Pipe-Smoking and Health: Some Considerations
Pipe-Smoking and Health: Some Considerations
by G.T. Steel
from here
This page is written by a pipe-smoker and not by a doctor. It is intended to provide information which might be helpful to pipe-smokers who, like myself, wish to continue to smoke, but who want to do as much as they can to avoid getting a pipe-smoking related illness.
There can be no pipe-smokers today who have not heard something about the health concerns with tobacco use. We have always been happy to believe that while cigarette-smoking has been known to be harmful for some time, pipe-smoking was comparatively safe. Most of the books on pipe-smoking, written by fellow devotees, suggest this and one was, until quite recently, told by many a doctor, that it was better to smoke a pipe than cigarettes and that it posed little real risk to health. Nowadays, it is rare to find a doctor who will condone any form of tobacco use. I am sure the views of the medical profession and the government on tobacco use include a degree of political expediency, but it does no harm to look into the matter for ourselves.
With all the medical attention now being given to other forms of tobacco use, a growing body of research is accumulating which would appear to show that pipe-smoking, while possibly less harmful than cigarette smoking overall, nonetheless is not free from health concerns. We all know pipe-smokers who have lived to a ripe old age without any problems and this may be the majority of pipe-smokers, but there are some who have succumbed to pipe-related disease.
The plus side of smoking a pipe as far as health is concerned is that the major disease associated with smoking - lung cancer - is relatively rare in pipe-smokers. Much of the research on pipe-smoking suggests that, as a group, we generally smoke less than cigarette-smokers, which serves us well. Indeed, some research has even suggested that in mean statistical terms, we live as long as non-smokers! Pipe-smoking is, as with life generally, something of a lottery.
So what are the risks with pipe-smoking? Put very simply, smoke is an irritant to the mouth and as it passes over sensitive tissues in years of persistent pipe-smoking, it can cause lesions to form. The carcinogens in smoke compound the problem and may trigger off a reaction, leading to cancer. Cancer may also take root in sore areas not initially caused by smoking, but affected by exposure to the smoke. Disease can spread quite quickly to other areas from these sites and through the bloodstream.
Pipe-smokers are not immune from cancers of the lungs, throat, larynx or oesophagus, but because we don't inhale directly, the most likely risk is from cancers of the mouth, the so-called "oral" cancers (over 80% of these cancers are in smokers and heavy drinkers), most commonly affecting the tongue (especially the sides and the back), the floor of the mouth, the roof of the mouth (i.e. the hard and soft palate) and the lower lip.
Needless to say, it is much more complex than this brief account suggests, but this outline should give you the general idea. Oral cancers are not the commonest of cancers, but they are certainly some of the most potentially devastating. Fortunately, some oral cancers can be treated succesfully if found in time. This depends, however, on each individual case. To be blunt, some pipe-smokers with oral cancer may be cured completely (with or without some form of impairment), but others may die from the disease. Approximately 50% of oral cancer subjects die within five years of the disease being diagnosed.
I have looked into the research a little myself, as far as a layman is able to do, but perhaps most importantly, I have sought the advice of an eminent head and neck surgeon and also that of a respected dental surgeon, who have both advised me in some detail on the health concerns and what one may do about them, short of giving up the pipe.
Of course, I can offer no guarantees that simply by following the suggestions made here that you will be stay free from a smoking related disease. But my hope is that this page will enable you to be more aware.
I would strongly urge you to confirm the sense of all that I have to say with your own doctor or dentist. Please read the disclaimer at the bottom of this page.
For those who are not prepared to take the risks involved, total abstention from all forms of tobacco use is the only choice.
For those who wish to continue to smoke a pipe, the following are some suggestions.
Smoking tobacco in any form poses some risk, so it makes sense to smoke moderately. If you can do without your pipe for a day, a week or even longer, this will rest your mouth a little and allow the nicotine and other harmful chemicals to eventually pass from your body. If you smoke 5 pipes or more a day, reduce this so that you enjoy a smaller number of pipes more. Moderation is the key thing here. In the medical data, "moderate" pipe-smoking is said to be 1-3 pipes a day. Pipes generate more heat in the smoke than cigarettes do and therefore are more irritating to the tissues in the mouth.
Never smoke a pipe when you have sores, lesions or ulcers anywhere in the mouth or on your lips. Smoking tobacco when you do can slow down the natural healing process and increase the chance of unprotected tissue being exposed to the carcinogens in tobacco smoke. Any persistent sores, lesions, ulcers, bumps, lumps or other irregularities such as red speckling or white or red patches (painful or painless - they are often the latter in the early stages), should be checked out with your doctor or a dentist if they haven't resolved themselves within two weeks. Other symptoms of something wrong in this area include uncommonly bad breath, a change in the taste in your mouth, lumps in the neck, facial swelling, difficulty in swallowing or moving the tongue, jaw pain or persistent earache, a bloody discharge from the mouth - all of these may be of concern and should be looked into without delay.
Don't be afraid to have things checked things out. It is far better to be safe than sorry.It may be nothing serious, or should it be so, a great deal can often be done in the early stages of the disease. And unlike some other cancers, oral cancers can often be clearly spotted early on before thay have had a chance to develop too far. Unfortunately a large number of cases are reported far too late and the consequence is death.
But even if you exhibit no symptoms, it is a good idea to have a six monthly check-up with a good dentist or oral surgeon and to inform him or her that you are a pipe-smoker and would like your mouth to be examined particularly carefully for any signs of anything untoward. In between times, get into a once-weekly habit of looking around your mouth for anything odd.(There are a number of good Web sites, which show how to give yourself an oral examination and what to look out for). This doesn't mean that you should become a hypochondriac or overly obsessive - being disturbed by every minor, benign occurrence in your mouth, but merely that you should be alert and cautious.
Avoid keeping your pipe in one position. Move the pipe about as much as possible. The pressure and heat of the stem of the pipe on one particular part of your lip can lead to lip cancer. Also, if the stream of smoke goes to one particular part of your tongue, the roof of your mouth or inside lining, over many years of irritation you are more likely to develop pre-cancerous and cancerous "patches". Therefore, it is better to hold your pipe in your hand rather than with your lips and teeth. It is irritation which we should most avoid. It is a good idea to space your pipe-smoking sessions as far apart as possible, giving your mouth a rest between bowls. Some pipe-smokers have had their dentists make up "palate guards" for themselves. These plastic guards, which look like a dental plate or retainer without the teeth, are slipped over the roof of the mouth and attach to side teeth when smoking. They protect the hard palate from a direct flow of smoke onto this region.
There is some medical evidence to suggest that those who are both smokers and heavy drinkers are much more likely to develop oral cancers through the effect of the alcohol and tobacco smoke "pooling" together in their saliva. Therefore, it may be more sensible not to smoke and drink concomitantly. The following may be a sensible precaution: If one has been drinking alcohol and wishes to smoke, rinse the mouth out with water first and vice-versa. While smoking, regularly rinse your mouth out with water. At the end of a smoking session, again rinse your mouth out thoroughly with water, gargling to clear your throat.
Avoid using harsh mouthwashes, especially those containing alcohol - most do. These irritate the mouth's tissues and the alcohol content is of concern in a smoker. A much more soothing and harmless mouthwash can be made from a teaspoon of kitchen salt dissolved in a glass or warm (not hot) water, with which you rinse and gargle thoroughly, especially just before going to bed. This salt wash is not recommended for frequent use, but only when you have oral problems. Your saliva has its own natural antiseptic qualities and it should be allowed to do its work without the aid of any mouthwash.
Also avoid drinking boiling hot drinks, which can irritate your mouth. Spicy or acid foods which sting your mouth, or those with sharp edges such as potato crisps, can also cause irritation or cuts and abrasions, so avoid them if you find they do and stop smoking until anything resulting from their consumption has repaired itself.
Many toothpastes contain sodium lauryl sulphate, and in some people this is known to irritate the linings of the mouth through the frothing "detergent" action. It may even cause mouth ulcers (canker sores) in some people. There are milder, more natural toothpastes on the market, which won't sting or irritate when you use them. Use a pea-sized amount of toothpaste and always wash your mouth out very thoroughly after using any toothpaste.
Keep your pipes clean. Don't let tars and tobacco juices build up in your pipes (tars particularly cling to the mortise of the shank). Regularly clean out your pipes and stems with pipe-cleaning fluid or drinking spirits and leave them to dry out thoroughly before smoking again. If you use charcoal, balsa-wood or paper filters, replace these after every smoke. Don't economize with them. It may be more harmful to smoke through an old, dirty filter than with no filter at all. Also, try to avoid "wet smoking" as it is possible to suck up the tobacco juices into your mouth.
If your mouth gets sore from smoking or you are suffering from tongue bite, give your mouth a rest for a few days. Use the salt and water solution 2-3 times a day for a few days.
Remember that many "drugstore" brands of cheaper tobaccos have numerous additives (chemicals) in them to give them a long shelf life, to prevent mold developing, to keep them moist and to add flavour, and these additions may not be harmless. Some of the more expensive pipe tobaccos are much more pure and have few, if any, additives. You may also find from experience that some tobaccos cause you less irritation than others. Those with a low nicotine content, such as latakia, are said by some to be less irritating.
When you smoke a pipe, don't inhale. Pipe smoke is heavier than cigarette smoke. The pleasure you get from smoking pipe tobacco is different from that of cigarettes, and doesn't need to be inhaled to be enjoyed.
Try to smoke gently, not hurriedly or nervously. If you smoke furiously the pipe will burn hot and the temperature of the smoke will increase, making the smoke more irritating.
Ensure good oral hygiene by brushing your teeth gently, but thoroughly, three times a day, and don't forget to floss your gums. Tongue brushing (very gently) may also be helpful. Have tobacco stains removed by your dentist every six months. This will assist your dentist in his job of thoroughly examining all dental surfaces. It is important to have any sources of abrasion such as sharp teeth, rough fillings or ill fitting false-teeth, seen to. Constant irritation from any source can encourage the onset of cancer. Therefore, if you have dental problems, get these checked out promptly and stop smoking until you have.
