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