The Fireman Read online

  The Fireman By Ray Bradbury

  I

  Fire, Fire, Burn Books

  THE four men sat silently playing blackjack under a green drop-light in the dark morning. Only a voice whispered from the ceiling: "One thirty-five a.m. Thursday morning, October 4th, 2052, A.D.... One forty a.m.... one fifty..."

  Mr. Montag sat stiffly among the other firemen in the fire house, heard the voice-clock mourn out the cold hour and the cold year, and shivered.

  The other three glanced up.

  "What's wrong, Montag?"

  A radio hummed somewhere. "… War may be declared any hour. This country stands ready to defend its destiny and..."

  The fire house trembled as five hundred jet-planes screamed across the black morning sky.

  The firemen slumped in their coal-blue uniforms, with the look of thirty years in their blue-shaved, sharp, pink faces and their burnt-colored hair. Stacked behind them were glittering piles of auxiliary helmets. Downstairs in concrete dampness the fire monster itself slept, the silent dragon of nickel and tangerine colors, the boa-constrictor hoses, the twinkling brass.

  "I'm thinking of our last job," said Mr. Montag.

  "Don't," said Leahy, the fire chief.

  "That poor man, when we burned his library. How would it feel if firemen burned our houses and our books?"

  "We haven't any books."

  "But if we did have some."

  "You got some?"

  "No."

  Montag gazed beyond them to the wall and the typed lists of a million forbidden books. The titles cringed in fire, burning down the years under his ax and his fire hose spraying not water but — kerosene.

  "Was it always like this?" asked Mr. Montag. "The fire house, our duties? I mean, well, once upon a time..."

  "Once upon a time!" Leahy crowed. "What kind of language is that?"

  Fool, cried Montag to himself. You'll give yourself away! That last fire. A book of fairy tales. He had dared to read a line or so. "I mean," he said, quickly, "in the old days, before homes were completely fireproof, didn't firemen ride to fires to put them out, instead of start them?"

  "I never knew that." Stoneman and Black drew forth their rule books and laid them where Montag, though long familiar with them, might read:

  1. Answer the alarm quickly.

  2. Start the fire swiftly.

  3. Be sure you burn everything.

  4. Report back to fire house.

  5. Stand alert for another alarm.

  Everyone watched Montag.

  He swallowed. "What will they do to that old man we caught last night with his books?"

  "Insane asylum."

  "But he wasn't insane!"

  "Any man is who thinks he can hide books from the Government or us." Leahy blew a great fiery cloud of cigar smoke from his thin mouth. He idled back.

  The alarm sounded.

  The bell kicked itself two hundred times in a few seconds. Suddenly there were three empty chairs. The cards fell in a snow flurry. The brass pole trembled. The men were gone, their hats with them. Montag still sat. Below, the orange dragon coughed to life.

  Montag slid down the pole like a man in a dream.

  "Montag, you forgot your hat!"

  He got it and they were off, the night wind hammering about their siren noise and their mighty metal thunder.

  IT WAS a flaking three-story house in the old section of town. A century old if it was a day, but, like every house, it had been given a thin fireproof plastic coat fifty years ago, and this preservative shell seemed to be holding it up.

  "Here we are!"

  The engine slammed to a stop. Leahy, Stoneman, and Black ran up the side-walk, suddenly odious and fat in their plump slickers. Montag followed.

  They crashed the front door and caught a woman, running.

  "I didn't hurt anyone!" she cried.

  "Where are they?" Leahy twisted her wrist.

  "You wouldn't take an old woman's pleasures from her, would you?"

  Stoneman produced the telephone alarm card with the complaint signed in facsimile duplicate on the back. "Says here, Chief, the books are in the attic."

  "All right, men, let's get 'em!"

  Next thing they were up in musty blackness, swinging silver hatchets at doors that were, after all, unlocked, tumbling through like boys all rollick and shout.

  "Hey!"

  A fountain of books sprayed down on Montag as he climbed shuddering up the steep stair well. Books bombarded his shoulders, his pale face. A book lit, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering.

  In the dim, wavering light a page hung open and it was like a snowy feather, the words delicately painted thereon. In all the rush and fervor, Montag had only an instant to read a line, but it blazed in his mind for the next minute as if stamped there with a fiery iron. He dropped the book. Immediately, another fell into his arms.

  "Montag, come on up!"

  Montag's hand closed like a trap, crushed the book with wild devotion, with an insanity of mindlessness to his chest. The men above were hurling shovelfuls of literature into the dusty air. They fell like slaughtered birds and the woman stood like a small girl among the bodies.

  "Montag!"

