A Pleasure to Burn (38 page)

“What do we do tonight?” asked Montag.

“Just wait, that's all.”

 

M
ONTAG LOOKED AT THE MEN'S FACES
,
old, all of them, in the firelight, and certainly tired. Perhaps he was looking for a brightness, a resolve, a triumph over tomorrow that wasn't really there. Perhaps he expected these men to be proud with the knowledge they carried, to glow with the wisdom as lanterns glow with the fire they contain.

But all the light came from the campfire here, and these men seemed no different than any other man who has run a long run, searched a long search, seen precious things destroyed, seen old friends die, and now, very late in time, were gathered together to watch the machines die, or hope they might die, even while cherishing a last paradoxical love for those very machines which could spin out a material with happiness in the warp and terror in the woof, so interblended that a man might go insane trying to tell the design to himself, and his place in it.

They weren't at all certain that what they carried in their heads might make every future dawn dawn brighter. They were sure of nothing save that the books were on file behind their solemn eyes and that if man put his mind to them properly, something of dignity and happiness might be regained.

Montag looked from one face to another.

“Don't judge a book by its cover,” said someone.

A soft laughter moved among them.

Montag turned to look at the city across the river.

“My wife's in that city now,” he said.

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“Look,” said Simmons.

Montag glanced up.

The bombardment was finished and over, even while the seeds were in the windy sky. The bombs were there, the jet-planes were there, for the merest trifle of an instant, like grain thrown across the heavens by a great hand, and the bombs drifted with a dreadful slowness down upon the morning city where all of the people looked up at their destiny coming upon them like the lid of a dream shutting tight and become an instant later a red and powdery nightmare.

The bombardment to all military purposes was finished. Once the planes had sighted their target, alerted their bombardier at five thousand miles an hour, as quick as the whisper of a knife through the sky, the war was finished. Once the trigger was pulled, once the bombs took flight, it was over.

Now, a full three seconds, all of the time in history, before the bombs struck, the enemy ships themselves were gone, half around the visible world, it seemed, like bullets in which an island savage might not believe because they were unseen, yet the heart is struck suddenly, the body falls into separate divisions, the blood is astounded to be free on the air, and the brain gives up all its precious memories and, still puzzled, dies.

 

T
HIS WAR WAS NOT TO BE BELIEVED
.
It was merely 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!” To Mildred, “Get out, get out of there!” But Clarisse, he remembered, was dead. And 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 junkyard.

And Mildred!

“Get out, run!” he thought.

He could see Mildred in that metropolis now, in the half second remaining, as the bombs were perhaps three inches, three small inches shy of her hotel building. He could see her leaning into the TV set as if all of the hunger of looking would find the secret of her sleepless unease there. Mildred, leaning anxiously, nervously into that tubular world as into a crystal ball to find happiness.

The first bomb struck.

“Mildred!”

Perhaps the television station went first into oblivion.

Montag saw the screen go dark in Mildred's face, and heard her screaming, because in the next millionth part of time left, she would see her own face reflected there, hungry and alone, in a mirror instead of a crystal ball, 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, carrying her with a million pounds of brick, metal and people down into the cellar, there to dispose of them in its unreasonable way.

“I remember now,” thought Montag, “where we first met. It was in Chicago. Yes, now I remember.”

Montag found himself on his face. The concussion had knocked the air across the river, 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 lay with his face toward the city. Now it, 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 or strived to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in gouts of dust and sparkles of torn metal into a city not unlike a reversed avalanche, 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.

The sound of its death came after.

 

A
ND
M
ONTAG LYING THERE
,
his eyes shut, gasping and crying out, suddenly thought, “Now I remember another thing. Now I remember the Book of Job.” He said it over to himself, lying tight to the earth; he said the words of it many times and they were perfect without trying. “Now I remember the Book of Job. Now I
do
remember …”

“There,” said a voice, Granger's voice.

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 them, shaking their hair, tearing at their lips, making their noses bleed.

Montag watched the blood drip into the earth with such an absorption that the city was effortlessly forgotten.

The wind died.

The city was flat, as if one had taken a heaping tablespoon of flour and passed one finger over it, smoothing it to an even level.

The men said nothing. They lay a while like people on the dawn edge of sleep, not yet ready to arise and begin the day's 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 with the slowness of normality.

Montag sat up. He did not move any farther, however. The other men did likewise. The sun was touching the black 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.

And across the world, thought Montag, the cities of the other nations are dead, too, almost in the same instant.

Silently, the leader of the small group, Granger, arose, felt of 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, Granger touched it to a piece of paper and shoved this under a bit of kindling, and shoved together bits of straw and dry wood, and after a while, drawing the men slowly, awkwardly to it by its glow, the fire licked up, coloring their faces pink and yellow, while the sun rose slowly to color their backs.

 

T
HERE WAS NO SOUND
except the low and secret talk of men at morning, and the talk was no more than this:

“How many strips?”

“Two each.”

“Good enough.”

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, thought Montag, a thing man had done over and over again, and Montag felt at ease among them, as if during the long night the walls of a great prison had vaporized around them and they were on the land again and only the birds sang on or off as they pleased, with no schedule, and with no nagging human insistence.

“Here,” said Granger, dishing out the bacon and eggs to each from the hot pan. They each held out the scratched tin plates that had been passed around.

Then, without looking up, breaking more eggs into the pan for himself, Granger slowly and with a concern both for what he said, recalling it, rounding it, and for 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, round about.

