A Pleasure to Burn

by Ray Bradbury

  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.

  “THAT’S BETTER, MR. MONTAG,” 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—”

  GRANGER 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.”

  THE 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.”

  “What do we do tonight?” asked Montag.

  “Just wait, that’s all.”

  MONTAG LOOKED AT THE MEN’S FACES, old, all of them, in the firelight, and certainly tired. Perhaps he was looking for a brightness, a resolve, a triumph over tomorrow that wasn’t really there. Perhaps he expected these men to be proud with the knowledge they carried, to glow with the wisdom as lanterns glow with the fire they contain.

  But all the light came from the campfire here, and these men seemed no different than any other man who has run a long run, searched a long search, seen precious things destroyed, seen old friends die, and now, very late in time, were gathered together to watch the machines die, or hope they might die, even while cherishing a last paradoxical love for those very machines which could spin out a material with happiness in the warp and terror in the woof, so interblended that a man might go insane trying to tell the design to himself, and his place in it.

  They weren’t at all certain that what they carried in their heads might make every future dawn dawn brighter. They were sure of nothing save that the books were on file behind their solemn eyes and that if man put his mind to them properly, something of dignity and happiness might be regained.

  Montag looked from one face to another.

  “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” said someone.

  A soft laughter moved among them.

  Montag turned to look at the city across the river.

  “My wife’s in that city now,” he said.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Look,” said Simmons.

  Montag glanced up.

  The bombardment was finished and over, even while the seeds were in the windy sky. The bombs were there, the jet-planes were there, for the merest trifle of an instant, like grain thrown across the heavens by a great hand, and the bombs drifted with a dreadful slowness down upon the morning city where all of the people looked up at their destiny coming upon them like the lid of a dream shutting tight and become an instant later a red and powdery nightmare.

  The bombardment to all military purposes was finished. Once the planes had sighted their target, alerted their bombardier at five thousand miles an hour, as quick as the whisper of a knife through the sky, the war was finished. Once the trigger was pulled, once the bombs took flight, it was over.

  Now, a full three seconds, all of the time in history, before the bombs struck, the enemy ships themselves were gone, half around the visible world, it seemed, like bullets in which an island savage might not believe because they were unseen, yet the heart is struck suddenly, the body falls into separate divisions, the blood is astounded to be free on the air, and the brain gives up all its precious memories and, still puzzled, dies.

  THIS WAR WAS NOT TO BE BELIEVED. It was merely a gesture. It was the flirt of a great metal hand over the city and a voice saying, “Disintegrate. Leave not one stone upon another. Perish. Die.”

  Montag held the bombs in the sky for a precious moment, with his mind and his hands. “Run!” he cried to Faber. To Clarisse: “Run!” To Mildred, “Get
out, get out of there!” But Clarisse, he remembered, was dead. And Faber was out; there, in the deep valleys of the country, went the dawn train on its way from one desolation to another. Though the desolation had not yet arrived, was still in the air, it was as certain as man could make it. Before the train had gone another fifty yards on the track, its destination would be meaningless, its point of departure made from a metropolis into a junkyard.

  And Mildred!

  “Get out, run!” he thought.

  He could see Mildred in that metropolis now, in the half second remaining, as the bombs were perhaps three inches, three small inches shy of her hotel building. He could see her leaning into the TV set as if all of the hunger of looking would find the secret of her sleepless unease there. Mildred, leaning anxiously, nervously into that tubular world as into a crystal ball to find happiness.

  The first bomb struck.

  “Mildred!”

  Perhaps the television station went first into oblivion.

  Montag saw the screen go dark in Mildred’s face, and heard her screaming, because in the next millionth part of time left, she would see her own face reflected there, hungry and alone, in a mirror instead of a crystal ball, and it would be such a wildly empty face that she would at last recognize it, and stare at the ceiling almost with welcome as it and the entire structure of the hotel blasted down upon her, carrying her with a million pounds of brick, metal and people down into the cellar, there to dispose of them in its unreasonable way.

  “I remember now,” thought Montag, “where we first met. It was in Chicago. Yes, now I remember.”

  Montag found himself on his face. The concussion had knocked the air across the river, turned the men down like dominoes in a line, blown out the fire like a last candle, and caused the trees to mourn with a great voice of wind passing away south.

  Montag lay with his face toward the city. Now it, instead of the bombs, was in the air. They had displaced each other. For another of those impossible instants the city stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped or strived to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in gouts of dust and sparkles of torn metal into a city not unlike a reversed avalanche, formed of flame and steel and stone, a door where a window ought to be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell.