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Nothingness

Granger stood looking back with Montag "Everyone randfather said A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoesyour hand touched soo when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there It doesn'tfro that's like you after you take your hands away The difference between the , he said The lawn-cutter ardener will be there a lifetime"

Granger randfather showed o Have you ever seen the atom bomb mushroo With the wilderness all around it

"My grandfather ran off the V-2 rocket film a dozen times and then hoped that soreen and the land and the wilderness in more, to remind people that we're allotted a little space on earth and that we survive in that wilderness that can take back what it has given, as easily as blowing its breath on us or sending the sea to tell us we are not so big When we forget how close the wilderness is in the night, et us, for ill have forgotten how terrible and real it can be You see?" Granger turned to Montag "Grandfather's been dead for all these years, but if you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of es of his thumbprint He touched me As I said, earlier, he was a sculptor 'I hate a Roman named Status Quo!' he said to me 'Stuff your eyes onder,' he said, 'live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds See the world It's more fantastic than any dreauarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an anireat sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away To hell with that,' he said, 'shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass' "

"Look!" cried Montag

And the war began and ended in that instant

Later, thecould not say if they had really seen anything Perhaps the ht and motion in the sky Perhaps the bombs were there, and the jets, ten rain thrown over the heavens by a great sowing hand, and the bo with dreadful swiftness, yet sudden slowness, down upon thecity they had left behind The bombardment was to all intents and purposes finished, once the jets had sighted their target, alerted their bombardier at five thousand miles an hour; as quick as the whisper of a scythe the as finished Once the bomb release was yanked, it was over Now, a full three seconds, all of the time in history, before the boone half around the visible world, like bullets in which a savage islander ht not believe because they were invisible; yet the heart is suddenly shattered, the body falls in separate motions and the blood is astonished to be freed on the air; the brain squanders its few precious memories and, puzzled, dies

This was not to be believed It was reat metal fist over the far city and he knew the scream of the jets that would folloould say, after the deed, disintegrate, leave no stone on another, perish Die

Montag held the bolehelplessly up at them "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 somewhere the five AM bus was on its way froh the desolation had not yet arrived, was still in the air, it was certain as man could hway, its destination would be ed from metropolis to junkyard

And Mildred

Get out, run!

He saw her in her hotel roo with the bo He saw her leaning toward the great shi walls of color and motion where the family talked and talked and talked to her, where the family prattled and chatted and said her na of the bomb that was an inch, now a half inch, now a quarter inch fro into the wall as if all the hunger of looking would find the secret of her sleepless unease there Mildred, leaning anxiously nervously, as if to plunge, drop, fall into that swarht happiness

The first bomb struck

"Mildred!"

Perhaps, ould ever know? perhaps the great broadcasting stations with their beaht and talk and chatter went first into oblivion