. They have the ‘kid appeal’ Mr. Sloan discussed last Thursday, with one small modification on the shopper doll. The mother model. I found, in giving the dolls to six selected groups of test children–eight in each group–that the pocket on the apron was ignored completely. The children had no use for it, and I think it can be eliminated to the advantage of the item.”
    Sloan looked at me. “Jimmy,” he said, “what would that mean in terms of lowering the per-unit cost of the mother shopper?”
    I already had my calculator out and was running the figures. “Uh, that would be…three cents per unit on a projected run of–” I looked at Schwann; he scribbled 3 mil on his pad. “A run of three million units: ninety thousand dollars.” It had been a most ordinary question, and an ordinary answer.
    Netta Bernstein, without looking at me, said to Sloan, “I believe that figure is incorrect. The per-unit saving would be closer to 4.6 cents, for a total of one hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars.”
    Sloan didn’t answer. He just looked at Schwann and Dixon. They both nodded rapidly, like a pair of those Woolworth’s cork birds that dip their beaks into a glass of water and then sit upright again. It would have been pointless to say the three-cents-per-unit figure had been given to me by prelim the week before and that Netta had obviously gotten more up-to-date stats on the project. It would have been pointless, not only because Sloan didn’t like to hear excuses, but because Netta had clearly set out to mousetrap me. Cost stats were not her area, never had been, never should be; yet she had them. Chance? I doubted it. Either way, I looked like a doughnut.
    There was a hefty chunk of silence, and then Netta went on to the test results of three other proposals, none of them mine. On one of them the changes would have been impractical, on the second the kids simply didn’t like the toy, and on the third the changes would have been too expensive.
    Then she was down to the last two sheafs of notes, and I smelled the warm Devonian seas again.
    How I killed her was slovenly, sloppily, untidily, random, and rumpled.
    As she reached into the clothes closet for her bathrobe I pushed her inside and tried to strangle her. She fought me off and started to come out and I pushed her back. The clothes rack bar fell out of its