Bradbury, Ray - Fahrenheit 451

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RAY BRADBURY
FAHRENHEIT 451
This one, with gratitude, is for DON CONGDON.
FAHRENHEIT 451:
The temperature at which book-paper catches fire and burns
PART I
IT WAS A PLEASURE TO BURN
IT was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.
With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous
kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the
hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning
to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet
numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of
what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that
burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies.
He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the
furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the
house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned
dark with burning.
Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame.
He knew that when he returned to the firehouse, he might wink at himself, a minstrel
man, burnt-corked, in the mirror. Later, going to sleep, he would feel the fiery smile
still gripped by his face muscles, in the dark. It never went away, that. smile, it never
ever went away, as long as he remembered.
He hung up his black-beetle-coloured helmet and shined it, he hung his flameproof
jacket neatly; he showered luxuriously, and then, whistling, hands in pockets, walked
across the upper floor of the fire station and fell down the hole. At the last moment,
when disaster seemed positive, he pulled his hands from his pockets and broke his
fall by grasping the golden pole. He slid to a squeaking halt, the heels one inch from
the concrete floor downstairs.
He walked out of the fire station and along the midnight street toward the subway
where the silent, air-propelled train slid soundlessly down its lubricated flue in the
earth and let him out with a great puff of warm air an to the cream-tiled escalator
rising to the suburb.
Whistling, he let the escalator waft him into the still night air. He walked toward the
comer, thinking little at all about nothing in particular. Before he reached the corner,
however, he slowed as if a wind had sprung up from nowhere, as if someone had
called his name.
The last few nights he had had the most uncertain feelings about the sidewalk just
around the corner here, moving in the starlight toward his house. He had felt that a
moment before his making the turn, someone had been there. The air seemed
charged with a special calm as if someone had waited there, quietly, and only a
moment before he came, simply turned to a shadow and let him through. Perhaps his
nose detected a faint perfume, perhaps the skin on the backs of his hands, on his
face, felt the temperature rise at this one spot where a person's standing might raise
the immediate atmosphere ten degrees for an instant. There was no understanding it.
Each time he made the turn, he saw only the white, unused, buckling sidewalk, with
perhaps, on one night, something vanishing swiftly across a lawn before he could
focus his eyes or speak.
But now, tonight, he slowed almost to a stop. His inner mind, reaching out to turn the
corner for him, had heard the faintest whisper. Breathing? Or was the atmosphere
compressed merely by someone standing very quietly there, waiting?
He turned the corner.
The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl
who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and
the leaves carry her forward. Her head was half bent to watch her shoes stir the
circling leaves. Her face was slender and milk-white, and in it was a kind of gentle
hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity. It was a look, almost, of
pale surprise; the dark eyes were so fixed to the world that no move escaped them.
Her dress was white and it whispered. He almost thought he heard the motion of her
hands as she walked, and the infinitely small sound now, the white stir of her face
turning when she discovered she was a moment away from a man who stood in the
middle of the pavement waiting.
The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain. The girl
stopped and looked as if she might pull back in surprise, but instead stood regarding
Montag with eyes so dark and shining and alive, that he felt he had said something
quite wonderful. But he knew his mouth had only moved to say hello, and then when
she seemed hypnotized by the salamander on his arm and the phoenix-disc on his
chest, he spoke again.
"Of course," he said, "you're a new neighbour, aren't you?"
"And you must be"-she raised her eyes from his professional symbols-"the fireman."
Her voice trailed off.
"How oddly you say that."
"I'd-I'd have known it with my eyes shut," she said, slowly.
"What-the smell of kerosene? My wife always complains," he laughed. "You never
wash it off completely."
"No, you don't," she said, in awe.
He felt she was walking in a circle about him, turning him end for end, shaking him
quietly, and emptying his pockets, without once moving herself.
"Kerosene," he said, because the silence had lengthened, "is nothing but perfume to
me."
"Does it seem like that, really?"
"Of course. Why not?"
She gave herself time to think of it. "I don't know." She turned to face the sidewalk
going toward their homes. "Do you mind if I walk back with you? I'm Clarisse
McClellan."
"Clarisse. Guy Montag. Come along. What are you doing out so late wandering
around? How old are you?"
They walked in the warm-cool blowing night on the silvered pavement and there was
the faintest breath of fresh apricots and strawberries in the air, and he looked around
and realized this was quite impossible, so late in the year.
There was only the girl walking with him now, her face bright as snow in the
moonlight, and he knew she was working his questions around, seeking the best
answers she could possibly give.
"Well," she said, "I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go
together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.
Isn't this a nice time of night to walk? I like to smell things and look at things, and
sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise."
They walked on again in silence and finally she said, thoughtfully, "You know, I'm not
afraid of you at all."