Because of the toll tobacco places on the body, ensure a good balanced diet and include lots of fresh fruit and vegetables. Recent research suggests that there may be some risk in taking large doses of vitamin and mineral supplements previously recommended to smokers, especially vitamins A and beta-carotene, C and E and selenium. Rather than taking supplements, it may be more sensible to ensure that your diet is rich in the foods which naturally contain these vitamins and minerals. Any physical exercise you can do will further enhance your body's immune system.
Be sensible with your smoking. If you find that you get a sore mouth easily, experience any increase in your heart rate, easily get a sore throat or a cough or have any other adverse reaction which you can relate to your pipe-smoking, give up the pipe; it is not for you. If you have got into a cycle of heavy pipe-smoking, then discipline yourself to reduce or give up. Most of us would rather smoke a few pipes than none at all. I hope that this site may be found helpful to pipe-smokers.
by G.T. Steel
from here
This page is written by a pipe-smoker and not by a doctor. It is intended to provide information which might be helpful to pipe-smokers who, like myself, wish to continue to smoke, but who want to do as much as they can to avoid getting a pipe-smoking related illness.
There can be no pipe-smokers today who have not heard something about the health concerns with tobacco use. We have always been happy to believe that while cigarette-smoking has been known to be harmful for some time, pipe-smoking was comparatively safe. Most of the books on pipe-smoking, written by fellow devotees, suggest this and one was, until quite recently, told by many a doctor, that it was better to smoke a pipe than cigarettes and that it posed little real risk to health. Nowadays, it is rare to find a doctor who will condone any form of tobacco use. I am sure the views of the medical profession and the government on tobacco use include a degree of political expediency, but it does no harm to look into the matter for ourselves.
With all the medical attention now being given to other forms of tobacco use, a growing body of research is accumulating which would appear to show that pipe-smoking, while possibly less harmful than cigarette smoking overall, nonetheless is not free from health concerns. We all know pipe-smokers who have lived to a ripe old age without any problems and this may be the majority of pipe-smokers, but there are some who have succumbed to pipe-related disease.
The plus side of smoking a pipe as far as health is concerned is that the major disease associated with smoking - lung cancer - is relatively rare in pipe-smokers. Much of the research on pipe-smoking suggests that, as a group, we generally smoke less than cigarette-smokers, which serves us well. Indeed, some research has even suggested that in mean statistical terms, we live as long as non-smokers! Pipe-smoking is, as with life generally, something of a lottery.
So what are the risks with pipe-smoking? Put very simply, smoke is an irritant to the mouth and as it passes over sensitive tissues in years of persistent pipe-smoking, it can cause lesions to form. The carcinogens in smoke compound the problem and may trigger off a reaction, leading to cancer. Cancer may also take root in sore areas not initially caused by smoking, but affected by exposure to the smoke. Disease can spread quite quickly to other areas from these sites and through the bloodstream.
Pipe-smokers are not immune from cancers of the lungs, throat, larynx or oesophagus, but because we don't inhale directly, the most likely risk is from cancers of the mouth, the so-called "oral" cancers (over 80% of these cancers are in smokers and heavy drinkers), most commonly affecting the tongue (especially the sides and the back), the floor of the mouth, the roof of the mouth (i.e. the hard and soft palate) and the lower lip.
Needless to say, it is much more complex than this brief account suggests, but this outline should give you the general idea. Oral cancers are not the commonest of cancers, but they are certainly some of the most potentially devastating. Fortunately, some oral cancers can be treated succesfully if found in time. This depends, however, on each individual case. To be blunt, some pipe-smokers with oral cancer may be cured completely (with or without some form of impairment), but others may die from the disease. Approximately 50% of oral cancer subjects die within five years of the disease being diagnosed.
I have looked into the research a little myself, as far as a layman is able to do, but perhaps most importantly, I have sought the advice of an eminent head and neck surgeon and also that of a respected dental surgeon, who have both advised me in some detail on the health concerns and what one may do about them, short of giving up the pipe.
Of course, I can offer no guarantees that simply by following the suggestions made here that you will be stay free from a smoking related disease. But my hope is that this page will enable you to be more aware.
I would strongly urge you to confirm the sense of all that I have to say with your own doctor or dentist. Please read the disclaimer at the bottom of this page.
For those who are not prepared to take the risks involved, total abstention from all forms of tobacco use is the only choice.
For those who wish to continue to smoke a pipe, the following are some suggestions.
Smoking tobacco in any form poses some risk, so it makes sense to smoke moderately. If you can do without your pipe for a day, a week or even longer, this will rest your mouth a little and allow the nicotine and other harmful chemicals to eventually pass from your body. If you smoke 5 pipes or more a day, reduce this so that you enjoy a smaller number of pipes more. Moderation is the key thing here. In the medical data, "moderate" pipe-smoking is said to be 1-3 pipes a day. Pipes generate more heat in the smoke than cigarettes do and therefore are more irritating to the tissues in the mouth.
Never smoke a pipe when you have sores, lesions or ulcers anywhere in the mouth or on your lips. Smoking tobacco when you do can slow down the natural healing process and increase the chance of unprotected tissue being exposed to the carcinogens in tobacco smoke. Any persistent sores, lesions, ulcers, bumps, lumps or other irregularities such as red speckling or white or red patches (painful or painless - they are often the latter in the early stages), should be checked out with your doctor or a dentist if they haven't resolved themselves within two weeks. Other symptoms of something wrong in this area include uncommonly bad breath, a change in the taste in your mouth, lumps in the neck, facial swelling, difficulty in swallowing or moving the tongue, jaw pain or persistent earache, a bloody discharge from the mouth - all of these may be of concern and should be looked into without delay.
Don't be afraid to have things checked things out. It is far better to be safe than sorry.It may be nothing serious, or should it be so, a great deal can often be done in the early stages of the disease. And unlike some other cancers, oral cancers can often be clearly spotted early on before thay have had a chance to develop too far. Unfortunately a large number of cases are reported far too late and the consequence is death.
But even if you exhibit no symptoms, it is a good idea to have a six monthly check-up with a good dentist or oral surgeon and to inform him or her that you are a pipe-smoker and would like your mouth to be examined particularly carefully for any signs of anything untoward. In between times, get into a once-weekly habit of looking around your mouth for anything odd.(There are a number of good Web sites, which show how to give yourself an oral examination and what to look out for). This doesn't mean that you should become a hypochondriac or overly obsessive - being disturbed by every minor, benign occurrence in your mouth, but merely that you should be alert and cautious.
Avoid keeping your pipe in one position. Move the pipe about as much as possible. The pressure and heat of the stem of the pipe on one particular part of your lip can lead to lip cancer. Also, if the stream of smoke goes to one particular part of your tongue, the roof of your mouth or inside lining, over many years of irritation you are more likely to develop pre-cancerous and cancerous "patches". Therefore, it is better to hold your pipe in your hand rather than with your lips and teeth. It is irritation which we should most avoid. It is a good idea to space your pipe-smoking sessions as far apart as possible, giving your mouth a rest between bowls. Some pipe-smokers have had their dentists make up "palate guards" for themselves. These plastic guards, which look like a dental plate or retainer without the teeth, are slipped over the roof of the mouth and attach to side teeth when smoking. They protect the hard palate from a direct flow of smoke onto this region.
There is some medical evidence to suggest that those who are both smokers and heavy drinkers are much more likely to develop oral cancers through the effect of the alcohol and tobacco smoke "pooling" together in their saliva. Therefore, it may be more sensible not to smoke and drink concomitantly. The following may be a sensible precaution: If one has been drinking alcohol and wishes to smoke, rinse the mouth out with water first and vice-versa. While smoking, regularly rinse your mouth out with water. At the end of a smoking session, again rinse your mouth out thoroughly with water, gargling to clear your throat.
Avoid using harsh mouthwashes, especially those containing alcohol - most do. These irritate the mouth's tissues and the alcohol content is of concern in a smoker. A much more soothing and harmless mouthwash can be made from a teaspoon of kitchen salt dissolved in a glass or warm (not hot) water, with which you rinse and gargle thoroughly, especially just before going to bed. This salt wash is not recommended for frequent use, but only when you have oral problems. Your saliva has its own natural antiseptic qualities and it should be allowed to do its work without the aid of any mouthwash.
Also avoid drinking boiling hot drinks, which can irritate your mouth. Spicy or acid foods which sting your mouth, or those with sharp edges such as potato crisps, can also cause irritation or cuts and abrasions, so avoid them if you find they do and stop smoking until anything resulting from their consumption has repaired itself.
Many toothpastes contain sodium lauryl sulphate, and in some people this is known to irritate the linings of the mouth through the frothing "detergent" action. It may even cause mouth ulcers (canker sores) in some people. There are milder, more natural toothpastes on the market, which won't sting or irritate when you use them. Use a pea-sized amount of toothpaste and always wash your mouth out very thoroughly after using any toothpaste.
Keep your pipes clean. Don't let tars and tobacco juices build up in your pipes (tars particularly cling to the mortise of the shank). Regularly clean out your pipes and stems with pipe-cleaning fluid or drinking spirits and leave them to dry out thoroughly before smoking again. If you use charcoal, balsa-wood or paper filters, replace these after every smoke. Don't economize with them. It may be more harmful to smoke through an old, dirty filter than with no filter at all. Also, try to avoid "wet smoking" as it is possible to suck up the tobacco juices into your mouth.
If your mouth gets sore from smoking or you are suffering from tongue bite, give your mouth a rest for a few days. Use the salt and water solution 2-3 times a day for a few days.
Remember that many "drugstore" brands of cheaper tobaccos have numerous additives (chemicals) in them to give them a long shelf life, to prevent mold developing, to keep them moist and to add flavour, and these additions may not be harmless. Some of the more expensive pipe tobaccos are much more pure and have few, if any, additives. You may also find from experience that some tobaccos cause you less irritation than others. Those with a low nicotine content, such as latakia, are said by some to be less irritating.
