A Pleasure to Burn (37 page)

Montag waited ten minutes in the shadows. Finally a voice called: “All right, you can come out now.”

He shrank back.

It's okay,” said the voice. “You're welcome here.”

He let himself stand forth and then he walked tiredly toward the fire, peering at the men and their dirty clothing.

“We're not very elegant,” said the man who seemed to be the leader of the little group. “Sit down. Have some coffee.”

He watched the dark steaming mixture poured into a collapsible cup which was handed him straight off. He sipped it gingerly. He felt the scald on his lips. The men were watching him. Their faces were unshaved but their beards were much too neat, and their hands were clean. They had stood up, as if to welcome a guest, and now they sat down again. Montag sipped. “Thanks,” he said.

The leader said, “My name is Granger, as good a name as any. You don't have to tell us your name at all.” He remembered something. “Here, before you finish the coffee, better take this.” He held out a small bottle of colorless fluid.

“What is it?”

“Drink it. Whoever you are, you wouldn't be here unless you were in trouble. Either that, or you're a Government spy, in which case we are only a bunch of men traveling nowhere and hurting no one. In any event, whoever you are, an hour after you've drunk this fluid, you'll be someone else. It does something to the perspiratory system—changes the sweat content. If you want to stay here you'll have to drink it, otherwise you'll have to move on. If there's a Hound after you, you'd be bad company.”

“I think I took care of the Hound,” said Montag, and drank the tasteless stuff. The fluid stung his throat. He was sick for a moment; there was a blackness in his eyes, and roaring in his head. Then it passed.

 

“T
HAT'S BETTER
, M
R.
M
ONTAG
,”
said Granger, and snorted at his social error. “I beg your pardon—” He poked his thumb at a small portable TV beyond the fire. “We've been watching. They videoed a picture of you, not a very good resemblance. We hoped you'd head this way.”

“It's been quite a chase.”

“Yes.” Granger snapped the TV on. It was no bigger than a handbag, weighing some seven pounds, mostly screen. A voice from the set cried:

“The chase is now veering south along the river. On the eastern shore the police helicopters are converging on Avenue 87 and Elm Grove Park.”

“You're safe,” said Granger. “They're faking. You threw them off at the river, but they can't admit it. Must be a million people watching that bunch of scoundrels hound after you. They'll catch you in five minutes.”

“But if they're ten miles away, how can they … ?”

“Watch.”

He turned the TV picture brighter.

“Up that street there, somewhere, right now, out for an early morning walk. A rarity, an odd one. Don't think the police don't know the habits of queer ducks like that, men who walk early in the morning just for the hell of it. Anyway, up that street the police know that every morning a certain man walks alone, for the air, to smoke. Call him Billings or Brown or Baumgartner, but the search is getting nearer to him every minute. See?”

In the video screen, a man turned a corner. The Electric Hound rushed forward, screeching. The police converged upon the man.

The TV voice cried, “There's Montag now! The search is over!”

The innocent man stood watching the crowd come on. In his hand was a cigarette, half smoked. He looked at the Hound and his jaw dropped and he started to say something when a godlike voice boomed, “All right, Montag, don't move! We've got you, Montag!”

By the small fire, with seven other men, Mr. Montag sat, ten miles removed, the light of the video screen on his face.

“Don't run, Montag!”

The man turned, bewildered. The crowd roared. The Hound leaped up.

“The poor son-of-a-bitch,” said Granger, bitterly.

A dozen shots rattled out. The man crumpled.

“Montag is dead, the search is over, a criminal is given his due,” said the announcer.

The camera trucked forward. Just before it showed the dead man's face, however, the screen went black.

“We now switch you to the Sky Room of the Hotel Lux in San Francisco for a half hour of dance music by—”

 

G
RANGER TURNED IT OFF
.
“They didn't show the man's face, naturally. Better if everyone thinks it's Montag.

Montag said nothing, but simply looked at the blank screen. He could not move or speak.

Granger put out his hand. “Welcome back from the dead, Mr. Montag.” Montag took the hand, numbly. The man said, “My real name is Clement, former occupant of the T.S. Eliot Chair at Cambridge. That was before it became an Electrical Engineering school. This gentleman here is Dr. Simmons from U.C.L.A.”

“I don't belong here,” said Montag, at last, slowly. “I've been an idiot, all the way down the line, bungled and messed and tripped myself up.”

“Anger makes idiots of us all, I'm afraid. You can only be angry so long, then you explode and do the wrong things. It can't be helped now.”

“I shouldn't have come here. It might endanger you.”

“We're used to that. We all make mistakes, or we wouldn't be here ourselves. When we were separate individuals, all we had was rage. I struck a fireman in the face, once. He'd come to burn my library back about 40 years ago. I had to run. I've been running ever since. And Simmons here …”

“I quoted Donne in the midst of a genetics lecture one afternoon. For no reason at all. Just started quoting Donne. You see? Fools, all of us.”

They glanced at the fire, self-consciously.

“So you want to join us, Mr. Montag?”

“Yes.”

“What have you to offer?”

“Nothing. I thought I had the Book of Job, but I haven't even got that.”

“The Book of Job would do very well. Where was it?”

“Here.” Montag touched his head.

“Ah,” said Granger-Clement. He smiled and nodded.

“What's wrong, isn't it all right?” said Montag.

“Better than all right—perfect! Mr. Montag, you have hit upon the secret of, if you want to give it a term, our organization. Living books, Mr. Montag, living books. Inside the old skull where no one can see.” He turned to Simmons. “Do we have a Book of Job?”

