Bread Overhead

Bread Overhead, by Fritz Reuter
Leiber

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Title: Bread Overhead
Author: Fritz Reuter Leiber
Illustrator: Wood
Release Date: September 11, 2007 [EBook #22579]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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OVERHEAD ***

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Bread Overhead

By FRITZ LEIBER
The Staff of Life suddenly and disconcertingly sprouted wings --and
mankind had to eat crow!
Illustrated by WOOD
As a blisteringly hot but guaranteed weather-controlled future summer
day dawned on the Mississippi Valley, the walking mills of Puffy
Products ("Spike to Loaf in One Operation!") began to tread delicately
on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas.
The walking mills resembled fat metal serpents, rather larger than those
Chinese paper dragons animated by files of men in procession. Sensory
robot devices in their noses informed them that the waiting wheat had
reached ripe perfection.
As they advanced, their heads swung lazily from side to side, very
much like snakes, gobbling the yellow grain. In their throats, it was
threshed, the chaff bundled and burped aside for pickup by the crawl
trucks of a chemical corporation, the kernels quick-dried and blown
along into the mighty chests of the machines. There the tireless mills
ground the kernels to flour, which was instantly sifted, the bran being
packaged and dropped like the chaff for pickup. A cluster of tanks
which gave the metal serpents a decidedly humpbacked appearance
added water, shortening, salt and other ingredients, some named and
some not. The dough was at the same time infused with gas from a tank
conspicuously labeled "Carbon Dioxide" ("No Yeast Creatures in Your
Bread!").
[Illustration]
Thus instantly risen, the dough was clipped into loaves and shot into
radionic ovens forming the midsections of the metal serpents. There the
bread was baked in a matter of seconds, a fierce heat-front browning
the crusts, and the piping-hot loaves sealed in transparent plastic
bearing the proud Puffyloaf emblem (two cherubs circling a floating
loaf) and ejected onto the delivery platform at each serpent's rear end,

where a cluster of pickup machines, like hungry piglets, snatched at the
loaves with hygienic claws.
A few loaves would be hurried off for the day's consumption, the
majority stored for winter in strategically located mammoth deep
freezes.
But now, behold a wonder! As loaves began to appear on the delivery
platform of the first walking mill to get into action, they did not linger
on the conveyor belt, but rose gently into the air and slowly traveled off
down-wind across the hot rippling fields.
* * * * *
The robot claws of the pickup machines clutched in vain, and, not
noticing the difference, proceeded carefully to stack emptiness, tier by
tier. One errant loaf, rising more sluggishly than its fellows, was
snagged by a thrusting claw. The machine paused, clumsily wiped off
the injured loaf, set it aside--where it bobbed on one corner, unable to
take off again--and went back to the work of storing nothingness.
A flock of crows rose from the trees of a nearby shelterbelt as the flight
of loaves approached. The crows swooped to investigate and then
suddenly scattered, screeching in panic.
The helicopter of a hangoverish Sunday traveler bound for Wichita
shied very similarly from the brown fliers and did not return for a
second look.
A black-haired housewife spied them over her back fence, crossed
herself and grabbed her walkie-talkie from the laundry basket. Seconds
later, the yawning correspondent of a regional newspaper was jotting
down the lead of a humorous news story which, recalling the old
flying-saucer scares, stated that now apparently bread was to be
included in the mad aerial tea party.
The congregation of an open-walled country church, standing up to
recite the most familiar of Christian prayers, had just reached the

petition for daily sustenance, when a sub-flight of the loaves, either
forced down by a vagrant wind or lacking the natural buoyancy of the
rest, came coasting silently as the sunbeams between the graceful
pillars at the altar end of the building.
Meanwhile, the main flight, now augmented by other bread flocks from
scores and hundreds of walking mills that had started work a little later,
mounted slowly and majestically into the cirrus-flecked upper air,
where a steady wind was blowing strongly toward the east.
About one thousand miles farther on in that direction, where a cluster
of stratosphere-tickling towers marked the location of the