“It looks like a Seashell radio.”

“And something more! It listens! If you put it in your ear, Montag, I can sit comfortably home, warming my frightened bones, and hear and analyse the firemen’s world, find its weaknesses, without danger. I’m the Queen Bee, safe in the hive. You will be the drone, the travelling ear. Eventually, I could put out ears into all parts of the city, with various men, listening and evaluating. If the drones die, I’m still safe at home, tending my fright with a maximum of comfort and a minimum of chance. See how safe I play it, how contemptible I am?”

Montag placed the green bullet in his ear. The old man inserted a similar object in his own ear and moved his lips.

“Montag!”

The voice was in Montag’s head.

“I hear you!”

The old man laughed. “You’re coming over fine, too!” Faber whispered, but the voice in Montag’s head was clear. “Go to the firehouse when it’s time. I’ll be with you. Let’s listen to this Captain Beatty together. He could be one of us. God knows. I’ll give you things to say. We’ll give him a good show. Do you hate me for this electronic cowardice of mine? Here I am sending you out into the night, while I stay behind the lines with my damned ears listening for you to get your head chopped off.”

“We all do what we do,” said Montag. He put the Bible in the old man’s hands. “Here. I’ll chance turning in a substitute. Tomorrow—”

“I’ll see the unemployed printer, yes; that much I can do.”

“Good night, Professor.”

“Not good night. I’ll be with you the rest of the night, a vinegar gnat tickling your ear when you need me. But good night and good luck, anyway.”

The door opened and shut. Montag was in the dark street again, looking at the world.

You could feel the war getting ready in the sky that night. The way the clouds moved aside and came back, and the way the stars looked, a million of them swimming between the clouds, like the enemy discs, and the feeling that the sky might fall upon the city and turn it to chalk dust, and the moon go up in red fire; that was how the night felt.

Montag walked from the subway with the money in his pocket (he had visited the bank which was open all night and every night with robot tellers in attendance) and as he walked he was listening to the Seashell radio in one car…? We have mobilized a million men. Quick victory is ours if the war comes…” Music flooded over the voice quickly and it was gone.

“Ten million men mobilized,” Faber’s voice whispered in his other ear. “But say one million. It’s happier.”

“Faber?”

“Yes?”

“I’m not thinking. I’m just doing like I’m told, like always. You said get the money and I got it. I didn’t really think of it myself. When do I start working things out on my own?”

“You’ve started already, by saying what you just said. You’ll have to take me on faith.”

“I took the others on faith!”

“Yes, and look where we’re headed. You’ll have to travel blind for a while. Here’s my arm to hold on to.”

“I don’t want to change sides and just be told what to do. There’s no reason to change if I do that.”

“You’re wise already!”

Montag felt his feet moving him on the sidewalk toward his house. “Keep talking.”

“Would you like me to read? I’ll read so you can remember. I go to bed only five hours a night. Nothing to do. So if you like; I’ll read you to sleep nights. They say you retain knowledge even when you’re sleeping, if someone whispers it in your ear.”

“Yes.”

“Here.” Far away across town in the night, the faintest whisper of a turned page. “The Book of Job.”

The moon rose in the sky as Montag walked, his lips moving just a trifle.

He was eating a light supper at nine in the evening when the front door cried out in the hall and Mildred ran from the parlour like a native fleeing an eruption of Vesuvius. Mrs. Phelps and Mrs. Bowles came through the front door and vanished into the volcano’s mouth with martinis in their hands: Montag stopped eating. They were like a monstrous crystal chandelier tinkling in a thousand chimes, he saw their Cheshire Cat smiles burning through the walls of the house, and now they were screaming at each other above the din. Montag found himself at the parlour door with his food still in his mouth.

“Doesn’t everyone look nice!”

“Nice.”

“You look fine, Millie!”

“Fine.”

“Everyone looks swell.”

“Swell!”

Montag stood watching them.

“Patience,” whispered Faber.

“I shouldn’t be here,” whispered Montag, almost to himself. “I should be on my way back to you with the money!”

“Tomorrow’s time enough. Careful!”

“Isn’t this show wonderful?” cried Mildred. “Wonderful!”

On one wall a woman smiled and drank orange juice simultaneously. How does she do both at once, thought Montag, insanely. In the other walls an X-ray of the same woman revealed the contracting journey of the refreshing beverage on its way to her delightful stomach! Abruptly the room took off on a rocket flight into the clouds, it plunged into a lime-green sea where blue fish ate red and yellow fish. A minute later, Three White Cartoon Clowns chopped off each other’s limbs to the accompaniment of immense incoming tides of laughter. Two minutes more and the room whipped out of town to the jet cars wildly circling an arena, bashing and backing up and bashing each other again. Montag saw a number of bodies fly in the air.

“Millie, did you see that?”

“I saw it, I saw it!”

Montag reached inside the parlour wall and pulled the main switch. The images drained away, as if the water had been let out from a gigantic crystal bowl of hysterical fish.

The three women turned slowly and looked with unconcealed irritation and then dislike at Montag.

“When do you suppose the war will start?” he said. “I notice your husbands aren’t here tonight?”

“Oh, they come and go, come and go,” said Mrs. Phelps. “In again out again Finnegan, the Army called Pete yesterday. He’ll be back next week. The Army said so. Quick war. Forty-eight hours they said, and everyone home. That’s what the Army said. Quick war. Pete was called yesterday and they said he’d be, back next week. Quick…”

The three women fidgeted and looked nervously at the empty mud-coloured walls.

“I’m not worried,” said Mrs. Phelps. “I’ll let Pete do all the worrying.” She giggled. “I’ll let old Pete do all the worrying. Not me. I’m not worried.”

“Yes,” said Millie. “Let old Pete do the worrying.”

“It’s always someone else’s husband dies, they say.”

“I’ve heard that, too. I’ve never known any dead man killed in a war. Killed jumping off buildings, yes, like Gloria’s husband last week, but from wars? No.”

“Not from wars,” said Mrs. Phelps. “Anyway, Pete and I always said, no tears, nothing like that. It’s our third marriage each and we’re independent. Be independent, we always said. He said, if I get killed off, you just go right ahead and don’t cry, but get married again, and don’t think of me.”

“That reminds me,” said Mildred. “Did you see that Clara Dove five-minute romance last night in your wall? Well, it was all about this woman who—”

Montag said nothing but stood looking at the women’s faces as he had once looked at the faces of saints in a strange church he had entered when he was a child. The faces of those enamelled creatures meant nothing to him, though he talked to them and stood in that church for a long time, trying to be of that religion, trying to know what that religion was, trying to get enough of the raw incense and special dust of the place into his lungs and thus into his blood to feel touched and concerned by the meaning of the colourful men and women with the porcelain eyes and the blood-ruby lips. But there was nothing, nothing; it was a stroll through another store, and his currency strange and unusable there, and his passion cold, even when he touched the wood and plaster and clay. So it was now, in his own parlour, with these women twisting in their chairs under his gaze, lighting cigarettes, blowing smoke, touching their sun-fired hair and examining their blazing fingernails as if they had caught fire from his look. Their faces grew haunted with silence. They leaned forward at the sound of Montag’s swallowing his final bite of food. They listened to his feverish breathing. The three empty walls of the room were like the pale brows of sleeping giants now, empty of dreams. Montag felt that if you touched these three staring brows you would feel a fine salt sweat on your finger-tips. The perspiration gathered with the silence and the sub-audible trembling around and about and in the women who were burning with tension. Any moment they might hiss a long sputtering hiss and explode.