© Загородняя И. Б., адаптация, сокращение, словарь, 2023

© ООО «Издательство «Антология», 2023

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FAHRENHEIT 451:

The temperature at which book-paper

catches fire and burns

Part I

It was a special pleasure to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting kerosene upon the world, he looked like some amazing conductor wearing a symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his head. He flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a fire that burned the evening sky red, yellow, and black. The books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind.

Montag grinned.

He knew that when he returned to the firehouse, he might wink at himself, a minstrel man^[1], 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 helmet and shined it, he hung his flameproof jacket neatly; he showered with great pleasure. Then he walked out of the fire station and along the midnight street toward the subway where the silent, air-propelled train slid soundlessly down the tube in the earth and let him out to the escalator rising to the suburb.

Whistling, he walked out into the still night air. He walked toward the corner. Before he reached the corner, however, he slowed 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 toward his house. He had felt that a moment before he made the turn, someone had been there. There was no understanding it. Each time he made the turn, he saw only the white, unused sidewalk.

But now, tonight, he slowed almost to a stop. He turned the corner.

The autumn leaves blew over the 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 face was slender and milk-white; 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. She was a moment away from a man who stood in the middle of the pavement waiting.

The girl stopped. She stood looking at 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 neighbor, aren’t you?”

“And you must be” – she raised her eyes from his professional symbols – “the fireman.”

“How oddly you say that.”

“I could say 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.

“Kerosene,” he said, “is like 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 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 was as bright as snow in the moonlight.

“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. But you’re just a man, after all^[2]…”

Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk crystal with a soft and constant light in it. And then Clarisse McClellan said:

“Do you mind if I ask? How long have you worked as a fireman?”

“Since I was twenty, ten years ago.”

“Do you ever read any of the books you burn?”

He laughed. “That’s against the law!”

“Oh. Of course.”

“It’s fine work. Monday burn Millay^[3], Wednesday Whitman^[4], Friday Faulkner^[5], burn them to ashes, then burn the ashes. That’s our ofcif ial 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.”

“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.”

“You laugh when I haven’t been funny and you answer right of.f 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 insult you. 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 black 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, 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 TV 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.”

“I didn’t know that!” Montag laughed abruptly.

“I am sure 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.

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 so many house lights.

“Oh, just my mother and father and uncle sitting around, talking. Oh, we’re most peculiar.”

“But what do you talk about?”

She laughed at this. “Good night!” She turned around and started walking. Then she remembered something and came back to look at him with wonder and curiosity. “Are you happy?” she said.

“Am I what?” he asked.

But she was gone. Her front door shut gently.

“Happy! 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 looked at him now. He moved his eyes quickly away.

He opened the bedroom door.

It was like the cold room of a mausoleum after the moon had set. Complete darkness, the windows are tightly shut. The room was not empty.

He felt his smile slide away. Darkness. He was not happy. He was not happy. He said the words to himself. He recognized this as the true state of afaf irs^[6]. He wore his happiness like a mask.

Without turning on the light, he imagined how this room could look. His wife, Mildred, is stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, with her eyes fixed to the ceiling, immovable. And in her ears are the little Seashells, the radios, and there is an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind.

He did not wish to open the curtains, for he did not want the moon to come into the room. So, he felt his way toward his open, separate, and therefore cold bed.

Suddenly his foot hit an object on the floor. He stood very straight and listened to the person on the dark bed. The breath coming out of the nostrils was faint.

He still did not want outside light. He pulled out his igniter, felt the salamander engraved on its silver disc, gave it a flick…

“Mildred!”

Her face was like a snow-covered island. There was only the singing of the radios in her ears, and her eyes were all glass, and breath was going in and out, softly, faintly, in and out of her nostrils.

The object he had hit with his foot was 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 little flare.

As he stood there the sky over the house screamed. There was a tremendous sound. The jet-bombs^[7] were going over, going over, going over, one two, one two, one two, six of them, nine of them, twelve of them… The house shook. The flare went out in his hand. He took the telephone.

