FAHRENHEIT 451(华氏451度).doc

RAY BRADBURY
Abridged for ELL

FAHRENHEIT 451

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 head, with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.
Montag grinned driven back by flame. He knew that when he returned to the firehouse, he might wink at himself 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 helmet and shined it, he hung his flameproof jacket neatly; he showered , 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 he got in to go home.
He left the subway whistling. 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.
He had felt that a moment before his making the turn, someone had been there. Each time he made the turn, he saw something vanishing swiftly across a lawn before he could focus his eyes or speak.
But now, tonight, he slowed almost to a stop. Had he heard the faintest whisper? Breathing? Or was 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. He almost thought he heard the motion of her hands as she walked.
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 looking at Montag with eyes so dark and shining and alive, that he felt he had said something quite wonderful.
"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.
"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.
"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.
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 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 'parlor 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. 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
dull, only rarer. My uncle was arrested another time-did I tell you?-for being a dull. 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. 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 thought to himself. 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.
"What?" asked Montag of himself. How rarely did other people make you think about your innermost thoughts?
He opened the bedroom door. The room was not empty. He felt his smile slide away.
He was not happy. He was not happy. He said the words to himself. He recognized this as the true state of affairs.
Without turning on the light he imagined how this room would look. His wife Mildred stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of a tomb. And in her ears the little IPods, 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.
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.
He stood very straight and listened to the person on the dark bed in the completely featureless night. He still did not want outside light. He pulled out his igniter, gave it a flick....
Two moonstones looked up at him in the light of his small hand-held fire.
"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 her breath going in and out.
Montag then saw 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 opened his own mouth and let their shriek come down and out between his bared teeth. He felt his hand plunge toward the telephone. He felt his lips move, brushing the mouthpiece of the phone.
"Emergency hospital." A terrible whisper.
A rescue team came.
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? 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 piece of marble. 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 hammer, 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. 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 earthimble. 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 took up their load of machine and tube, 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 color 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 drycleaner's and emptied the pockets and steamed and cleansed it and relocked 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 finding the empty bottle of sleeping pills. Only an hour, but the world had melted down and sprung up in a new and colorless form.
Laughter blew across the moon-colored 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