He was surprised. "Why should you be?"
"So many people are. Afraid of firemen, I mean. But you're just a man, after all..."
He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself
dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes
were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact. Her
face, turned to him now, was fragile milk crystal with a soft and constant light in it. It
was not the hysterical light of electricity but-what? But the strangely comfortable and
rare and gently flattering light of the candle. One time, when he was a child, in a
power-failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief
hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew
comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping that
the power might not come on again too soon ....
And then Clarisse McClellan said:
"Do you mind if I ask? How long have you worked at being a fireman?"
"Since I was twenty, ten years ago."
"Do you ever read any of the books you bum?"
He laughed. "That's against the law!"
"Oh. Of course."
"It's fine work. Monday bum Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em
to ashes, then bum the ashes. That's our official slogan."
They walked still further and the girl said, "Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out
instead of going to start them?"
"No. Houses. have always been fireproof, take my word for it."
"Strange. I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident and
they needed firemen to stop the flames."
He laughed.
She glanced quickly over. "Why are you laughing?"
"I don't know." He started to laugh again and stopped "Why?"
"You laugh when I haven't been funny and you answer right off. You never stop to
think what I've asked you."
He stopped walking, "You are an odd one," he said, looking at her. "Haven't you any
respect?"
"I don't mean to be insulting. It's just, I love to watch people too much, I guess."
"Well, doesn't this mean anything to you?" He tapped the numerals 451 stitched on
his char-coloured sleeve.
"Yes," she whispered. She increased her pace. "Have you ever watched the jet cars
racing on the boulevards down that way?
"You're changing the subject!"
"I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never
see them slowly," she said. "If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he'd say,
that's grass! A pink blur? That's a rose-garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs
are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour
and they jailed him for two days. Isn't that funny, and sad, too?"
"You think too many things," said Montag, uneasily.
"I rarely watch the 'parlour walls' or go to races or Fun Parks. So I've lots of time for
crazy thoughts, I guess. Have you seen the two-hundred-foot-long billboards in the
country beyond town? Did you know that once billboards were only twenty feet long?
But cars started rushing by so quickly they had to stretch the advertising out so it
would last."
"I didn't know that!" Montag laughed abruptly.
"Bet I know something else you don't. There's dew on the grass in the morning."
He suddenly couldn't remember if he had known this or not, and it made him quite
irritable.
"And if you look"-she nodded at the sky-"there's a man in the moon."
He hadn't looked for a long time.
They walked the rest of the way in silence, hers thoughtful, his a kind of clenching
and uncomfortable silence in which he shot her accusing glances. When they
reached her house all its lights were blazing.
"What's going on?" Montag had rarely seen that many house lights.
"Oh, just my mother and father and uncle sitting around, talking. It's like being a
pedestrian, only rarer. My uncle was arrested another time-did I tell you?-for being a
pedestrian. Oh, we're most peculiar."
"But what do you talk about?"
She laughed at this. "Good night!" She started up her walk. Then she seemed to
remember something and came back to look at him with wonder and curiosity. "Are
you happy?" she said.
"Am I what?" he cried.
But she was gone-running in the moonlight. Her front door shut gently.
"Happy! Of all the nonsense."
He stopped laughing.
He put his hand into the glove-hole of his front door and let it know his touch. The
front door slid open.
Of course I'm happy. What does she think? I'm not? he asked the quiet rooms. He
stood looking up at the ventilator grille in the hall and suddenly remembered that
something lay hidden behind the grille, something that seemed to peer down at him
now. He moved his eyes quickly away.
What a strange meeting on a strange night. He remembered nothing like it save one
afternoon a year ago when he had met an old man in the park and they had talked ....
Montag shook his head. He looked at a blank wall. The girl's face was there, really
quite beautiful in memory: astonishing, in fact. She had a very thin face like the dial of
a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to
see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second,
with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing what it has to tell of the
night passing swiftly on toward further darknesses but moving also toward a new
sun.
"What?" asked Montag of that other self, the subconscious idiot that ran babbling at
times, quite independent of will, habit, and conscience.
He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how
many people did you know that refracted your own light to you? People were more
often-he searched for a simile, found one in his work-torches, blazing away until they
whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you
your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?
What incredible power of identification the girl had; she was like the eager watcher of
a marionette show, anticipating each flicker of an eyelid, each gesture of his hand,
each flick of a finger, the moment before it began. How long had they walked
together? Three minutes? Five? Yet how large that time seemed now. How immense
a figure she was on the stage before him; what a shadow she threw on the wall with
her slender body! He felt that if his eye itched, she might blink. And if the muscles of
his jaws stretched imperceptibly, she would yawn long before he would.
Why, he thought, now that I think of it, she almost seemed to be waiting for me there,
in the street, so damned late at night ... .
He opened the bedroom door.
