The section

The book opens in a city in an unnamed future, in autumn. Guy Montag is a fireman, and his job is to burn books. Tonight he has sprayed kerosene on a house and set it alight, and he loved it. The books flapped and died like birds on the lawn. He grins a fierce, burnt grin that never quite leaves his face. Back at the firehouse he hangs up his black helmet, numbered 451, showers, and slides down the brass pole. Then he rides a silent, air-driven subway train home to the suburbs.

For several nights he has had a strange feeling at one street corner, as if someone had just been standing there. Tonight he turns the corner and meets a girl in a white dress, walking through the falling leaves. She is Clarisse McClellan, his new neighbour. She is seventeen and calls herself crazy, a joke from her uncle. She likes to walk all night, smell things and watch the sun rise. She studies Montag closely. He has been a fireman for ten years, since he was twenty. She asks if he ever reads the books he burns. He laughs and says that is against the law.

Clarisse asks odd questions. She has heard that firemen once put fires out instead of starting them. Montag says houses have always been fireproof. She notices that he laughs and answers without thinking. She talks about jet cars that race so fast that drivers see only blurs. Her uncle was jailed for driving too slowly, and once for walking. She tells Montag there is dew on the grass in the morning and a man in the moon. He realises he can't remember the last time he looked. At her house every light is on, because her family sits up talking. Before going in, she turns and asks if he is happy.

At home, Montag tells himself of course he is happy. He glances at the ventilator grille in the hall, where something is hidden, and quickly looks away. He thinks about how Clarisse's face seemed to reflect him back, like a mirror. He remembers only one other talk like it, with an old man in a park a year ago. Then he steps into his dark bedroom and admits the truth: he is not happy. His happiness was a mask, and the girl has run off with it.

His wife, Mildred, lies on her bed, eyes open, with tiny radios called Seashells in her ears. For two years she has fallen asleep to them every night. Montag's foot kicks something on the floor. By the light of his igniter he sees an empty bottle that held thirty sleeping pills that morning. Jet bombers scream over the house as he calls the emergency hospital. Two bored workmen, not doctors, arrive with two machines. One pumps out her stomach. The other swaps her blood for fresh blood. They say they get nine or ten cases like this a night. They charge fifty dollars and leave for the next call. Montag sits by Mildred, thinking that nobody knows anyone anymore.

The section

It is two in the morning, an hour after the men saved Mildred. Montag opens the windows. Across the lawn, laughter drifts from Clarisse's brightly lit house. He stands in the shadows outside, wishing he could go in and listen. A man's voice, probably the uncle, says people today use each other like tissues and throw each other away. Montag goes home, tucks Mildred in and lies awake. The night's events tumble through his head like rain.

At nine the next morning, Mildred is in the kitchen, eating buttered toast with her Seashells in. She can lip-read after ten years of wearing them. She is starving but remembers nothing. She guesses there was a party. Montag lets her believe it. That rainy afternoon he tells her she swallowed all her pills. She calmly denies it and says she would never do that. She is busy with a script for a play on the wall-to-wall TV. The viewer at home reads the one missing part. Her lines are things like agreeing that everything is fine. She wants a fourth TV wall for two thousand dollars, a third of his yearly pay. Montag reminds her they are still paying for the third wall. He asks if the play ends happily. She hasn't read that far.

Outside, Clarisse is walking in the rain, tasting it. She rubs a dandelion under her chin. The flower's yellow mark, she says, means she is in love. She tries it on Montag, and there is no mark. He insists he is in love, but he can't picture any face to go with the words. She apologises for upsetting him. She has to see a psychiatrist, she says, because people want to know why she walks in the woods, watches birds and just sits and thinks. She will turn seventeen next month. Then she asks how he became a fireman. He isn't like the others, she says, because he listens and looks at the moon when she points at it. Montag feels split in two. He sends her off. Then, alone, he tips his head back and lets the rain fall into his mouth.

At one in the morning, at the firehouse, Montag looks at the Mechanical Hound in its kennel. It is a machine like a giant insect, with eight legs, a sharp nose for smells and a steel needle that injects drugs. On dull nights the firemen let rats, cats or chickens loose and bet on which the Hound will catch first. Montag stopped joining in two years ago. When he touches its nose, the Hound growls and pushes out its needle. He escapes up the brass pole.

