Free Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison Page B

brackets and we were lying in a heap on the floor. I hit her a couple of times and she hit me back, even harder than I’d hit her. Finally, I grabbed the plastic clothing bag from a dress fresh from the dry cleaners, and suffocated her with it. Then I went into her bathroom and vomited up the prime rib and spinach.
    I could feel Sloan’s eyes on me as she launched into the recitation of the problems inherent in producing the Can-Do Chipper. The toy was a preschool game that flipped a group of colored chips into the air when the child stomped on a foot pedal. The chips came in four distinct shapes and colors, four of each, with decals on them of bees, birds, fishes, and flowers. The object was for the child to grab as many of his designated decal chips as possible. Some of the squares were yellow with bees, some of the circles were red with flowers, some of the triangles were blue with birds, some of the stars were green with fishes. But some stars had bees on them, some circles had birds on them…and so forth. So a child had to identify in that instant the chips were in the air not only its proper decal, but its shape and its color as well.
    Netta had given the game to ten groups of four kids each, for “can-do” testing. She had left them alone in the big playroom on the third floor of the Research & Development wing. One needed a yellow color-coded badge to get onto the third floor, and a top-clearance red dot in the center of the yellow badge to get into that wing .
    The children had not responded to the game as I’d indicated they would. They ignored the decals entirely, set up the rules the way they wanted to play it, and simply caught shapes or colors. The cost analysis people said we’d save twenty-five thousand dollars by omitting the decals, and I thought I was home free; but Netta added what I thought was a gratuitous observation: “I think the sales potential of this item is drastically reduced by the loss of the decals. There won’t be any ready-to-hand advertising lures. In fact, when we gave each child a list of toys they could have for participating in the tests, and this was when we first brought them in, the Can-Do Chipper was in the lowest percentile of choice. And after we observed them through the one-way mirrors playing with the game, and after we showed them the cartoons and the commercials and then told them we’d made an error on the forms and they should now pick their prizes, it was the least wanted item on the list.”
    They scrubbed the project. I was two down for the day.
    She went on to the Little Miss Goodie Two-Shoes doll, my Big Breakthrough. It was the last sheaf of test notes, and I harbored the foolish hope that Netta had been playing some kind of deadly stupid lovers’ game with me, that she had saved my hottest project for last, so she could recommend it highly. She hung me out to dry.
    “This is one of the most dangerous toys I’ve ever tested,” she began. “To refresh your memory, it is a baby doll that contains a voice-activated tape loop. When you say to the doll, ‘Good dolly, you’re a good dolly,’ or similar affectionate phrase, the doll goes mmmmmm . When you say, ‘Bad dolly, you’ve been a bad dolly,’ or similar hostile phrase, the dolly whimpers. Unfortunately, my tests with a large group of children–” and she looked directly at me, “–which I’ve cross-checked through our independent testing group at Harvard, clearly show that not only the tape loop is activated by hostile phrases. This toy activates aggression in children, triggering the worst in them and feeding it. They were brutal with the dolls, tormenting them, savaging them, tearing them apart when merely spanking them and throwing them against the walls failed to satisfy their need to hear the whimpering.”
    I was, on the spot, in an instant, a pariah.
    I was the despoiler of the children’s crusade.
    I was the lurking child molester.
    I was the lizard piper of Hamelin.
    I was, with the