Bread Overhead | Page 6

strongly tinged with humor seized the people of
the world. Ministers sermonized about the bread, variously interpreting
it as a call to charity, a warning against gluttony, a parable of the
evanescence of all earthly things, and a divine joke. Husbands and
wives, facing each other across their walls of breakfast toast, burst into
laughter. The mere sight of a loaf of bread anywhere was enough to
evoke guffaws. An obscure sect, having as part of its creed the
injunction "Don't take yourself so damn seriously," won new adherents.
The bread flight, rising above an Atlantic storm widely reported to have
destroyed it, passed unobserved across a foggy England and rose out of
the overcast only over Mittel-europa. The loaves had at last reached
their maximum altitude.
The Sun's rays beat through the rarified air on the distended plastic
wrappers, increasing still further the pressure of the confined hydrogen.
They burst by the millions and tens of millions. A high-flying
Bulgarian evangelist, who had happened to mistake the up-lever for the
east-lever in the cockpit of his flier and who was the sole witness of the
event, afterward described it as "the foaming of a sea of diamonds, the
crackle of God's knuckles."

* * * * *
By the millions and tens of millions, the loaves coasted down into the
starving Ukraine. Shaken by a week of humor that threatened to invade
even its own grim precincts, the Kremlin made a sudden about-face. A
new policy was instituted of communal ownership of the produce of
communal farms, and teams of hunger-fighters and caravans of trucks
loaded with pumpernickel were dispatched into the Ukraine.
World distribution was given to a series of photographs showing
peasants queueing up to trade scavenged Puffyloaves for traditional
black bread, recently aerated itself but still extra solid by comparison,
the rate of exchange demanded by the Moscow teams being twenty
Puffyloaves to one of pumpernickel.
Another series of photographs, picturing chubby workers' children
being blown to bits by booby-trapped bread, was quietly destroyed.
Congratulatory notes were exchanged by various national governments
and world organizations, including the Brotherhood of Free Business
Machines. The great bread flight was over, though for several weeks
afterward scattered falls of loaves occurred, giving rise to a new
folklore of manna among lonely Arabian tribesmen, and in one
well-authenticated instance in Tibet, sustaining life in a party of
mountaineers cut off by a snow slide.
Back in NewNew York, the managerial board of Puffy Products
slumped in utter collapse around the conference table, the long crisis
session at last ended. Empty coffee cartons were scattered around the
chairs of the three humans, dead batteries around those of the two
machines. For a while, there was no movement whatsoever. Then
Roger Snedden reached out wearily for the earphones where Megera
Winterly had hurled them down, adjusted them to his head, pushed a
button and listened apathetically.
After a bit, his gaze brightened. He pushed more buttons and listened
more eagerly. Soon he was sitting tensely upright on his stool, eyes
bright and lower face all a-smile, muttering terse comments and

questions into the lapel mike torn from Meg's fair neck.
The others, reviving, watched him, at first dully, then with quickening
interest, especially when he jerked off the earphones with a happy
shout and sprang to his feet.
* * * * *
"Listen to this!" he cried in a ringing voice. "As a result of the
worldwide publicity, Puffyloaves are outselling Fairy Bread three to
one--and that's just the old carbon-dioxide stock from our freezers! It's
almost exhausted, but the government, now that the Ukrainian crisis is
over, has taken the ban off helium and will also sell us stockpiled wheat
if we need it. We can have our walking mills burrowing into the wheat
caves in a matter of hours!
"But that isn't all! The far greater demand everywhere is for
Puffyloaves that will actually float. Public Relations, Child Liaison
Division, reports that the kiddies are making their mothers' lives
miserable about it. If only we can figure out some way to make
hydrogen non-explosive or the helium loaf float just a little--"
"I'm sure we can take care of that quite handily," Tin Philosopher
interrupted briskly. "Puffyloaf has kept it a corporation secret--even
you've never been told about it--but just before he went crazy, Everett
Whitehead discovered a way to make bread using only half as much
flour as we do in the present loaf. Using this secret technique, which
we've been saving for just such an emergency, it will be possible to
bake a helium loaf as buoyant in every respect as the hydrogen loaf."
"Good!" Roger cried. "We'll tether 'em on strings and sell 'em like
balloons. No mother-child shopping team will leave the store without a
cluster. Buying