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

They had this machine. They had two machines, really. One of them slid down into your stomach like a black cobra down an echoing well looking for all the old water and the old time gathered there. It drank up the green matter that flowed to the top in a slow boil. Did it drink of the darkness? Did it suck out all the poisons accumulated with the years? It fed in silence with an occasional sound of inner suffocation and blind searching. It had an Eye. The impersonal operator of the machine could, by wearing a special optical helmet, gaze into the soul of the person whom he was pumping out. What did the Eye see? He did not say. He saw but did not see what the Eye saw. The entire operation was not unlike the digging of a trench in one’s yard. The woman on the bed was no more than a hard stratum of marble they had reached. Go on, anyway, shove the bore down, slush up the emptiness, if such a thing could be brought out in the throb of the suction snake. The operator stood smoking a cigarette. The other machine was working too.

The other machine was operated by an equally impersonal fellow in non-stainable reddish-brown overalls. This machine pumped all of the blood from the body and replaced it with fresh blood and serum.

‘Got to clean ’em out both ways,’ said the operator, standing over the silent woman. ‘No use getting the stomach if you don’t clean the blood. Leave that stuff in the blood and the blood hits the brain like a mallet, bang, a couple of thousand times and the brain just gives up, just quits.’

‘Stop it!’ said Montag.

‘I was just sayin’,’ said the operator.

‘Are you done?’ said Montag.

They shut the machines up tight. ‘We’re done.’ His anger did not even touch them. They stood with the cigarette smoke curling around their noses and into their eyes without making them blink or squint. ‘That’s fifty bucks.’

‘First, why don’t you tell me if she’ll be all right?’

‘Sure, she’ll be OK. We got all the mean stuff right in our suitcase here, it can’t get at her now. As I said, you take out the old and put in the new and you’re OK.’

‘Neither of you is an MD. Why didn’t they send an MD from Emergency?

‘Hell!’ the operator’s cigarette moved on his lips. ‘We get these cases nine or ten a night. Got so many, starting a few years ago, we had the special machines built. With the optical lens, of course, that was new; the rest is ancient. You don’t need an MD, case like this; all you need is two handymen, clean up the problem in half an hour. Look’ – he started for the door – ‘we gotta go. Just had another call on the old ear-thimble. Ten blocks from here. Someone else just jumped off the cap of a pillbox. Call if you need us again. Keep her quiet. We got a contra-sedative in her. She’ll wake up hungry. So long.’

And the men with the cigarettes in their straight-lined mouths, the men with the eyes of puff-adders, took up their load of machine and tube, their case of liquid melancholy and the slow dark sludge of nameless stuff, and strolled out the door.

Montag sank down into a chair and looked at this woman. Her eyes were closed now, gently, and he put out his hand to feel the warmness of breath on his palm.

‘Mildred,’ he said, at last.

There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that’s too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood. Good God, who were those men? I never saw them before in my life!

Half an hour passed.

The bloodstream in this woman was new and it seemed to have done a new thing to her. Her cheeks were very pink and her lips were very fresh and full of colour and they looked soft and relaxed. Someone else’s blood there. If only someone else’s flesh and brain and memory. If only they could have taken her mind along to the dry-cleaner’s and emptied the pockets and steamed and cleansed it and reblocked it and brought it back in the morning. If only …

He got up and put back the curtains and opened the windows wide to let the night air in. It was two o’clock in the morning. Was it only an hour ago, Clarisse McClellan in the street, and him coming in, and the dark room and his foot kicking the little crystal bottle? Only an hour, but the world had melted down and sprung up in a new and colourless form.

Laughter blew across the moon-coloured lawn from the house of Clarisse and her father and mother and the uncle who smiled so quietly and so earnestly. Above all, their laughter was relaxed and hearty and not forced in any way, coming from the house that was so brightly lit this late at night while all the other houses were kept to themselves in darkness. Montag heard the voices talking, talking, talking, giving, talking, weaving, reweaving their hypnotic web.

Montag moved out through the french windows and crossed the lawn, without even thinking of it. He stood outside the talking house in the shadows, thinking he might even tap on their door and whisper, ‘Let me come in. I won’t say anything. I just want to listen. What is it you’re saying?’

But instead he stood there, very cold, his face a mask of ice, listening to a man’s voice (the uncle?) moving along at an easy pace:

‘Well, after all, this is the age of the disposable tissue. Blow your nose on a person, wad them, flush them away, reach for another, blow, wad, flush. Everyone using everyone else’s coat-tails. How are you supposed to root for the home team when you don’t even have a programme or know the names? For that matter, what colour jerseys are they wearing as they trot out on to the field?’

Montag moved back to his own house, left the window wide, checked Mildred, tucked the covers about her carefully, and then lay down with the moonlight on his cheek-bones and on the frowning ridges in his brow, with the moonlight distilled in each eye to form a silver cataract there.

One drop of rain. Clarisse. Another drop. Mildred. A third. The uncle. A fourth. The fire tonight. One, Clarisse. Two, Mildred. Three, uncle. Four, fire, One, Mildred, two, Clarisse. One, two, three, four, five, Clarisse, Mildred, uncle, fire, sleeping-tablets, men, disposable tissue, coat-tails, blow, wad, flush, Clarisse, Mildred, uncle, fire, tablets, tissues, blow, wad, flush. One, two, three, one, two, three! Rain. The storm. The uncle laughing. Thunder falling downstairs. The whole world pouring down. The fire gushing up in a volcano. All rushing on down around in a spouting roar and rivering stream toward morning.

‘I don’t know anything any more,’ he said, and let a sleep-lozenge dissolve on his tongue.

At nine in the morning, Mildred’s bed was empty.

Montag got up quickly, his heart pumping, and ran down the hall and stopped at the kitchen door.

Toast popped out of the silver toaster, was seized by a spidery metal hand that drenched it with melted butter.

Mildred watched the toast delivered to her plate. She had both ears plugged with electronic bees that were humming the hour away. She looked up suddenly, saw him, and nodded.

‘You all right?’ he asked.

She was an expert at lip-reading from ten years of apprenticeship at Seashell ear-thimbles. She nodded again. She set the toaster clicking away at another piece of bread.

Montag sat down.

His wife said, ‘I don’t know why I should be so hungry.’

‘You –’

‘I’m hungry.’

‘Last night,’ he began.

‘Didn’t sleep well. Feel terrible,’ she said. ‘God, I’m hungry. I can’t figure it.’

‘Last night –’ he said again.

She watched his lips casually. ‘What about last night?’

‘Don’t you remember?’

‘What? Did we have a wild party or something? Feel like I’ve a hangover. God, I’m hungry. Who was here?’

‘A few people,’ he said.

‘That’s what I thought.’ She chewed her toast. ‘Sore stomach, but I’m hungry as all-get-out. Hope I didn’t do anything foolish at the party.’

‘No,’ he said, quietly.

The toaster spidered out a piece of buttered bread for him. He held it in his hand, feeling grateful.

‘You don’t look so hot yourself,’ said his wife.

In the late afternoon in rained and the entire world was dark grey. He stood in the hall of his house, putting on his badge with the orange salamander burning across it. He stood looking up at the air-conditioning vent in the hall for a long time. His wife in the TV parlour paused long enough from reading her script to glance up. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘The man’s thinking!’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’ He paused. ‘You took all the pills in your bottle last night.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that,’ she said, surprised.

‘The bottle was empty.’