reatened 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 queueing 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 wi