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

Further on, as Montag moved in the darkness, he could see the helicopters falling, falling, like the first flakes of snow in the long winter to come …

The house was silent.

Montag approached from the rear, creeping through a thick night-moistened scent of daffodils and roses and wet grass. He touched the screen door in back, found it open, slipped in, moved across the porch, listening.

Mrs Black, are you asleep in there? he thought. This isn’t good, but your husband did it to others and never asked and never wondered and never worried. And now since you’re a fireman’s wife, it’s your home and your turn, for all the houses your husband burned and the people he hurt without thinking.

The house didn’t reply.

He hid the books in the kitchen and moved from the house again to the alley and looked back and the house was still dark and quiet, sleeping.

On his way across town, with the helicopters fluttering like torn bits of paper in the sky, he phoned the alarm at a lonely phone booth outside a store that was closed for the night. Then he stood in the cold night air, waiting and at a distance he heard the fire sirens start up and run, and the Salamanders coming, coming to burn Mr Black’s house while he was away at work, to make his wife stand shivering in the morning air while the roof let go and dropped in upon the fire. But now, she was still asleep.

Good night, Mrs Black, he thought.

‘Faber!’

Another rap, a whisper, and a long waiting. Then, after a minute, a small light flickered inside Faber’s small house. After another pause, the back door opened.

They stood looking at each other in the half-light. Faber and Montag, as if each did not believe in the other’s existence. Then Faber moved and put out his hand and grabbed Montag and moved him in and sat him down and went back and stood in the door, listening. The sirens were wailing off in the morning distance. He came in and shut the door.

Montag said, ‘I’ve been a fool all down the line. I can’t stay long. I’m on my way God knows where.’

‘At least you were a fool about the right things,’ said Faber. ‘I thought you were dead. The audio-capsule I gave you –’

‘Burnt.’

‘I heard the captain talking to you and suddenly there was nothing. I almost came out looking for you.’

‘The captain’s dead. He found the audio-capsule, he heard your voice, he was going to trace it. I killed him with the flame-thrower.’

Faber sat down and did not speak for a time.

‘My God, how did this happen?’ said Montag. ‘It was only the other night everything was fine and the next thing I know I’m drowning. How many times can a man go down and still be alive? I can’t breathe. There’s Beatty dead, and he was my friend once, and there’s Millie gone, I thought she was my wife, but now I don’t know. And the house all burnt. And my job gone and myself on the run, and I planted a book in a fireman’s house on the way. Good Christ, the things I’ve done in a single week!’

‘You did what you had to do. It was coming on for a long time.’

‘Yes, I believe that, if there’s nothing else I believe. It saved itself up to happen. I could feel it for a long time, I was saving something up, I went around doing one thing and feeling another. God, it was all there. It’s a wonder it didn’t show on me, like fat. And now here I am, messing up your life. They might follow me here.’

‘I feel alive for the first time in years,’ said Faber. ‘I feel I’m doing what I should have done a lifetime ago. For a little while I’m not afraid. Maybe it’s because I’m doing the right thing at last. Maybe it’s because I’ve done a rash thing and don’t want to look the coward to you. I suppose I’ll have to do even more violent things, exposing myself so I won’t fall down on the job and turn scared again. What are your plans?’

‘To keep running.’

‘You know the war’s on?’

‘I heard.’

‘God, isn’t it funny?’ said the old man. ‘It seems so remote because we have our own troubles.’

‘I haven’t had time to think.’ Montag drew out a hundred dollars. ‘I want this to stay with you, use it any way that’ll help when I’m gone.’

‘But –’

‘I might be dead by noon; use this.’

Faber nodded. ‘You’d better head for the river if you can, follow it along, and if you can hit the old railroad lines going out into the country, follow them. Even though practically everything’s airborne these days and most of the tracks are abandoned, the rails are still there, rusting. I’ve heard there are still hobo camps all across the country, here and there; walking camps they call them, and if you keep walking far enough and keep an eye peeled, they say there’s lots of old Harvard degrees on the tracks between here and Los Angeles. Most of them are wanted and hunted in the cities. They survive, I guess. There aren’t many of them, and I guess the Government’s never considered them a great enough danger to go in and track them down. You might hole up with them for a time and get in touch with me in St Louis. I’m leaving on the five A.M. bus this morning, to see a retired printer there, I’m getting out into the open myself, at last. The money will be put to good use. Thanks and God bless you. Do you want to sleep a few minutes?’

‘I’d better run.’

‘Let’s check.’

