This war was not to be believed. It was a gesture. It was the flirt of a great metal hand over the city and a voice saying, “Disintegrate. Leave not one stone upon another. Perish. Die.”
Montag held the bombs in the sky for a precious moment, with his mind and his hands. “Run,” he cried to Faber. To Clarisse: “Run, get out, get out!” But Faber was out. There, in the deep valleys of the country, went the dawn train on its way from one desolation to another.
Though the desolation had not yet arrived, was still in the air, it was as certain as man could make it. Before the train had gone another fifty yards on the track, its destination would be meaningless, its point of departure made from a metropolis into a yard, and in that metropolis now, in the half second left, as the bombs perhaps were three inches, three small inches shy of her hotel building, Montag could see Mildred, leaning into the TV set as if all of the hunger of looking would find the secret of her sleepless unease there, leaning anxiously, nervously into that tubular world as into a crystal ball to find happiness. The first bomb struck. Perhaps the television station went first into oblivion.
Montag saw the screen go dark in Mildred’s face and her screaming, because, in the next millionth part of time remaining, Mildred would see her own face reflected there, hungry and alone, in a mirror instead of a crystal, and it would be such a wildly empty face that she would at last recognize it, and stare at the ceiling almost with welcome as it and the entire structure of the hotel blasted down upon her and carried her with a million pounds of brick, metal and people down into the cellar, there to dispose of them in its unreasonable way.
Montag found himself on his face. The concussion had knocked the air across the river, and turned the men down like dominoes in a line, blown out the fire like a last candle, and caused the trees to mourn with a great voice of wind passing away south. Montag raised his head. Now the city, instead of the bombs, was in the air, they had displaced each other.
For another of those impossible instants the city stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in gusts of dust and sparkles of torn metal into a city not unlike the shakings of a kaleidoscope in a giant hand, now one pattern, now another, but all of it formed of flame and steel and stone, a door where a window ought to be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell down dead. The sound of its death came after.
“THERE,” SAID THE STRANGER.
The men lay like gasping fish on the grass.
They did not get up for a long time, but held to the earth as children hold to a familiar thing, no matter how cold or dead, no matter what has happened or will happen, their fingers were clawed into the soil, and they were all shouting to keep their ears in balance and open, Montag shouting with them, a protest against the wind that swept over them and made their noses bleed. Montag watched the blood drip into the earth with such an abstraction that the city was forgotten.
The wind died.
The city was flat as if one took a heaping tablespoon of baking powder and passed one finger over it, smoothing it to an even level.
The man said nothing. They lay awhile like people on the dawn edge of sleep, not yet ready to arise and begin the day with its obligations, its fires and foods, its thousand details of putting foot after foot, hand after hand, its deliveries and functions and minute obsessions. They lay blinking their stunned eyelids. You could hear them breathing faster, then slower, then slow.
Montag sat up but did not move farther. The other men did likewise, sun was touching the horizon with a faint red tip. The air was cool and sweet and smelled of rain. In a few minutes it would smell of dust and pulverized iron, but now it was sweet.
Silently, the leader of the small group arose, felt his arms and legs, touched his face to see if everything was in its place, then shuffled over to the blown-out fire and bent over it. Montag watched. Striking a match, the man touched it to a piece of paper and shoved this under a bit of kindling, placed together tiny bits of straw and dry kindling, and after a while, drawing the men slowly, awkwardly to it, the fire was licking up, coloring their faces pink and yellow, while the sun rose slowly to color their backs.
There was no sound except the low and secret talk of men at morning, and the talk was this:
“How many strips?”
“Two each.”
The bacon was counted out on a wax paper. The frying pan was set to the fire and the bacon laid in it. After a moment it began to flutter and dance in the pan and the sputter of it filled the morning air with its aroma. Eggs were cracked in upon the bacon and the men watched this ritual, for the leader was a participant, as were they, in a religion of early rising, a thing man had done for many centuries, and Montag felt at ease, among them, as if during the night the walls of a great jail had vaporized around them and they were on the land again and only the birds sang on or off as they pleased, no schedule, and no insistence.
“Here,” said the old man, dishing out the bacon and eggs to each from the hot pan.
And then, without looking up, breaking fresh eggs into the pan, the leader, slowly, and with a concern both for what he said, recalling it, rounding it, but careful of making the food also began to recite snatches and rhythms, even while the day brightened all about as if a pink lamp had been given more wick, and Montag listened and they all looked at the tin plates in their hands, waiting a moment for the eggs to cool, while the leader started the routine, and others took it up, here or there, about, and when it was Montag’s turn he spoke, too:
“Thy days are as grass …”
“To be or not to be, that is the question …”
The bacon sputtered.
“She walks in beauty like the night …”
“Behold, the lilies of the fields …”
The forks moved in the pink light.
“They, oil not, neither do they spin …”
The sun was fully up.
“Oh, do you remember Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt … ?”
Montag felt fine.
The Fireman
Fire, Fire, Burn Books
The four men sat silently playing blackjack under a green drop-light in the dark morning. Only a voice whispered from the ceiling:
“One thirty-five a.m. Thursday morning, October 4th, 2052, A.D… . One forty a.m… . one fifty …”
Mr. Montag sat stiffly among the other firemen in the fire house, heard the voice-clock mourn out the cold hour and the cold year, and shivered.
The other three glanced up.
“What’s wrong, Montag?”
A radio hummed somewhere. “War may be declared any hour. This country is ready to defend its destiny and …”
The fire house trembled as five hundred jet-planes screamed across the black morning sky.
The firemen slumped in their coal-blue uniforms, with the look of thirty years in their blue-shaved, sharp, pink faces and their burnt-colored hair. Stacked behind them were glittering piles of auxiliary helmets. Downstairs in concrete dampness the fire monster itself slept, the silent dragon of nickel and tangerine colors, the boa-constrictor hoses, the twinkling brass.
“I’m thinking of our last job,” said Mr. Montag.
“Don’t,” said Leahy, the fire chief.
“That poor man, when we burned his library. How would it feel if firemen burned our houses and our books?”
“We haven’t any books.”
“But if we did have some.”
“You got some?”
“No.”
Montag gazed beyond them to the wall and the typed lists of a million forbidden books. The titles cringed in fire, burning down the years under his ax and his fire hose spraying not water but—kerosene!
“Was it always like this?” asked Mr. Montag. “The fire house, our duties. I mean, well, once upon a time …”
“Once upon a time?” Leahy crowed. “What kind of language is that?”
Fool! cried Mr. Montag to himself. You’ll give yourself away! The last
