"Sure," said McLeod, and cut the connection. Give or take a couple, Mayor Spurgess had about thirty-six hours to live.
And McLeod?
Snow was falling in thick, slow flakes which melted on contact with the ground when McLeod went outside after lunch. Since neither the Star-Times nor the World was depending on the cold virus or influenza for medical headlines this season, it was comparatively safe venturing out in this weather.
This, McLeod thought, seeing it for the first time in a strange, new light, was the city. Gray-white sky, overflowing snowflakes. Slidewalks, covered for the winter, conducting crowds of bovinely unaware people from place to place. Steel and glass and stone, soaring skyward, disappearing in the feathery white snow which, up above, was not feathery at all but a solid gray pall.
Did the cud-munching people know the truth about newspapers? McLeod doubted it. The old name had remained—newspapers—but the function had changed. We give them each day their daily cud. We don't report. We motivate. You didn't find it anyplace. It wasn't written. It happened and it was accepted. Maybe they did know. It might make a good book, if people ever went back to reading books again. Not yellow journalism, but ROY G. BIV journalism, for all the colors in the rainbow. Concepts had changed. How? After the Third World War? The Fourth? People wanted to believe what they read. Each individual existence was precarious, cliff-edged, ready to fall or scramble back to safety. People believed. Almost, it was as if they had forgotten their Western Christian heritage, in which they moved through time from past to future, active agents in a static environment. Now they embodied the old Greek idea. People didn't flow. Time did. They stood backwards in the river of time, with the future flowing up, unseen, behind them, becoming the present, flowing on and becoming the past which lay, decipherable, before their eyes. Only newspapermen had eyes in the back of their heads.
Look out, cancer's coming. I read it in the World. (The World Medical Corps sows the seed, and the incidence of cancer increases.) Good newspaper, the World. Always lets you know what's coming. I see where the Star-Times says the cancer rate is dropping. Hope they're right. (Newspaper Medical Corps battle mightily, offstage, and the Star-Times wins. Temporarily, no more cancer.) What do you know, the Star-Times was right.
Star-Times says we ought to have a spaceship on the moon soon. Thrilling, isn't it (Star-Times astronauts prepare to launch a two-stage rocket from their space station, but World astronauts intercept it with a guided missile and destroy it.) Well, looks like the World was right. Space travel soon, but not yet.
Senator Blundy's daughter was attacked on the campus of that there college up-state, what's its name? You read about it in the Star-Times? You know, it's not so bad, being small time, I always say. Things like that only happen to important people. Yes sir, we're lucky.
World says it's a Brinks, one of those unsolved robberies. Three million dollars from the Bank of New York! (But Star-Times detectives go to work and find—or sometimes frame—the criminal.) Hey, it's not a Brinks anymore. Maybe I ought to read the Star-Times more often.