Fahrenheit 451 (18 page)

            Montag stepped back into the shadows.

            "It's all right," the voice said. "You're welcome here."

            Montag walked slowly toward the fire and the five old men sitting there dressed in dark blue denim pants and jackets and dark blue suits. He did not know what to say to them.

            "Sit down," said the man who seemed to be the leader of the small group. "Have some coffee?"

            He watched the dark steaming mixture pour into a collapsible tin cup, which was handed him straight off. He sipped it gingerly and felt them looking at him with curiosity. His lips were scalded, but that was good. The faces around him were bearded, but the beards were clean, neat, and their hands were clean. They had stood up as if to welcome a guest, and now they sat down again. Montag sipped. "Thanks," he said. "Thanks very much."

            "You're welcome, Montag. My name's Granger." He held out a small bottle of colourless fluid. "Drink this, too. It'll change the chemical index of your perspiration. Half an hour from now you'll smell like two other people. With the Hound after you, the best thing is Bottoms up."

            Montag drank the bitter fluid.

            "You'll stink like a bobcat, but that's all right," said Granger.

            "You know my name," said Montag.

            Granger nodded to a portable battery TV set by the fire.

            "We've watched the chase. Figured you'd wind up south along the river. When we heard you plunging around out in the forest like a drunken elk, we didn't hide as we usually do. We figured you were in the river, when the helicopter cameras swung back in over the city. Something funny there. The chase is still running. The other way, though."

            "The other way?"

            "Let's have a look."

            Granger snapped the portable viewer on. The picture was a nightmare, condensed, easily passed from hand to hand, in the forest, all whirring colour and flight. A voice cried: "The chase continues north in the city! Police helicopters are converging on Avenue 87 and Elm Grove Park!"

            Granger nodded. "They're faking. You threw them off at the river. They can't admit it. They know they can hold their audience only so long. The show's got to have a snap ending, quick! If they started searching the whole damn river it might take all night. So they're sniffing for a scape-goat to end things with a bang. Watch. They'll catch Montag in the next five minutes!"

            "But how―"

            "Watch."

            The camera, hovering in the belly of a helicopter, now swung down at an empty street.

            "See that?" whispered Granger. "It'll be you; right up at the end of that street is our victim. See how our camera is coming in? Building the scene. Suspense. Long shot. Right now, some poor fellow is out for a walk. A rarity. An odd one. Don't think the police don't know the habits of queer ducks like that, men who walk mornings for the hell of it, or for reasons of insomnia. Anyway, the police have had him charted for months, years. Never know when that sort of information might be handy. And today, it turns out, it's very usable indeed. It saves face. Oh, God, look there!"

            The men at the fire bent forward.

            On the screen, a man turned a corner. The Mechanical Hound rushed forward into the viewer, suddenly. The helicopter light shot down a dozen brilliant pillars that built a cage all about the man.

            A voice cried, "There's Montag! The search is
done!
"

            The innocent man stood bewildered, a cigarette burning in his hand. He stared at the Hound, not knowing what it was. He probably never knew. He glanced up at the sky and the wailing sirens. The cameras rushed down. The Hound leapt up into the air with a rhythm and a sense of timing that was incredibly beautiful. Its needle shot out. It was suspended for a moment in their gaze, as if to give the vast audience time to appreciate everything, the raw look of the victim's face, the empty street, the steel animal a bullet nosing the target.

            "Montag, don't move!" said a voice from the sky.

            The camera fell upon the victim, even as did the Hound. Both reached him simultaneously. The victim was seized by Hound and camera in a great spidering, clenching grip. He screamed. He screamed. He screamed!

            Blackout.

            Silence.

            Darkness.

            Montag cried out in the silence and turned away.

            Silence.

            And then, after a time of the men sitting around the fire, their faces expressionless, an announcer on the dark screen said, "The search is over, Montag is dead; a crime against society has been avenged."

            Darkness.

            "We now take you to the Sky Room of the Hotel Lux for a half-hour of Just-Before-Dawn, a programme of―"

            Granger turned it off.

            "They didn't show the man's face in focus. Did you notice?

            "Even your best friends couldn't tell if it was you. They scrambled it just enough to let the imagination take over. Hell," he whispered. "Hell."

            Montag said nothing but now, looking back, sat with his eyes fixed to the blank screen, trembling.

            Granger touched Montag's arm. "Welcome back from the dead." Montag nodded. Granger went on. "You might as well know all of us, now. This is Fred Clement, former occupant of the Thomas Hardy chair at Cambridge in the years before it became an Atomic Engineering School. This other is Dr. Simmons from U.C.L.A., a specialist in Ortega y Gasset; Professor West here did quite a bit for ethics, an ancient study now, for Columbia University quite some years ago. Reverend Padover here gave a few lectures thirty years ago and lost his flock between one Sunday and the next for his views. He's been bumming with us some time now. Myself: I wrote a book called
The Fingers in the Glove; the Proper Relationship between the Individual and Society
, and here I
am!
Welcome, Montag!"

            "I don't belong with you," said Montag, at last, slowly. "I've been an idiot all the way."

            "We're used to that. We all made the
right
kind of mistakes, or we wouldn't be here. When we were separate individuals, all we had was rage. I struck a fireman when he came to burn my library years ago. I've been running ever since. You want to join us, Montag?"

            "Yes."

            "What have you to offer?"

            "Nothing. I thought I had part of the Book of Ecclesiastes and maybe a little of Revelation, but I haven't even that now."

