Fahrenheit 451 (3 page)

            Toast popped out of the silver toaster, was seized by a spidery metal hand that drenched it with melted butter.

            Mildred watched the toast delivered to her plate. She had both ears plugged with electronic bees that were humming the hour away. She looked up suddenly, saw him, and nodded.

            "You all right?" he asked.

            She was an expert at lip-reading from ten years of apprenticeship at Seashell ear-thimbles. She nodded again. She set the toaster clicking away at another piece of bread.

            Montag sat down.

            His wife said, "I don't know
why
I should be so hungry."

            "You―"

            "I'm
hungry
."

            "Last night," he began.

            "Didn't sleep well. Feel terrible," she said. "God, I'm hungry. I can't figure it."

            "Last night-" he said again.

            She watched his lips casually. "What about last night?"

            "Don't you remember?"

            "What? Did we have a wild party or something? Feel like I've a hangover. God, I'm hungry. Who was here?"

            "A few people," he said.

            "That's what I thought." She chewed her toast. "Sore stomach, but I'm hungry as all-get-out. Hope I didn't do anything foolish at the party."

            "No," he said, quietly.

            The toaster spidered out a piece of buttered bread for him. He held it in his hand, feeling grateful.

            "You don't look so hot yourself," said his wife.

            In the late afternoon it rained and the entire world was dark grey. He stood in the hall of his house, putting on his badge with the orange salamander burning across it. He stood looking up at the air-conditioning vent in the hall for a long time. His wife in the TV parlour paused long enough from reading her script to glance up. "Hey," she said. "The man's
thinking!
"

            "Yes," he said. "I wanted to talk to you." He paused. "You took all the pills in your bottle last night."

            "Oh, I wouldn't do that," she said, surprised.

            "The bottle was empty."

            "I wouldn't do a thing like that. Why would I do a thing like that?" she asked.

            "Maybe you took two pills and forgot and took two more, and forgot again and took two more, and were so dopy you kept right on until you had thirty or forty of them in you."

            "Heck," she said, "what would I want to go and do a silly thing like that for?"

            "I don't know," he said.

            She was quite obviously waiting for him to go. "I didn't do that," she said. "Never in a billion years."

            "All right if you say so," he said.

            "That's what the lady said." She turned back to her script.

            "What's on this afternoon?" he asked tiredly.

            She didn't look up from her script again. "Well, this is a play comes on the wall-to-wall circuit in ten minutes. They mailed me my part this morning. I sent in some box-tops. They write the script with one part missing. It's a new idea. The home-maker, that's me, is the missing part. When it comes time for the missing lines, they all look at me out of the three walls and I say the lines: Here, for instance, the man says, 'What do you think of this whole idea, Helen?' And he looks at me sitting here centre stage, see? And I say, I say --" She paused and ran her finger under a line in the script. "'I think that's fine!' And then they go on with the play until he says, 'Do you agree to that, Helen!' and I say, 'I sure do!' Isn't that fun, Guy?"

            He stood in the hall looking at her.

            "It's sure fun," she said.

            "What's the play about?"

            "I just told you. There are these people named Bob and Ruth and Helen."

            "Oh."

            "It's really fun. It'll be even more fun when we can afford to have the fourth wall installed. How long you figure before we save up and get the fourth wall torn out and a fourth wall-TV put in? It's only two thousand dollars."

            "That's one-third of my yearly pay."

            "It's only two thousand dollars," she replied. "And I should think you'd consider me sometimes. If we had a fourth wall, why it'd be just like this room wasn't ours at all, but all kinds of exotic people's rooms. We could do without a few things."

            "We're already doing without a few things to pay for the third wall. It was put in only two months ago, remember?"

            "Is that all it was?" She sat looking at him for a long moment. "Well, good-bye, dear.".

            "Good-bye," he said. He stopped and turned around. "Does it have a happy ending?"

            "I haven't read that far."

            He walked over, read the last page, nodded, folded the script, and handed it back to her. He walked out of the house into the rain.

            The rain was thinning away and the girl was walking in the centre of the sidewalk with her head up and the few drops falling on her face. She smiled when she saw Montag.

            "Hello!"

            He said hello and then said, "What are you up to now?"

            "I'm still crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it.

            "I don't think I'd like that," he said.

            "You might if you tried."

            "I never have."

            She licked her lips. "Rain even tastes good."

            "What do you do, go around trying everything once?" he asked.

            "Sometimes twice." She looked at something in her hand.

            "What've you got there?" he said.

            "I guess it's the last of the dandelions this year. I didn't think I'd find one on the lawn this late. Have you ever heard of rubbing it under your chin? Look." She touched her chin with the flower, laughing.

            "Why?"

            "If it rubs off, it means I'm in love. Has it?"

            He could hardly do anything else but look.

            "Well?" she said.

            "You're yellow under there."

            "Fine! Let's try
you
now."

            "It won't work for me."

            "Here." Before he could move she had put the dandelion under his chin. He drew back and she laughed. "Hold still!"

            She peered under his chin and frowned.

            "Well?" he said.

            "What a shame," she said. "You're not in love with anyone."

            "Yes, I am!"

            "It doesn't show."

            "I am very much in love!" He tried to conjure up a face to fit the words, but there was no face. "I am!"

            "Oh please don't look that way."