He tells the Captain the Hound doesn't like him. The Captain says it can't like or dislike. It only does what it is set to do. Montag points out that someone could set it to his body's chemistry. It has threatened him twice before, last month. The Captain promises to have it checked. Montag thinks about the thing hidden behind his grille at home. Could someone have told the Hound? The Captain, whose name is Beatty, asks if Montag has a guilty conscience, then laughs softly.

The section

For seven days, Clarisse is everywhere Montag looks. She shakes a walnut tree, knits on the lawn and leaves him small gifts: flowers, chestnuts, autumn leaves pinned to paper. Every day she walks him to the corner. He tells her he feels he has known her for years and that she makes him feel like a father. She asks why he has no children. He says his wife never wanted any. She says his laugh sounds more relaxed now.

Clarisse explains why she isn't at school. They call her anti-social. To her, school is TV lessons, sports and endless answers, with no questions ever asked. After it, young people smash windows and wreck cars at Fun Parks. Six of her friends were shot in the last year, and ten died in car crashes. She is afraid of people her own age. She likes to watch people instead, on the subway and in cafes, and she has noticed that nobody really talks about anything. They name cars and clothes and all say the same things. Her uncle says things were different once.

At the firehouse, the other men tease Montag. One mentions a fireman in Seattle who set a Hound to his own chemistry and let it loose on himself. Then one afternoon Clarisse is gone. The street is empty, and Montag feels uneasy without knowing why. Early on Thursday, November 4th, the firemen play cards while a radio warns that war may come at any hour. Montag notices that every fireman looks like him: black hair, fiery face, ash-coloured cheeks. He asks Beatty about a man whose books they burned last week. Beatty says the man was taken screaming to an asylum, because anyone who thinks he can fool the Government is insane. Montag catches himself: at the last fire he had already glanced at one line in a book of fairy tales. Speaking almost in Clarisse's voice, he asks if firemen once prevented fires. Stoneman and Black show him their rulebook. It says the firemen began in 1790, with Benjamin Franklin as the first fireman. The rules are short: respond fast, burn everything, report back.

The alarm rings. They race to an old house in the oldest part of the city. Inside, an old woman stands dazed, reciting a strange old line. A neighbour, Mrs. Blake, reported her. Beatty slaps her. The firemen storm the attic, and books rain down. One lands in Montag's hands, and he reads a single beautiful line about time asleep in the sunshine. Almost by itself, his hand hides a book under his arm. This time is different. Usually the police take the owner away first, so nobody gets hurt. Tonight the woman is still here.

The men soak the house in kerosene. The woman kneels among her books and refuses to leave. Beatty starts counting to ten. Montag begs her to come with him. She opens her hand and shows a kitchen match. The men rush out. Before Beatty can light the kerosene, she strikes the match herself. On the silent ride back, Beatty explains her words. They were said by a man named Latimer to another man, Ridley, as both were burned alive for heresy in 1555. At home, in the dark, Montag won't turn on the light. Mildred asks if he is drunk.

The section

It is the same night, right after the fire. Montag undresses in the dark, feeling as if his hands have caught a hunger for books that is spreading up his arms. He pushes the stolen book under his pillow and falls into bed. Mildred chatters at him, but he only makes small sounds. When she touches his face, it is wet. Later she lies awake with her Seashells in, and she suddenly feels like a stranger to him. He asks when and where they first met. She can't remember. They have been married only ten years. He hears her swallowing something in the bathroom and fears it is more pills. He wonders how many she takes without knowing.

Montag thinks about the night of the overdose. He realised then that if Mildred died, he would not cry, and that thought made him cry. He wonders how people get so empty. He remembers Clarisse's dandelion. There is a wall between him and his wife, he thinks. In fact there are three, the TV walls. Mildred calls the people on them her family, and Montag calls them the relatives. They shout and argue, but nothing they say connects to anything. Once a blast of music from the walls left him shaking and sweating. He also remembers her driving at over a hundred miles an hour, both of them shouting and unheard.