When you smoke a pipe, don't inhale. Pipe smoke is heavier than cigarette smoke. The pleasure you get from smoking pipe tobacco is different from that of cigarettes, and doesn't need to be inhaled to be enjoyed.
Try to smoke gently, not hurriedly or nervously. If you smoke furiously the pipe will burn hot and the temperature of the smoke will increase, making the smoke more irritating.
Ensure good oral hygiene by brushing your teeth gently, but thoroughly, three times a day, and don't forget to floss your gums. Tongue brushing (very gently) may also be helpful. Have tobacco stains removed by your dentist every six months. This will assist your dentist in his job of thoroughly examining all dental surfaces. It is important to have any sources of abrasion such as sharp teeth, rough fillings or ill fitting false-teeth, seen to. Constant irritation from any source can encourage the onset of cancer. Therefore, if you have dental problems, get these checked out promptly and stop smoking until you have.
Because of the toll tobacco places on the body, ensure a good balanced diet and include lots of fresh fruit and vegetables. Recent research suggests that there may be some risk in taking large doses of vitamin and mineral supplements previously recommended to smokers, especially vitamins A and beta-carotene, C and E and selenium. Rather than taking supplements, it may be more sensible to ensure that your diet is rich in the foods which naturally contain these vitamins and minerals. Any physical exercise you can do will further enhance your body's immune system.
Be sensible with your smoking. If you find that you get a sore mouth easily, experience any increase in your heart rate, easily get a sore throat or a cough or have any other adverse reaction which you can relate to your pipe-smoking, give up the pipe; it is not for you. If you have got into a cycle of heavy pipe-smoking, then discipline yourself to reduce or give up. Most of us would rather smoke a few pipes than none at all. I hope that this site may be found helpful to pipe-smokers.
How to Survive a Grizzly Bear Attack
from here
How to Survive a Grizzly Bear Attack
A grizzly bear is probably the scariest thing you can imagine encountering when you're hiking or camping in the woods. Respect your fear -- a grizzly attack would likely kill you or leave you severely maimed or scarred.
The most famous recent grizzly attack was probably the attack on Timothy Treadwell, a grizzly bear activist who spent time living among the bears in Alaska. In October 2006, Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were fatally attacked by one of the bears they'd come to love, documented in the Warner Herzog film "Grizzly Man."
Grizzly attack stories date back through the ages. As the story goes, in 1823, fur trapper Hugh Glass was on an expedition up the Missouri River, headed toward Yellowstone Park. Separated from his group, Glass accidentally surprised a mother grizzly and her cubs, and before he had a chance to grab his gun, the grizzly attacked him. Legend has it, he'd wrestled the bear to the ground by the time his men showed up to shoot the bear. But his injuries were so great that, after bandaging his wounds and sitting vigil for a few days, his men took his rifle and knife and left him there in a shallow grave. Glass actually survived to tell the tale, setting his own broken leg and wearing the grizzly bear pelt for warmth as he hiked for two months. A monument still stands at the site where Glass fought the grizzly.
The stories of Timothy Treadwell and Hugh Glass seem almost unbelievable. But grizzly bear attacks can and do happen to people just like you and me.
Although there are no formal statistics on bear attacks, collected news reports show at least 24 fatal attacks during the current decade in the United States and Canada [source: Black Bear Heaven]. In Alaska, there were eight non-fatal bear attacks in the first eight months of 2008 [source: Vick].
An encounter with a grizzly doesn't always have to end in bloodshed -- that's your blood or the bear's. By using safe hiking and camping practices, learning to read a bear's body language, staying calm and protecting yourself, you can greatly increase the odds you'll walk away from a grizzly in one piece.
About the Grizzly Bear
When you're camping or hiking, the two bears you're most likely to encounter are black bears and grizzly bears. It's important to know the distinction, since each type reacts differently to the presence of a human. For example, black bears tend to be more tolerant of people and live near human settlements. They're also generally less aggressive than grizzly bears.
Look for visual cues to tell the difference. Black bears may be black, but also brown, blue-black or even cinnamon-colored. Grizzlies also range in color, but primarily are brown. (Note: All grizzly bears are part of the species of brown bears, but not all brown bears are grizzly bears.) The hair on a grizzly's back and shoulders often has white tips, lending it a "grizzled" appearance. A grizzly has more of a shoulder hump, and a more concave face profile. A black bear has no shoulder hump and its facial profile is flatter (some describe it as having a "more Roman nose" than a grizzly). A black bear has short (1.5 inch, or 3.8 cm), dark claws, while a grizzly's are very long (2 to 5 inches, or 5 to 12.7 cm) and light in color. Grizzlies also tend to be bigger than black bears. Male grizzlies weigh around 500 pounds (226 kg), but some top out at 800 (362 kg). Black bears average 300 to 400 pounds (136 to 181 kg). Grizzlies stand around 3.5 feet (106.6 cm) at the shoulder and can stand up to 6.5 feet (198 cm). Black bears stand up to about 5 feet (152 cm). Oh, and don't ever try to outrun a grizzly -- they can reach 30 mph (48 kph).
There are about 200,000 grizzly bears worldwide. Although plentiful in locales like Russia, until recently grizzly bears were in danger of extinction in the United States. Today, the IUCN List of Threatened Species lists them as "Least Concern." However, the grizzly population is still under threat in isolated areas due to their low numbers. There are more grizzlies in Alaska and Canada than the continental United States, where only about 1,000 grizzlies remain.
Grizzly bears prefer mountain forest, tundra and coastal habitats. They're often found feeding at salmon breeding areas. They're omnivores and will eat just about anything -- plants, insects, fish, dead animals, hoofed animals and occasionally livestock. Around November or December, bears go into a dormancy period in their dens. But they don't go into complete hibernation and will occasionally emerge to forage for food.
Grizzlies are much more aggressive than black bears, due to evolution. Because of their long claws and shoulder hump, grizzlies can't easily climb trees to escape a threat (black bears can and do climb trees). Instead, grizzlies stand their ground. Mother grizzlies are particularly aggressive. Experts believe this aggression is linked to the fact that grizzlies tend to produce only six to eight cubs in a lifetime, compared to black bears that rear 12 or 13 cubs. Additionally, black bear cubs only remain with their mother for about a year, while a grizzly's cubs won't cut the apron strings for up to three years.
Brown bears have an extremely keen sense of smell and can detect odors up to a mile away! Experts believe a bear's hearing and eyesight are equivalent to a person's. What happens when you and a grizzly meet?
Hunting and Grizzlies
If you're a sportsman who hunts in grizzly country, use caution. The sound of a gunshot is like a dinner bell to a grizzly bear. After felling an elk or other big game, many a hunter has come upon a grizzly taking ownership of the carcass. Hunters should be careful when approaching their kills and should never try to take the carcass if it looks like the site has been disturbed by a bear. The bear is likely hiding nearby in a protective position. Sometimes, it's better to just let it go
Encountering a Grizzly Bear
You can cut your chances of ever encountering a bear if you pay attention to your surroundings. When you're hiking or camping, check with park officials about any bear sightings or activity. Bears like to frequent stream beds, berry patches and dense edge cover (the border of grass, weeds and shrubs along the forest line). If your vision on the trail is limited -- for example when you are rounding a blind curve -- sing or talk loudly to scare off any lurking bears. Don't let your dog run without a leash -- it could lead a bear right back to you. Look out for bear tracks or fresh bear scat on hiking trails. Any scat that is more than two inches in diameter probably is bear scat. Beware of any animal carcasses. Grizzlies are attracted to fresh kills and will hang around for days to protect their food source. Obviously, if you see a bear cub, the mother is not far behind. If you see any of these things, leave the area and report your findings to park officials.
Grizzly bears are typically active at dawn, dusk and during the night, but it's possible to encounter one at any time. If you can interpret a grizzly's body language, it will help you determine its intentions and how you should react. Bears primarily are solitary animals and they'll typically ignore humans unless they're surprised or they feel threatened. Grizzlies rarely seek out humans for attack, unless they're hungry and predatory -- in which case, yes, they'll likely attempt to kill and eat you. But most of the time, a grizzly just wants to remove a threat. A bear standing on its hind legs is not necessarily going to charge you; it's usually just trying to get a better look and smell. When a bear is agitated and upset, it will do any number of things -- put its ears back, lower its head, swing its head from side to side, paw at the ground, make woofing or growling noises or simply charge without warning. If a bear looks you directly in the eye with its ears back, it's definitely feeling threatened, and you should take this as a serious warning. If it begins to "pop" its jaw, it's getting ready to charge. It could "bluff" charge you to gauge your reaction, or it could knock you right down. Either way, never try to outrun a bear that's charging you -- it can reach speeds of up to 30 mph (48 kph). And even though grizzlies aren't the best climbers, they can reach up to 10 feet (304 cm) into a tree and have been known to scramble up after prey.
Why would a bear attack you in the first place? The most common reason is that you've met with a protective mother bear and her cubs. Other reasons? Surprising or startling a bear or getting too close to a bear's food. Or, the bear may simply be hungry and predatory. Just like Yogi Bear, a grizzly's main drive in life is to acquire food -- except a grizzly won't show up wearing a tie and politely nick your picnic basket. When you're camping and hiking, be extremely careful with food smells. Don't cook close to camp and be sure to store all your food in odor-proof containers, at least 14 feet (4.2 meters) up a tree and 4 feet (1.2 meters) away from the trunk.
Some bears will actually stalk you. Usually they're young male bears who have not yet learned the dangers of interacting with humans. In this case, you'll have to defend yourself aggressively. What do you do when a bear attacks?
If You Are Attacked by a Grizzly
If a bear is moving toward you aggressively, what do you do? Most importantly, keep your composure and don't make any sudden moves. Avoid making direct eye contact with the bear -- it's a sign of aggression. Instead, show the bear you're being submissive by backing away slowly and speaking to it in a calm, monotone voice. This helps the bear identify you as human and not a threat.