It was like coming into the cold marbled room of a mausoleum after the moon had
set. Complete darkness, not a hint of the silver world outside, the windows tightly
shut, the chamber a tomb-world where no sound from the great city could penetrate.
The room was not empty.
He listened.
The little mosquito-delicate dancing hum in the air, the electrical murmur of a hidden
wasp snug in its special pink warm nest. The music was almost loud enough so he
could follow the tune.
He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over, and down on itself like a tallow skin, like
the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown
out. Darkness. He was not happy. He was not happy. He said the words to himself.
He recognized this as the true state of affairs. He wore his happiness like a mask and
the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to
knock on her door and ask for it back.
Without turning on the light he imagined how this room would look. His wife stretched
on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of a tomb, her eyes
fixed to the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little
Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of
music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her
unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and
bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning.
There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea,
had not gladly gone down in it for the third time.
The room was cold but nonetheless he felt he could not breathe. He did not wish to
open the curtains and open the french windows, for he did not want the moon to
come into the room. So, with the feeling of a man who will die in the next hour for
lack of air,.he felt his way toward his open, separate, and therefore cold bed.
An instant before his foot hit the object on the floor he knew he would hit such an
object. It was not unlike the feeling he had experienced before turning the corner and
almost knocking the girl down. His foot, sending vibrations ahead, received back
echoes of the small barrier across its path even as the foot swung. His foot kicked.
The object gave a dull clink and slid off in darkness.
He stood very straight and listened to the person on the dark bed in the completely
featureless night. The breath coming out of the nostrils was so faint it stirred only the
furthest fringes of life, a small leaf, a black feather, a single fibre of hair.
He still did not want outside light. He pulled out his igniter, felt the salamander etched
on its silver disc, gave it a flick....
Two moonstones looked up at him in the light of his small hand-held fire; two pale
moonstones buried in a creek of clear water over which the life of the world ran, not
touching them.
"Mildred ! "
Her face was like a snow-covered island upon which rain might fall; but it felt no rain;
over which clouds might pass their moving shadows, but she felt no shadow. There
was only the singing of the thimble-wasps in her tamped-shut ears, and her eyes all
glass, and breath going in and out, softly, faintly, in and out of her nostrils, and her
not caring whether it came or went, went or came.
The object he had sent tumbling with his foot now glinted under the edge of his own
bed. The small crystal bottle of sleeping-tablets which earlier today had been filled
with thirty capsules and which now lay uncapped and empty in the light of the tiny
flare.
As he stood there the sky over the house screamed. There was a tremendous ripping
sound as if two giant hands had torn ten thousand miles of black linen down the
seam. Montag was cut in half. He felt his chest chopped down and split apart. The
jet-bombs going over, going over, going over, one two, one two, one two, six of them,
nine of them, twelve of them, one and one and one and another and another and
another, did all the screaming for him. He opened his own mouth and let their shriek
come down and out between his bared teeth. The house shook. The flare went out in
his hand. The moonstones vanished. He felt his hand plunge toward the telephone.
The jets were gone. He felt his lips move, brushing the mouthpiece of the phone.
"Emergency hospital." A terrible whisper.
He felt that the stars had been pulverized by the sound of the black jets and that in
the morning the earth would be thought as he stood shivering in the dark, and let his
lips go on moving and moving.
They had this machine. They had two machines, really. One of them slid down into
your stomach like a black cobra down an echoing well looking for all the old water
and the old time gathered there. It drank up the green matter that flowed to the top in
a slow boil. Did it drink of the darkness? Did it suck out all the poisons accumulated
with the years? It fed in silence with an occasional sound of inner suffocation and
blind searching. It had an Eye. The impersonal operator of the machine could, by
wearing a special optical helmet, gaze into the soul of the person whom he was
pumping out. What did the Eye see? He did not say. He saw but did not see what the
Eye saw. The entire operation was not unlike the digging of a trench in one's yard.
The woman on the bed was no more than a hard stratum of marble they had
reached. Go on, anyway, shove the bore down, slush up the emptiness, if such a
thing could be brought out in the throb of the suction snake. The operator stood
smoking a cigarette. The other machine was working too.
The other machine was operated by an equally impersonal fellow in non-stainable
reddish-brown overalls. This machine pumped all of the blood from the body and
replaced it with fresh blood and serum.
"Got to clean 'em out both ways," said the operator, standing over the silent woman.
"No use getting the stomach if you don't clean the blood. Leave that stuff in the blood
and the blood hits the brain like a mallet, bang, a couple of thousand times and the
brain just gives up, just quits."
"Stop it!" said Montag.
"I was just sayin'," said the operator.
"Are you done?" said Montag.
They shut the machines up tight. "We're done." His anger did not even touch them.
