WASHINGTON — It wasn't your usual order that blared from the police cruiser's loudspeaker in front of the Supreme Court: "The person who ordered pizza from Pizza Boli's," the metallic voice announced, "your pizza's here."
But then, Thursday was not a usual night at the Supreme Court.
People hunkered down against the chill November wind outside the floodlighted marble court. One man had brought a folding cot, and several had foam-rubber and air mattresses or sleeping bags. Two camping tents were pitched, one on a grass median between the sidewalk and the street, another on the sidewalk. People played chess, Trivial Pursuit. They ate pizza, ordered by cellphone.
And everywhere, people talked of the hearing Friday, when the Supreme Court enters the legal impasse over the Florida presidential election. A half-dozen members of Grace Church in Fredricksburg, Va., played guitars and conga drums and sang "worship music," invoking God's guidance on the justices.
"Money can't buy this. Money can't buy history," said John Fucetola, first in line to get a ticket for the hearing. "This is something we'll be telling our grandchildren."
Fucetola, 20, a political science major at George Washington University, took his place at 3:57 a.m.
Fucetola and two other relatively early arrivals engineered a self-regulating system and cleared it unofficially with Capitol Police officers to keep tabs of who was in line and who was among the few who had dropped out by late evening. They called the roll every hour, on the hour, and those who didn't answer lost their places.
Only the first 50 people will be seated throughout the hearing. Plans were to show in the others for three-minute intervals to get a feel of the court.
Sue Hoffman, of College Park, Md., was No. 23.
"What makes this exciting for me is that I hope this will determine who will be the next president," said Hoffman, a campus pastor at the University of Maryland. "I hope this settles it and lets us get back to being a country."
The justices are hearing an appeal by Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the Republican presidential nominee certified by Florida as winner of the state's election but contested by Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic candidate. Bush wants the high court to declare invalid a ruling by Florida's Supreme Court upholding the validity of hand counting of votes; Gore wants the justices to rule that choosing presidential electors is the business of the states and not of federal courts.
Beryl Anderson, Ohio's deputy secretary of state, flew in especially for the hearing and was waiting with the rest.
Outside one of the tents, two 17-year-olds, Laura Wiens, No. 7, and Peng Wu, No. 8, both high school seniors in Alexandria, Va., nibbled on crackers, cheese and Pringles brought over by their mothers. Wiens said she and her friend brought their tent to do an all-nighter because "this is definitely a landmark case. We leapt at the chance."
A child of the television age, Peng added: "The fact that no cameras are allowed makes it even more of an honor to be there."
C-SPAN and others requested permission to mount the first television broadcast for the monumental case. The justices said no. Instead, they will distribute an audio tape of the hearing.
Scott Shryack, 20, of Los Angeles, a junior sociology major at the University of California, Los Angeles, attending Washington's American University for a semester, said he came to mark the "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I'd be stupid to miss it."
Not everybody was so sanguine about the history ready to be made.
A man driving by the milling crowd yelled out his car window: "No president. We don't need no president."