“Don’t!” screamed Leahy.
And then he was a shrieking blaze, a jumping sprawling, babbling thing, all aflame, writhing on the grass as Montag shot three more blasting squirts of liquid fire at him. The sounds Leahy made were horrible. He twisted in on himself, like a ridiculous black wax image and was silent.
The other two men stood appalled.
“Montag!”
He pointed the weapon at them. “Turn around!”
They turned. He beat them over the head with the weapon, he didn’t want to burn them, too. Then he turned the firethrower on the fire engine itself, set the trigger, and ran. The engine blew up, a hundred gallons of kerosene in one great flower of heat.
He ran away down the street and into an alley, thinking, that’s the end of you, Leahy, that’s the end of you and what you are.
He kept running.
He remembered the books and turned back.
“You’re a fool, a damned fool, an awful fool, but definitely a fool,” he told himself. “You idiot, you and your stinking temper. And you’ve ruined it all. At the very start, you ruin. But those women, those stupid women, they drove me to it with their nonsense!” he protested, in his mind.
“A fool, nevertheless, no better than them! We’ll save what we can, we’ll do what has to be done.”
He found the books where he had left them, beyond the garden fence. He heard voices yelling in the night and flash-beams jerked about. Other Fire Engines wailed from far off and police cars were arriving.
Mr. Montag took as many books as he could carry under each arm, ten on a side and staggered away down the alley. He hadn’t realized what a shock the evening had been to himself, but suddenly he fell and lay sobbing, weak, his legs folded. At a distance he heard running feet. Get up, he told himself. But he lay there. Get up, get up. But he cried like a child. He hadn’t wanted to kill anybody, not even Leahy, killing did nothing but kill something of yourself when you did it, and suddenly he saw Leahy again, a torch, screaming, and he shut his eyes and crawled his sooty fingers over his wet face. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Everything at once. In one 24 hour period, the burning of a woman, the burning of books, the trip to the professor’s, Leahy, Shakespeare, trying to memorize, the sand and the sieve, the bank money, the printing press, the plan, the rage, the alarm, Mildred’s departure, the fire, Leahy into a torch, too much for any one day in any one life. Too much.
At last he was able to get to his feet, but the books were impossibly heavy. He staggered along the alley and the voices and sound faded behind him. He moved in darkness, panting.
“You must remember,” he said. “You must burn them or they’ll burn you. Burn them or they’ll burn you.”
Six blocks away the alley opened out onto a wide empty thoroughfare, that looked like an amphitheatre, so broad, so quiet, so clean, and him, alone, running across it, easily seen, easily shot down. He hid back in the shadows. There was a gas station nearby. First he must go there, clean up, wash, comb his hair, become presentable. Then, with books under arm, stroll calmly across that wide boulevard to get where he was going.
“Where am I going?”
He didn’t know.
THERE WAS THE WIDE BOULEVARD, a game for him to win, there was the vast bowling alley at two in the morning, and him dirty, his lungs like burning brooms in his chest, his mouth sucked dry from running, all of the lead in the world poured into his empty feet, and the gas station nearby like a big white metal flower open for the long night ahead.
The moon had set and a mist was come to shelter him and drive away the police helicopters. He saw them wavering, indecisive, a half mile off, like butterflies puzzled by autumn, dying with winter, and then they were landing, one by one, dropping softly to the streets where, turned into police cars, they would scream along the boulevard, continuing their search.
Approaching from the rear, Mr. Montag entered the men’s wash room. Through the tin wall he could hear a voice crying, “War has been declared! War has been declared. Ten minutes ago—” But the sound of washing his hands and rinsing his face and toweling himself dry cut the announcer’s voice away. Emerging from the washroom a cleaner, newer man, less suspect, having left ashes and dirt behind down the drain, Mr. Montag returned to his bundle of books, picked them up and walked as casual as a man looking for a bus, out upon the boulevard.
