Incredulity and indifference were her only reaction: incredulity, because she could not conceive of what would bring human beings to such a state—indmerence, because she could not regard those who reached it, as human any longer. They went on talking, but she was unable to speak or to listen. She caught herself feeling that her only desire was now to get home and fall asleep.
“Miss Taggart,” said a politely rational, faintly anxious voice—and jerking her head up, she saw the courteous figure of a waiter, “the assistant manager of the Taggart Terminal is on the telephone, requesting permission to speak to you at once. He says it’s an emergency.”
It was a relief to leap to her feet and get out of that room, even if in answer to the call of some new disaster. It was a relief to hear the assistant manager’s voice, even though it was saying, “The interlocker system is out, Miss Taggart. The signals are dead. There are eight incoming trains held up and six outgoing. We can’t move them in or out of the tunnels, we can’t find the chief engineer, we can’t locate the breach of the circuit, we have no copper wire for repairs, we don’t know what to do, we—” “I’ll be right down,” she said, dropping the receiver.
Hurrying to the elevator, then half-running through the stately lobby of the Wayne-Falkland, she felt herself returning to life at the summons of the possibility of action.
Taxicabs were rare, these days, and none came in answer to the doorman’s whistle. She started rapidly down the street, forgetting what she wore, wondering why the touch of the wind seemed too cold and too intimately close.
Her mind on the Terminal ahead, she was startled by the loveliness of a sudden sight: she saw the slender figure of a woman hurrying toward her, the ray of a lamppost sweeping over lustrous hair, naked arms, the swirl of a black cape and the flame of a diamond on her breast, with the long, empty corridor of a city street behind her and skyscrapers drawn by lonely dots of light. The knowledge that she was seeing her own reflection in the side mirror of a florist’s window, came an instant too late: she had felt the enchantment of the full context to which that image and city belonged. Then she felt a stab of desolate loneliness, much wider a loneliness than the span of an empty street—and a stab of anger at herself, at the preposterous contrast between her appearance and the context of this night and age.
She saw a taxi turn a corner, she waved to it and leaped in, slamming the door against a feeling which she hoped to leave behind her, on the empty pavement by a florist’s window. But she knew—in self-mockery, in bitterness, in longing—that this feeling was the sense of expectation she had felt at her first ball and at those rare times when she had wanted the outward beauty of existence to match its inner splendor. What a time to think of it! she told herself in mockery—not now! she cried to herself in anger—but a desolate voice kept asking her quietly to the rattle of the taxi’s wheels: You who believed you must live for your happiness, what do you now have left of it?—what are you gaining from your struggle?—yes! say it honestly: what’s in it for you?—or are you becoming one of those abject altruists who has no answer to that question any longer? ... Not now!—she ordered, as the glowing entrance to the Taggart Terminal flared up in the rectangle of the taxi’s windshield.
The men in the Terminal manager’s office were like extinguished signals, as if here, too, a circuit were broken and there were no living current to make them move. They looked at her with a kind of inanimate passivity, as if it made no difference whether she let them stay still or threw a switch to set them in motion.
The Terminal manager was absent. The chief engineer could not be found; he had been seen at the Terminal two hours ago, not since. The assistant manager had exhausted his power of initiative by volunteering to call her. The others volunteered nothing. The signal engineer was a college-boyish man in his thirties, who kept saying aggressively, “But this has never happened before, Miss Taggart! The interlocker has never failed. It’s not supposed to fail. We know our jobs, we can take care of it as well as anybody can—but not if it breaks down when it’s not supposed to!” She could not tell whether the dispatcher, an elderly man with years of railroad work behind him, still retained his intelligence but chose to hide it, or whether months of suppressing it had choked it for good, granting him the safety of stagnation.
“We don’t know what to do, Miss Taggart.” “We don’t know whom to call for what sort of permission.” “There are no rules to cover an emergency of this kind.” “There aren’t even any rules about who’s to lay down the rules for it!”
She listened, she reached for the telephone without a word of explanation, she ordered the operator to get her the operating vice-president of the Atlantic Southern in Chicago, to get him at his home and out of bed, if necessary.
