Ray Bradbury 3-Book Collection: Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man

‘Nice.’

‘You look fine, Millie!’

‘Fine.’

‘Everyone looks swell.’

‘Swell!’

Montag stood watching them.

‘Patience,’ whispered Faber.

‘I shouldn’t be here,’ whispered Montag, almost to himself. ‘I should be on my way back to you with the money!’

‘Tomorrow’s time enough. Careful!’

‘Isn’t this show wonderful?’ cried Mildred.

‘Wonderful!’

On one wall a woman smiled and drank orange juice simultaneously. How does she do both at once, thought Montag, insanely. In the other walls an X-ray of the same woman revealed the contracting journey of the refreshing beverage on its way to her delightful stomach! Abruptly the room took off on a rocket flight into the clouds, it plunged into a lime-green sea where blue fish ate red and yellow fish. A minute later, three White Cartoon Clowns chopped off each other’s limbs to the accompaniment of immense incoming tides of laughter. Two minutes more and the room whipped out of town to the jet cars wildly circling an arena, bashing and backing up and bashing each other again. Montag saw a number of bodies fly in the air.

‘Millie, did you see that?’

‘I saw it, I saw it!’

Montag reached inside the parlour wall and pulled the main switch. The images drained away, as if the water had been let out from a gigantic crystal bowl of hysterical fish.

The three women turned slowly and looked with unconcealed irritation and then dislike at Montag.

‘When do you suppose the war will start?’ he said. ‘I notice your husbands aren’t here tonight?’

‘Oh, they come and go, come and go,’ said Mrs Phelps. ‘In again out again Finnegan, the Army called Pete yesterday. He’ll be back next week. The Army said so. Quick war. Forty-eight hours they said, and everyone home. That’s what the Army said. Quick war. Pete called yesterday and they said he’d be back next week. Quick …’

The three women fidgeted and looked nervously at the empty mud-coloured walls.

‘I’m not worried,’ said Mrs Phelps. ‘I’ll let Pete do all the worrying.’ She giggled. ‘I’ll let old Pete do all the worrying. Not me. I’m not worried.’

‘Yes,’ said Millie. ‘Let old Pete do the worrying.’

‘It’s always someone else’s husband dies, they say.’

‘I’ve heard that, too. I’ve never known any dead man killed in war. Killed jumping off buildings, yes, like Gloria’s husband last week, but from wars? No.’

‘Not from wars,’ said Mrs Phelps. ‘Anyway, Pete and I always said, no tears, nothing like that. It’s our third marriage each and we’re independent. Be independent, we always said. He said, if I get killed off, you just go right ahead and don’t cry, but get married again, and don’t think of me.’

‘That reminds me,’ said Mildred. ‘Did you see that Clara Dove five-minute romance last night in your wall? Well, it was all about this woman who –’

Montag said nothing but stood looking at the women’s faces as he had once looked at the faces of saints in a strange church he had entered when he was a child. The faces of those enamelled creatures meant nothing to him, though he talked to them and stood in that church for a long time, trying to be of that religion, trying to know what that religion was, trying to get enough of the raw incense and special dust of the place into his lungs and thus into his blood to feel touched and concerned by the meaning of the colourful men and women with the porcelain eyes and the blood-ruby lips. But there was nothing, nothing; it was a stroll through another store, and his currency strange and unusable there, and his passion cold, even when he touched the wood and plaster and clay. So it was now, in his own parlour, with these women twisting in their chairs under his gaze, lighting cigarettes, blowing smoke, touching their sun-fired hair and examining their blazing fingernails as if they had caught fire from his look. Their faces grew haunted with silence. They leaned forward at the sound of Montag’s swallowing his final bite of food. They listened to his feverish breathing. The three empty walls of the room were like the pale brows of sleeping giants now, empty of dreams. Montag felt that if you touched these three staring brows you would feel a fine salt sweat on your finger-tips. The perspiration gathered with the silence and the sub-audible trembling around and about and in the women who were burning with tension. Any moment they might hiss a long sputtering hiss and explode.

Montag moved his lips.

‘Let’s talk.’

The women jerked and stared.

‘How’re your children, Mrs Phelps?’ he asked.

‘You know I haven’t any! No one in his right mind, the Good Lord knows, would have children!’ said Mrs Phelps, not quite sure why she was angry with this man.

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Mrs Bowles. ‘I’ve had two children by Caesarian section. No use going through all that agony for a baby. The world must reproduce, you know, the race must go on. Besides, they sometimes look just like you and that’s nice. Two Caesarians turned the trick, yes, sir. Oh, my doctor said, Caesarians aren’t necessary; you’ve got the hips for it, everything’s normal, but I insisted.’

‘Caesarians or not, children are ruinous; you’re out of your mind,’ said Mrs Phelps.

‘I plunk the children in school nine days out of ten. I put up with them when they come home three days a month; it’s not bad at all. You heave them into the “parlour” and turn the switch. It’s like washing clothes; stuff laundry in and slam the lid.’ Mrs Bowles tittered. ‘They’d just as soon kick as kiss me. Thank God, I can kick back!’

The women showed their tongues, laughing.

Mildred sat a moment and then, seeing that Montag was still in the doorway, clapped her hands. ‘Let’s talk politics, to please Guy!’

‘Sounds fine,’ said Mrs Bowles. ‘I voted last election, same as everyone, and I laid it on the line for President Noble. I think he’s one of the nicest-looking men who ever became president.’

‘Oh, but the man they ran against him!’

‘He wasn’t much, was he? Kind of small and homely and he didn’t shave too close or comb his hair very well.’

‘What possessed the “Outs” to run him? You just don’t go running a little short man like that against a tall man. Besides – he mumbled. Half the time I couldn’t hear a word he said. And the words I did hear I didn’t understand!’

‘Fat, too, and didn’t dress to hide it. No wonder the landslide was for Winston Noble. Even their names helped. Compare Winston Noble to Hubert Hoag for ten seconds and you can almost figure the results.’

‘Damn it!’ cried Montag. ‘What do you know about Hoag and Noble?’

‘Why, they were right in that parlour wall, not six months ago. One was always picking his nose; it drove me wild.’

‘Well, Mr Montag,’ said Mrs Phelps, ‘do you want us to vote for a man like that?’

Mildred beamed. ‘You just run away from the door, Guy, and don’t make us nervous.’

But Montag was gone and back in a moment with a book in his hand.

‘Guy!’

‘Damn it all, damn it all, damn it!’

‘What’ve you got there; isn’t that a book? I thought that all special training these days was done by film.’ Mrs Phelps blinked. ‘You reading up on fireman theory?’

‘Theory, hell,’ said Montag. ‘It’s poetry.’