“Just thought I’d come by and see how the sick man is.”
“How’d you guess!”
“Oh.” Leahy smiled his pink smile and shrugged. “I’m an old hand at this. I’ve seen it all. You were going to call me and tell me you needed a day off.”
“Yes.”
“Take a day off,” said Leahy. “Take two. But never take three. Not, that is, unless, you’re really ill. Remember that.” He took a cigar from his pocket and cut off a little piece to chew. “When will you be well?”
“Tomorrow, the next day, first of the week.”
“We’ve been talking about you,” said Leahy. “Every man goes through this. They only need a little understanding. They need to be told how the wheels run.”
“And how do they?”
“Mr. Montag, you don’t seem to have assimilated the history of your honorable trade. They don’t give it to rookies any more. Only fire chiefs remember it now. I’ll let you in on it.” He chewed a moment.
“Yes,” said Montag. Mildred fidgeted.
“You ask yourself why, how, and when. About the books.”
“Maybe.”
“It started in the early 1900s, I’d say. After the Civil War maybe. Photography invented. Fast print presses. Films. Television. Things began to have mass, Montag, mass.”
“I see.”
“And because they had mass, they had to become simpler. Books now. Once they appealed to various bits of people here and there. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. Plenty of room for elbows and differentness, right?”
“Right.”
“But then the world got full of mass and elbows. And things for lots of millions of people had to be simple. Films and radio and TV and big big magazines had to be a sort of paste-pudding norm, you might say. Follow me?”
“I think.”
“Picture it. The nineteenth century man with his horses and books and leisure. You might call him the Slow Motion man. Everyone taking a year to sit down, get up, jump a fence. Then, in the Twentieth Century you speed up the camera.”
“A good simile.”
“Splendid. Books get shorter. Condensations appear. Tabloids. Radio programs simplify. The exquisite pantomime of great actors become the pratfall. Everything sublimates itself to the joke, the gag, the snap ending. Everything is sacrificed for pace.”
“Pace.” Mildred smiled.
“Great classics are cut to fit a fifteen minute show, then a two minute Book column, then a two line Dictionary resume. Magazines become picture books! Out of the nursery to the college back to the nursery, in a few short centuries!”
Mildred got up. She was losing the thread of the talk, Montag knew, and when this happened, she began to fiddle with things. She went about the room, cleaning up. Leahy ignored her.
“Faster and faster the film, Mr. Montag, quick! Men over hurdles, dogs over stiles, horses over fences! CLICK? PIC, LOOK, EYE, NOW? FLICK, HERE, THERE? QUICK, WHY, HOW, WHO, EH?, Mr. Montag! The world’s political affairs become one paper column, a sentence, a headline. Then, in mid-air, vanishes. Look at your man now, quick over hurdles, over stile, horse over fence so swift you can’t see the blur. And the mind of man, whirling so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broad-casters that the centrifuge throws off all ideas! He is unable to concentrate.”
Mildred was smoothing the bed now. Montag felt panic as she approached his pillow to straighten it. The book was behind the pillow! And she would pull it out, not knowing, of course, in front of Leahy!
“School is shortened. Short cuts are made, philosophies and languages dropped. English dropped. Spelling dropped. Life is immediate. The job is what counts. Why learn anything except how to work your hands, press a button, pull a switch, fit a bolt?”
“Yes,” quavered Montag.
“Let me fix your pillow,” said Mildred, smiling.
“No,” whispered Montag.
“The button is replaced by the zipper. Does a man have time to think while he dresses, a philosophical time, in the morning.”
“He does not,” said Montag, automatically.
Mildred pulled at the pillow.
“Get away,” said Montag.
“Life becomes one Big Prat Fall, Mr. Montag. No more of the subtleties, everything is bang and boff and wow!”
“Wow,” said Mildred, yanking at the pillow.
“For God’s sake, leave me alone,” said Montag. Leahy stared at him.
Mildred’s hand was thrusting behind him.
“The theatres are empty, Mr. Montag. Something that was getting meaningless is replaced by something evermore massive and meaningless, the television set, and after that The Clam.”
“What’s this?” said Mildred. Montag crushed back against her hand. “What’ve you got hidden here?”
“Go sit down,” he screamed at her. She drew back, her hand empty. “We’re talking.”