The jets^[8] were gone. He felt his lips move. “Emergency hospital.”

They had this machine. They had two machines, really. One of them slid down into your stomach like a black cobra down a well. It drank up the green matter. Did it suck out all the poisons accumulated with the years? The operator stood smoking a cigarette. The other machine was working too.

The other machine was operated by an equally indifferent fellow in reddish-brown overalls. This machine pumped all of the blood from the body and replaced it with fresh blood.

“We have to clean them out both ways,” said the operator, standing over the silent woman. “It’s no use cleaning the stomach if you don’t clean the blood. Leave that stuff in the blood and the blood hits the brain, bang, and the brain just gives up.”

“Stop it!” said Montag.

“I was just explaining,” 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 smoking. “That’s fifty dollars.”

“First, why don’t you tell me if she’ll be all right?”

“Sure, she’ll be O. K.”

“Neither of you is an M. D.^[9] 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. It started a few years ago, so we had the special machines built. You don’t need an M. D. in cases like this; all you need is two handymen, who clean up the problem in half an hour. Look” – he started for the door – “we’ve got to go. Just had another call. Ten blocks from here. Someone else just took all the pills in his bottle. Call if you need us again. Keep her quiet. She’ll wake up hungry. Good-bye.”

And the men left.

Montag sank down into a chair and looked at this woman.

“Mildred,” he said, at last.

Half an hour passed.

The bloodstream in this woman was new and it seemed it had 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.

He got up, 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 his return home, 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 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 sincere, coming from the house that was so brightly lit this late at night while all the other houses were dark. Montag heard the voices talking.

He moved out through the french windows^[10] and crossed the lawn. 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, 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^[11]. Blow your nose on a person, wad them, flush them away^[12], reach for another, blow, wad, flush. Everyone is using everyone else’s coat-tails.”

Montag moved back to his own house, left the window wide, checked Mildred, covered her carefully, and then lay down in his bed.

One drop of rain. Clarisse. Another drop. Mildred. A third. The uncle. A fourth. The fire tonight. One, two, three, four, five, Clarisse, Mildred, uncle, fire, tablets, tissues, blow, wad, flush. Rain. The storm. Thunder falling downstairs. The whole world pouring down.

“I don’t know anything anymore,” he said, and let a sleeping-tablet dissolve on his tongue.

At nine in the morning, Mildred’s bed was empty.

Montag got up quickly, ran down the hall and stopped at the kitchen door.

Toast popped out of the silver toaster, was held by a metal hand that drenched it with melted butter.

Mildred watched the toast delivered to her plate. She had both ears plugged with electronic bees. She looked up suddenly, saw him, and nodded.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She was an expert at lip-reading from ten years of using Seashell ear-tabs. She nodded again.

Montag sat down.

His wife said, “I don’t know why I am so hungry.”

“Last night,” he began.

“I didn’t sleep well. I feel terrible,” she said. “God, I’m hungry. I can’t understand 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? I 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. “I hope I didn’t do anything foolish at the party.”

“No,” he said, quietly.

The toaster gave out a piece of buttered bread for him.

He held it in his hand, feeling grateful.

“You don’t look good,” 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 room was reading her script. She paused 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.

“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.

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 which comes on the wall-to-wall circuit in ten minutes. They mailed me my part this morning. 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, see? And I say, I say —” She paused and ran her finger under a line in the script. “I say, ‘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 afof rd to have the fourth wall installed. How soon could 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. “If we had a fourth wall, this room wouldn’t be ours at all, but all kinds of exotic people’s rooms. We could do without^[13] 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?”

“Really?” 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 center 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 doing 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 like it if you tried.” 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 of,f it means I’m in love. Has it?”

He had to 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.

She peered under his chin and frowned.

“Well?” he said.

“What a shame,” she said. “You’re not in love with anyone.”