Montag pulls out one of her Seashells and asks about Clarisse. He hasn't seen her for four days. Mildred says she meant to tell him. She thinks the girl was run over by a car four days ago, and the family has moved away. She isn't sure, only pretty sure. She simply forgot to mention it. Then she puts her Seashell back and sings softly. Outside, Montag senses something moving past the window. He thinks the Hound is out there. He does not open the window.

In the morning he has chills and a fever. Mildred, thin and dry-haired from chemicals, is busy with the parlour. She won't turn it off for him, only down, and she is slow to bring aspirin. The smell of kerosene makes him vomit. He tells her they burned an old woman with her books. Mildred mops the washable rug and talks about visiting a friend called Helen. He asks her to phone Beatty and say he is sick. She refuses, and he can't do it himself, because he is afraid. The book is still under his pillow.

Montag asks how it would be if he quit his job for a while. Mildred panics. They could lose the house, and she says she hates the woman for causing trouble. Montag says there must be something in books that made the woman stay and burn. He says the fire will burn in his mind for life. He became a fireman like his father and grandfather, without choosing. For the first time he realises that a person spent a lifetime writing each book, and he destroyed it in two minutes. People need to be bothered sometimes, he says. Then Mildred looks outside. A Phoenix car has pulled up. Captain Beatty is walking up the path.

The section

It is noon at Montag's house, the day after the old woman's fire. Montag hides the book behind his pillow and sits up in bed as Captain Beatty strolls in. Beatty orders Mildred to shut off the relatives, and for once she runs to do it. He guessed Montag would call in sick, and tells him to take the night off. Every fireman goes through this, Beatty says, and needs to hear the history of their job.

Beatty explains it his way. As photos, films, radio and TV spread, and the world filled with people, everything had to be simpler to please the masses. Books were cut down to short summaries, then to a few lines. Schools dropped history, languages and philosophy. Life became speed, sport and fun. While he talks, Mildred tries to fix Montag's pillow. Her fingers find the book's outline, and she starts to ask what it is. Montag shouts at her to sit down. Beatty carries on as if nothing happened.

Beatty says no government order started it. People simply stopped wanting to be upset. Every group objected to some book, and people came to dread anyone cleverer than themselves. Everyone had to be made alike, so no one would feel small. A book became like a loaded gun in the house next door. Once all houses were fireproofed, firemen got a new job: to burn books and keep everyone at peace. Even the dead are burned within minutes, so no one mourns. Montag asks about Clarisse. Beatty says the firemen kept a record on her family and watched them. Her uncle was anti-social. Clarisse was a time bomb, because she asked why, not how. He says she is better off dead. To keep people calm, he adds, you fill them with useless facts, so they feel clever and never think.

Before leaving, Beatty says every fireman gets curious about books at least once. He has read some, and he claims they say nothing. Montag asks what happens if a fireman takes a book home by accident. Beatty says the fireman gets twenty-four hours to burn it himself. After that, the firemen come and burn it for him. Montag says he may come in later, but privately he thinks he will never go back.

After Beatty drives off, Montag remembers Clarisse saying that front porches and rocking chairs were done away with, perhaps so people wouldn't sit and think. Mildred is chatting with a TV announcer. Montag tells her he is unhappy and wants to do something big. Mildred says she is happy. Then he stands on a chair and pulls open the hall grille. Behind it are books he has hidden over the past year, about twenty of them. He drops them at Mildred's feet.

Mildred grabs one and runs for the kitchen incinerator. Montag catches her, slaps her and begs her to help. He asks for just a day or two to look at the books. If Beatty is right, they will burn them together. Then the front door voice announces someone outside. Mildred is sure it is Beatty. They don't answer, and the footsteps finally go away. Montag opens a small book and reads a strange line about eleven thousand people dying rather than break their eggs at the smaller end. Mildred says it means nothing. Montag says they will start again at the beginning.

The section

Part Two begins on the same day, in Montag's house. All through a cold, rainy November afternoon, Montag and Mildred sit in the hall with the hidden books. The parlour walls are switched off and grey. Montag reads pages aloud, some of them ten times. One passage says friendship grows from many small kindnesses, until one last kindness makes the heart overflow. Montag wonders if that is what happened with Clarisse. Mildred says Clarisse is dead and they should talk about someone alive. Montag says Clarisse was the first person in years who looked at him as if he mattered.

