The Trigger by Arthur C. Clarke

Author:Arthur C. Clarke [Clarke, Arthur C.]
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780553576207
Publisher: New York : Bantam Books, 2000.
Published: 2010-06-04T18:30:00+00:00

just about anyone - did you have a good weekend and forget to tell me? None of these donors contacted us for our account information. How do I handle this?' 'I had an awful weekend, thank you, and I'm expecting an even worse week,' Trent said curtly as he came to his feet. 'Allocate the money to Education and Outreach. We're going to spend a lot of it in the next twenty-four hours. Kenneth!' The last was a shout directed at the outer office. His administrative aide came running. 'Yes?' 'Call in the council. We have work to do.' The netmail action alert tree worked perfectly. By dawn on Tuesday, the vanguard of the Justice Day demonstrators was streaming into Washington aboard a small fleet of tour buses and charter aircraft. Converging on the west end of the Mall, the buses disgorged their human cargo near the Lincoln Memorial, then headed off to gather more. March captains gathered the new arrivals into groups of two or three hundred, and led them east along Con-stitution Avenue toward the Capitol. That route took them past the windows of the White House, and many marchers shouted jeers across the Ellipse. But they were otherwise well behaved, and while the park police on horseback watched attentively and seemed to be doing a great deal of talking on their radios, they kept a comfortable distance and did not try to interfere. By 8.00 a.m., there were more than ten thousand outside the Capitol, milling on the grassy eastern tip of the Mall in sight of the Supreme Court half a block away. By then the parade along Constitution Avenue had grown to a thin but unbroken stream, and the shouted jeers had been replaced by a wordless but equally challenging display of clenched fists and one-fingered salutes. The signs and placards reading JUSTICE NOW! and FREEDOM NOW! finally arrived, and soon were in evidence along the full length of the Mall. Every side street seemed to have at least one police unit parked and watching, but still there were no confrontations. The march had taken the authorities by surprise, and while they were no doubt uncomfortable watching the crowd swell, they had no ready strategy for preventing it.

There were cameras evident from the beginning, some feeding NARfriendly sites and others belonging to press outlets friendly to their cause, but the march officially became an event when two of the 'Big Five' netcasters put the story at the top of their portals. It cascaded quickly from there to the smaller providers, and the buzz spread even faster throughout Washington: 'Something's happening on the Mall.' Just after nine, normal morning traffic and the influx of curious locals slowed traffic flow near the Lincoln Memorial to near-gridlock, and the city police responded by trying to close Arlington Memorial Bridge. Almost immediately, the half-dozen officers whose vehicles formed the barricade found themselves caught between more than a thousand demonstrators disembarking from buses stopped on the Virginia side of the Potomac and more than three times that number marching in relief from the Mall.

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