Fahrenheit 451 PAGE 16 by Isaac Asimov

 

Fahrenheit 451 PAGE 16 by Isaac Asimov

Fahrenheit 451

 

PAGE 16

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Montag started to speak twice and then finally managed to put his thought together.

"Was it my wife turned in the alarm?"

Beatty nodded. "But her friends turned in an alarm earlier, that I let ride. One way or the other,

you'd have got it. It was pretty silly, quoting poetry around free and easy like that. It was the act

of a silly damn snob. Give a man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation.


You think you can walk on water with your books. Well, the world can get by just fine without

them. Look where they got you, in slime up to your lip. If I stir the slime with my little finger,

you'll drown ! "



Montag could not move. A great earthquake had come with fire and levelled the house and

Mildred was under there somewhere and his entire life under there and he could not move. The

earthquake was still shaking and falling and shivering inside him and he stood there, his knees

half-bent under the great load of tiredness and bewilderment and outrage, letting Beatty hit him

without raising a hand.

"Montag, you idiot, Montag, you damn fool; why did you really do it?"

Montag did not hear, he was far away, he was running with his mind, he was gone, leaving this

dead soot-covered body to sway in front of another raving fool.

"Montag, get out of there! " said Faber.

Montag listened.

Beatty struck him a blow on the head that sent him reeling back. The green bullet in which

Faber's voice whispered and cried, fell to the sidewalk. Beatty snatched it up, grinning. He held it

half in, half out of his ear.

Montag heard the distant voice calling, "Montag, you all right?"

Beatty switched the green bullet off and thrust it in his pocket. "Well�so there's more here than I

thought. I saw you tilt your head, listening. First I thought you had a Seashell. But when you

turned clever later, I wondered. We'll trace this and drop it on your friend."

"No! " said Montag.

He twitched the safety catch on the flame-thrower. Beatty glanced instantly at Montag's fingers

and his eyes widened the faintest bit. Montag saw the surprise there and himself glanced to his

hands to see what new thing they had done. Thinking back later he could never decide whether

the hands or Beatty's reaction to the hands gave him the final push toward murder. The last

rolling thunder of the avalanche stoned down about his ears, not touching him.

Beatty grinned his most charming grin. "Well, that's one way to get an audience. Hold a gun on a

man and force him to listen to your speech. Speech away. What'll it be this time? Why don't you

belch Shakespeare at me, you fumbling snob? "There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats, for I

am arm'd so strong in honesty that they pass by me as an idle wind, which I respect not!' How's

that? Go ahead now, you second-hand litterateur, pull the trigger." He took one step toward

Montag.

Montag only said, "We never burned right..."

"Hand it over, Guy," said Beatty with a fixed smile.

And then he was a shrieking blaze, a jumping, sprawling, gibbering mannikin, no longer human

or known, all writhing flame on the lawn as Montag shot one continuous pulse of liquid fire on

him. There was a hiss like a great mouthful of spittle banging a redhot stove, a bubbling and

frothing as if salt had been poured over a monstrous black snail to cause a terrible liquefaction

and a boiling over of yellow foam. Montag shut his eyes, shouted, shouted, and fought to get his

hands at his ears to clamp and to cut away the sound. Beatty flopped over and over and over, and

at last twisted in on himself like a charred wax doll and lay silent.

The other two firemen did not move.

Montag kept his sickness down long enough to aim the flame-thrower. "Turn around!"

They turned, their faces like blanched meat, streaming sweat; he beat their heads, knocking off

their helmets and bringing them down on themselves. They fell and lay without moving.

The blowing of a single autumn leaf.

He turned and the Mechanical Hound was there.

It was half across the lawn, coming from the shadows, moving with such drifting ease that it was

like a single solid cloud of black-grey smoke blown at him in silence.



It made a single last leap into the air, coming down at Montag from a good three feet over his

head, its spidered legs reaching, the procaine needle snapping out its single angry tooth. Montag

caught it with a bloom of fire, a single wondrous blossom that curled in petals of yellow and blue

and orange about the metal dog, clad it in a new covering as it slammed into Montag and threw

him ten feet back against the bole of a tree, taking the flame-gun with him. He felt it scrabble and

seize his leg and stab the needle in for a moment before the fire snapped the Hound up in the air,

burst its metal bones at the joints, and blew out its interior in the single flushing of red colour

like a skyrocket fastened to the street. Montag lay watching the dead-alive thing fiddle the air

and die. Even now it seemed to want to get back at him and finish the injection which was now

working through the flesh of his leg. He felt all of the mingled relief and horror at having pulled

back only in time to have just his knee slammed by the fender of a car hurtling by at ninety miles

an hour. He was afraid to

get up, afraid he might not be able to gain his feet at all, with an anaesthetized leg. A numbness

in a numbness hollowed into a numbness....

And now...?

The street empty, the house burnt like an ancient bit of stage-scenery, the other homes dark, the

Hound here, Beatty there, the three other firemen another place, and the Salamander . . . ? He

gazed at the immense engine. That would have to go, too.