Then something scratches and sniffs under the front door, breathing out a smell like electricity. Mildred laughs and says it is just a dog. Montag tells her to stay still. After a long silence they go back to reading. Mildred kicks a book. Books are not people, she says, but her parlour "family" is. She fears Beatty will burn the house. Montag shouts back about the snake machine that pumped her stomach, the burned woman, and Clarisse. Bombers roar overhead. Why does nobody talk about the war? The country has started and won two atomic wars since 1960. He has heard rumours that the world is starving and hates them. Maybe books can stop the same mistakes. Then the phone rings. It is Mildred's friend Ann, excited about the White Clown show tonight.

Montag realizes he needs a teacher. He remembers a day in a park a year ago. An old man in a black suit hid something in his coat and was afraid of Montag. The man was Faber, a retired English professor. He lost his job forty years ago when the last college of its kind closed. He spoke poems aloud, with a hand over his coat pocket. Faber gave Montag his address, "for your file." Montag finds the name still in his file. He phones Faber and asks how many copies of the Bible, Shakespeare and Plato are left. Faber, sure it is a trap, says none and hangs up.

Mildred announces that her lady friends are coming over. Montag shows her the Bible, maybe the last copy around. Mildred says Beatty knows about a book, so it must go back tonight. But if Montag hands in a different book and Beatty knows which one he took, Beatty will guess there is a whole library. Mildred screams that he will ruin them. Montag decides to have a copy made before tonight. At the door he asks her whether her parlour "family" truly loves her. She calls it a silly question.

On the subway, Montag feels numb. He remembers being a child on a beach. A cousin promised him a dime if he filled a sieve with sand, and the sand kept pouring through. Now he reads the Bible fast, hoping some words will stay. A loud advert for Denham's Dentifrice keeps repeating. Montag tries to hold on to a Bible line about the lilies of the field, until he yells "Shut up!" at the radio. Passengers stare and someone wants to call the guard. At Knoll View he jumps off and runs. At Faber's door, a frightened voice asks who it is. Montag swears he is alone.

The section

That evening, Faber opens his door. He is pale, white-haired and frightened, as if he has not left the house in years. Then he sees the book under Montag's arm, and his fear fades. Montag glimpses a room full of tools and machinery before Faber quickly shuts its door. Montag says he stole the book. He came because, he says, his wife is dying, a friend is dead, and a woman burned less than a day ago. He wants someone to listen, and to teach him to understand what he reads.

Faber holds the Bible lovingly. He says the parlours have turned Christ into a sugary "family" member who sells products. He calls himself a coward. Long ago he saw where things were going and said nothing. Montag explains that people have everything to be happy, yet they are not. Books were the one thing he knew was gone. Faber says it is not books themselves Montag needs, but what was in them. Three things are missing. First, quality: books full of real, detailed life, which is why comfortable people fear them. Second, leisure: real time to think, not just time off filled with fast cars and loud walls. Third, the right to act on what we learn. Faber shows the small rubber plugs he wears on the subway to block the noise.

Montag suggests printing more books. Faber refuses even to listen, then jokes that he would only help if they hid books in firemen's own homes and reported them. Montag takes the joke seriously. Faber paces, tempted. But he says the public stopped reading on its own. The firemen are only a small sideshow. He thinks they should wait for the war to break things open. Montag pleads, and Faber tells him to go home. Then Montag's hands start ripping pages out of the Bible. He says he is a fireman and could burn Faber. Shaken, Faber gives in and agrees to teach him.

Faber asks for money. He knows a printer who is out of work. He remembers when only one student signed up for his drama class, and newspapers died because no one missed them. Montag fears Beatty will talk him back into his old self. Faber finally shows him his secret. In the tool room is a tiny green device, like a Seashell radio, but two-way. With it in Montag's ear, Faber can hear everything and whisper advice from home. Faber calls himself the safe queen bee and Montag the drone. He mocks his own cowardice. Montag leaves the Bible with Faber and decides to risk handing Beatty a different book. Faber will see the printer tomorrow.

Outside, the night feels as if war is coming. Montag takes money from an all-night bank run by robot tellers. His Seashell says a million men are ready for war. Faber whispers that the real number is ten million. Montag worries he is just obeying a new boss. Faber says asking that question is a start. Then Faber offers to read aloud so Montag can remember. Far away, a page turns. He begins the Book of Job.