They stood with the cigarette smoke curling around their noses and into their eyes
without making them blink or squint. "That's fifty bucks."
"First, why don't you tell me if she'll be all right?"
"Sure, she'll be O.K. We got all the mean stuff right in our suitcase here, it can't get at
her now. As I said, you take out the old and put in the new and you're O.K."
"Neither of you is an M.D. Why didn't they send an M.D. from Emergency?"
"Hell! " the operator's cigarette moved on his lips. "We get these cases nine or ten a
night. Got so many, starting a few years ago, we had the special machines built. With
the optical lens, of course, that was new; the rest is ancient. You don't need an M.D.,
case like this; all you need is two handymen, clean up the problem in half an hour.
Look"-he started for the door-"we gotta go. Just had another call on the old ear-
thimble. Ten blocks from here. Someone else just jumped off the cap of a pillbox.
Call if you need us again. Keep her quiet. We got a contra-sedative in her. She'll
wake up hungry. So long."
And the men with the cigarettes in their straight-lined mouths, the men with the eyes
of puff-adders, took up their load of machine and tube, their case of liquid melancholy
and the slow dark sludge of nameless stuff, and strolled out the door.
Montag sank down into a chair and looked at this woman. Her eyes were closed now,
gently, and he put out his hand to feel the warmness of breath on his palm.
"Mildred," he said, at last.
There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that's too many.
Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut
your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood. Good God, who were those
men? I never saw them before in my life!
Half an hour passed.
The bloodstream in this woman was new and it seemed to have done a new thing to
her. Her cheeks were very pink and her lips were very fresh and full of colour and
they looked soft and relaxed. Someone else's blood there. If only someone else's
flesh and brain and memory. If only they could have taken her mind along to the dry-
cleaner's and emptied the pockets and steamed and cleansed it and reblocked it and
brought it back in the morning. If only . . .
He got up and put back the curtains and opened the windows wide to let the night air
in. It was two o'clock in the morning. Was it only an hour ago, Clarisse McClellan in
the street, and him coming in, and the dark room and his foot kicking the little crystal
bottle? Only an hour, but the world had melted down and sprung up in a new and
colourless form.
Laughter blew across the moon-coloured lawn from the house of Clarisse and her
father and mother and the uncle who smiled so quietly and so earnestly. Above all,
their laughter was relaxed and hearty and not forced in any way, coming from the
house that was so brightly lit this late at night while all the other houses were kept to
themselves in darkness. Montag heard the voices talking, talking, talking, giving,
talking, weaving, reweaving their hypnotic web.
Montag moved out through the french windows and crossed the lawn, without even
thinking of it. He stood outside the talking house in the shadows, thinking he might
even tap on their door and whisper, "Let me come in. I won't say anything. I just want
to listen. What is it you're saying?"
But instead he stood there, very cold, his face a mask of ice, listening to a man's
voice (the uncle?) moving along at an easy pace:
"Well, after all, this is the age of the disposable tissue. Blow your nose on a person,
wad them, flush them away, reach for another, blow, wad, flush. Everyone using
everyone else's coattails. How are you supposed to root for the home team when you
don't even have a programme or know the names? For that matter, what colour
jerseys are they wearing as they trot out on to the field?"
Montag moved back to his own house, left the window wide, checked Mildred, tucked
the covers about her carefully, and then lay down with the moonlight on his cheek-
bones and on the frowning ridges in his brow, with the moonlight distilled in each eye
to form a silver cataract there.
One drop of rain. Clarisse. Another drop. Mildred. A third. The uncle. A fourth. The
fire tonight. One, Clarisse. Two, Mildred. Three, uncle. Four, fire, One, Mildred, two,
Clarisse. One, two, three, four, five, Clarisse, Mildred, uncle, fire, sleeping-tablets,
men, disposable tissue, coat-tails, blow, wad, flush, Clarisse, Mildred, uncle, fire,
tablets, tissues, blow, wad, flush. One, two, three, one, two, three! Rain. The storm.
The uncle laughing. Thunder falling downstairs. The whole world pouring down. The
fire gushing up in a volcano. All rushing on down around in a spouting roar and
rivering stream toward morning.
"I don't know anything any more," he said, and let a sleep-lozenge dissolve on his
tongue.
At nine in the morning, Mildred's bed was empty.
Montag got up quickly, his heart pumping, and ran down the hall and stopped at the
kitchen door.
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
摘要：

RAYBRADBURYFAHRENHEIT451Thisone,withgratitude,isforDONCONGDON.FAHRENHEIT451:Thetemperatureatwhichbook-papercatchesfireandburnsPARTIITWASAPLEASURETOBURNITwasaspecialpleasuretoseethingseaten,toseethingsblackenedandchanged.Withthebrassnozzleinhisfists,withthisgreatpythonspittingitsvenomouskeroseneupont...

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