“George? Dagny Taggart,” she said, when the voice of her competitor came on the wire. “Will you lend me the signal engineer of your Chicago terminal, Charles Murray, for twenty-four hours? ... Yes.... Right.... Put him aboard a plane and get him here as fast as you can. Tell him we’ll pay three thousand dollars.... Yes, for the one day.... Yes, as bad as that.... Yes, I’ll pay him in cash, out of my own pocket, if necessary. I’ll pay whatever it takes to bribe his way aboard a plane, but get him on the first plane out of Chicago.... No, George, not one—not a single mind left on Taggart Transcontinental.... Yes, I’ll get all the papers, exemptions, exceptions and emergency permissions.... Thanks, George. So long.”
She hung up and spoke rapidly to the men before her, not to hear the stillness of the room and of the Terminal, where no sound of wheels was beating any longer, not to hear the bitter words which the stillness seemed to repeat: Not a single mind left on Taggart Transcontinental....
“Get a wrecking train and crew ready at once,” she said. “Send them out on the Hudson Line, with orders to tear down every foot of copper wire, any copper wire, lights, signals, telephone, everything that’s company property. Have it here by morning.” “But, Miss Taggart! Our service on the Hudson Line is only temporarily suspended and the Unification Board has refused us permission to dismantle the line!” “I’ll be responsible.” “But how are we going to get the wrecking train out of here, when there aren’t any signals?” “There will be signals in half an hour.” “How?” “Come on,” she said, rising to her feet.
They followed her as she hurried down the passenger platforms, past the huddling, shifting groups of travelers by the motionless trains. She hurried down a narrow catwalk, through a maze of rail, past blinded signals and frozen switches, with nothing but the beat of her satin sandals to fill the great vaults of the underground tunnels of Taggart Transcontinental, with the hollow creaking of planks under the slower steps of men trailing her like a reluctant echo—she hurried to the lighted glass cube of Tower A, that hung in the darkness like a crown without a body, the crown of a deposed ruler above a realm of empty tracks.
The tower director was too expert a man at too exacting a job to be able wholly to conceal the dangerous burden of intelligence. He understood what she wanted him to do from her first few words and answered only with an abrupt “Yes, ma‘am,” but he was bent over his charts by the time the others came following her up the iron stairway, he was grimly at work on the most humiliating job of calculation he had ever had to perform in his long career. She knew how fully he understood it, from a single glance he threw at her, a glance of indignation and endurance that matched some emotion he had caught in her face. “We’ll do it first and feel about it afterwards,” she said, even though he had made no comment. “Yes, ma’.am,” he answered woodenly.
His room, on the top of an underground tower, was like a glass verandah overlooking what had once been the swiftest, richest and most orderly stream in the world. He had been trained to chart the course of over ninety trains an hour and to watch them roll safely through a maze of tracks and switches in and out of the Terminal, under his glass walls and his fingertips. Now, for the first time, he was looking out at the empty darkness of a dried channel.
Through the open door of the relay room, she saw the tower men standing grimly idle—the men whose jobs had never permitted a moment’s relaxation—standing by the long rows that looked like vertical copper pleats, like shelves of books and as much of a monument to human intelligence. The pull of one of the small levers, which protruded like bookmarks from the shelves, threw thousands of electric circuits into motion, made thousands of contacts and broke as many others, set dozens of switches to clear a chosen course and dozens of signals to light it, with no error left possible, no chance, no contradiction -an enormous complexity of thought condensed into one movement of a human hand to set and insure the course of a train, that hundreds of trains might safely rush by, that thousands of tons of metal and lives might pass in speeding streaks a breath away from one another, protected by nothing but a thought, the thought of the man who devised the levers. But they—she looked at the face of her signal engineer -they believed that that muscular contraction of a hand was the only thing required to move the traffic—and now the tower men stood idle—and on the great panels in front of the tower director, the red and green lights, which had flashed announcing the progress of trains at a distance of miles, were now so many glass beads—like the glass beads for which another breed of savages had once sold the Island of Manhattan.