Doing just that may be enough to allow you or the bear to leave the area safely. Sometimes, however, you may not be so lucky. If a bear continues to advance toward you, it's time to use your bear spray. Never travel into bear country without bear spray, which is a canister of pepper spray -- much like mace -- designed to repel and frighten bears. Use bear spray only as a last resort. You don't want to take a chance that you'll miss and simply agitate the bear more. And, you might be wondering whether you should use your gun, if you've got one. Guns versus bears isn't recommended, and not just because most national parks ban the use of firearms. According to a study by bear biologist Thomas Smith, bear spray halted aggressive bear behavior a whopping 92 percent of the time. Guns, on the other hand, were successful only 67 percent of the time. Bear spray casts a cloud of gas that swirls the bear's head, confusing and blinding it -- giving you precious time to escape. On the other hand, you'd need to fire a gun with pinpoint accuracy, which isn't easy to do if a gigantic grizzly bear is charging you. And, you'd probably need to get off multiple shots to do it in.
Most experts advise that once a bear makes contact with you, you should fight back as hard as you can. But this tactic works better with black bears than with grizzlies, as black bears are more timid. You can greatly reduce your chances of grievous injury from a grizzly if you play dead. Most grizzlies defensively attack, so it's important to show the bear you're no longer a threat. Don't play dead until the last possible moment -- you don't want to blow any chance of getting out of the way. If you're wearing a backpack, keep it on. Lie on your side in the fetal position, bring your knees to your chest and bury your head in your legs. Alternatively, lie on your stomach with your backpack on, covering the back of your neck with your hands. If the grizzly still won't stop attacking, you may have to fight back. Use any available weapon -- a rock, your fist, a hunting knife -- and try to aim for the bear's head, eyes or nostrils.
There are some documented cases of grizzlies coming into camping tents. These bears were usually hungry or overly aggressive. You should always sleep in tents big enough to stack your gear between you and the tent wall, for protection. A bear that enters your tent sees you as prey -- so don't play dead. Fight back, using your bear spray and anything else you've got. Make noise, shine your flashlight in its eyes, do anything you can. When a grizzly enters your tent, it's definitely a worst-case scenario.
For more information about bears, take a swipe at the links on the next page.
Grizzly Facts
A grizzly bear's claws can reach up to five inches long. That's one heck of a manicure.
How to Survive a Grizzly Bear Attack
A grizzly bear is probably the scariest thing you can imagine encountering when you're hiking or camping in the woods. Respect your fear -- a grizzly attack would likely kill you or leave you severely maimed or scarred.
The most famous recent grizzly attack was probably the attack on Timothy Treadwell, a grizzly bear activist who spent time living among the bears in Alaska. In October 2006, Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were fatally attacked by one of the bears they'd come to love, documented in the Warner Herzog film "Grizzly Man."
Grizzly attack stories date back through the ages. As the story goes, in 1823, fur trapper Hugh Glass was on an expedition up the Missouri River, headed toward Yellowstone Park. Separated from his group, Glass accidentally surprised a mother grizzly and her cubs, and before he had a chance to grab his gun, the grizzly attacked him. Legend has it, he'd wrestled the bear to the ground by the time his men showed up to shoot the bear. But his injuries were so great that, after bandaging his wounds and sitting vigil for a few days, his men took his rifle and knife and left him there in a shallow grave. Glass actually survived to tell the tale, setting his own broken leg and wearing the grizzly bear pelt for warmth as he hiked for two months. A monument still stands at the site where Glass fought the grizzly.
The stories of Timothy Treadwell and Hugh Glass seem almost unbelievable. But grizzly bear attacks can and do happen to people just like you and me.
Although there are no formal statistics on bear attacks, collected news reports show at least 24 fatal attacks during the current decade in the United States and Canada [source: Black Bear Heaven]. In Alaska, there were eight non-fatal bear attacks in the first eight months of 2008 [source: Vick].
An encounter with a grizzly doesn't always have to end in bloodshed -- that's your blood or the bear's. By using safe hiking and camping practices, learning to read a bear's body language, staying calm and protecting yourself, you can greatly increase the odds you'll walk away from a grizzly in one piece.
About the Grizzly Bear
When you're camping or hiking, the two bears you're most likely to encounter are black bears and grizzly bears. It's important to know the distinction, since each type reacts differently to the presence of a human. For example, black bears tend to be more tolerant of people and live near human settlements. They're also generally less aggressive than grizzly bears.
Look for visual cues to tell the difference. Black bears may be black, but also brown, blue-black or even cinnamon-colored. Grizzlies also range in color, but primarily are brown. (Note: All grizzly bears are part of the species of brown bears, but not all brown bears are grizzly bears.) The hair on a grizzly's back and shoulders often has white tips, lending it a "grizzled" appearance. A grizzly has more of a shoulder hump, and a more concave face profile. A black bear has no shoulder hump and its facial profile is flatter (some describe it as having a "more Roman nose" than a grizzly). A black bear has short (1.5 inch, or 3.8 cm), dark claws, while a grizzly's are very long (2 to 5 inches, or 5 to 12.7 cm) and light in color. Grizzlies also tend to be bigger than black bears. Male grizzlies weigh around 500 pounds (226 kg), but some top out at 800 (362 kg). Black bears average 300 to 400 pounds (136 to 181 kg). Grizzlies stand around 3.5 feet (106.6 cm) at the shoulder and can stand up to 6.5 feet (198 cm). Black bears stand up to about 5 feet (152 cm). Oh, and don't ever try to outrun a grizzly -- they can reach 30 mph (48 kph).
There are about 200,000 grizzly bears worldwide. Although plentiful in locales like Russia, until recently grizzly bears were in danger of extinction in the United States. Today, the IUCN List of Threatened Species lists them as "Least Concern." However, the grizzly population is still under threat in isolated areas due to their low numbers. There are more grizzlies in Alaska and Canada than the continental United States, where only about 1,000 grizzlies remain.
Grizzly bears prefer mountain forest, tundra and coastal habitats. They're often found feeding at salmon breeding areas. They're omnivores and will eat just about anything -- plants, insects, fish, dead animals, hoofed animals and occasionally livestock. Around November or December, bears go into a dormancy period in their dens. But they don't go into complete hibernation and will occasionally emerge to forage for food.
Grizzlies are much more aggressive than black bears, due to evolution. Because of their long claws and shoulder hump, grizzlies can't easily climb trees to escape a threat (black bears can and do climb trees). Instead, grizzlies stand their ground. Mother grizzlies are particularly aggressive. Experts believe this aggression is linked to the fact that grizzlies tend to produce only six to eight cubs in a lifetime, compared to black bears that rear 12 or 13 cubs. Additionally, black bear cubs only remain with their mother for about a year, while a grizzly's cubs won't cut the apron strings for up to three years.
Brown bears have an extremely keen sense of smell and can detect odors up to a mile away! Experts believe a bear's hearing and eyesight are equivalent to a person's. What happens when you and a grizzly meet?
Hunting and Grizzlies
If you're a sportsman who hunts in grizzly country, use caution. The sound of a gunshot is like a dinner bell to a grizzly bear. After felling an elk or other big game, many a hunter has come upon a grizzly taking ownership of the carcass. Hunters should be careful when approaching their kills and should never try to take the carcass if it looks like the site has been disturbed by a bear. The bear is likely hiding nearby in a protective position. Sometimes, it's better to just let it go
Encountering a Grizzly Bear
You can cut your chances of ever encountering a bear if you pay attention to your surroundings. When you're hiking or camping, check with park officials about any bear sightings or activity. Bears like to frequent stream beds, berry patches and dense edge cover (the border of grass, weeds and shrubs along the forest line). If your vision on the trail is limited -- for example when you are rounding a blind curve -- sing or talk loudly to scare off any lurking bears. Don't let your dog run without a leash -- it could lead a bear right back to you. Look out for bear tracks or fresh bear scat on hiking trails. Any scat that is more than two inches in diameter probably is bear scat. Beware of any animal carcasses. Grizzlies are attracted to fresh kills and will hang around for days to protect their food source. Obviously, if you see a bear cub, the mother is not far behind. If you see any of these things, leave the area and report your findings to park officials.
Grizzly bears are typically active at dawn, dusk and during the night, but it's possible to encounter one at any time. If you can interpret a grizzly's body language, it will help you determine its intentions and how you should react. Bears primarily are solitary animals and they'll typically ignore humans unless they're surprised or they feel threatened. Grizzlies rarely seek out humans for attack, unless they're hungry and predatory -- in which case, yes, they'll likely attempt to kill and eat you. But most of the time, a grizzly just wants to remove a threat. A bear standing on its hind legs is not necessarily going to charge you; it's usually just trying to get a better look and smell. When a bear is agitated and upset, it will do any number of things -- put its ears back, lower its head, swing its head from side to side, paw at the ground, make woofing or growling noises or simply charge without warning. If a bear looks you directly in the eye with its ears back, it's definitely feeling threatened, and you should take this as a serious warning. If it begins to "pop" its jaw, it's getting ready to charge. It could "bluff" charge you to gauge your reaction, or it could knock you right down. Either way, never try to outrun a bear that's charging you -- it can reach speeds of up to 30 mph (48 kph). And even though grizzlies aren't the best climbers, they can reach up to 10 feet (304 cm) into a tree and have been known to scramble up after prey.
Why would a bear attack you in the first place? The most common reason is that you've met with a protective mother bear and her cubs. Other reasons? Surprising or startling a bear or getting too close to a bear's food. Or, the bear may simply be hungry and predatory. Just like Yogi Bear, a grizzly's main drive in life is to acquire food -- except a grizzly won't show up wearing a tie and politely nick your picnic basket. When you're camping and hiking, be extremely careful with food smells. Don't cook close to camp and be sure to store all your food in odor-proof containers, at least 14 feet (4.2 meters) up a tree and 4 feet (1.2 meters) away from the trunk.
Some bears will actually stalk you. Usually they're young male bears who have not yet learned the dangers of interacting with humans. In this case, you'll have to defend yourself aggressively. What do you do when a bear attacks?