The section

At nine that evening, back home with Faber's device in his ear, Montag is eating supper when Mildred's friends arrive. Mrs. Phelps and Mrs. Bowles bring martinis and settle into the parlour with Mildred. The walls show a woman drinking orange juice, cartoon clowns chopping each other's limbs off, and jet cars crashing with bodies flying. Faber whispers to be patient. Instead, Montag pulls the main switch. The walls go dead.

The women are annoyed. Montag asks about the war and their husbands. Mrs. Phelps says the Army called up her husband Pete yesterday. It will be a quick war, she says, and she is not worried. The women say it is always someone else's husband who dies. They have known men who jumped off buildings, but no one killed in war. Mrs. Phelps has no children and thinks only a fool would. Mrs. Bowles had two by Caesarean section, keeps them at school most of the time, and parks them in front of the parlour when they are home. Then they talk about the last election. They chose President Noble over his rival because Noble was taller and better-looking.

Montag fetches a book of poetry. Faber begs him to stop. Mildred quickly covers for him. She tells the women that firemen may bring one old book home a year to show how silly they are. Faber urges Montag to agree, and he says "Yes." Mildred hands him a poem, "Dover Beach." He reads it in a shaky voice that grows stronger. It speaks of faith fading and a dark world with no real joy or peace. Mrs. Phelps starts sobbing and cannot say why. Mrs. Bowles calls Montag nasty and says poetry only brings tears and sickness. Montag drops the book into the wall incinerator. Then he shouts at Mrs. Bowles, listing her divorce, her dead husbands and her unhappy children, and orders her out. The women leave.

Mildred takes sleeping pills in the bathroom. Montag pulls out the ear device as Faber calls him a fool. He finds that some of the books stacked behind the refrigerator are missing, probably burned by Mildred. He hides the rest in the backyard bushes near the alley fence. Clarisse's house stands dark.

On the subway, Faber's voice calms him. Montag feels he is becoming two people, Montag and Faber, fire and water, which one day might mix into something new. Faber says he should pity the women, not attack them. At the firehouse Montag freezes, but Faber talks his feet into moving. The Hound's kennel is empty. Beatty takes Montag's substitute book and throws it into the trash without even looking at the title.

During a card game, Montag keeps washing and hiding his guilty hands. Beatty describes a dream in which he and Montag fought with quotations from books. Beatty showered him with lines that contradict each other. Books are traitors, he says, because anyone can use them against you. He grips Montag's wrist and laughs at his racing pulse. Faber whispers that Beatty is muddying the water. Montag must decide for himself, but beware the crushing power of the majority. Then the alarm rings. Beatty pockets the address and plays on for forty seconds. Tonight, unusually, Beatty drives the engine himself, grinning. When it stops, Montag sees where they are. It is his own house.

The section

Part Three opens outside Montag's own house, in the middle of the night. Neighbours turn on lights to watch. Beatty is pleased. He says Montag flew too near the sun, and asks whether sending the Hound around his house was not hint enough. He mocks Clarisse, whose flowers and sunsets are all in her file. Then Mildred runs out with a suitcase, climbs into a taxi and speeds away, mumbling about her poor "family." Stoneman and Black smash the windows. Faber's voice asks what is happening, and urges Montag to run. Montag cries that he can't, because of the Hound.

Beatty talks about fire. Its beauty, he says, is that it destroys responsibility. When a problem gets too heavy, you burn it. Inside, Montag sees the books spilled on the floor. Mildred must have found them in the garden and brought them back in. Beatty orders Montag to burn his own house with a flamethrower. Montag burns the beds, the furniture, the books, and finally the three parlour walls. It feels good, as burning always did. If there is no answer, at least now there is no problem. By three-thirty in the morning the house is a heap of glowing ash, and the crowd goes back indoors. Beatty tells Montag he is under arrest.