  He climbed up into the attic. " 'This too shall pass away.' "

  "What?" Leahy glared at him.

  Montag froze, blinking. "Did I say something?"

  "Move, you idiot!"

  THE books lay in piles like fishes left to dry.

  "Trash! Trash!" The men danced on the books. Titles glittered their golden eyes, falling, gone.

  "Kerosene!"

  They pumped the cool fluid from the white snake they had twined upstairs. They coated every book; they pumped rooms full of it.

  "This is better than the old man's place last night, eh?"

  That had not been as much fun. The old man had lived in an apartment house with other people. They had had to use controlled fire there. Here, they could ravage the entire house.

  They ran downstairs, Montag reeling after them in the kerosene fumes.

  "Come on, woman!"

  "My books," she said, quietly. She knelt among them to touch the drenched leather, to read the gilt titles with her fingers instead of her eyes, while her eyes accused Montag.

  "You can't take my books," she said.

  "You know the law," said Leahy. "Pure nonsense, all of it. No two books alike, none agreeing. Confusion. Stories about people who never existed. Come on, now."

  "No," she said.

  "The whole house'll burn."

  "I won't go."

  The three men walked clumsily to the door. They glanced back at Montag who stood near the woman.

  "You're not leaving her here?" he protested.

  "She won't come."

  "But she's got to!"

  Leahy raised his hand. It contained the concealed igniter to start the fire. "Got to get back to the station. Besides, she'd cost us a trial, money, jail."

  Montag placed his hand around the woman's elbow. "You can come with me."

  "No." She actually focused her eyes on him for a moment. "Thank you, anyway."

  "I'm counting to ten," said Leahy. "One, two..."

  "Please," said Montag.

  "Go on," said the woman.

  "Three," said Leahy.

  "Come." Montag pulled at her.

  "I want to stay here," she replied, quietly.

  "Four... five..."

  The woman twisted. Montag slipped on an oily book and fell. The woman ran up the stairs half way and stood there with the books at her feet.

  "Six... seven... Montag," said Leahy.

  Montag did not move. He looked out the door at that man there with the pink face, pink and burned and shiny from too many fires,
pink from night excitements, the pink face of Mr. Leahy with the igniter poised in his pink fingers.

  Montag felt the book hidden against his pounding chest.

  "Go get him!" ordered Leahy.

  THE men dragged Montag yelling from the house.

  Leahy backed out after them, leaving a kerosene trail down the walk. When they were a hundred feet away, Montag was still shouting and kicking. He glanced wildly back.

  In the front door where she had come to gaze out at them quietly, her quietness a condemnation, staring straight into Leahy's eyes, was the woman.

  Leahy twitched his finger to ignite the fuel.

  He was too late. Montag gasped.

  The woman in the door, reaching with contempt toward them all, struck a match against the saturated wood.

  People ran out of houses all down the street.

  "WHO is it?"

  "Who would it be?" said Mr. Montag, leaning back against the closed door in the dark.

  His wife said, at last, "Well, put on the light."

  "I don't want the light," he said.

  "Come to bed."

  He heard her roll impatiently; the springs squeaked. "Are you drunk?"

  He worked out of his coat and let it slump to the floor. He held his pants out into an abyss and let them fall forever and forever into darkness.

  His wife said, "What are you doing?"

  He balanced in space with the book in his sweating, icy hand.

  A minute later, she said, "Well, don't just stand there in the middle of the room."

  He made a small sound.

  "What?" she asked.

  He made more soft sounds. He stumbled toward the bed and shoved the book clumsily under the cold pillow. He fell into bed and his wife cried out, startled. He lay separate from her. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and when he didn't reply but only made sounds, he felt her hand creep over, up along his chest, his throat, his chin. Her hand brushed his cheek. He knew that she pulled her hand away from his cheek wet.

  A long time later when he was finally floating into sleep, he heard her say, "You smell of kerosene."

  "I always smell of kerosene," he mumbled.

  Late in the night he looked over at Mildred. She was awake. There was a tiny dance of melody in the room. She had her thimble-radio tamped into her ear, listening, listening to far people in far places, her eyes peeled wide at deep ceilings of blackness.

  Many nights in the last ten years he had found her with her eyes open, like a dead woman. She would lie that way, blankly, hour upon hour, and then rise and go soundlessly to the bath. You could hear faucet water run, the tinkle of the sedatives bottle, and Mildred gulping hungrily, frantically, at sleep.

  She was awake now. In a moment she would rise and go for the barbiturates.

  "Mildred," he thought.

