It was a panic until the traffic-directors descended upon us. We were
pushed up on the moving sidewalks. North or south, whichever direction
came handiest, we were herded upon the sidewalks and whirled away. With
a hundred other spectators near me I was shoved to a sidewalk moving
south along the Tenth Level. It was going some four miles an hour. But
they would not let me stay there. From behind, the crowd was shoving;
and from one parallel strip of moving pavement to the other I was pushed
along--until at last I reached the seats of the forty mile an hour
inside section.
The scene at Park Sixty was far out of direct sight and hearing. The
park there had already been cleared of spectators, I knew; and they were
doubtless bearing the President's body away.
"Murdered!" said a man beside me. "Murdered! Look there!"
We were across the river, into Manhattan. The Tenth Level here runs
about four hundred feet above the ground-street of the city. The man
beside me was pointing to a steel tower we were passing. It was several
hundreds yards away; on its side abreast of us was a forty-foot square
news-mirror, brightly illumined. On all the stairways and balconies here
a local crowd had gathered, watching the mirror. It was reporting the
present scene at Park Sixty. As we sped past the tower I could see in
the silver surface of the mirror the image of the now empty park from
which we had been so summarily ejected. They were carrying off the
President's body; a little group of officials bearing it away; red,
broken, gruesome, with the dying rays of the sun still upon it. Carrying
it slowly along to where an aero-car was waiting on the side landing
stage.
We were past the mirror in a moment.
"Murdered," the man next to me repeated. "The President murdered."
He seemed stunned, as indeed everyone was. Then he eyed me--my cap,
which had on it the insignia of my calling.
"You are one of them," he said bitterly. "The last word he said--the
lurid news-gatherers."
But I shook my head. "We are necessary. It was unfortunate that he
should have said that."
I had no opportunity to talk further. The man moved away toward the foot
of a landing stage near us. A south-bound flyer had overtaken us and was
landing. I boarded it also, and ten minutes later was in my office in
South-Manhattan.
I was at this time employed by one of the most enterprising
news-organizations in Greater New York. There was pandemonium in there
that evening. My supper came up in the pneumatic tube from the public
cookery nearby, but I had hardly time to taste it.
This, the evening of May 12, 2430, was for me--and for all the
Earth--the most stirring evening of history. Events of inter-planetary
importance tumbled over each other as they came to us through the air
from the Official Information Stations. And we--myself and a thousand
like me in our office--retold them for our twenty million subscribers
throughout the Anglo-Saxon Nation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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