Montag asks whether his wife turned in the alarm. Beatty says yes, though her friends had already reported him earlier. He sneers at Montag for quoting poetry and hits him on the head. The green ear device falls out. Beatty picks it up, hears a voice, and says they will trace it to Montag's friend. Montag raises the flamethrower. Beatty taunts him, quoting a line from a play and daring him to pull the trigger. Montag says only that they never burned right. Then he sets Beatty on fire. Beatty burns on the lawn and dies. Montag knocks out Stoneman and Black.

The Mechanical Hound comes out of the shadows and leaps. Montag burns it, and it explodes, but first its needle stabs his leg. The leg goes numb. He limps around the ruins. Beatty always said don't face a problem, burn it. Now, Montag thinks, he has done both. He goes back for the books. Four are still hidden near the fence. Mildred missed them. In the alley he collapses and sobs. Suddenly he understands that Beatty wanted to die. Beatty did nothing to save himself and kept taunting a man with a weapon. Montag never wanted to kill anyone. He feels sick and sorry.

Running feet come closer. He forces himself up. Slowly the feeling returns to his leg, and he starts to jog with the books in his hands. He thinks Faber is lost too. The green capsule was in Beatty's pocket when Beatty burned. Montag still has his money and his Seashell radio. On it, a police alert names him: Guy Montag, fireman, wanted for murder and crimes against the State.

The section

In the early morning, Montag runs six blocks down the alley. He reaches a huge, brightly lit boulevard, ten lanes wide. His Seashell tells everyone to watch for a man running alone. He realizes he is heading for Faber's house. He just wants to see that Faber is alive, and to leave him some money. Police helicopters rise in the distance. At a gas station he slips into the washroom to clean up. Through the wall a radio says war has been declared. He feels nothing.

To cross the boulevard he must walk calmly, not run. Halfway across, a car races at him at more than a hundred miles an hour. He panics and runs, drops a book, and falls flat. The car swerves at the last second, and laughter trails behind it. Its tyre has left a black mark on his finger. It was not the police. It was a carload of kids, maybe twelve to sixteen, who saw a man walking and tried to run him down for fun. Montag wonders if kids like these killed Clarisse. The car turns to come back, but he has picked up the books and reached the dark alley.

He creeps into the house of Black, one of his fellow firemen, while Black is at work. He hides the books in the kitchen. From a phone booth he reports an alarm, then hears the fire engines head for Black's house. Mrs. Black is still asleep.

At Faber's back door, Faber pulls him inside. He thought Montag was dead. Montag tells him he killed the captain. Everything has fallen apart in one week. Faber says it was coming for a long time. For the first time in years, Faber feels alive and unafraid. Montag gives him a hundred dollars. Faber advises him to follow the river, then the old railroad tracks into the country. He has heard there are camps of wandering, educated men out there. Faber himself is leaving on the five a.m. bus to St. Louis to see a retired printer.

Faber has a tiny TV hidden behind a picture. It shows that a new Mechanical Hound has been brought in. Camera helicopters will follow the hunt live, for everyone's parlour walls. The two men drink whisky. Montag imagines watching himself be caught on screen. Then he gives Faber instructions: burn and wipe everything he touched, air the house, turn the sprinklers on full. Faber fills a suitcase with his own dirty old clothes. Montag splashes whisky on it and takes the bottle. They say good-bye.

Montag runs toward the river. Through house windows he sees people watching the Hound on their walls, moving through his neighbourhood. On screen it reaches Faber's house, where the sprinklers are spraying. It pauses. Then it turns away. On his Seashell, the police tell everyone in the area to open their doors and look out at the count of ten. A man running alone will be easy to spot. Montag runs faster as the count begins, and at five, he feels hands on the doorknobs.

The section

The count reaches ten and thousands of doors open, but Montag has made it to the river. He strips in the dark, splashes himself with whisky and drinks some. He puts on Faber's old clothes and throws his own into the water. Then he wades out with the suitcase until the current carries him away. He is three hundred yards downstream when the Hound reaches the river. Helicopter lights flood the water, and he dives under. Then the lights swing back over the city, as if they have found another trail. The chase is gone.

Floating on his back, Montag feels peace. He has left the stage, the actors and the noise behind. For the first time in years he sees the stars. The river gives him time to think at last. He looks at the moon, lit by the sun, and thinks how the sun burns every day, burning up time itself. Everything burns already. So someone has to stop burning, and it must be him and the men he worked with. Someone has to start saving things again, in books, in records or in people's heads.