Well, he thought, let's see how badly off you are. On your feet now. Easy, easy . . . there.

He stood and he had only one leg. The other was like a chunk of burnt pine-log he was carrying

along as a penance for some obscure sin. When he put his weight on it, a shower of silver

needles gushed up the length of the calf and went off in the knee. He wept. Come on ! Come on,

you, you can't stay here!

A few house-lights were going on again down the street, whether from the incidents just passed,

or because of the abnormal silence following the fight, Montag did not know. He hobbled around

the ruins, seizing at his bad leg when it lagged, talking and whimpering and shouting directions

at it and cursing it and pleading with it to work for him now when it was vital. He heard a

number of people crying out in the darkness and shouting. He reached the back yard and the

alley. Beatty, he thought, you're not a problem now. You always said, don't face a problem, bum

it. Well, now I've done both. Good-bye, Captain.

And he stumbled along the alley in the dark.

A shotgun blast went off in his leg every time he put it down and he thought, you're a fool, a

damn fool, an awful fool, an idiot, an awful idiot, a damn idiot, and a fool, a damn fool; look at

the mess and where's the mop, look at the mess, and what do you do? Pride, damn it, and temper,

and you've junked it all, at the very start you vomit on everyone and on yourself. But everything

at once, but everything one on top of another; Beatty, the women, Mildred, Clarisse, everything.

No excuse, though, no excuse. A fool, a damn fool, go give yourself up!

No, we'll save what we can, we'll do what there is left to do. If we have to burn, let's take a few

more with us. Here!

He remembered the books and turned back. Just on the off chance.

He found a few books where he had left them, near the garden fence. Mildred, God bless her, had

missed a few. Four books still lay hidden where he had put them. Voices were wailing in the

night and flashbeams swirled about. Other Salamanders were roaring their engines far away, and

police sirens were cutting their way across town with their sirens.

Montag took the four remaining books and hopped, jolted, hopped his way down the alley and

suddenly fell as if his head had been cut off and only his body lay there. Something inside had



jerked him to a halt and flopped him down. He lay where he had fallen and sobbed, his legs

folded, his face pressed blindly to the gravel.

Beatty wanted to die.

In the middle of the crying Montag knew it for the truth. Beatty had wanted to die. He had just

stood there, not really trying to save himself, just stood there, joking, needling, thought Montag,

and the thought was enough to stifle his sobbing and let him pause for air. How strange, strange,

to want to die so much that you let a man walk around armed and then instead of shutting up and

staying alive, you go on yelling at people and making fun of them until you get them mad, and

then ....

At a distance, running feet.

Montag sat up. Let's get out of here. Come on, get up, get up, you just can't sit! But he was still

crying and that had to be finished. It was going away now. He hadn't wanted to kill anyone, not

even Beatty. His flesh gripped him and shrank as if it had been plunged in acid. He gagged. He

saw Beatty, a torch, not moving, fluttering out on the grass. He bit at his knuckles. I'm sorry, I'm

sorry, oh God, sorry ....

He tried to piece it all together, to go back to the normal pattern of life a few short days ago

before the sieve and the sand, Denham's Dentifrice, moth-voices, fireflies, the alarms and

excursions, too much for a few short days, too much, indeed, for a lifetime.

Feet ran in the far end of the alley.

"Get up!" he told himself. "Damn it, get up!" he said to the leg, and stood. The pains were spikes

driven in the kneecap and then only darning needles and then only common, ordinary safety pins,

and after he had dragged along fifty more hops and jumps, filling his hand with slivers from the

board fence, the prickling was like someone blowing a spray of scalding water on that leg. And

the leg was at last his own leg again. He had been afraid that running might break the loose

ankle. Now, sucking all the night into his open mouth, and blowing it out pale, with all the

blackness left heavily inside himself, he set out in a steady jogging pace. He carried the books in

his hands.

He thought of Faber.

Faber was back there in the steaming lump of tar that had no name or identity now. He had burnt

Faber, too. He felt so suddenly shocked by this that he felt Faber was really dead, baked like a

roach in that small green capsule shoved and lost in the pocket of a man who was now nothing

but a frame skeleton strung with asphalt tendons.

You must remember, burn them or they'll burn you, he thought. Right now it's as simple as that.

He searched his pockets, the money was there, and in his other pocket he found the usual

Seashell upon which the city was talking to itself in the cold black morning.

"Police Alert. Wanted: Fugitive in city. Has committed murder and crimes against the State.

Name: Guy Montag. Occupation: Fireman. Last seen ..."

He ran steadily for six blocks, in the alley, and then the alley opened out on to a wide empty

thoroughfare ten lanes wide. It seemed like a boatless river frozen there in the raw light of the

high white arc-lamps; you could drown trying to cross it, he felt; it was too wide, it was too open.

It was a vast stage without scenery, inviting him to run across, easily seen in the blazing

illumination, easily caught, easily shot down.

The Seashell hummed in his ear.

"... watch for a man running ... watch for the running man . . . watch for a man alone, on foot . . .

watch..