If You Are Attacked by a Grizzly
If a bear is moving toward you aggressively, what do you do? Most importantly, keep your composure and don't make any sudden moves. Avoid making direct eye contact with the bear -- it's a sign of aggression. Instead, show the bear you're being submissive by backing away slowly and speaking to it in a calm, monotone voice. This helps the bear identify you as human and not a threat.
Doing just that may be enough to allow you or the bear to leave the area safely. Sometimes, however, you may not be so lucky. If a bear continues to advance toward you, it's time to use your bear spray. Never travel into bear country without bear spray, which is a canister of pepper spray -- much like mace -- designed to repel and frighten bears. Use bear spray only as a last resort. You don't want to take a chance that you'll miss and simply agitate the bear more. And, you might be wondering whether you should use your gun, if you've got one. Guns versus bears isn't recommended, and not just because most national parks ban the use of firearms. According to a study by bear biologist Thomas Smith, bear spray halted aggressive bear behavior a whopping 92 percent of the time. Guns, on the other hand, were successful only 67 percent of the time. Bear spray casts a cloud of gas that swirls the bear's head, confusing and blinding it -- giving you precious time to escape. On the other hand, you'd need to fire a gun with pinpoint accuracy, which isn't easy to do if a gigantic grizzly bear is charging you. And, you'd probably need to get off multiple shots to do it in.
Most experts advise that once a bear makes contact with you, you should fight back as hard as you can. But this tactic works better with black bears than with grizzlies, as black bears are more timid. You can greatly reduce your chances of grievous injury from a grizzly if you play dead. Most grizzlies defensively attack, so it's important to show the bear you're no longer a threat. Don't play dead until the last possible moment -- you don't want to blow any chance of getting out of the way. If you're wearing a backpack, keep it on. Lie on your side in the fetal position, bring your knees to your chest and bury your head in your legs. Alternatively, lie on your stomach with your backpack on, covering the back of your neck with your hands. If the grizzly still won't stop attacking, you may have to fight back. Use any available weapon -- a rock, your fist, a hunting knife -- and try to aim for the bear's head, eyes or nostrils.
There are some documented cases of grizzlies coming into camping tents. These bears were usually hungry or overly aggressive. You should always sleep in tents big enough to stack your gear between you and the tent wall, for protection. A bear that enters your tent sees you as prey -- so don't play dead. Fight back, using your bear spray and anything else you've got. Make noise, shine your flashlight in its eyes, do anything you can. When a grizzly enters your tent, it's definitely a worst-case scenario.
For more information about bears, take a swipe at the links on the next page.
Grizzly Facts
A grizzly bear's claws can reach up to five inches long. That's one heck of a manicure.
The Comparative Anatomy of Eating
Milton R. Mills, M.D. 11/21/09
from here
Humans are most often described as "omnivores." This classification is based on the "observation" that humans generally eat a wide variety of plant and animal foods. However, culture, custom and training are confounding variables when looking at human dietary practices. Thus, "observation" is not the best technique to use when trying to identify the most "natural" diet for humans. While most humans are clearly "behavioral" omnivores, the question still remains as to whether humans are anatomically suited for a diet that includes animal as well as plant foods.
A better and more objective technique is to look at human anatomy and physiology. Mammals are anatomically and physiologically adapted to procure and consume particular kinds of diets. (It is common practice when examining fossils of extinct mammals to examine anatomical features to deduce the animal's probable diet.) Therefore, we can look at mammalian carnivores, herbivores (plant-eaters) and omnivores to see which anatomical and physiological features are associated with each kind of diet. Then we can look at human anatomy and physiology to see in which group we belong.
Oral Cavity
Carnivores have a wide mouth opening in relation to their head size. This confers obvious advantages in developing the forces used in seizing, killing and dismembering prey. Facial musculature is reduced since these muscles would hinder a wide gape, and play no part in the animal's preparation of food for swallowing. In all mammalian carnivores, the jaw joint is a simple hinge joint lying in the same plane as the teeth. This type of joint is extremely stable and acts as the pivot point for the "lever arms" formed by the upper and lower jaws. The primary muscle used for operating the jaw in carnivores is the temporalis muscle. This muscle is so massive in carnivores that it accounts for most of the bulk of the sides of the head (when you pet a dog, you are petting its temporalis muscles). The "angle" of the mandible (lower jaw) in carnivores is small. This is because the muscles (masseter and pterygoids) that attach there are of minor importance in these animals. The lower jaw of carnivores cannot move forward, and has very limited side-to-side motion. When the jaw of a carnivore closes, the blade-shaped cheek molars slide past each other to give a slicing motion that is very effective for shearing meat off bone.
The teeth of a carnivore are discretely spaced so as not to trap stringy debris. The incisors are short, pointed and prong-like and are used for grasping and shredding. The canines are greatly elongated and dagger-like for stabbing, tearing and killing prey. The molars (carnassials) are flattened and triangular with jagged edges such that they function like serrated-edged blades. Because of the hinge-type joint, when a carnivore closes its jaw, the cheek teeth come together in a back-to-front fashion giving a smooth cutting motion like the blades on a pair of shears.
The saliva of carnivorous animals does not contain digestive enzymes. When eating, a mammalian carnivore gorges itself rapidly and does not chew its food. Since proteolytic (protein-digesting) enzymes cannot be liberated in the mouth due to the danger of autodigestion (damaging the oral cavity), carnivores do not need to mix their food with saliva; they simply bite off huge chunks of meat and swallow them whole.
According to evolutionary theory, the anatomical features consistent with an herbivorous diet represent a more recently derived condition than that of the carnivore. Herbivorous mammals have well-developed facial musculature, fleshy lips, a relatively small opening into the oral cavity and a thickened, muscular tongue. The lips aid in the movement of food into the mouth and, along with the facial (cheek) musculature and tongue, assist in the chewing of food. In herbivores, the jaw joint has moved to position above the plane of the teeth. Although this type of joint is less stable than the hinge-type joint of the carnivore, it is much more mobile and allows the complex jaw motions needed when chewing plant foods. Additionally, this type of jaw joint allows the upper and lower cheek teeth to come together along the length of the jaw more or less at once when the mouth is closed in order to form grinding platforms. (This type of joint is so important to a plant-eating animal, that it is believed to have evolved at least 15 different times in various plant-eating mammalian species.) The angle of the mandible has expanded to provide a broad area of attachment for the well-developed masseter and pterygoid muscles (these are the major muscles of chewing in plant-eating animals). The temporalis muscle is small and of minor importance. The masseter and pterygoid muscles hold the mandible in a sling-like arrangement and swing the jaw from side-to-side. Accordingly, the lower jaw of plant-eating mammals has a pronounced sideways motion when eating. This lateral movement is necessary for the grinding motion of chewing.
The dentition of herbivores is quite varied depending on the kind of vegetation a particular species is adapted to eat. Although these animals differ in the types and numbers of teeth they posses, the various kinds of teeth when present, share common structural features. The incisors are broad, flattened and spade-like. Canines may be small as in horses, prominent as in hippos, pigs and some primates (these are thought to be used for defense) or absent altogether. The molars, in general, are squared and flattened on top to provide a grinding surface. The molars cannot vertically slide past one another in a shearing/slicing motion, but they do horizontally slide across one another to crush and grind. The surface features of the molars vary depending on the type of plant material the animal eats. The teeth of herbivorous animals are closely grouped so that the incisors form an efficient cropping/biting mechanism, and the upper and lower molars form extended platforms for crushing and grinding. The "walled-in" oral cavity has a lot of potential space that is realized during eating.
These animals carefully and methodically chew their food, pushing the food back and forth into the grinding teeth with the tongue and cheek muscles. This thorough process is necessary to mechanically disrupt plant cell walls in order to release the digestible intracellular contents and ensure thorough mixing of this material with their saliva. This is important because the saliva of plant-eating mammals often contains carbohydrate-digesting enzymes which begin breaking down food molecules while the food is still in the mouth.
Stomach and Small Intestine
Striking differences between carnivores and herbivores are seen in these organs. Carnivores have a capacious simple (single-chambered) stomach. The stomach volume of a carnivore represents 60-70% of the total capacity of the digestive system. Because meat is relatively easily digested, their small intestines (where absorption of food molecules takes place) are short&151;about three to five or six times the body length. Since these animals average a kill only about once a week, a large stomach volume is advantageous because it allows the animals to quickly gorge themselves when eating, taking in as much meat as possible at one time which can then be digested later while resting. Additionally, the ability of the carnivore stomach to secrete hydrochloric acid is exceptional. Carnivores are able to keep their gastric pH down around 1-2 even with food present. This is necessary to facilitate protein breakdown and to kill the abundant dangerous bacteria often found in decaying flesh foods.
Because of the relative difficulty with which various kinds of plant foods are broken down (due to large amounts of indigestible fibers), herbivores have significantly longer and in some cases, far more elaborate guts than carnivores. Herbivorous animals that consume plants containing a high proportion of cellulose must "ferment" (digest by bacterial enzyme action) their food to obtain the nutrient value. They are classified as either "ruminants" (foregut fermenters) or hindgut fermenters. The ruminants are the plant-eating animals with the celebrated multiple-chambered stomachs. Herbivorous animals that eat a diet of relatively soft vegetation do not need a multiple-chambered stomach. They typically have a simple stomach, and a long small intestine. These animals ferment the difficult-to-digest fibrous portions of their diets in their hindguts (colons). Many of these herbivores increase the sophistication and efficiency of their GI tracts by including carbohydrate-digesting enzymes in their saliva. A multiple-stomach fermentation process in an animal which consumed a diet of soft, pulpy vegetation would be energetically wasteful. Nutrients and calories would be consumed by the fermenting bacteria and protozoa before reaching the small intestine for absorption. The small intestine of plant-eating animals tends to be very long (greater than 10 times body length) to allow adequate time and space for absorption of the nutrients.
Colon
The large intestine (colon) of carnivores is simple and very short, as its only purposes are to absorb salt and water. It is approximately the same diameter as the small intestine and, consequently, has a limited capacity to function as a reservoir. The colon is short and non-pouched. The muscle is distributed throughout the wall, giving the colon a smooth cylindrical appearance. Although a bacterial population is present in the colon of carnivores, its activities are essentially putrefactive.