The river carries him to shore. He is afraid to leave the water. He thinks of Mildred and wonders how she would bear all this silence. The smell of hay reminds him of a farm he visited as a small boy. He imagines sleeping in a barn loft, and seeing a young woman in a farmhouse window whose face is like Clarisse's. In the morning he would find a glass of milk and some apples and pears waiting at the foot of the stairs. That is all he wants now: a sign that the world will accept him and give him time to think.

He steps out of the river, and the land hits him like a wave. Darkness, smells and stars overwhelm him. Two eyes stare at him from the forest. He screams, thinking it is the Hound. But it is only a deer, which bounds away. He walks through deep leaves and smells everything: potato, pickles, parsley, mustard, carnations, liquorice. He feels full, not empty. Then his foot hits metal: an old railroad track. He follows it. He feels sure, though he cannot prove it, that Clarisse once walked here.

Half an hour later he sees a fire ahead. It is not burning things. It is warming people. Around it sit five old men, talking quietly about everything. One of them calls him out of the shadows and welcomes him. The leader, Granger, gives him coffee and knows his name. He gives Montag a drink that will change the smell of his sweat, to fool the Hound. The men have been watching the chase on a small portable TV.

Granger turns it on. The chase is still running, but now in the city, far from the river. Granger explains that the police have lost Montag and cannot admit it. The show needs a quick ending. On screen, an innocent man is out for a walk. The cameras close in. The Hound leaps and seizes him, and he screams. The announcer says Montag is dead. Granger notes that the man's face was never shown clearly. Montag sits staring at the blank screen, shaking.

The section

By the campfire near the river, just before dawn, Granger welcomes Montag back from the dead. He introduces the men. They are former professors and a minister who lost their jobs or their followers. Granger wrote a book himself, and has been on the run since he hit a fireman who came to burn his library. Montag says he has nothing to offer. He once had parts of two books of the Bible, Ecclesiastes and Revelation, in his head, but he has lost them. Granger is delighted. Only one other man, Harris of Youngstown, carries Ecclesiastes. Now Montag is important. Granger says the words will come back when needed. Simmons has spent twenty years on a method for recalling anything read once.

Then Granger explains. Each man is a book. Granger is a book by Plato called the Republic. Simmons is the writings of Marcus Aurelius. Others are Swift, Darwin, Einstein, Gandhi, Jefferson, Lincoln and more. They read books, memorized them, then burned them so they could never be found. Thousands of people on the roads and old tracks carry books this way. One small town holds the complete essays of one writer, a few pages per person. They are not trying to start a fight. They want to keep the knowledge safe, wait for the war to end, and then help rebuild. If no one listens, they will pass the books to their children by word of mouth. Above all, they must never feel more important than anyone else.

The men put out the fire and walk south along the river. It is five in the morning. Someone says the city has never bothered to hunt them. Montag studies their faces. They look tired and ordinary, not glowing with wisdom. Jets scream overhead. Montag says his wife is back in the city, but he feels nothing. Granger tells him about his grandfather, a sculptor. When he died, Granger cried for all the things his grandfather would never do again. Everyone should leave something behind, his grandfather said: a child, a book, a garden. Montag realizes he cannot picture Mildred's hands doing anything.

Then Montag cries out. In an instant, bombs fall on the city, and the war begins and ends. Montag imagines Mildred in a hotel room, leaning toward her walls, seeing her own empty face in them just before the building falls. Suddenly he remembers: they met in Chicago. The blast knocks the men flat. The city rises in the air and collapses. Lying on the ground, Montag remembers part of Ecclesiastes, perfectly and without trying.

When the wind dies, Granger looks upstream. The city is flat, he says. Gone. The men build a small fire and cook bacon. Granger talks about the phoenix, an old bird that burned itself up and rose again from the ashes. People keep doing the same. But people can remember their mistakes, and one day stop. Granger says that when people ask what they are doing, they will say they are remembering.

They set off upstream, north, toward the city, to help. Montag finds himself leading. He feels words from Ecclesiastes stir in him, about a time for everything. A verse about a tree of life comes too, its leaves healing the nations. He decides to save that one for noon, when they reach the city.