Short Fiction Fritz Leiber (free e books to read .txt) 📖

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 nonexplosive 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 Behring 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 Last Letter

On Tenthmonth 1, 2457 AD, at exactly 9 a.m. Planetary Federation Time⁠—but with a permissible error of a millionth of a second either way⁠—in the fifth sublevel of NewNew York Robot Postal Station 68, Black Sorter gulped down ten thousand pieces of first-class mail.

This breakfast tidbit did not agree with the mail-sorting machine. It was as if a robust dog had been fed a large chunk of good red meat with a strychnine pill in it. Black Sorter’s innards went whirr-klunk, a blue electric glow enveloped him, and he began to shake as if he might break loose from the concrete.

He desperately spat back over his shoulder a single envelope, gave a great huff and blew out toward the sorting tubes a medium-size snowstorm consisting of the other nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine pieces of first-class mail chewed to confetti. Then, still convulsed, he snapped up a fresh ten thousand and proceeded to chomp and grind on them. Black Sorter was rugged.

The rejected envelope was tongued up by Red Subsorter, who growled deep in his throat, said a very bad word, and passed it to Yellow Rerouter, who passed it to Green Rerouter, who passed it to Brown Study, who passed it to Pink Wastebasket.

Unlike Black Sorter, Pink Wastebasket was very delicate, though highly intuitive⁠—the machine equivalent of a White Russian countess. She was designed to scan in 3,137 codes, route special-delivery spacemail to interplanetary liners by messenger rocket, and distinguish 9s from upside-down 6s.

Pink Wastebasket haughtily inhaled the offending envelope and almost instantly turned a bright crimson and began to tremble. After a few minutes, small atomic flames started to flicker from her midsection.

White Nursemaid Seven and Greasy Joe both received Pink Wastebasket’s distress signal and got there as fast as their wheels would roll them, but the highborn machine’s malady was beyond their simple skills of oilcan and electroshock.

They summoned other machine-tending-and-repairing machines, ones far more expert than themselves, but all were baffled. It was clear that Pink Wastebasket, who continued to tremble and flicker uncontrollably, was suffering from the equivalent of a major psychosis with severe psychosomatic symptoms. She spat a stream of filthy ions at Gray Psychiatrist, not recognizing her old friend.

Meanwhile, the paper blizzard from Black Sorter was piling up in great drifts between the dark pillars of the sublevel, and flurries had reached Pink Wastebasket’s aristocratic area. An expedition of sturdy machines, headed by two hastily summoned snowplows, was dispatched to immobilize Black Sorter at all costs.

Pink Wastebasket, quivering like a demented hula dancer, was clearly approaching a crisis. Finally Gray Psychiatrist⁠—after consulting with Green Surgeon, and even then with an irritated reluctance, as if he were