"... Basra, where Khalid ib'n Hussein was assassinated early this
morning--early afternoon, local time. This is the scene of the crime;
the body of the murderer has been removed, but you can still see the
stones with which he was pelted to death by the mob...."
A close-up of the square, still littered with torn-up paving-stones. A
Caliphate army officer, displaying the weapon--it was an old M3, all
right; Chalmers had used one of those things, himself, thirty years
before, and he and his contemporaries had called it a "grease-gun."
There were some recent pictures of Khalid, including one taken as he
left the plane on his return from Ankara. He watched, absorbed; it
was all exactly as he had "remembered" a month ago. It gratified him
to see that his future "memories" were reliable in detail as well as
generality.
"But the most amazing part of the story comes, not from Basra, but
from Blanley College, in California," the commentator was saying,
"where, it is revealed, the murder of Khalid was foretold, with
uncanny accuracy, a month ago, by a history professor, Doctor Edward
Chalmers...."
There was a picture of himself, in hat and overcoat, perfectly
motionless, as though a brief moving glimpse were being prolonged. A
glance at the background told him when and where it had been taken--a
year and a half ago, at a convention at Harvard. These telecast people
must save up every inch of old news-film they ever took. There were
views of Blanley campus, and interviews with some of the Modern
History IV boys, including Dacre and Kendrick. That was one of the
things they'd been doing with that jeep-mounted sound-camera, this
afternoon, then. The boys, some brashly, some embarrassedly, were
substantiating the fact that he had, a month ago, described
yesterday's event in detail. There was an interview with Leonard
Fitch; the psychology professor was trying to explain the phenomenon
of precognition in layman's terms, and making heavy going of it. And
there was the mobbing of Whitburn in front of Administration Center.
The college president was shouting denials of every question asked
him, and as he turned and fled, the guffaws of the reporters were
plainly audible.
An argument broke out along the counter.
"I don't believe it! How could anybody know all that about something
before it happened?"
"Well, you heard that-there professor, what was his name. An' you
heard all them boys...."
"Ah, college-boys; they'll do anything for a joke!"
"After refusing to be interviewed for telecast, the president of
Blanley College finally consented to hold a press conference in his
office, from which telecast cameras were barred. He denied the whole
story categorically and stated that the boys in Professor Chalmers'
class had concocted the whole thing as a hoax...."
"There! See what I told you!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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