Go past, thought Montag, don't stop, go on, don't turn in!
On the parlor wall, Faber's house, with its sprinkler system pulsing in the night air.
The Hound paused, quivering.
No! Montag held to the windowsill. This way! Here!
The procaine needle flicked out and in, out and in. A single clear drop of the stuff of dreams fell from the needle as it vanished in the Hound's muzzle.
Montag held his breath, like a doubled fist, in his chest.
The Mechanical Hound turned and plunged away from Faber's house down the alley again.
Montag snapped his gaze to the sky. The helicopters were closer, a great blowing of insects to a single light source.
With an effort, Montag reminded himself again that this was no fictional episode to be watched on his run to the river; it was in actuality his own chess game he was witnessing, move by move.
He shouted to give himself the necessary push away from this last house window, and the fascinating seance going on in there! Hell! and he was away and gone! The alley, a street, the alley, a street, and the smell of the river. Leg out, leg down, leg out and down. Twenty million Montags running, soon, if the cameras caught him. Twenty million Montags running, running like an ancient flickery Keystone Comedy, cops, robbers, chasers and the chased, hunters and hunted, he had seen it a thousand times. Behind him now twenty million silently baying Hounds, ricocheted across parlors, three-cushion shooting from right wall to center wall to left wall, gone, right wall, center wall, left wall, gone!
Montag jammed his Seashell to his ear:
"Police suggest entire population in the Elm Terrace area do as follows: Everyone in every house in every street open a front or rear door or look from the windows. The fugitive cannot escape if everyone in the next minute looks from his house. Ready!"
Of course! Why hadn't they done it before! Why, in all the years, hadn't this game been tried! Everyone up, everyone out! He couldn't be missed! The only man running alone in the night city, the only man proving his legs!
"At the count of ten now! One! Two!"
He felt the city rise.
"Three!"
He felt the city turn to its thousands of doors.
"Four!"
The people sleepwalking in their hallways.
"Five!"
He felt their hands on the doorknobs!
The smell of the river was cool and like a solid rain. His throat was burnt rust and his eyes were wept dry with running. He yelled as if this yell would jet him on, fling him the last hundred yards.
"Six, seven, eight!"
The doorknobs turned on five thousand doors.
"Nine!"
He ran out away from the last row of houses, on a slope leading down to a solid moving blackness.
"Ten!"
&nbs
p; The doors opened.
He imagined thousands on thousands of faces peering into yards, into alleys, and into the sky, faces hid by curtains, pale, night-frightened faces, like gray animals peering from electric caves, faces with gray colorless eyes, gray tongues and gray thoughts looking out through the numb flesh of the face.