He took Montag quickly into the bedroom and lifted a picture frame aside, revealing a television screen the size of a postal card. ‘I always wanted something very small, something I could talk to, something I could blot out with the palm of my hand, if necessary, nothing that could shout me down, nothing monstrous big. So, you see.’ He snapped it on.

‘Montag,’ the TV set said, and lit up. ‘M-O-N-T-A-G.’ The name was spelled out by the voice. ‘Guy Montag. Still running. Police helicopters are up. A new Mechanical Hound has been brought from another district …’

Montag and Faber looked at each other.

‘… Mechanical Hound never fails. Never since its first use in tracking quarry has this incredible invention made a mistake. Tonight, this network is proud to have the opportunity to follow the Hound by camera helicopter as it starts on its way to the target …’

Faber poured two glasses of whisky. ‘We’ll need these.’

They drank.

‘… nose so sensitive the Mechanical Hound can remember and identify ten thousand odour-indexes on ten thousand men without re-setting!’

Faber trembled the least bit and looked about at his house, at the walls, the door, the doorknob, and the chair where Montag now sat. Montag saw the look. They both looked quickly about the house and Montag felt his nostrils dilate and he knew that he was trying to track himself and his nose was suddenly good enough to sense the path he had made in the air of the room and the sweat of his hand hung from the doorknob, invisible, but as numerous as the jewels of a small chandelier, he was everywhere, in and on and about everything, he was a luminous cloud, a ghost that made breathing once more impossible. He saw Faber stop up his own breath for fear of drawing that ghost into his own body, perhaps, being contaminated with the phantom exhalations and odours of a running man.

‘The Mechanical Hound is now landing by helicopter at the site of the Burning!’

And there on the small screen was the burnt house, and the crowd, and something with a sheet over it and out of the sky, fluttering, came the helicopter like a grotesque flower.

So they must have their game out, thought Montag. The circus must go on, even with war beginning within the hour …

He watched the scene, fascinated, not wanting to move. It seemed so remote and no part of him; it was a play apart and separate, wondrous to watch, not without its strange pleasure. That’s all for me, you thought, that’s all taking place just for me, by God.

If he wished, he could linger here, in comfort, and follow the entire hunt on through its swift phases, down alleys across streets, over empty running avenues, crossing lots and playgrounds, with pauses here or there for the necessary commercials, up other alleys to the burning house of Mr and Mrs Black, and so on finally to this house with Faber and himself seated, drinking, while the Electric Hound snuffed down the last trail, silent as a drift of death itself, skidded to a halt outside that window there. Then, if he wished, Montag might rise, walk to the window, keep one eye on the TV screen, open the window, lean out, look back, and see himself dramatized, described, made over, standing there, limned in the bright small television screen from outside, a drama to be watched objectively, knowing that in other parlours he was large as life, in full colour, dimensionally perfect! And if he kept his eye peeled quickly he would see himself, an instant before oblivion, being punctured for the benefit of how many civilian parlour-sitters who had been wakened from sleep a few minutes ago by the frantic sirening of their living-room walls to come watch the big game, the hunt, the one-man carnival.

Would he have time for a speech? As the Hound seized him, in view of ten or twenty or thirty million people, mightn’t he sum up his entire life in the last week in one single phrase or a word that would stay with them long after the Hound had turned, clenching him in its metal-plier jaws, and trotted off in darkness, while the camera remained stationary, watching the creature dwindle in the distance – a splendid fade-out! What could he say in a single word, a few words, that would sear all their faces and wake them up?

‘There,’ whispered Faber.

Out of a helicopter glided something that was not machine, not animal, not dead, not alive, glowing with a pale green luminosity. It stood near the smoking ruins of Montag’s house and the men brought his discarded flame-thrower to it and put it down under the muzzle of the Hound. There was a whirring, clicking, humming.

Montag shook his head and got up and drank the rest of his drink. ‘It’s time. I’m sorry about this.’

‘About what? Me? My house? I deserve everything. Run, for God’s sake. Perhaps I can delay them here –’

‘Wait. There’s no use your being discovered. When I leave, burn the spread of this bed, that I touched. Burn the chair in the living room, in your wall incinerator. Wipe down the furniture with alcohol, wipe the doorknobs. Burn the throw-rug in the parlour. Turn the airconditioning on full in all the rooms and spray with moth-spray if you have it. Then, turn on your lawn sprinklers as high as they’ll go and hose off the sidewalks. With any luck at all, we can kill the trail in here, anyway.’