Ray Bradbury 3-Book Collection: Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man

Montag put the book down. He began to unwad the crumpled paper and flatten it out as the old man watched tiredly.

Faber shook his head as if he were waking up.

‘Montag, have you some money?’

‘Some. Four, five hundred dollars. Why?’

‘Bring it. I know a man who printed our college paper half a century ago. That was the year I came to class at the start of the new semester and found only one student to sign up for Drama from Aeschylus to O’Neill. You see? How like a beautiful statue of ice it was, melting in the sun. I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths. No one wanted them back. No one missed them. And the Government, seeing how advantageous it was to have people reading only about passionate lips and the fist in the stomach, circled the situation with your fire-eaters. So, Montag, there’s this unemployed printer. We might start a few books, and wait on the war to break the pattern and give us the push we need. A few bombs and the “families” in the walls of all the houses, like harlequin rats, will shut up! In silence, our stage-whisper might carry.’

They both stood looking at the book on the table.

‘I’ve tried to remember,’ said Montag. ‘But, hell, it’s gone when I turn my head. God, how I want something to say to the Captain. He’s read enough so he has all the answers, or seems to have. His voice is like butter. I’m afraid he’ll talk me back the way I was. Only a week ago, pumping a kerosene hose, I thought: God, what fun!’

The old man nodded. ‘Those who don’t build must burn. It’s as old as history and juvenile delinquents.’

‘So that’s what I am.’

‘There’s some of it in all of us.’

Montag moved towards the front door. ‘Can you help me in any way tonight, with the Fire Captain? I need an umbrella to keep off the rain. I’m so damned afraid I’ll drown if he gets me again.’

The old man said nothing, but glanced once more nervously, at his bedroom. Montag caught the glance. ‘Well?’

The old man took a deep breath, held it, and let it out. He took another, eyes closed, his mouth tight, and at last exhaled. ‘Montag …’

The old man turned at last and said, ‘Come along. I would actually have let you walk right out of my house. I am a cowardly old fool.’

Faber opened the bedroom door and led Montag into a small chamber where stood a table upon which a number of metal tools lay among a welter of microscopic wire-hairs, tiny coils, bobbins, and crystals.

‘What’s this?’ asked Montag.

‘Proof of my terrible cowardice. I’ve lived alone so many years, throwing images on walls with my imagination. Fiddling with electronics, radio-transmission, has been my hobby. My cowardice is such a passion, complementing the revolutionary spirit that lives in its shadow, I was forced to design this.’

He picked up a small green-metal object no larger than a .22 bullet.

‘I paid for all this – how? Playing the stock-market, of course, the last refuge in the world for the dangerous intellectual out of a job. Well, I played the market and built all this and I’ve waited. I’ve waited, trembling, half a lifetime for someone to speak to me. I dared speak to no one. That day in the park when we sat together, I knew that some day you might drop by, with fire or friendship, it was hard to guess. I’ve had this little item ready for months. But I almost let you go, I’m that afraid!’

‘It looks like a Seashell radio.’

‘And something more! It listens! If you put it in your ear, Montag, I can sit comfortably home, warming my frightened bones, and hear and analyse the firemen’s world, find its weaknesses, without danger. I’m the Queen Bee, safe in the hive. You will be the drone, the travelling ear. Eventually, I could put out ears into all parts of the city, with various men, listening and evaluating. If the drones die, I’m still safe at home, tending my fright with a maximum of comfort and a minimum of chance. See how safe I play it, how contemptible I am?’

Montag placed the green bullet in his ear. The old man inserted a similar object in his own ear and moved his lips.

‘Montag!’

The voice was in Montag’s head.

‘I hear you!’

The old man laughed. ‘You’re coming over fine, too!’ Faber whispered, but the voice in Montag’s head was clear. ‘Go to the firehouse when it’s time. I’ll be with you. Let’s listen to this Captain Beatty together. He could be one of us. God knows. I’ll give you things to say. We’ll give him a good show. Do you hate me for this electronic cowardice of mine? Here I am sending you out into the night, while I stay behind the lines with my damned ears listening for you to get your head chopped off.’

‘We all do what we do,’ said Montag. He put the Bible in the old man’s hands. ‘Here. I’ll chance turning in a substitute. Tomorrow –’

‘I’ll see the unemployed printer, yes; that much I can do.’

‘Good night, Professor.’

‘Not good night. I’ll be with you the rest of the night, a vinegar gnat tickling your ear when you need me. But good night and good luck, anyway.’

The door opened and shut. Montag was in the dark street again, looking at the world.

You could feel the war getting ready in the sky that night. The way the clouds moved aside and came back, and the way the stars looked, a million of them swimming between the clouds, like the enemy discs, and the feeling that the sky might fall upon the city and turn it to chalk dust, and the moon go up in red fire; that was how the night felt.

Montag walked from the subway with the money in his pocket (he had visited the bank which was open all night and every night with robot tellers in attendance) and as he walked he was listening to the Seashell radio in one ear … ‘We have mobilized a million men. Quick victory is ours if the war comes …’ Music flooded over the voice quickly and it was gone.

‘Ten million men mobilized,’ Faber’s voice whispered in his other ear. ‘But say one million. It’s happier.’

‘Faber?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m not thinking. I’m just doing like I’m told, like always. You said get the money and I got it. I didn’t really think of it myself. When do I start working things out on my own?’

‘You’ve started already, by saying what you just said. You’ll have to take me on faith.’

‘I took the others on faith!’

‘Yes, and look where we’re headed. You’ll have to travel blind for a while. Here’s my arm to hold on to.’

‘I don’t want to change sides and just be told what to do. There’s no reason to change if I do that.’

‘You’re wise already!’

Montag felt his feet moving him on the sidewalk toward his house. ‘Keep talking.’

‘Would you like me to read? I’ll read so you can remember. I go to bed only five hours a night. Nothing to do. So if you like, I’ll read you to sleep nights. They say you retain knowledge even when you’re sleeping, if someone whispers it in your ear.’

‘Yes.’

‘Here.’ Far away across town in the night, the faintest whisper of a turned page. ‘The Book of Job.’

The moon rose in the sky as Montag walked, his lips moving just a trifle.

He was eating a light supper at nine in the evening when the front door cried out in the hall and Mildred ran from the parlour like a native fleeing an eruption of Vesuvius. Mrs Phelps and Mrs Bowles came through the front door and vanished into the volcano’s mouth with martinis in their hands. Montag stopped eating. They were like a monstrous crystal chandelier tinkling in a thousand chimes, he saw their Cheshire Cat smiles burning through the walls of the house, and now they were screaming at each other above the din.

Montag found himself at the parlour door with his food still in his mouth.

‘Doesn’t everyone look nice!’