            "The Book of Ecclesiastes would be fine. Where was it?"

            "Here," Montag touched his head.

            "Ah," Granger smiled and nodded.

            "What's wrong? Isn't that all right?" said Montag.

            "Better than all right; perfect!" Granger turned to the Reverend. "Do we have a Book of Ecclesiastes?"

            "One. A man named Harris in Youngstown."

            "Montag." Granger took Montag's shoulder firmly. "Walk carefully. Guard your health. If anything should happen to Harris,
you
are the Book of Ecclesiastes. See how important you've become in the last minute!"

            "But I've forgotten!"

            "No, nothing's ever lost. We have ways to shake down your clinkers for you."

            "But I've tried to remember!"

            "Don't try. It'll come when we need it. All of us have photographic memories, but spend a lifetime learning how to block off the things that are really
in
there. Simmons here has worked on it for twenty years and now we've got the method down to where we can recall anything that's been read once. Would you like, some day, Montag, to read Plato's
Republic?
"

            "Of course!"

            "
I
am Plato's
Republic
. Like to read Marcus Aurelius? Mr. Simmons is Marcus."

            "How do you do?" said Mr. Simmons.

            "Hello," said Montag.

            "I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book,
Gulliver's Travels!
And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John."

            Everyone laughed quietly.

            "It can't
be
," said Montag.

            "It is," replied Granger, smiling. "
We're
book-burners, too. We read the books and burnt them, afraid they'd be found. Micro-filming didn't pay off; we were always travelling, we didn't want to bury the film and come back later. Always the chance of discovery. Better to keep it in the old heads, where no one can see it or suspect it. We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli, or Christ, it's here. And the hour is late. And the war's begun. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colours. What do you think, Montag?"

            "I think I was blind trying to do things my way, planting books in firemen's houses and sending in alarms."

            "You did what you had to do. Carried out on a national scale, it might have worked beautifully. But our way is simpler and, we think, better. All we want to do is keep the knowledge we think we will need, intact and safe. We're not out to incite or anger anyone yet. For if we are destroyed, the knowledge is dead, perhaps for good. We are model citizens, in our own special way; we walk the old tracks, we lie in the hills at night, and the city people let us be. We're stopped and searched occasionally, but there's nothing on our persons to incriminate us. The organization is flexible, very loose, and fragmentary. Some of us have had plastic surgery on our faces and fingerprints. Right now we have a horrible job; we're waiting for the war to begin and, as quickly, end. It's not pleasant, but then we're not in control, we're the odd minority crying in the wilderness. When the war's over, perhaps we can be of some use in the world."

            "Do you really think they'll listen then?"

            "If not, we'll just have to wait. We'll pass the books on to our children by word of mouth, and let our children wait, in turn, on the other people. A lot will be lost that way, of course. But you can't
make
people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them. It can’t last."

            "How many of you are there?"

            "Thousands on the roads, the abandoned railtracks, tonight, bums on the outside, libraries inside. It wasn't planned, at first. Each man had a book he wanted to remember, and did. Then, over a period of twenty years or so, we met each other, travelling, and got the loose network together and set out a plan. The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves was that we were not important, we mustn't be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We're nothing more than dust-jackets for books, of no significance otherwise. Some of us live in small towns. Chapter One of Thoreau's
Walden
in Green River, Chapter Two in Willow Farm, Maine. Why, there's one town in Maryland, only twenty-seven people, no bomb'll ever touch that town, is the complete essays of a man named Bertrand Russell. Pick up that town, almost, and flip the pages, so many pages to a person. And when the war's over, some day, some year, the books can be written again, the people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know and we'll set it up in type until another Dark Age, when we might have to do the whole damn thing over again. But that's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and
worth
the doing."

            "What do we do tonight?" asked Montag.

            "Wait," said Granger. "And move downstream a little way, just in case."

            He began throwing dust and dirt on the fire.

            The other men helped, and Montag helped, and there, in the wilderness, the men all moved their hands, putting out the fire together.

            They stood by the river in the starlight.

            Montag saw the luminous dial of his waterproof. Five. Five o'clock in the morning. Another year ticked by in a single hour, and dawn waiting beyond the far bank of the river.

            "Why do you trust me?" said Montag.

            A man moved in the darkness.

            "The look of you's enough. You haven't seen yourself in a mirror lately. Beyond that, the city has never cared so much about us to bother with an elaborate chase like this to find us. A few crackpots with verses in their heads can't touch them, and they know it and we know it; everyone knows it. So long as the vast population doesn't wander about quoting the Magna Carta and the Constitution, it's all right. The firemen were enough to check that, now and then. No, the cities don't bother us. And
you
look like hell."

            They moved along the bank of the river, going south. Montag tried to see the men's faces, the old faces he remembered from the firelight, lined and tired. He was looking for a brightness, a resolve, a triumph over tomorrow that hardly seemed to be there. Perhaps he had expected their faces to burn and glitter with the knowledge they carried, to glow as lanterns glow, with the light in them. But all the light had come from the camp fire, and these men had seemed no different from any others who had run a long race, searched a long search, seen good things destroyed, and now, very late, were gathering to wait for the end of the party and the blowing out of the lamps. They weren't at all certain that the things they carried in their heads might make every future dawn glow with a purer light, they were sure of nothing save that the books were on file behind their quiet eyes, the books were waiting, with their pages uncut, for the customers who might come by in later years, some with clean and some with dirty fingers.