In herbivorous animals, the large intestine tends to be a highly specialized organ involved in water and electrolyte absorption, vitamin production and absorption, and/or fermentation of fibrous plant materials. The colons of herbivores are usually wider than their small intestine and are relatively long. In some plant-eating mammals, the colon has a pouched appearance due to the arrangement of the muscle fibers in the intestinal wall. Additionally, in some herbivores the cecum (the first section of the colon) is quite large and serves as the primary or accessory fermentation site.
What About Omnivores?
One would expect an omnivore to show anatomical features which equip it to eat both animal and plant foods. According to evolutionary theory, carnivore gut structure is more primitive than herbivorous adaptations. Thus, an omnivore might be expected to be a carnivore which shows some gastrointestinal tract adaptations to an herbivorous diet.
This is exactly the situation we find in the Bear, Raccoon and certain members of the Canine families. (This discussion will be limited to bears because they are, in general, representative of the anatomical omnivores.) Bears are classified as carnivores but are classic anatomical omnivores. Although they eat some animal foods, bears are primarily herbivorous with 70-80% of their diet comprised of plant foods. (The one exception is the Polar bear which lives in the frozen, vegetation poor arctic and feeds primarily on seal blubber.) Bears cannot digest fibrous vegetation well, and therefore, are highly selective feeders. Their diet is dominated by primarily succulent lent herbage, tubers and berries. Many scientists believe the reason bears hibernate is because their chief food (succulent vegetation) not available in the cold northern winters. (Interestingly, Polar bears hibernate during the summer months when seals are unavailable.)
In general, bears exhibit anatomical features consistent with a carnivorous diet. The jaw joint of bears is in the same plane as the molar teeth. The temporalis muscle is massive, and the angle of the mandible is small corresponding to the limited role the pterygoid and masseter muscles play in operating the jaw. The small intestine is short (less than five times body length) like that of the pure carnivores, and the colon is simple, smooth and short. The most prominent adaptation to an herbivorous diet in bears (and other "anatomical" omnivores) is the modification of their dentition. Bears retain the peg-like incisors, large canines and shearing premolars of a carnivore; but the molars have become squared with rounded cusps for crushing and grinding. Bears have not, however, adopted the flattened, blunt nails seen in most herbivores and retain the elongated, pointed claws of a carnivore.
An animal which captures, kills and eats prey must have the physical equipment which makes predation practical and efficient. Since bears include significant amounts of meat in their diet, they must retain the anatomical features that permit them to capture and kill prey animals. Hence, bears have a jaw structure, musculature and dentition which enable them to develop and apply the forces necessary to kill and dismember prey even though the majority of their diet is comprised of plant foods. Although an herbivore-style jaw joint (above the plane of the teeth) is a far more efficient joint for crushing and grinding vegetation and would potentially allow bears to exploit a wider range of plant foods in their diet, it is a much weaker joint than the hinge-style carnivore joint. The herbivore-style jaw joint is relatively easily dislocated and would not hold up well under the stresses of subduing struggling prey and/or crushing bones (nor would it allow the wide gape carnivores need). In the wild, an animal with a dislocated jaw would either soon starve to death or be eaten by something else and would, therefore, be selected against. A given species cannot adopt the weaker but more mobile and efficient herbivore-style joint until it has committed to an essentially plant-food diet test it risk jaw dislocation, death and ultimately, extinction.
What About Me?
The human gastrointestinal tract features the anatomical modifications consistent with an herbivorous diet. Humans have muscular lips and a small opening into the oral cavity. Many of the so-called "muscles of expression" are actually the muscles used in chewing. The muscular and agile tongue essential for eating, has adapted to use in speech and other things. The mandibular joint is flattened by a cartilaginous plate and is located well above the plane of the teeth. The temporalis muscle is reduced. The characteristic "square jaw" of adult males reflects the expanded angular process of the mandible and the enlarged masseter/pterygoid muscle group. The human mandible can move forward to engage the incisors, and side-to-side to crush and grind.
Human teeth are also similar to those found in other herbivores with the exception of the canines (the canines of some of the apes are elongated and are thought to be used for display and/or defense). Our teeth are rather large and usually abut against one another. The incisors are flat and spade-like, useful for peeling, snipping and biting relatively soft materials. The canines are neither serrated nor conical, but are flattened, blunt and small and function Like incisors. The premolars and molars are squarish, flattened and nodular, and used for crushing, grinding and pulping noncoarse foods.
Human saliva contains the carbohydrate-digesting enzyme, salivary amylase. This enzyme is responsible for the majority of starch digestion. The esophagus is narrow and suited to small, soft balls of thoroughly chewed food. Eating quickly, attempting to swallow a large amount of food or swallowing fibrous and/or poorly chewed food (meat is the most frequent culprit) often results in choking in humans.
Man's stomach is single-chambered, but only moderately acidic. (Clinically, a person presenting with a gastric pH less than 4-5 when there is food in the stomach is cause for concern.) The stomach volume represents about 21-27% of the total volume of the human GI tract. The stomach serves as a mixing and storage chamber, mixing and liquefying ingested foodstuffs and regulating their entry into the small intestine. The human small intestine is long, averaging from 10 to 11 times the body length. (Our small intestine averages 22 to 30 feet in length. Human body size is measured from the top of the head to end of the spine and averages between two to three feet in length in normal-sized individuals.)
The human colon demonstrates the pouched structure peculiar to herbivores. The distensible large intestine is larger in cross-section than the small intestine, and is relatively long. Man's colon is responsible for water and electrolyte absorption and vitamin production and absorption. There is also extensive bacterial fermentation of fibrous plant materials, with the production and absorption of significant amounts of food energy (volatile short-chain fatty acids) depending upon the fiber content of the diet. The extent to which the fermentation and absorption of metabolites takes place in the human colon has only recently begun to be investigated.
In conclusion, we see that human beings have the gastrointestinal tract structure of a "committed" herbivore. Humankind does not show the mixed structural features one expects and finds in anatomical omnivores such as bears and raccoons. Thus, from comparing the gastrointestinal tract of humans to that of carnivores, herbivores and omnivores we must conclude that humankind's GI tract is designed for a purely plant-food diet.
Atlas Shrugged 5
CHAPTER IV
ANTI-LIFE
James Taggart reached into the pocket of his dinner jacket, pulled out the
first wad of paper he found, which was a hundred-dollar bill, and dropped it
into the beggar's hand.
He noticed that the beggar pocketed the money in a manner as indifferent
as his own. "Thanks, bud." said the beggar contemptuously, and walked away.
James Taggart remained still in the middle of the sidewalk, wondering what
gave him a sense of shock and dread. It was not the man's insolence—he had
not sought any gratitude, he had not been moved by pity, his gesture had been
automatic and meaningless. It was that the beggar acted as if he would have
been indifferent had he received a hundred dollars or a dime or, failing to
find any help whatever, had seen himself dying of starvation within this
night. Taggart shuddered and walked brusquely on, the shudder serving to cut
off the realization that the beggar's mood matched his own.
The walls of the street around him had the stressed, unnatural clarity of
a summer twilight, while an orange haze filled the channels of intersections
and veiled the tiers of roofs, leaving him on a shrinking remnant of ground.
The calendar in the sky seemed to stand insistently out of the haze, yellow
like a page of old parchment, saying: August 5, No—he thought, in answer to
things he had not named—it was not true, he felt fine, that's why he wanted
to do something tonight. He could not admit to himself that his peculiar
restlessness came from a desire to experience pleasure; he could not admit
that the particular pleasure he wanted was that of celebration, because he
could not admit what it was that he wanted to celebrate.
This had been a day of intense activity, spent on words floating as
vaguely as cotton, yet achieving a purpose as precisely as an adding machine,
summing up to his full satisfaction. But his purpose and the nature of his
satisfaction had to be kept as carefully hidden from himself as they had been
from others; and his sudden craving for pleasure was a dangerous breach.
The day had started with a small luncheon in the hotel suite of a visiting
Argentinian legislator, where a few people of various nationalities had
talked at leisurely length about the climate of Argentina, its soil, its
resources, the needs of its people, the value of a dynamic, progressive
attitude toward the future—and had mentioned, as the briefest topic of
conversation, that Argentina would be declared a People's State within two
weeks.
It had been followed by a few cocktails at the home of Orren Boyle, with
only one unobtrusive gentleman from Argentina sitting silently in a corner,
while two executives from Washington and a few friends of unspecified
positions had talked about national resources, metallurgy, mineralogy,
neighborly duties and the welfare of the globe—and had mentioned that a loan
of four billion dollars would be granted within three weeks to the People's
State of Argentina and the People's State of Chile.
It had been followed by a small cocktail party in a private room of the
bar built like a cellar on the roof of a skyscraper, an informal party given
by him, James Taggart, for the directors of a recently formed company, The
Interneighborly Amity and Development Corporation, of which Orren Boyle was
president and a slender, graceful, overactive man from Chile was treasurer, a
man whose name was Senor Mario Martinez, but whom Taggart was tempted, by
some resemblance of spirit, to call Senor Cuffy Meigs. Here they had talked
about golf, horse races, boat races, automobiles and women. It had not been
necessary to mention, since they all knew it, that the Interneighborly Amity
and Development Corporation had an exclusive contract to operate, on a
--------------------------------------- 659
twenty-year "managerial lease," all the industrial properties of the People's
States of the Southern Hemisphere.
The last event of the day had been a large dinner reception at the home of
Senor Rodrigo Gonzales, a diplomatic representative of Chile.
No one had heard of Senor Gonzales a year ago, but he had become famous
for the parties he had given in the past six months, ever since his arrival
in New York. His guests described him as a progressive businessman. He had
lost his property—it was said—when Chile, becoming a People's State, had
nationalized all properties, except those belonging to citizens of backward,
non-People's countries, such as Argentina; but he had adopted an enlightened
attitude and had joined the new regime, placing himself in the service of his
country. His home in New York occupied an entire floor of an exclusive
residential hotel.