“Call all of your unskilled laborers,” she said to the assistant manager, “the section hands, trackwalkers, engine wipers, whoever’s in the Terminal right now, and have them come here at once.”
.
“Here?”
“Here,” she said, pointing at the tracks outside the tower. “Call all your switchmen, too. Phone your storehouse and have them bring here every lantern they can lay their hands on, any sort of lantern, conductors’ lanterns, storm lanterns, anything.”
“Lanterns,
Miss Taggart?”
“Get going.”
“Yes, ma.‘am.”
“What is it we’re doing, Miss Taggart?” asked the dispatcher.
“We’re going to move trains and we’re going to move them manually.”
“Manually?”
said the signal engineer.
“Yes, brother! Now why should
you
be shocked?” She could not resist it. “Man is only muscles, isn’t he? We’re going back—back to where there were no interlocking systems, no semaphores, no electricity -back to the time when train signals were not steel and wire, but men holding lanterns. Physical men, serving as lampposts. You’ve advocated it long enough—you got what you wanted. Oh, you thought that your tools would determine your ideas? But it happens to be the other way around—and now you’re going to see the kind of tools your ideas have determined!”
But even to go back took an act of intelligence—she thought, feeling the paradox of her own position, as she looked at the lethargy of the faces around her.
“How will we work the switches, Miss Taggart?”
“By hand.”
“And the signals?”
“By hand.”
.“How?”
“By placing a man with a lantern at every signal post.”
“How? There’s not enough clearance.”
“We’ll use alternate tracks.”
“How will the men know which way to throw the switches?”
“By written orders.”
.“Uh?”
“By written orders—just as in the old days.” She pointed to the tower director. “He’s working out a schedule of how to move the trains and which tracks to use. He’ll write out an order for every signal and switch, he’ll pick some men as runners and they’ll keep delivering the orders to every post—and it will take hours to do what used to take minutes, but we’ll get those waiting trains into the Terminal and out on the road.”
“We’re to work it that way all night?”
“And all day tomorrow—until the engineer who’s got the brains for it, shows you how to repair the interlocker.”
“There’s nothing in the union contracts about men standing with lanterns. There’s going to be trouble. The union will object.”
“Let them come to me.”
“The Unification Board will object.”
“I’ll be responsible.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to be held for giving the orders—”
“I’ll give the orders.”
She stepped out on the landing of the iron stairway that hung on the side of the tower; she was fighting for self-control. It seemed to her for a moment as if she, too, were a precision instrument of high technology, left without electric current, trying to run a transcontinental railroad by means of her two hands. She looked out at the great, silent darkness of the Taggart underground—and she felt a stab of burning humiliation that she should now see it brought down to the level where human lampposts would stand in its tunnels as its last memorial statues.
She could barely distinguish the faces of the men when they gathered at the foot of the tower. They came streaming silently through the darkness and stood without moving in the bluish murk, with blue bulbs on the walls behind them and patches of light falling on their shoulders from the tower’s windows. She could see the greasy garments, the slack, muscular bodies, the limply hanging arms of men drained by the unrewarding exhaustion of a labor that required no thought. These were the dregs of the railroad, the younger men who could now seek no chance to rise and the older men who had never wanted to seek it. They stood in silence, not with the apprehensive curiosity of workmen, but with the heavy indifference of convicts.
“The orders which you are about to receive have come from me,” she said, standing above them on the iron stairs, speaking with resonant clarity. “The men who’ll issue them are acting under my instructions. The interlocking control system has broken down. It will now be replaced by human labor. Train service will be resumed at once.”
She noticed some faces in the crowd staring at her with a peculiar look: with a veiled resentment and the kind of insolent curiosity that made her suddenly conscious of being a woman. Then she remembered what she wore, and thought that it did look preposterous—and then, at the sudden stab of some violent impulse that felt like defiance and like loyalty to the full, real meaning of the moment, she threw her cape back and stood in the raw glare of light, under the sooted columns, like a figure at a formal reception, sternly erect, flaunting the luxury of naked arms, of glowing black satin, of a diamond flashing like a military cross.