www.onlinereadfreebooks.com Open in urlscan Pro
2a06:98c1:3121::c  Public Scan

Form analysis
0 forms found in the DOM

Text Content

onlinereadfreebooks
 * Search


Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14


FAHRENHEIT 451




Thank you for purchasing this Simon & Schuster eBook.

Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content,
and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Simon &
Schuster.

or visit us online to sign up at

eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com





Also by Ray Bradbury

NOVELS

The Martian Chronicles Fahrenheit 451

Dandelion Wine

Something Wicked This Way Comes Death Is a Lonely Business A Graveyard for
Lunatics Green Shadows, White Whale From the Dust Returned Let's All Kill
Constance Farewell Summer

Ahmed and the Oblivion Machines: A Fable SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

Dark Carnival

The Illustrated Man

The Golden Apples of the Sun The October Country

A Medicine for Melancholy R is for Racket

The Machineries of Joy The Autumn People

The Vintage Bradbury S is for Space

Twice 22

I Sing the Body Electric Long After Midnight

The Small Assassin

The Mummies of Guanajuato Beyond 1984: Remembrance of Things Future The Attic
Where the Meadow Greens The Ghosts of Forever The Last Circus and the
Electrocution The Stories of Ray Bradbury The Complete Poems of Ray Bradbury The
Love Affair

Dinosaur Tales

A Memory of Murder

The Climate of Palettes Classic Stories 1

Classic Stories 2

Quicker Than the Eye Driving Blind

Ray Bradbury Collected Short Stories One More for the Road Bradbury Stories

The Cat's Pajamas

The Sound of Thunder and Other Stories The Dragon Who Ate His Tale Now and
Forever

Summer Morning, Summer Night We'll Always Have Paris A Pleasure to Burn

NONFICTION

The Essence of Creative Writing Zen and the Art of Writing The God in Science
Fiction Yestermorrow

Bradburry Speaks





SIMON & SCHUSTER

Rockefeller Center

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.

Copyright (c) 1951, 1953, 1967 by Ray Bradbury

Copyright renewed (c) 1979, 1981, 1995 by Ray Bradbury

A shorter version of Fahrenheit 451 appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction under the
title The Fireman, copyright (c) 1950 by World Editions, Inc.

Copyright renewed 1978 by Ray Bradbury.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions
thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster
Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition January 2012



SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster,
Inc.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon
& Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com.

ISBN 978-1-4516-7326-5

ISBN: 978-1-4516-7331-9 (pbk)

eISBN: 978-1-43914267-7





This one, with gratitude, is for

DON CONGDON





Contents


one: The Hearth and the Salamander

two: The Sieve and the Sand

three: Burning Bright





one

The Hearth

and the Salamander


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 stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame
with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped
up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He
strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove
a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books
died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling
whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.

Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame. He
knew that when he returned to the firehouse, he might wink at himself, a
minstrel man, burnt-corked, 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 beetle-colored helmet and shined it; he hung his flameproof
jacket neatly; he showered luxuriously, 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 the silent air-propelled train slid soundlessly down its lubricated
flue in the earth and let him out with a great puff of warm air onto the
cream-tiled escalator rising to the suburb.

Whistling, he let the escalator waft him into the still night air. He walked
toward the corner, 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
just around the corner here, moving in the starlight toward his house. He had
felt that a moment prior to his making the turn, someone had been there. The air
seemed charged with a special calm as if someone had waited there, quietly, and
only a moment before he came, simply turned to a shadow and let him through.
Perhaps his nose detected a faint perfume, perhaps the skin on the backs of his
hands, on his face, felt the temperature rise at this one spot where a person's
standing might raise the immediate atmosphere ten degrees for an instant. There
was no understanding it. Each time he made the turn, he saw only the white,
unused, buckling sidewalk, with perhaps, on one night, something vanishing
swiftly across a lawn before he could focus his eyes or speak.

But now tonight, he slowed almost to a stop. His inner mind, reaching out to
turn the corner for him, had heard the faintest whisper. Breathing? Or was the
atmosphere compressed merely by 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, letting the motion of
the wind and the leaves carry her forward. Her head was half bent to watch her
shoes stir the circling leaves. Her face was slender and milk-white, and in it
was a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless
curiosity. It was a look, almost, of pale surprise; 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, and the
infinitely small sound now, the white stir of her face turning when she
discovered she was a moment away from a man who stood in the middle of the
pavement waiting.

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
regarding 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 our new neighbor, 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.

He felt she was walking in a circle about him, turning him end for end, shaking
him quietly, and emptying his pockets, without once moving herself.

"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 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 bright as snow in the
moonlight, and he knew she was working his questions around, seeking the best
answers she could possibly give.

"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
allon again too soon. . . ."

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. Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk
crystal with a soft and constant light in it. It was not the hysterical light of
electricity but--what? But the strangely comfortable and rare and gently
flattering light of the candle. One time, as a child, in a power failure, his
mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of
rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew
comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping
that the power might not come on again too soon. . . .

And then Clarisse McClellan said:

"Do you mind if I ask? How long've you worked at being 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, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn
'em to ashes, then burn 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?"

"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, hers thoughtful, his a kind of
clenching and uncomfortable silence in which he shot her accusing glances. 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 pedestrian, only rarer. My uncle was arrested another time--did I tell
you?--for being a pedestrian. 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--running in the moonlight. 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 asked the quiet rooms. He
stood looking up at the ventilator grill in the hall and suddenly remembered
that something lay hidden behind the grill, 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. She had a very thin face
like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a
night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and
the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and
knowing what it has to tell of the night passing swiftly on toward further
darknesses, but moving also toward a new sun.

"What?" asked Montag of that other self, the subconscious idiot that ran
babbling at times, quite independent of will, habit, and conscience.

He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for
how many people did you know that refracted your own light to you? People were
more often--he searched for a simile, found one in his work--torches, blazing
away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and
throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?

What incredible power of identification the girl had; she was like the eager
watcher of a marionette show, anticipating each flicker of an eyelid, each
gesture of his hand, each flick of a finger, the moment before it began. How
long had they walked together? Three minutes? Five? Yet how large that time
seemed now. How immense a figure she was on the stage before him; what a shadow
she threw on the wall with her slender body! He felt that if his eye itched, she
might blink. And if the muscles of his jaws stretched imperceptibly, she would
yawn long before he would.

Why, he thought, now that I think of it, she almost seemed to be waiting for me
there, in the street, so damned late at night. . . .

He opened the bedroom door.

It was like coming into the cold marbled room of a mausoleum after the moon has
set. Complete darkness, not a hint of the silver world outside, the windows
tightly shut, the chamber a tomb-world where no sound from the great city could
penetrate. The room was not empty.

He listened.

The little mosquito-delicate dancing hum in the air, the electrical murmur of a
hidden wasp snug in its special pink warm nest. The music was almost loud enough
so he could follow the tune.

He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over and down on itself like a tallow
skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing
and now blown out. Darkness. He was not happy. He was not happy. He said the
words to himself. He recognized this as the true state of affairs. He wore his
happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and
there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.

Without turning on the light he imagined how this room would look. His wife
stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of a
tomb, her eyes fixed to the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable.
And in her ears the little Seashells, 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. Every
night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating
her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years
that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third
time.

The room was cold b
No Previous Page Next Page »


NAME THE BOOKMARK

×
Bookmark Name it so you can find it faster next time.
Save changes Close

Should you have any enquiry, please contact us via onlinereadfreebooks