Tarrano the Conqueror | Page 2

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 the first. At 6:15 word came from Tokyohama,[2] that the ruler of Allied Mongolia was dead--murdered under similar circumstances. And ten minutes later from Mombozo, Africa, the blacks reported their leader killed while asleep in his official residence.
[Footnote 2: Tokyo-Yokohama, Japan.]
The Earth momentarily was without leadership!
I was struggling to get accounts of these successive disasters out over our audiophones. Above my desk, in a duplicating mirror from Headquarters, I could see that at the palace of Mombozo a throng of terrified blacks