The Project Gutenberg EBook of 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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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