Tarrano the Conqueror | Page 2

should be settled with sober
thought--around the council table. This talk of war was ridiculous. He
was denouncing the public news-broadcasters; moulders of public
opinion, who every day--every hour--must offer a new sensation to

their millions of subscribers.
[Footnote 1: New York City, about where Yonkers now stands.]
He had reached this point when without warning his body pitched
forward. The balcony rail caught it; and it hung there inert. The slanting
rays of the sun fell full upon the ruffled white shirt; white, but turning
pink, then red, with the crimson stain welling out from beneath.
For an instant the crowd was stunned into silence. Then a murmur
arose, and swelled into shouts of horror. A surge of people swept me
forward. I could not see clearly what was happening on the balcony.
The form of the murdered President was hanging there against the rail;
a score of government officials were rushing toward it; but the body,
toppling over the low support, came hurtling downward into the crowd,
quite near me; but I could not reach it--the throng was too dense.
The shouts everywhere were deafening. I was shoved along the Tenth
Level by the press of people coming up the stairway. Shouts, excited
questions; the wail of children almost trampled under foot; the screams
of women. And over it all, the electrically magnified voice of the traffic
director-general in the peak of the main tower roaring his orders to the
crowd.
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.
The President of the Anglo-Saxon Republic was murdered at 5:10. It
was the first of the new murders. I say new murders, for not in two
hundred years had the life of so high an official been wilfully taken.
But it was only