Atlas Shrugged (178 page)

“It’s all right, Hank. We’ll last with such rail as we have, for—” She stopped.

“For a month?”

“For the winter—I hope.”

Cutting across their silence, a shrill voice reached them from another table, and they turned to look at a man who had the jittery manner of a cornered gangster about to reach for his gun. “An act of anti-social destruction,” he was snarling to a sullen companion, “at a time when there’s such a desperate shortage of copper! ... We can’t permit it! We can’t permit it to be true!”

Rearden turned abruptly to look off, at the city. “I’d give anything to know where he is,” he said, his voice low. “Just to know where he is, right now, at this moment.”

“What would you do, if you knew it?”

He dropped his hand in a gesture of futility. “I wouldn’t approach him. The only homage I can still pay him is not to cry for forgiveness where no forgiveness is possible.”

They remained silent. They listened to the voices around them, to the splinters of panic trickling through the luxurious room.

She had not been aware that the same presence seemed to be an invisible guest at every table, that the same subject kept breaking through the attempts at any other conversation. People sat in a manner, not quite of cringing, but as if they found the room too large and too exposed—a room of glass, blue velvet, aluminum and gentle lighting. They looked as if they had come to this room at the price of countless evasions, to let it help them pretend that theirs was still a civilized existence—but an act of primeval violence had blasted the nature of their world into the open and they were no longer able not to .see.

“How could he? How could he?” a woman was demanding with petulant terror. “He had no right to do it!”

“It was an accident,” said a young man with a staccato voice and an odor of public payroll. “It was a chain of coincidences, as any statistical curve of probabilities can easily prove. It is unpatriotic to spread rumors exaggerating the power of the people’s enemies.”

“Right and wrong is all very well for academic conversations,” said a woman with a schoolroom voice and a barroom mouth, “but how can anybody take his own ideas seriously enough to destroy a fortune when people need it?”

“I don’t understand it,” an old man was saying with quavering bitterness. “After centuries of efforts to curb man’s innate brutality, after centuries of teaching, training and indoctrination with the gentle and the humane!”

A woman’s bewildered voice rose uncertainly and trailed off: “I thought we were living in an age of brotherhood ...”

“I’m scared,” a young girl was repeating, “I’m scared ... oh, I don’t know! ... I’m just scared ...”

“He couldn’t have done it!” ... “He did!” ... “But why?” ... “I refuse to believe it!” ... “It’s not human!” ... “But why?” ... “Just a worthless playboy!” ... “But why?”

The muffled scream of a woman across the room and some half-grasped signal on the edge of Dagny’s vision, came simultaneously and made her whirl to look at the city.

The calendar was run by a mechanism locked in a room behind the screen, unrolling the same film year after year, projecting the dates in steady rotation, in changeless rhythm, never moving but on the stroke of midnight. The speed of Dagny’s turn gave her time to see a phenomenon as unexpected as if a planet had reversed its orbit in the sky: she saw the words “September 2” moving upward and vanishing past the edge of the screen.

Then, written across the enormous page, stopping time, as a last message to the world and to the world’s motor which was New York, she saw the lines of a sharp, intransigent handwriting: .

She did not know which shock was greater: the sight of the message or the sound of Rearden’s laughter—Rearden, standing on his feet, in full sight and hearing of the room behind him, laughing above their moans of panic, laughing in greeting, in salute, in acceptance of the gift he had tried to reject, in release, in triumph, in surrender.

On the evening of September 7, a copper wire broke in Montana, stopping the motor of a loading crane on a spur track of Taggart Transcontinental, at the rim of the Stanford Copper Mine.

The mine had been working on three shifts, its days and nights blending into a single stretch of struggle to lose no minute, no drop of copper it could squeeze from the shelves of a mountain into the nation’s industrial desert. The crane broke down at the task of loading a train; it stopped abruptly and hung still against the evening sky, between a string of empty cars and piles of suddenly immovable ore.

The men of the railroad and of the mine stopped in dazed bewilderment: they found that in all the complexity of their equipment, among the drills, the motors, the derricks, the delicate gauges, the ponderous floodlights beating down into the pits and ridges of a mountain—there was no wire to mend the crane. They stopped, like men on an ocean liner propelled by ten-thousand-horsepower generators, but perishing for lack of a safety pin.

The station agent, a young man with a swift body and a brusque voice, stripped the wiring from the station building and set the crane in motion again-and while the ore went clattering to fill the cars, the light of candles came trembling through the dusk from the windows of the station.

“Minnesota, Eddie,” said Dagny grimly, closing the drawer of her special file. “Tell the Minnesota Division to ship half their stock of wire to Montana.” “But good God, Dagny!—with the peak of the harvest rush approaching—” “They’ll hold through it—I think. We don’t dare lose a single supplier of copper.”

“But I have!” screamed James Taggart, when she reminded him once more. “I have obtained for you the top priority on copper wire, the first claim, the uppermost ration level, I’ve given you all the cards, certificates, documents and requisitions—what else do you want?” “The copper wire.” “I’ve done all I could! Nobody can blame me!”