“Only one. A man named Harris in Youngstown.”

“Mr. Montag.” The man reached out and held Montag's shoulder firmly. “Walk slowly, be careful, take your health seriously. If anything should happen to Harris, you are the Book of Job. Do you see how important you are?”

“But I've forgotten it!”

“Nonsense, nothing is ever forgotten. Mislaid, perhaps, but not forgotten. We have ways, several new methods of hypnosis, to shake down the clinkers there. You'll remember, don't fear.”

“I've been
trying
to remember.”

“Don't try. Relax. It'll come when we need it. Some people are quick studies but don't know it. Some of God's simplest creatures have the ability called eidetic or photographic memory, the ability to memorize entire pages of print at a glance. It has nothing to do with IQ. No offense, Montag. It varies. Would you like, one day, to read Plato's
Republic?
”

“Of course.”

Stewart nodded to a man who had been sitting to one side.

“Mr. Plato, if you please.”

 

T
HE MAN BEGAN TO TALK
.
He looked at Montag idly, his hands filling a corncob pipe, unaware of the words tumbling from his lips. He talked for two minutes without a pause or stumble.

Granger made the smallest move of his fingers. The man cut off. “Perfect word-for-word memory, every word important, every word Plato's,” said Granger.

“And,” said the man who was Plato, “I don't understand a damned word of it. I just say it. It's up to you to understand.”

“Don't you understand
any
of it?”

“None of it. But I can't get it out. Once it's in, it's like solidified glue in a bottle, there for good. Mr. Granger says it's important. That's good enough for me.”

“We're old friends,” said Granger. “We hadn't seen each other since we were boys. We met a few years ago on that track, somewhere between here and Seattle, walking, me running away from firemen, he running from cities.”

“Never liked cities,” said the one who was Plato. “Always felt that cities owned men, that was all, and used men to keep themselves going, to keep machines oiled and dusted. So I got out. And then I met Granger and he found out that I had this eidetic memory, as he calls it, and he gave me a book to read and then we burned the book ourselves so we wouldn't be caught with it. And now I'm Plato; that's what I am.”

“He is also Socrates.”

The man nodded.

“And Schopenhauer.”

Another nod.

“And John Dewey.”

“All that in one bottle. You wouldn't think there was room. But I can open my head like a concertina and play it. There's plenty of room if you don't try to think about what you've memorized. It's when you start thinking that all of a sudden it's crowded. I don't think about anything except eating, sleeping, and traveling. I let you people do the thinking when you hear what I recite. Oh, there's
plenty
of room, believe me.”

“So here we are, Mr. Montag. Mr. Simmons is really Mr. John Donne and Mr. Darwin and Mr. Aristophanes. These other gentlemen are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And
I
am Ruth.”

Everyone laughed quietly.

“You see, we are not without humor in this melancholy age. I'm also bits and pieces, Mr. Montag, snatches of Byron and Shelley and Shaw and Washington Irving and Shakespeare. I'm one of those kaleidoscopes. Hold me up to the sun, give a shake, watch the patterns. And you are Mr. Job, and in half an hour or less, a war will begin. While those people in the anthill across the river have been busy chasing Montag, as if he were the cause of all their nervous anxiety and frustration, the war has been getting underway. By this time tomorrow the world will belong to the little green towns and the rusted railroad tracks and the men walking on them; that's us. The cities will be soot and ash and baking powder.”

The TV rang a bell. Granger switched it on.

“Final negotiations are arranged for a conference today with the enemy government—”

Granger snapped it off.

“Well, what do you think Montag?”

“I think I was pretty blind and ferocious trying to go at it the way I did, planting books and calling firemen.”

“You did what you thought you had to do. But our way is simpler and better and the thing we wish to do is keep the knowledge intact and safe and not to excite or anger anyone; for then, if we are destroyed, the knowledge is most certainly dead. We are model citizens in our own special way—we walk the tracks, we lie in the hills at night, we bother no one, and the city have none, and our faces have been changed by plastic surgery, as have our fingerprints. So we wait quietly for the day when the machines are dented junk and then we hope to walk by and say ‘Here we are,' to those who survived this war, and we'll say ‘Have you come to your senses now? Perhaps a few books will do you some good.'”

“But will they listen to you?”

“Perhaps not. Then we'll have to wait some more. Maybe a few hundred years. Maybe they'll never listen; we can't
make
them. So we'll pass the books on to our children in their minds, and let them wait in turn, on other people.
Some
day someone will need us. This can't last forever.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Thousands on the road, on the rails, bums on the outside, libraries on the inside. It wasn't really planned; it grew. Each man had a book he wanted to remember and did. Then we discovered each other and over twenty years or so got a loose network together and made a plan. The important thing we had to learn was that we were not important, we were not to be pedants, we were not to feel superior, we were nothing more than covers for books, of no individual significance whatever. Some of us live in small towns—chapter one of
Walden
in Nantucket, chapter two in Reading, chapter three in Waukesha, each according to his ability. Some can learn a few lines, some a lot.”

“The books are safe then.”

“Couldn't be safer. Why there's one village in North Carolina, some 200 people, no bomb'll ever touch their town, which is the complete
Meditations
of Marcus Aurelius. You could pick up that town, almost, and flip the pages, a page to a person. People who wouldn't dream of being seen with a book gladly memorized a page. You can't be caught with that. And when the war's over and we've time and need, the books can be written again. The people will be called in one by one to recite what they know and it'll be in print again until another Dark Age, when maybe we'll have to do the whole damned thing over again, man being the fool he is.”