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"How did it start? How did you get into it? How did you pick your work and how did you happen to think to take the job you have? You're not like the others I've seen a few; I know When I talk, you look atabout the ht The others would never do that The others would walk off and leaveOr threaten me No one has time any more for anyone else You're one of the feho put up with e you're a fireht for you, somehow"

He felt his body divide itself into a hotness and a coldness, a softness and a hardness, a tre one upon the other

"You'd better run on to your appointment," he said

And she ran off and left hi time did he move

And then, very slowly, as he walked, he tilted his head back in the rain, for just a few moments, and opened his mouth

The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently hu, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse The diht froreat , touched here and there on the brass and the copper and the steel of the faintly trelass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber-padded paws

Montag slid down the brass pole He went out to look at the city and the clouds had cleared away coarette and careat bee come home from some field where the honey is full of poison wildness, of insanity and nightmare, its body cra the evil out of itself

"Hello," whispered Montag, fascinated as alith the dead beast, the living beast

Nights when things got dull, which was every night, thecombinations of the olfactory system of the Hound and let loose rats in the firehouse areaway, and sometimes chickens, and sometimes cats that would have to be drowned anyway, and there would be betting to see which of the cats or chickens or rats the Hound would seize first The aniaht half across the areaway, gripped in gentling pahile a four-inch hollow steel needle plunged down from the proboscis of the Hound to inject massive jolts of morphine or procaine The paas then tossed in the incinerator A new gaan

Montag stayed upstairs hts when this went on There had been a tio when he had bet with the best of theer, which showed itself in veins and blotches But now nights he lay in his bunk, face turned to the wall, listening to the whoops of laughter below and the piano-string scurry of rat feet, the violin squeaking of ,out like aneedle and going back to its kennel to die as if a switch had been turned

Montag touched the muzzle

The Hound growled

Montag jumped back

The Hound half rose in its kennel and looked at hi in its suddenly activated eye bulbs It growled again, a strange rasping co of s that seemed rusty and ancient with suspicion

"No, no, boy," said Montag, his heart pounding