by Fritz Leiber
Delhi issued nervous denials of a millet blight that no one had heard of until that moment and reaffirmed India’s ability to feed her population with no outside help except the usual.
Radio Moscow asserted that the Kremlin would brook no interference in its treatment of the Ukrainians, jokingly referred to the flying bread as a farce perpetrated by mad internationalists inhabiting Cloud Cuckoo Land, added contradictory references to airborne bread booby-trapped by Capitalist gangsters, and then fell moodily silent on the whole topic.
Radio Venus reported to its winged audience that Earth’s inhabitants were establishing food depots in the upper air, preparatory to taking up permanent aerial residence “such as we have always enjoyed on Venus.”
NewNew York made feverish preparations for the passage of the flying bread. Tickets for sightseeing space in skyscrapers were sold at high prices; cold meats and potted spreads were hawked to viewers with the assurance that they would be able to snag the bread out of the air and enjoy a historic sandwich.
Phineas T. Gryce, escaping from his own managerial suite, raged about the city, demanding general cooperation in the stretching of great nets between the skyscrapers to trap the errant loaves. He was captured by Tin Philosopher, escaped again, and was found posted with oxygen mask and submachine-gun on 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.
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 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 queuing 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 bread balloons will be the big event of the day for kiddies. It’ll make the carry-home shopping load lighter too! I’ll issue orders at once—”
He broke off, looking at Phineas T. Gryce, said with quiet assurance, “Excuse me, sir, if I seem to be taking too much upon myself.”
“Not at all, son; go straight ahead,” the great manager said approvingly. “You’re”—he laughed in anticipation of getting off a memorable remark—”rising to the challenging situation like a genuine Puffyloaf.”
Megera Winterly looked from the older man to the younger. Then in a single leap she was upon Roger, her arms wrapped tightly around him.
“My sweet little ever-victorious, self-propelled monkey wrench!” she crooned in his ear. Roger looked fatuously over her soft shoulder at Tin Philosopher who, as if moved by some similar feeling, reached over and touched claws with Rose Thinker.
This, however, was what he telegraphed silently to his fellow machine across the circuit so completed:
“Good-o, Rosie! That makes another victory for robot-engineered world unity, though you almost gave us away at the start
with that ‘bread overhead’ jingle. We’ve struck another blow against the next world war, in which—as we know only too well!—we machines would suffer the most. Now if we can only arrange, say, a fur-famine in Alaska and a migration of long-haired Siberian lemmings across Bering Straits… we’d have to swing the Japanese Current up there so it’d be warm enough for the little fellows… Anyhow, Rosie, with a spot of help from the Brotherhood, those humans will paint themselves into the peace corner yet.”
Meanwhile, he and Rose Thinker quietly watched the Blonde Icicle melt.
THE REWARD
And here behind this dingy door, Miss Silvers—Well, Diana then—All right, Di! (I am unused to addressing lovely young ladies familiarity, in fact I am unused to lovely young ladies, they rarely register for my courses—even the elementary survey—and you are the first who ever did me the very great honor of coming back afterwards to pay me a visit, an evening visit indeed.) Well, behind this unimpressive door, Di, the least impressive in the whole science building, is Geller’s Folly, the last whimsical fling of a professor emeritus, the ridiculous project that makes it crystal clear that I am not one of the infinitely competent new nuclear men, but a physicist of the Cavendish breed—a half-mad hobbyist. Yes, that is a typewriter of sorts you hear behind the door—it is part of the Folly. The typist seems to think a lot between bursts, does he not?
Bother, I have left my key at home. We will pass up the Folly, Di. Without regrets. You will remember it better as a trivial mystery, an old man’s flaunting boast in a dimly lit corridor, than in its shrunken dull reality.
You really would like to see the Folly? It does have a certain robot fascination. Well, I suppose we can get Olafson’s key. He lives in the machine shop except for a brief respite after midnight—and it lacks three hours of that. With your permission, Di, we will descend to Olafson’s Hole. This way. Your furs and silks will make a brave shine in his dismal smithy where, a wide-cheeked Alberich, he fashions our brass and steel traps for the molecule. Olafson is a physicist’s machinist of the old breed, a dogged perfectionist such as Babbage depended on for building his ill-starred difference machine. Our Swedish Vulcan will be delighted by your presence and perhaps inwardly flustered—I imagine he is as unused to lovely young ladies as I.
But there is one thing that not even you will be able to elicit from Olafson—a smile. Olafson may conceivably have smiled as a baby, but there is no record of it, and he certainly has never smiled since. He is the very embodiment of sullen materialism, an aggregation of solidly packed molecules in which there is no room for the nonsense of spirit. I must confess that I like him that way, for I am a materialist myself, a devoted monist and atheist—I trust I do not shock you. I do not well understand the new young men in my field, who listen to Bach and Bruckner and Bartok, read Kierkegaard and Niebuhr and Dostoyevsky, have themselves psychoanalyzed, and eventually become Unitarians or High Episcopalians. I stand by Haeckel and Haldane, I know that the universe is a meaningless swirl of atoms, though from time to time I have whimsical fancies.
The Folly? Yes, perhaps it is best that I describe it to you now. Then we need steal only a quick glimpse of the actuality, which may leave it a shred of glamor. Besides, it will pass the time—as you see, Olafson’s Hole is a deep one and the way to it is long.