 

W
HEN IT WAS
M
ONTAG'S TURN
,
he spoke too:

 

“To everything there is a season,
And a time to every purpose under the heaven…
A time to be born, and a time to die…
A time to kill, and a time to heal …”

 

ORKS MOVED IN THE PINK LIGHT
.
Now each of the men remembered a separate and different thing, a bit of poetry, a line from a play, an old song. And they spoke these little bits and pieces in the early morning air:

 

“Man that is born of a woman
Is of few days and full of trouble …”

 

A
WIND BLEW IN THE TREES
.

 

“To be or not to be, that is the question …”

 

T
HE SUN WAS FULLY UP
.

 

“Oh, do you remember Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt … ?”

 

Montag felt fine.

 

Bonus Stories

 

THE DRAGON WHO ATE HIS TAIL

SOMETIME BEFORE DAWN

TO THE FUTURE

The Dragon Who Ate His Tail

 

W
HAT DID THEY WISH MOST
? D
ID THEY WISH TO LINGER IN
old Chicago, to smell the grit and grime, to touch the strange buildings, to inhabit the reeking subways of Manhattan, to taste the lime popsicles of some forgotten summer, to listen to scratchy phonographs in 1910, would they board the ships of Nelson for Trafalgar, would they have a day with Socrates prior to the hemlock, would they stroll Athens on the busiest day and see the flash of knees in the sunlit gas, in what idea and magnificent fashion would they most dearly love to spend the next hour, the next day, the next month, the next year. The rates were extremely reasonable, as on any excursion! So much down, so much a day, and you could fetch yourself home any time antiquity annoyed or bored or frightened you. Here was a way to learn your history! Here was a frontier for you, ready, waiting, alive, fresh and new.

Come along, now!

“Do you think you'd like it, Alice?”

“I hadn't thought. I imagine.”

“Would you like to go?”

“Where?”

“Paris, 1940. London, 1870. Chicago, 1895? Or the Saint Louis exposition around 1900, I hear it was naïve and tremendous.”

The husband and wife sat at their mechanical breakfast table being fed exact portions of magnificently browned toast adrip with synthetic and therefore absolutely guaranteed pure butter.

Oh, that empty future, when the dragon has devoured his radioactive tail, when the people of that time, dismayed and utterly discouraged, their faces blanched by explosions and their hair burned to the root, and their hope scorched and twisted to a shapeless mass in their hearts, when those people turn backward, turn backward, oh time in thy flight, makes us a child again just for tonight!

And so they were picking up, picking up and going, the law couldn't stop, the law-makers couldn't stop them, the police, the tribunals, the silly senates and corruptible congresses, the talkers and pounders and wavers of lists couldn't stop them, the world was emptying. The plug was pulled, and the people were gushing down the drain of time into yesterday.

Alice and John Weathers stood outside their door. The houses on their street were empty and silent. The children were gone from the trees, their stomachs no longer distended with green and hideous fruit. The curbs were empty of cars and the sky of ships, and the windows of light motion.

“Did you forget to turn off the bath tap?”

“It's off?”

“The gas?”

“Off.”

“The electricity?”

“Why must you worry?”

“Now, lock the door.”

“No one's going to come in.”

“The wind might.”

“Oh, the wind, that's different.”

“But lock it anyway, please, John.”

And so they locked it and walked off down the lawn with their clothes left behind and all the furniture neatly sheeted. Everything in its place.

“Do you think we'll ever come back?”

“No.”

“Never at all.”

“Never.”

“I wonder if we'll ever remember this house on Elm Terrace, the furniture, the electric lights, the parties, all of it, and, in the past, remember that there was such a time or place?”

“No, we'll never remember. They put you in a machine that takes memory away. And gives you a new memory. I'm going to be John Sessions, accountant in the city of Chicago in the year 1920, and you're my wife.”

They walked along the twilight street.

“And just think,” she said, quietly, “someday we'll meet Edgar and his wife on the street, in Chicago, and they'll look at us, and we'll look at them and think, Where've I seen those faces before, but walk on, strangers, never guessing we met a hundred and ninety years in the future.”

“Yes, strangers, that is an odd thought.”

“And all of us, a million or more, hiding in the Past, not knowing each other, but fitting into the pattern, never guessing that we are all from another age.”

“We're running away,” he said, stopping, and looking at the dead houses. “I don't like running away from a problem.”

“What else can we do?”

“Stay and fight it out.”

“Against the hydrogen bomb?”

“Make laws against it.”

“And have them broken.”

“Keep trying, keep trying, that's what we ought to do, instead of run.”

“It's no use.”

“No, of course it isn't,” he said. “I realize now that as long as there is one unscrupulous scientist and one dirty politician they'll get together and make the bomb for whatever silly reason they have. It used to be we had weapons, the little man, to fight back with, a musket, the minute men, a revolution of the people against tyranny, there were always spears to throw or guns to point, but we can't point a gun at the hydrogen explosion nor any of its keepers for fear of reprisal. The thing is so vast, we are like currants lost in a great yeast, baked before we know it. Come on, it's no use talking.”

They went on away from the dead street, into the silence of the business section of town.

 

B
UT OFTEN NIGHTS
,
when the great El rounds the corner near their sixth story room and for an instant flashes their bed with yellow and mechanical light, and trembles and jounces their bones in their sleeping flesh, she shudders and cries out to her husband's back in his slumber, and he, waking turns to whisper, “Now, now, what was it?”

“Oh, Charles,” she tells him in the now silent, now dark and empty and lost room, “I dreamt we were at breakfast in another time, with a mechanical table feeding us, and rockets in the air, and all sorts of strange things and inventions.”

“There, there, a nightmare,” he says.

And a minute later, clutched very tight together, they are tremblingly asleep once more.