He had a fat, blank face and the eyes of a killer. Watching him at
tonight's reception, Taggart had concluded that the man was impervious to any
sort of feeling, he looked as if a knife could slash, unnoticed, through his
pendulous layers of flesh—except that there was a lewd, almost sexual relish
in the way he rubbed his feet against the rich pile of his Persian rugs, or
patted the polished arm of his chair, or folded his lips about a cigar. His
wife, the Senora Gonzales, was a small, attractive woman, not as beautiful as
she assumed, but enjoying the reputation of a beauty by means of a violent
nervous energy and an odd manner of loose, warm, cynical self-assertiveness
that seemed to promise anything and to absolve anyone. It was known that her
particular brand of trading was her husband's chief asset, in an age when one
traded, not goods, but favors—and, watching her among the guests, Taggart had
found amusement in wondering what deals had been made, what directives
issued, what industries destroyed in exchange for a few chance nights, which
most of those men had had no reason to seek and, perhaps, could no longer
remember. The party had bored him, there had been only half a dozen persons
for whose sake he had put in an appearance, and it had not been necessary to
speak to that half-dozen, merely to be seen and to exchange a few glances.
Dinner had been about to be served, when he had heard what he had come to
hear: Senor Gonzales had mentioned—the smoke of his cigar weaving over the
half-dozen men who had drifted toward his armchair—that by agreement with the
future People's State of Argentina, the properties of d'Anconia Copper would
be nationalized by the People's State of Chile, in less than a month, on
September 2.
It had all gone as Taggart had expected; the unexpected had come when, on
hearing those words, he had felt an irresistible urge to escape.
He had felt incapable of enduring the boredom of the dinner, as if some
other form of activity were needed to greet the achievement of this night. He
had walked out into the summer twilight of the streets, feeling as if he were
both pursuing and pursued: pursuing a pleasure which nothing could give him,
in celebration of a feeling which he dared not name—pursued by the dread of
discovering what motive had moved him through the planning of tonight's
achievement and what aspect of it now gave him this feverish sense of
gratification.
He reminded himself that he would sell his d'Anconia Copper stock, which
had never rallied fully after its crash of last year, and he would purchase
shares of the Inter-neighborly Amity and Development Corporation, as agreed
with his friends, which would bring him a fortune. But the thought brought
him nothing but boredom; this was not the thing he wanted to celebrate.
He tried to force himself to enjoy it: money, he thought, had been his
motive, money, nothing worse. Wasn't that a normal motive? A valid one?
Wasn't that what they all were after, the Wyatts, the Reardens, the
d'Anconias? . . . He jerked his head to stop it: he felt as if his thoughts
--------------------------------------- 660
were slipping down a dangerous blind alley, the end of which he must never
permit himself to see.
No—he thought bleakly, in reluctant admission—money meant nothing to him
any longer. He had thrown dollars about by the hundreds—
at that party he had given today—for unfinished drinks, for uneaten
delicacies, for unprovoked tips and unexpected whims, for a long distance
phone call to Argentina because one of the guests had wanted to check the
exact version of a smutty story he had started telling, for the spur of any
moment, for the clammy stupor of knowing that it was easier to pay than to
think.
"You've got nothing to worry about, under that Railroad Unification Plan,"
Orren Boyle had giggled to him drunkenly. Under the Railroad Unification
Plan, a local railroad had gone bankrupt in North Dakota, abandoning the
region to the fate of a blighted area, the local banker had committed
suicide, first killing his wife and children—a freight train had been taken
oil the schedule in Tennessee, leaving a local factory without transportation
at a day's notice, the factory owner's son had quit college and was now in
jail, awaiting execution for a murder committed with a gang of raiders—a way
station had been closed in Kansas, and the station agent, who had wanted to
be a scientist, had given up his studies and become a dishwasher—that he,
James Taggart, might sit in a private barroom and pay for the alcohol pouring
down Orren Boyle's throat, for the waiter who sponged Boyle's garments when
he spilled his drink over his chest, for the carpet burned by the cigarettes
of an ex-pimp from Chile who did not want to take the trouble of reaching for
an ashtray across a distance of three feet.
It was not the knowledge of his indifference to money that now gave him a
shudder of dread. It was the knowledge that he would be equally indifferent,
were he reduced to the state of the beggar. There had been a time when he had
felt some measure of guilt—in no clearer a form than a touch of irritation—at
the thought that he shared the sin of greed, which he spent his time
denouncing. Now he was hit by the chill realization that, in fact, he had
never been a hypocrite: in full truth, he had never cared for money. This
left another hole gaping open before him, leading into another blind alley
which he could not risk seeing.
I just want to do something tonight!—he cried soundlessly to someone at
large, in protest and in demanding anger—in protest against whatever it was
that kept forcing these thoughts into his mind—in anger at a universe where
some malevolent power would not permit him to find enjoyment without the need
to know what he wanted or why.
What do you want?—some enemy voice kept asking, and he walked faster,
trying to escape it. It seemed to him that his brain was a maze where a blind
alley opened at every turn, leading into a fog that hid an abyss. It seemed
to him that he was running, while the small island of safety was shrinking
and nothing but those alleys would soon be left. It was like the remnant of
clarity in the street around him, with the haze rolling in to fill all exits.
Why did it have to shrink?—he thought in panic. This was the way he had lived
all his life—keeping his eyes stubbornly, safely on the immediate pavement
before him, craftily avoiding the sight of his road, of corners, of
distances, of pinnacles. He had never intended going anywhere, he had wanted
to be free of progression, free of the yoke of a straight line, he had never
wanted his years to add up to any sum—what had summed them up?—why had he
reached some unchosen destination where one could no longer stand still or
retreat? "Look where you're going, brother!" snarled some voice, while an
elbow pushed him back—and he realized that he had collided with some large,
ill-smelling figure and that he had been running.
He slowed his steps and admitted into his mind a recognition of the
streets he had chosen in his random escape. He had not wanted to know that he
--------------------------------------- 661
was going home to his wife. That, too, was a fogbound alley, but there was no
other left to him.
He knew—the moment he saw Cherryl's silent, poised figure as she rose at
his entrance into her room—that this was more dangerous than he had allowed
himself to know and that he would not find what he wanted. But danger, to
him, was a signal to shut off his sight, suspend his judgment and pursue an
unaltered course, on the unstated premise that the danger would remain unreal
by the sovereign power of his wish not to see it—like a foghorn within him,
blowing, not to sound a warning, but to summon the fog.
"Why, yes, I did have an important business banquet to attend, but I
changed my mind, I felt like having dinner with you tonight," he said in the
tone of a compliment—but a quiet "I see" was the only answer he obtained.
He felt irritation at her unastonished manner and her pale, unrevealing
face. He felt irritation at the smooth efficiency with which she gave
instructions to the servants, then at finding himself in the candlelight of
the dining room, facing her across a perfectly appointed table, with two
crystal cups of fruit in silver bowls of ice between them.
It was her poise that irritated him most; she was no longer an incongruous
little freak, dwarfed by the luxury of the residence which a famous artist
had designed; she matched it. She sat at the table as if she were the kind of
hostess that room had the right to demand. She wore a tailored housecoat of
russet-colored brocade that blended with the bronze of her hair, the severe
simplicity of its lines serving as her only ornament. He would have preferred
the jingling bracelets and rhinestone buckles of her past. Her eyes disturbed
him, as they had for months: they were neither friendly nor hostile, but
watchful and questioning.
"I closed a big deal today," he said, his tone part boastful, part
pleading. "A deal involving this whole continent and half a dozen
governments."
He realized that the awe, the admiration, the eager curiosity he had
expected, belonged to the face of the little shop girl who had ceased to
exist. He saw none of it in the face of his wife; even anger or hatred would
have been preferable to her level, attentive glance; the glance was worse
than accusing, it was inquiring.
"What deal, Jim?"
"What do you mean, what deal? Why are you suspicious? Why do you have to
start prying at once?"
"I'm sorry. I didn't know it was confidential. You don't have to answer
me."
"It's not confidential." He waited, but she remained silent. "Well?
Aren't you going to say anything?"
"Why, no." She said it simply, as if to please him.
"So you're not interested at all?"
"But I thought you didn't want to discuss it."
"Oh, don't be so tricky!" he snapped. "It's a big business deal. That's
what you admire, isn't it, big business? Well, it's bigger than anything
those boys ever dreamed of. They spend their lives grubbing for their
fortunes penny by penny, while I can do it like that"—he snapped his fingers—
"just like that. It's the biggest single stunt ever pulled."
"Stunt, Jim?"
"Deal!"
"And you did it? Yourself?"
"You bet I did it! That fat fool, Orren Boyle, couldn't have swung it in a
million years. This took knowledge and skill and timing"—he saw a spark of
interest in her eyes—"and psychology." The spark vanished, but he went
rushing heedlessly on. "One had to know how to approach Wesley, and how to
keep the wrong influences away from him, and how to get Mr. Thompson
--------------------------------------- 662
interested without letting him know too much, and how to cut Chick Morrison
in on it, but keep Tinky Holloway out, and how to get the right people to
give a few parties for Wesley at the right time, and . . . Say, Cherryl, is
there any champagne in this house?"
"Champagne?"
"Can't we do something special tonight? Can't we have a sort of
celebration together?"
"We can have champagne, yes, Jim, of course."
She rang the bell and gave the orders, in her odd, lifeless, uncritical
manner, a manner of meticulous compliance with his wishes while volunteering
none of her own.
"You don't seem to be very impressed," he said. "But what would you know
about business, anyway? You wouldn't be able to understand anything on so
large a scale. Wait till September second. Wait till they hear about it."
"They? Who?"
He glanced at her, as if he had let a dangerous word slip out
involuntarily, "We've organized a setup where we—me, Orren and a few friends—
are going to control every industrial property south of the border."
"Whose property?"
