n the topmost spire of Puffyloaf Tower, apparently
determined to shoot down the loaves as they appeared and before they
involved his company in more trouble with Customs and the State
Department.

Recaptured by Tin Philosopher, who suffered only minor bullet holes, he
was given a series of mild electroshocks and returned to the conference
table, calm and clear-headed as ever.

[Illustration]

But the bread flight, swinging away from a hurricane moving up the
Atlantic coast, crossed a clouded-in Boston by night and disappeared
into a high Atlantic overcast, also thereby evading a local storm
generated by the Weather Department in a last-minute effort to bring
down or at least disperse the H-loaves.

Warnings and counterwarnings by Communist and Capitalist governments
seriously interfered with military trailing of the flight during this
period and it was actually lost in touch with for several days.

At scattered points, seagulls were observed fighting over individual
loaves floating down from the gray roof--that was all.

A mood of spirituality 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 th