            "It's that dandelion," he said. "You've used it all up on yourself. That's why it won't work for me."

            "Of course, that must be it. Oh, now I've upset you, I can see I have; I'm sorry, really I am." She touched his elbow.

            "No, no," he said, quickly, "I'm all right."

            "I've got to be going, so say you forgive me. I don't want you angry with me."

            "I'm not angry. Upset, yes."

            "I've got to go to see my psychiatrist now. They
make
me go. I made up things to say. I don't know what he thinks of me. He says I'm a regular onion! I keep him busy peeling away the layers."

            "I'm inclined to believe you need the psychiatrist," said Montag.

            "You don't mean that."

            He took a breath and let it out and at last said, "No, I don't mean that."

            "The psychiatrist wants to know why I go out and hike around in the forests and watch the birds and collect butterflies. I'll show you my collection some day."

            "Good."

            "They want to know what I do with all my time. I tell them that sometimes I just sit and
think
. But I won't tell them what. I've got them running. And sometimes, I tell them, I like to put my head back, like this, and let the rain fall into my mouth. It tastes just like wine. Have you ever tried it?"

            "No I―"

            "You
have
forgiven me, haven't you?"

            "Yes." He thought about it. "Yes, I have. God knows why. You're peculiar, you're aggravating, yet you're easy to forgive. You say you're seventeen?"

            "Well―next month."

            "How odd. How strange. And my wife thirty and yet you seem so much older at times. I can't get over it."

            "You're peculiar yourself, Mr. Montag. Sometimes I even forget you're a fireman. Now, may I make you angry again?"

            "Go ahead."

            "How did it start? How did you get into it? How did you pick your work and how did you happen to think to take the job you have? You're not like the others. I've seen a few; I
know
. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon, last night. The others would never do that. The others would walk off and leave me talking. Or threaten me. No one has time any more for anyone else. You're one of the few who put up with me. That's why I think it's so strange you're a fireman, it just doesn't seem right for you, somehow."

            He felt his body divide itself into a hotness and a coldness, a softness and a hardness, a trembling and a not trembling, the two halves grinding one upon the other.

            "You'd better run on to your appointment," he said.

            And she ran off and left him standing there in the rain. Only after a long time did he move.

            And then, very slowly, as he walked, he tilted his head back in the rain, for just a few moments, and opened his mouth. . . .

            The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and the copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently, gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber-padded paws.

            Montag slid down the brass pole. He went out to look at the city and the clouds had cleared away completely, and he lit a cigarette and came back to bend down and look at the Hound. It was like a great bee come home from some field where the honey is full of poison wildness, of insanity and nightmare, its body crammed with that over-rich nectar and now it was sleeping the evil out of itself.

            "Hello," whispered Montag, fascinated as always with the dead beast, the living beast.

            At night when things got dull, which was every night, the men slid down the brass poles, and set the ticking combinations of the olfactory system of the Hound and let loose rats in the firehouse area-way, and sometimes chickens, and sometimes cats that would have to be drowned anyway, and there would be betting to see which the Hound would seize first. The animals were turned loose. Three seconds later the game was done, the rat, cat, or chicken caught half across the areaway, gripped in gentling paws while a four-inch hollow steel needle plunged down from the proboscis of the Hound to inject massive jolts of morphine or procaine. The pawn was then tossed in the incinerator. A new game began.

            Montag stayed upstairs most nights when this went on. There had been a time two years ago when he had bet with the best of them, and lost a week's salary and faced Mildred's insane anger, which showed itself in veins and blotches. But now at night he lay in his bunk, face turned to the wall, listening to whoops of laughter below and the piano-string scurry of rat feet, the violin squeaking of mice, and the great shadowing, motioned silence of the Hound leaping out like a moth in the raw light, finding, holding its victim, inserting the needle and going back to its kennel to die as if a switch had been turned.

            Montag touched the muzzle..

            The Hound growled.

            Montag jumped back.

            The Hound half rose in its kennel and looked at him with green-blue neon light flickering in its suddenly activated eyebulbs. It growled again, a strange rasping combination of electrical sizzle, a frying sound, a scraping of metal, a turning of cogs that seemed rusty and ancient with suspicion.

            "No, no, boy," said Montag, his heart pounding.

            He saw the silver needle extended upon the air an inch, pull back, extend, pull back. The growl simmered in the beast and it looked at him.

            Montag backed up. The Hound took a step from its kennel.

            Montag grabbed the brass pole with one hand. The pole, reacting, slid upward, and took him through the ceiling, quietly. He stepped off in the half-lit deck of the upper level. He was trembling and his face was green-white. Below, the Hound had sunk back down upon its eight incredible insect legs and was humming to itself again, its multi-faceted eyes at peace.

            Montag stood, letting the fears pass, by the drop-hole. Behind him, four men at a card table under a green-lidded light in the corner glanced briefly but said nothing. Only the man with the Captain's hat and the sign of the Phoenix on his hat, at last, curious, his playing cards in his thin hand, talked across the long room.

            "Montag...?"

            "It doesn't
like
me," said Montag.

            "What, the Hound?" The Captain studied his cards.

            "Come off it. It doesn't like or dislike. It just 'functions.' It's like a lesson in ballistics. It has a trajectory we decide for it. It follows through. It targets itself, homes itself, and cuts off. It's only copper wire, storage batteries, and electricity."