  And suddenly she was so strange that he couldn't believe that he knew her at all. He was in someone else's house, like those jokes men told about the gentleman, drunk on life, who had come home late at night, unlocked the wrong door, entered a wrong room. And now here Montag lay in the strange night by this unidentified body he had never seen before.

  "Millie?" he called.

  "What!"

  "I didn't mean to startle you. What I want to know is, when did we meet? And where?"

  "For what?"

  "I mean originally."

  She was frowning in the dark.

  HE CLARIFIED it. "The first time we ever met, where was it, and when?"

  "Why, it was at..." She stopped. "I don't know."

  He was frightened. "Can't you remember?"

  They both tried.

  "It's been so long."

  "Only ten years. We're both only thirty!"

  "Don't get excited, I'm trying to think." She laughed a strange laugh. "How funny, not to remember where or when you met your husband or wife."

  He lay with his eyes tight, pressing, massaging his brow. It was suddenly more important than any other thing in a lifetime that he knew where he had met Mildred.

  "It doesn't matter." She was up, in the bathroom now. He heard the water rushing, the swallowing sound.

  "No, I guess not," he murmured.

  And he wondered, did she take twenty tablets now, like a year ago, when we had to pump her stomach, and me shouting to keep her awake, walking her, asking her why she did it, why she wanted to die, and she saying she didn't know, she didn't know, she didn't know anything about anything!

  She didn't belong to him; he didn't belong to her. She didn't know herself, him, or anyone; the world didn't need her, she didn't need herself, and in the hospital he had realized that if she died he would not cry.

  For it was the dying of an unknown, a street face, a face in the newspaper and it was suddenly so wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man beside an empty woman while the doctors emptied her still more.

  And why are we empty, lonely, and not in love? he had asked himself, a year ago.

  They were never together. There was always something between, a radio, a televisor, a car, a plane, a game, nervous exhaustion, or, simply, a little pheno-barbitol. They didn't know each other; they knew things, inventions.

  They had applauded science while it had built a beautiful glass structure, a glittering miracle of contraptions about them, and, too late, they had found it to be a glass wall. They could not shout through the wall; they could only pantomime silently, never touching, hearing, barely seeing each other.

  Looking at Mildred at the hospital, he had thought, does it matter if we live of die?

  That might not have been enough if the people' had not moved next door with their daughter.

  Perhaps that had been the start of his awareness of his job, his marriage, his life.

  ONE night — it was so long ago — he had gone out for a long walk. In the moonlight, he realized that he had come out to get away from the nagging of his wife's television set. He walked, hands in pockets, blowing steam from his mouth into the cold air.

  "Alone," He looked at the avenues ahead. "By God, I'm alone. Not another pedestrian in miles." He walked swiftly down street after street. "Why, I'm the only pedestrian in the entire city!" The streets were empty and long and quiet.

  Distantly, on cross-town arteries, a few cars moved in the dark. But no other man ventured upon the earth to test the use of his legs. In fact, it had been so many years since the side-walks were used that they were buckling, becoming obscured with grass.

  So he walked alone, aware of his loneliness, until the police car pulled up and flashed its cold white light upon him.

  "What're you doing?" shouted a voice.

  "I'm out for a walk."

  "He says he's out for a walk." The laughter, the cold, precise turning over of his identity cards, the careful noting of his address.

  "Okay, mister, you can walk now."

  He had gone on, stomping his feet, jerking his mouth and hands, eyes blazing, gripping his elbows. "The nerve! The nerve! Is there a law against pedestrians!"

  The girl turned a corner and walked toward him. She stopped and glanced at him.

  "Why, hello," she said, and put out her hand. "You're my neighbor, aren't you?"

  "Am I?" he said.

  She was smiling quietly. "We're the only live ones, aren't we?" She waved at the empty side-walks. "Did the police stop you, too?"

  "Walking's a crime."

  "They flashed their lights on me, but saw I was a woman — " She was no more than sixteen, Montag estimated, with eyes and hair as dark as mulberries, and a paleness about her that was not illness but radiance. "Then they drove away. I'm Clarisse McClellan. And you're Mr. Montag, the fireman."

  They walked together. And she began to talk for both of them.

  "It's a graveyard, this town," she said. "I like to walk just to keep my franchise on the side-walks."

  He looked and it was true. The city was like a dark tomb, every house deep in t
elevision dimness, not a sound or move anywhere.

  "HAVE you ever noticed all the cars rushing?" she asked.

  "On the big boulevards down that way, day and night. I sometimes think they don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly. If you showed them a green blur, oh, yes! they'd say, that's grass! A pink blur, yes, that's roses!" She laughed to herself. "A white blur's a house. Quick brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slow on a highway once. They threw him in jail. Isn't that funny and sad, too?"