its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated

kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and the copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently, gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber-padded paws.

 

Montag slid down the brass pole. He went out to look at the city

and the clouds had cleared away completely, and he lit a cigarette and came back to bend down and look at the Hound. It was like a great bee come home from some field where the honey is full of poison wildness, of insanity and nightmare, its body crammed with that over-rich nectar and now it was sleeping the evil out of itself.

 

"Hello," whispered Montag, fascinated as always with the dead

beast, the living beast.

 

Nights when things got dull, which was every night, the men slid down the brass poles, and set the ticking combinations of the olfactory system of the Hound and let loose rats in the firehouse area-way, and sometimes chickens, and sometimes cats that would have to be drowned anyway, and there would be betting to see which the Hound would seize first. The animals were turned loose. Three seconds later the game was done, the rat, cat, or chicken caught half across the areaway, gripped in gentling paws while a four-inch hollow steel needle plunged down from the proboscis of the Hound to inject massive jolts of morphine or procaine.

         Montag jammed his Seashell to his ear:

         "Police suggest entire population in the Elm Terrace area do as follows: Everyone in every house in every street open a front or rear door or look from the windows. The fugitive cannot escape if everyone in the next minute looks from his house. Ready!"

           Of course! Why hadn't they done it before! Why, in all the years, hadn't this game been tried! Everyone up, everyone out! He couldn't be missed! The only man running alone in the night city, the only man proving his legs!

           "At the count of ten now! One! Two!"

            He felt the city rise.

           "Three!"

            He felt the city turn to its thousands of doors.

          "Four!"

           The people sleepwalking in their hallways.

           "Five!"

           He felt their hands on the doorknobs!

            The smell of the river was cool and like a solid rain. His throat was burnt rust and his eye were wept dry with running. He yelled as if this yell would jet him on, fling him the last hundred yards.

           "Six, seven, eight!"

             The doorknobs turned on five thousand doors.

           "Nine!"

            He ran out away from the last row of houses, on a slope leading down to a solid moving blackness.

             "Ten!"

              The doors opened.

              He imagined thousands on thousands of faces peering into yards, into alleys, and into the sky, faces hid by curtains, pale, night-frightened faces, like gray animals peering from electric caves, faces with gray colorless eyes, gray tongues and gray thoughts looking out through the numb flesh of the face.

He laughed. "That's against the law!" 

 "Oh. Of course." 

"It's fine work. Monday 🤬 Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then 🤬 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 char-colored 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?" 

300 words

     "You want to give up everything? After all these years of working, because, one night, some woman and her books--" 

     "You should have seen her, Millie! "

       "She's nothing to me; she shouldn't have had books. It was her responsibility, she should have thought of that. I hate her. She's got you going and next thing you know we'll be out, no house, no job, nothing." 

       "You weren't there, you didn't see," he said. "There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing." 

         "She was simple-minded." 

          "She was as rational as you and I, more so perhaps, and we burned her." "That's water under the bridge."

         "No, not water; fire. You ever seen a burned house? It smolders for days. Well, this fire'll last me the rest of my life. God! I've been trying to put it out, in my mind, all night. I'm crazy with trying."

 

         "You should have thought of that before becoming a fireman." 

       "Thought! " he said. "Was I given a choice? My grandfather and father were firemen. In my sleep, I ran after them."

 The parlor was playing a dance tune.

               "This is the day you go on the early shift," said Mildred. 

           "You should have gone two hours ago. I just noticed." 

             "It's not just the woman that died," said Montag. "Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before." He got out of bed. 

      "It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I came along in two minutes and boom! it's all over." 

 

  Montag placed his hand on the woman's elbow. "You can come

with me."

   "No," she said. "Thank you, anyway."

   "I'm counting to ten," said Beatty. "One. Two."

   "Please," said Montag.

   "Go on," said the woman.

   "Three. Four."

   "Here." Montag pulled at the woman.

   The woman replied quietly, "I want to stay here"

   "Five. Six."

  "You can stop counting," she said. She opened the fingers of one

hand slightly and in the palm of the hand was a single slender object.

   An ordinary kitchen match.

  The sight of it rushed the men out and down away from the house. Captain Beatty, keeping his dignity, backed slowly through the front door, his pink face burnt and shiny from a thousand fires and night excitements. God, thought Montag, how true! Always at night the alarm comes. Never by day! Is it because the fire is prettier by night? More spectacle, a better show? The pink face of Beatty now showed the faintest panic in the door. The woman's hand twitched on the single matchstick. The fumes of kerosene bloomed up about her. Montag felt the hidden book pound like a heart against his chest.

  "Go on," said the woman, and Montag felt himself back away and away out of the door, after Beatty, down the steps, across the lawn, where the path of kerosene lay like the track of some evil snail.

  On the front porch where she had come to weigh them quietly with her eyes, her quietness a condemnation, the woman stood motionless.

  Beatty flicked his fingers to spark the kerosene.

  He was too late. Montag gasped.

  The woman on the porch reached out with contempt for them all, and struck the kitchen match against the railing.