“As I was saying,” said Leahy. “Cartoons everywhere. Books become cartoons. The mind drinks in less and less. Impatience. Nervous impatience. Time to kill. No work. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, anywhere, nowhere. Impatience to be somewhere they are not, not where they are. The gasoline refugee, towns becoming almost exclusively motels. And people in vast nomadic moves from city to city, impatient, following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept last night and I slept the night before.”
Mildred went in the other room and shut the door. She turned on the radio.
“Go on,” said Montag.
“Along with the technological rush, there was the minority problem. The bigger a population, the more minorities. It’s hard to find a majority in a big mass. And since the Mass Market was with us there were ten thousand minorities, union minorities, church minorities, racial minorities, dog lovers, cat lovers.”
“Professional Irishmen, Texans, Brooklynites,” suggested Mr. Montag, sweating. He leaned back hard on the hidden book.
“Right. Swedes, Britons, French, people from Oregon, Illinois, Mexico. You couldn’t have doctors as villains, or lawyers, or merchants or chiefs. The UN prevented your doing films on past wars. The Dog Protectors had to be pleased and bull fights were banished. All the minorities with their own little navels that had to be kept clean. Intelligent men gave up in disgust.
“Pictures became puddings. Magazines were tapioca. The book buyer, the ticket buyer bored by dishwater, his brain spinning, quit buying, the trades died a slow death. There you have it. Don’t blame the government. Technology coupled with mass exploitation, coupled with censorship from minorities. All you’ve got today to read is comic books, confessions, and trade journals.”
“I know,” said Montag.
“The psychologists killed off Edgar Allan Poe, said his stories were bad for the mind. They killed off fairy tales, too. Fantasy. Not facing facts, they said.”
“But why the firemen,” said Montag at last. “Why all the fear and the prejudice and the burning and killing now?”
“Ah,” said Leahy, leaning forward to finish. “Books went out of fashion. Minority groups in order to insure their security made sure the censorship was fastened tight. Psychiatrists helped. They needn’t have bothered. By that time people were uneducated. They stayed away from books, and, in ignorance, hated and feared them. You always fear something you don’t know. Men have been burned at the stake for centuries, for knowing too much.”
“Yes,” said Montag. “The worst thing you can call a man today is a ‘professor’ or ‘intellectual.’ It’s a swear word.”
“Intelligence is suspect, for good reason. The little man fears someone’ll put something over on him as does the big man. So the best thing is to keep everybody as dumb as everybody else. The little man wants you and me to be like him. Rewrite the slogan. Not everyone born free and equal, but everyone made equal. Crush the IQs down to the sub-norm. A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shout out of the weapon. Unbreach men’s minds. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man. And so, the Fire Men came into being. You, Mr. Montag, and me.”
Leahy stood up. “I’ve got to go.”
“Thanks for talking to me.”
“You needed to be put straight. Now that you understand it, you’ll see our civilization, because it’s so big, has to be placid. We can’t have minorities stirred and upset. People must be content, Mr. Montag. Books upset them. Colored people who don’t like Little Black Sambo are unhappy. So we burn Little Black Sambo. White people who read Uncle Tom’s Cabin are unhappy. We burn that, too. Keep everyone calm and happy. That’s the trick.”
Leahy walked over and shook Mr. Montag’s hand.
“One more thing.”
“Yes.”
“Every fireman gets curious.”
“I imagine.”
“What do the books say, he wonders. A good question. They say nothing, Mr. Montag, nothing you can touch or believe in. They’re about people who never existed. Figments of the mind. Can you trust figments? No. Figments and confusion. But anyway, a fireman steals a book at a fire, almost by accident, a copy of the Bible, perhaps. A natural thing.”
“Natural.”
“We allow for that. We let him keep it 24 hours. If he hasn’t burned it by then, we burn it for him.”
“Thanks,” said Mr. Montag.
“I think you have a special edition of this one book the Bible, haven’t you?”
Montag felt his mouth move. “Yes.”
“You’ll be at work tonight at six o’clock?”
“No,” said Montag.
“What!”
Montag shut his eyes and opened them. “I’ll be in later, maybe.”
“See that you do,” said Leahy, smiling. “And bring the book with you, then, eh, after you’ve looked it over?”
“I’ll never come in again,” yelled Montag, in his mind.
“Get well,” said Leahy, and went out.
He watched Leahy drive away in his gleaming beetle the color of the last fire they had set.
Mildred was listening to the radio in the front room.
Montag cleared his throat in the door. She didn’t look up, but laughed at something the radio announcer said.
“It’s only a step,” said Montag.