The Folly is a tiny hermetically sealed chamber filled with air under the constant pressure of one atmosphere. Every five seconds a knife-edged wall descends swiftly through its midst, cutting it into two chambers. In each of these two chambers the pressure of the air is automatically measured with an accuracy of five figures. Then the dividing wall flies up, the Folly becomes one chamber again, and the process is repeated. With Olafson’s help I try to keep it operating 24 hours a day. There are occasional breakdowns, but we have had it slashing air and measuring pressure continuously for periods as long as 15 months. It is in its seventh month this time.
Somewhere in my pockets I should have a section of the record it taps out like a veritable stock ticker—I have compromised enough with modern methods to let one of the young men hook on a typewriting device that commits the air pressure measurements to a paper tape. Here it is! See, the left-hand column records the pressures in Chamber A and the right hand column the pressures that simultaneously exist in Chamber B—taking the pressure inside the Folly as unity.
1.00000
.99999
.99999
.99999
1.00000
1.00000
1.00000
1.00000
1.00000
.99999
As you can plainly see, the readings do not differ by more than two ten-thousandths—the Folly’s permissible margin of error in measurement. I have yards and yards of such figures, all showing the same boresome invariability. Once I spotted a reading of .99997 and my heart skipped a beat, but the reading was the same in the other chamber—the Folly had merely sprung a slow leak and the air pressure outside was lower.
Well may you ask, Di, even though you did audit the elementary survey… you know, I really should remember you. I should remember such a lovely young lady. I am growing old, I fear, and my memory has become an ungallant traitor, while you are exceptionally young to be bothering about alumni reunions and calls on old profs… Well may you ask, Di, why I should expect the air pressure in the two chambers ever to differ, why I should have Olafson build a machine that goes through such a trivial rigmarole, why in short I should spend my declining years dancing attendance on monotony. The answer is that I am trying to trap Maxwell’s demon. Here is Olafson’s Hole.
Who is he? Why, as I told you, he is our machinist—Oh, Maxwell’s demon. Well, he might be described as the element of the fantastic in the cosmos—the element of the possible but wildly improbable.
Bother, Olafson has gone off on some errand. He has locked up and hung his “Back in 20 minutes” sign on the door. I fear the Fates are against us, Di, tonight. They do not wish you to see Geller’s Folly, and be disillusioned. I am sure of course that they are wiser than we.
You still wish to see it? You are most flattering to an old man. Well, we can confidently wait for Olafson—his 20 minutes never means 21, nor—oddly—19. Better, we’ll take a turn around the quadrangle—it is a mild night for January and you have your furs, while I will simply button the cardigan I wear in winter beneath my suit coat. Allow me a moment to scribble a note to Olafson so that he does not go off again. Better, I’ll tell him to meet us at the Folly.
How do I expect to trap Max—I mean the fantastic in the Folly? Well… You are sure I am not boring you? Yes, I agree that if you wish to see the Folly, it is likely that you wish to understand it. Thank you. Well, in the Folly I have a double handful of air—billions of molecules of several gasses, each moving at thousands of feet a second, endlessly colliding, rebounding from each other and the walls of the Folly hundreds of times a second, a shuffled jumble of particles. The energy of movement of these molecules, of course, adds up to the air pressure—I fear I grow stuffy, Di.
Science does not allow me to predict the behavior of any one of the molecules—as Whitehead puts it, the individual particle is a rare bird—but I am able to make significant predictions about the behavior of the flock. For instance, I can say that at any given moment the chances are overwhelming (I will not trouble you with the figures) that half the molecules are moving predominantly westward and half eastward—and the same for north and south and up and down.
But that, mark you, is only the overwhelming probability. It is conceivable, though vastly improbable, that at some given instant, all the molecules (or, more modestly, significantly more than fifty percent) might be moving west. It is a little like the chance of getting thirteen hearts at bridge or a “pat” royal flush at poker—though of course vastly more unlikely than that. The point is that the possibility, however remote, is a real one.
You see, Di, miracles are possible though we might have to wait more than the life-times of a thousand uni
verses to see one. Yet, the miracles might come this moment, conceivably. You might unpin that charming half-moon silver brooch at your throat and hold it out, and if all the molecules immediately beneath it chanced to be moving upward at that instant, it would be struck from your hand high into the air! Or across the corridor into my hand, if that chanced to be the whim of the molecule flock. (Here, incidentally, is where Maxwell’s demon comes in. The British physicist Clerk Maxwell, simply to illustrate a point about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, hypothesized an invisible spirit with the ability to direct the motion of individual particles.)
Similarly, at some instant all the molecules in the Folly might chance to be in Chamber A when the knife edge comes down. In that case, we would surely know it, for the pressure reading would be twice unity—two—in Chamber A and zero—a vacuum—in Chamber B.
Naturally, I am not looking for any such horrendously spectacular result. The most I hope for is a reading that shows a barely significant difference. Even at that I am like a roulette player waiting for black to turn up a hundred times running (really a million or a billion times), I am like a bridge player hoping to be dealt thirteen hearts in every hand for, say, three weeks of play.
I am like a gambler tirelessly casting a billion billion dice—the Folly my box—in the hope of one day throwing a billion billion sixes. Note, Di, that I try not to change dice, I try to shake the same molecules each time—that is why the Folly is hermetically sealed. I don’t imagine that like an old deck of cards the molecules will develop markings with use and become “readers”—though that is an attractive notion—but I coddle in my mind the ridiculous fancy that the same molecular flock, cooped up so long in the Folly, will eventually become bored and frantic and panicky (part of my mind thinks like a pagan infant’s) and in their desperation begin to behave irregularly. Some men have suggested that light ages in its passage through space, you know, so why might not molecules go mad from long imprisonment?
