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

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