She did not argue. The afternoon newspaper was lying on his desk-and she was staring at an item on the back page: An Emergency State Tax had been passed in California for the relief of the state’s unemployed, in the amount of fifty per cent of any local corporation’s gross income ahead of other taxes; the California oil companies had gone .out of business.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Rearden,” said an unctuous voice over a long-distance telephone line from Washington, “I just wanted to assure you that you will not have to worry.” “About what?” asked Rearden, baffled. “About that temporary bit of confusion in California. We’ll straighten it out in no time, it was an act of illegal insurrection, their state government had no right to impose local taxes detrimental to national taxes, we’ll negotiate an equitable arrangement immediately—but in the meantime, if you have been disturbed by any unpatriotic rumors about the California oil companies, I just wanted to tell you that Rearden Steel has been placed in the top category of essential need, with first claim upon any oil available anywhere in the nation, very top category, Mr. Rearden—so I just wanted you to know that you won’t have to worry about the problem of fuel this winter!”

Rearden hung up the telephone receiver, with a frown of worry, not about the problem of fuel and the end of the California oil fields— disasters of this kind had become habitual—but about the fact that the Washington planners found it necessary to placate him. This was new; he wondered what it meant. Through the years of his struggle, he had learned that an apparently causeless antagonism was not hard to deal with, but an apparently causeless solicitude was an ugly danger. The same wonder struck him again, when, walking down an alley between the mill structures, he caught sight of a slouching figure whose posture combined an air of insolence with an air of expecting to be swatted: it was his brother Philip.

Ever since he had moved to Philadelphia, Rearden had not visited his former home and had not heard a word from his family, whose bills he went on paying. Then, inexplicably, twice in the last few weeks, he had caught Philip wandering through the mills for no apparent reason. He had been unable to tell whether Philip was sneaking to avoid him or waiting to catch his attention; it had looked like both. He had been unable to discover any clue to Philip’s purpose, only some incomprehensible solicitude, of a kind Philip had never displayed before.

The first time, in answer to his startled “What are you doing here?” -Philip had said vaguely, “Well, I know that you don’t like me to come to your office.” “What do you want?” “Oh, nothing ... but ... well, Mother is worried about you.” “Mother can call me any time she wishes.” Philip had not answered, but had proceeded to question him, in an unconvincingly casual manner, about his work, his health, his business; the questions had kept hitting oddly beside the point, not questions about business, but more about his, Rearden.‘s, feelings toward business. Rearden had cut him short and waved him away, but had been left with the small, nagging sense of an incident that remained inexplicable.

The second time, Philip had said, as sole explanation, “We just want to know how you feel.” “Who’s we?” “Why ... Mother and I. These are difficult times and ... well, Mother wants to know how you feel about it all.” “Tell her that I don’t.” The words had seemed to hit Philip in some peculiar manner, almost as if this were the one answer he dreaded. “Get out of here,” Rearden had ordered wearily, “and the next time you want to see me, make an appointment and come to my office. But don’t come unless you have something to say. This is not a place where one discusses feelings, mine or anybody else’s.”

Philip had not called for an appointment—but now there he was again, slouching among the giant shapes of the furnaces, with an air of .guilt and snobbishness together, as if he were both snooping and slum ming.

“But I do have something to say! I do!” he cried hastily, in answer to the angry frown on Rearden’s face.

“Why didn’t you come to my office?”

“You don’t want me in your office.”

“I don’t want you here, either.”

“But I’m only ... I’m only trying to be considerate and not to take your time when you’re so busy and ... you
are
very busy, aren’t you?”

“And?”

“And ... well, I just wanted to catch you in a spare moment ... to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“I ... Well, I need a job.”

He said it belligerently and drew back a little. Rearden stood looking at him blankly.

“Henry, I want a job. I mean, here, at the mills. I want you to give me something to do. I need a job, I need to earn my living, I’m tired of alms.” He was groping for something to say, his voice both offended and pleading, as if the necessity to justify the plea were an unfair imposition upon him. “I want a livelihood of my own, I’m not asking you for charity, I’m asking you to give me a chance!”

“This is a factory, Philip, not a gambling joint.”

“Uh?”

“We don’t take chances or give them.”

“I’m asking you to give me a
job!”

“Why should I?”

“Because I need it!”

Rearden pointed to the red spurts of flame shooting from the black shape of a furnace, shooting safely into space four hundred feet of steel-clay-and-steam-embodied thought above them. “I needed that furnace, Philip. It wasn’t my need that gave it to me.”

Philip’s face assumed a look of not having heard. “You’re not officially supposed to hire anybody, but that’s just a technicality, if you’ll put me on, my friends will okay it without any trouble and—” Something about Rearden’s eyes made him stop abruptly, then ask in an angrily impatient voice, “Well, what’s the matter? What have I said that’s wrong?”

“What you haven’t said.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What you’re squirming to leave unmentioned.”

“What?”

“That you’d be of no use to me whatever.”

“Is that what you—” Philip started with automatic righteousness, but stopped and did not finish.

“Yes,” said Rearden, smiling,
“that’s
what I think of first.”

Philip’s eyes oozed away; when he spoke, his voice sounded as if it were darting about at random, picking stray sentences: “Everybody is entitled to a livelihood ... How am I going to get it, if nobody gives me my chance?”

“How did I get mine?”

“I wasn’t born owning a steel plant.”

.“Was I?”

“I can do anything you can—if you’ll teach me.”

“Who taught me?”

“Why do you keep saying that? I’m not talking about you!”

“I am.”

In a moment, Philip muttered, “What do you have to worry about? It’s not
your
livelihood that’s in question!”

Rearden pointed to the figures of men in the steaming rays of the furnace. “Can you do what they’re doing?”

“I don’t see what you.‘re—”

“What will happen if I put you there and you ruin a heat of steel for .me?”