He looked north and south. The boulevard was as clean as a pinball machine, but, underneath, one could feel the electrical energy, the readiness to dart lights, flash red and blue, and out of nowhere, rolling like a silver ball, might flash the searchers. Two blocks away, there were a few headlights. He took a deep breath, and kept walking. He would have to chance it. A hundred yards across the boulevard in the open, plenty of time for a police car to run him down if one came.
There was a car coming. Its headlights leaped out and caught him in mid-stride. He faltered, got a new hold on his books, and forced himself not to run. He was now one third of the way across. There was a growl from the car motor as it put on more speed.
The police! thought Montag. They see me. Careful man, careful.
The car was coming at a terrific speed. A good one hundred miles an hour, if anything. Its horn was blaring. Its lights flushed the concrete and the heat of them, it seemed, burned his cheeks and eyelids and brought the sweat coursing from his body.
He began to shuffle and then run. The horn hooted. The sound of the motor went higher, higher. He ran. He dropped a book, hesitated, let it lie, and plunged on, babbling to himself, he was in the middle of the street, the car was a hundred yards away, closer, closer, hooting, pushing, rolling, screeching, the horn frozen, him running, his legs up and down, his eyes blind in the flashing hot light, the horn nearer, upon him.
They’re going to run me down, they know who I am, it’s all over, it’s all done! said Mr. Montag. But he held to the books and kept racing.
He stumbled and fell.
That saved him. Just an instant before reaching him the wild, hysterical car swerved to one side, went around him and was gone like a bullet away. Mr. Montag lay where he had fallen. Wisps of laughter trailed back with the blue exhaust.
That wasn’t the police, thought Mr. Montag.
It was a carful of high school children, yelling, whistling, hurrahing, laughing. And they had seen a man, a pedestrian, a rarity, and they had said to themselves, Let’s get him! They didn’t know he was wanted, that he was Montag, they were out for a night of howling and roaring here and there covering five hundred miles in a few moonlit hours, their faces icy with the wind, their hair flowing.
“They would have killed me,” thought Montag, lying there. “For no reason. They would have killed me.”
He got up and walked unsteadily to the far curb. Somehow he had remembered to pick up the spilled books. He looked at them, oddly, in his hands.
“I wonder,” he said, “If they were the ones who killed Clarisse.” His eyes watered, standing there. The thing that had saved him was self-preservation. If he had remained upright, they’d have hit him, like a domino, sent him spinning. But the fact that he was prone had caused the driver to consider the possibility that running over a body at one hundred miles an hour might turn the car over and spill them all out to their deaths.
Montag glanced down the avenue. A half mile away, the car full of kids had turned and was coming back, picking up speed.
Montag hurried into an alley and was gone long before the car returned.
The house was silent.
Mr. Montag approached it from the back, creeping through the scent of daffodils and roses and wet grass. He touched the screen door, found it open, slipped in, tiptoed across the porch, and, behind the ice-box, beyond another door, in the kitchen, deposited five of the books. He waited, listening to the house.
“Billett, are you asleep up there?” he asked of the second floor in a whisper. “I hate to do this to you, but you did it to others, never asking, never wondering, never worrying. Now it’s your house, and you in jail awhile, all the houses you’ve burned and people you’ve killed.”
The ceiling did not reply.
Quietly, Montag slipped from the house and returned to the alley. The house was still dark, no one had heard him come or go.
He walked casually down the alley, around a block to an all night druggist’s, where he closed himself in a booth and dialed a number.
“Hello?”
“I want to report an illegal ownership of books,” he said.
The voice sharpened on the other end. “The address?”
“11 South Grove Glade.”
“Who are you?”
“A friend, no name. Better get there before he burns them.”
“We’ll get there, thanks.” Click.
Montag stepped out and walked down the street. Far away, he heard sirens coming, coming to burn Mr. Billett’s house, and him upstairs, not knowing, deep in sleep.
“Good night, Mr. Billett,” said Montag.
A RAP AT THE DOOR.
“Professor Faber!”
Another rap and a long silence. And then, from
