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the afternoon, but it was not seeing her somewhere in the world. The lawn was empty, the trees empty, the street empty, and while at first he did not even know he missed her or was even looking for her, the fact was that by the time he reached the subway, there were vague stirrings of un-ease in him. Something was the matter, his routine had been disturbed. A simple routine, true, established in a short few days, and yet . . .? He almost turned back to make the walk again, to give her time to appear. He was certain if he tried the same route, everything would work out fine. But it was late, and the arrival of his train put a stop to his plan.
                The flutter of cards, motion of hands, of eyelids, the drone of the time-voice in the firehouse ceiling ". . . one thirty-five. Thursday morning, November 4th,. . . one thirty-six . . . one thirty-seven A.M. . . . " The tick of the playing-cards on the greasy table-top, all the sounds came to Montag, behind his closed eyes, behind the barrier he had momentarily erected. He could feel the firehouse full of glitter and shine and silence, of brass colours, the colours of coins, of gold, of silver: The unseen men across the table were sighing on their cards, waiting. ". . . one forty-five . . ." The voice-clock mourned out the cold hour of a cold morning of a still colder year.
                "What's wrong, Montag?"
                Montag opened his eyes.
                A radio hummed somewhere. ". . . war may be declared any hour. This country stands ready to defend its . . ."
                The firehouse trembled as a great flight of jet planes whistled a single note across the black morning sky.
                Montag blinked. Beatty was looking at him as if he were a museum statue. At any moment, Beatty might rise and walk about him, touching, exploring his guilt and self-consciousness. Guilt? What guilt was that?
                "Your play, Montag."
                Montag looked at these men whose faces were sunburnt by a thousand real and ten thousand imaginary fires, whose work flushed their cheeks and fevered their eyes. These men who looked steadily into their platinum igniter flames as they lit their eternally burning black pipes. They and their charcoal hair and soot-coloured brows and bluish-ash-smeared cheeks where they had shaven close; but their heritage showed. Montag started up, his mouth opened. Had he ever seen a fireman that didn't have black hair, black brows, a fiery face, and a blue-steel shaved but unshaved look? These men were all mirror-images of himself! Were all firemen picked then for their looks as well as their proclivities? The colour of cinders and ash about them, and the continual smell of burning from their pipes. Captain Beatty there, rising in thunderheads of tobacco smoke. Beatty opening a fresh tobacco packet, crumpling the cellophane into a sound of fire.
                Montag looked at the cards in his own hands. "I―I've been thinking. About the fire last week. About the man whose library we fixed. What happened to him?"
                "They took him screaming off to the asylum"
                "He. wasn't insane."
                Beatty arranged his cards quietly. "Any man's insane who thinks he can fool the Government and us."
                "I've tried to imagine," said Montag, "just how it would feel. I mean to have firemen burn our houses and our books."
                "We haven't any books."
                "But if we did have some."
                "You got some?"
                Beatty blinked slowly.
                "No." Montag gazed beyond them to the wall with the typed lists of a million forbidden books. Their names leapt in fire, burning down the years under his axe and his hose which sprayed not water but kerosene. "No." But in his mind, a cool wind started up and blew