"Why . . . the people's. This is not an old-fashioned grab for private
profit. It's a deal with a mission—a worthy, public-spirited mission—to
manage the nationalized properties of the various People's States of South
America, to teach their workers our modern techniques of production, to help
the underprivileged who've never had a chance, to—" He broke off abruptly,
though she had merely sat looking at him without shifting her glance. "You
know," he said suddenly, with a cold little chuckle, "if you're so damn
anxious to hide that you came from the slums, you ought to be less
indifferent to the philosophy of social welfare. It's always the poor who
lack humanitarian instincts. One has to be born to wealth in order to know
the finer feelings of altruism."
"I've never tried to hide that I came from the slums," she said in the
simple, impersonal tone of a factual correction. "And I haven't any sympathy
for that welfare philosophy. I've seen enough of them to know what makes the
kind of poor who want something for nothing."
He did not answer, and she added suddenly, her voice astonished, but firm,
as if in final confirmation of a long-standing doubt, "Jim, you don't care
about it, either. You don't care about any of that welfare hogwash."
"Well, if money is all that you're interested in," he snapped, "let me
tell you that that deal will bring me a fortune. That's what you've always
admired, isn't it, wealth?"
"It depends."
"I think I'll end up as one of the richest men in the world," he said; he
did not ask what her admiration depended upon. "There's nothing I won't be
able to afford. Nothing. Just name it. I can give you anything you want. Go
on, name it."
"I don't want anything, Jim."
"But I'd like to give you a present! To celebrate the occasion, see?
Anything you take it into your head to ask. Anything. I can do it. I want
to show you that I can do it. Any fancy you care to name."
"I haven't any fancies."
"Oh, come on! Want a yacht?"
"No."
"Want me to buy you the whole neighborhood where you lived in Buffalo?"
"No."
"Want the crown jewels of the People's State of England? They can be had,
you know. That People's State has been hinting about it on the black market
for a long time. But there aren't any old-fashioned tycoons left who're able
--------------------------------------- 663
to afford it. I'm able to afford it—or will be, after September second. Want
it?"
"No."
"Then what do you want?"
"I don't want anything, Jim."
"But you've got to! You've got to want something, damn you!"
She looked at him, faintly startled, but otherwise indifferent.
"Oh, all right, I'm sorry," he said; he seemed astonished by his own 87!
outbreak. "I just wanted to please you," he added sullenly, "but I guess
you can't understand it at all. You don't know how important it is.
You don't know how big a man you're married to."
"I'm trying to find out," she said slowly, "Do you still think, as you
used to, that Hank Rearden is a great man?"
"Yes, Jim, I do."
"Well, I've got him beaten. I'm greater than any of them, greater than
Rearden and greater than that other lover of my sister's, who—"
He stopped, as if he had slid too far.
"Jim," she asked evenly, "what is going to happen on September second?"
He glanced up at her, from under his forehead—a cold glance, while his
muscles creased into a semi-smile, as if in cynical breach of some hallowed
restraint. "They're going to nationalize d'Anconia Copper," he said.
He heard the long, harsh roll of a motor, as a plane went by somewhere in
the darkness above the roof, then a thin tinkle, as a piece of ice settled,
melting, in the silver bowl of his fruit cup—before she answered. She said,
"He was your friend, wasn't he?"
"Oh, shut up!"
He remained silent, not looking at her. When his eyes came back to her
face, she was still watching him and she spoke first, her voice oddly stern:
"What your sister did in her radio broadcast was great."
"Yes, I know, I know, you've been saying that for a month."
"You've never answered me."
"What is there to ans . . . ?"
"Just as your friends in Washington have never answered her." He remained
silent. "Jim, I'm not dropping the subject." He did not answer.
"Your friends in Washington never uttered a word about it. They did not
deny the things she said, they did not explain, they did not try to justify
themselves. They acted as if she had never spoken. I think they're hoping
that people will forget it. Some people will. But the rest of us know what
she said and that your friends were afraid to fight her."
"That's not true! The proper action was taken and the incident is closed
and I don't see why you keep bringing it up."
"What action?"
"Bertram Scudder was taken off the air, as a program not in the public
interest at the present time."
"Does that answer her?"
"It closes the issue and there's nothing more to be said about it."
"About a government that works by blackmail and extortion?"
"You can't say that nothing was done. It's been publicly announced that
Scudder's programs were disruptive, destructive and untrustworthy."
"Jim, I want to understand this. Scudder wasn't on her side—he was on
yours. He didn't even arrange that broadcast. He was acting on orders from
Washington, wasn't he?"
"I thought you didn't like Bertram Scudder."
"I didn't and I don't, but—"
"Then what do you care?"
"But he was innocent, as far as your friends were concerned, wasn't he?"
"I wish you wouldn't bother with politics. You talk like a fool."
--------------------------------------- 664
"He was innocent, wasn't he?"
"So what?"
She looked at him, her eyes incredulously wide. "Then they just made him
the scapegoat, didn't they?"
"Oh, don't sit there looking like Eddie Willers!"
"Do I? I like Eddie Willers. He's honest."
"He's a damn half-wit who doesn't have the faintest idea of how to deal
with practical reality!"
"But you do, don't you, Jim?"
"You bet I do!"
"Then couldn't you have helped Scudder?"
"I?" He burst into helpless, angry laughter. "Oh, why don't you grow up? I
did my best to get Scudder thrown to the lions! Somebody had to be. Don't you
know that it was my neck, if some other hadn't been found?"
"Your neck? Why not Dagny's, if she was wrong? Because she wasn't?"
"Dagny is in an entirely different category! It had to be Scudder or me."
"Why?"
"And it's much better for national policy to let it be Scudder. This way,
it's not necessary to argue about what she said—and if anybody brings it up,
we start howling that it was said on Scudder's program and that Scudder's
programs have been discredited and that Scudder is a proven fraud and liar,
etc., etc.—and do you think the public will be able to unscramble it?
Nobody's ever trusted Bertram Scudder, anyway.
Oh, don't stare at me like that! Would you rather they'd picked me to
discredit?"
"Why not Dagny? Because her speech could not be discredited?"
"If you're so damn sorry for Bertram Scudder, you should have seen him try
his damndest to make them break my neck! He's been doing that for years—how
do you think he got to where he was, except by climbing on carcasses? He
thought he was pretty powerful, too—you should have seen how the big business
tycoons used to be afraid of him! But he got himself outmaneuvered, this
time. This time, he belonged to the wrong faction."
Dimly, through the pleasant stupor of relaxing, of sprawling back in his
chair and smiling, he knew that this was the enjoyment he wanted: to be
himself. To be himself—he thought, in the drugged, precarious state of
floating past the deadliest of his blind alleys, the one that led to the
question of what was himself.
"You see, he belonged to the Tinky Holloway faction. It was pretty much of
a seesaw for a while, between the Tinky Holloway faction and the Chick
Morrison faction. But we won. Tinky made a deal and agreed to scuttle his pal
Bertram in exchange for a few things he needed from us. You should have heard
Bertram howl! But he was a dead duck and he knew it."
He started on a rolling chuckle, but choked it off, as the haze cleared
and he saw his wife's face. "Jim," she whispered, "is that the sort of . . .
victories you're winning?"
"Oh, for Christ's sake!" he screamed, smashing his fist down on the table.
"Where have you been all these years? What sort of world do you think you're
living in?" His blow had upset his water glass and the water went spreading
in dark stains over the lace of the tablecloth.
"I'm trying to find out," she whispered. Her shoulders were sagging and
her face looked suddenly worn, an odd, aged look that seemed haggard and
lost.
"I couldn't help it!" he burst out in the silence. "I'm not to blame! I
have to take things as I find them! It's not I who've made this world!"
He was shocked to see that she smiled—a smile of so fiercely bitter a
contempt that it seemed incredible on her gently patient face; she was not
--------------------------------------- 665
looking at him, but at some image of her own. "That's what my father used to
say when he got drunk at the corner saloon instead of looking for work."
"How dare you try comparing me to—" he started, but did not finish,
because she was not listening.
Her words, when she looked at him again, astonished him as completely
irrelevant. "The date of that nationalization, September second,"
she asked, her voice wistful, "was it you who picked it?"
"No. I had nothing to do with it. It's the date of some special session of
their legislature. Why?"
"It's the date of our first wedding anniversary."
"Oh? Oh, that's right!" He smiled, relieved at the change to a safe
subject. "We'll have been married a year. My, it doesn't seem that long!"
"It seems much longer," she said tonelessly.
She was looking off again, and he felt in sudden uneasiness that the
subject was not safe at all; he wished she would not look as if she were
seeing the whole course of that year and of their marriage.
. . . not to get scared, but to learn—she thought—the thing to do is not
to get scared, but to learn . . . The words came from a sentence she had
repeated to herself so often that it felt like a pillar polished smooth by
the helpless weight of her body, the pillar that had supported her through
the past year. She tried to repeat it, but she felt as if her hands were
slipping on the polish, as if the sentence would not stave off terror any
longer—because she was beginning to understand.
If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.
. . . It was in the bewildered loneliness of the first weeks of her
marriage that she said it to herself for the first time. She could not
understand Jim's behavior, or his sullen anger, which looked like weakness,
or his evasive, incomprehensible answers to her questions, which sounded like
cowardice; such traits were not possible in the James Taggart whom she had
married. She told herself that she could not condemn without understanding,
that she knew nothing about his world, that the extent of her ignorance was
the extent to which she misinterpreted his actions. She took the blame, she
took the beating of self reproach—against some bleakly stubborn certainty
which told her that something was wrong and that the thing she felt was fear.
"I must learn everything that Mrs. James Taggart is expected to know and
to be." was the way she explained her purpose to a teacher of etiquette. She
set out to learn with the devotion, the discipline, the drive of a military
cadet or a religious novice. It was the only way, she thought, of earning the
height which her husband had granted her on trust, of living up to his vision
of her, which it was now her duty to achieve. And, not wishing to confess it
to herself, she felt also that at the end of the long task she would
recapture her vision of him, that knowledge would bring back to her the man
she had seen on the night of his railroad's triumph.
She could not understand Jim's attitude when she told him about her
lessons. He burst out laughing; she was unable to believe that the laughter
had a sound of malicious contempt. "Why, Jim? Why? What are you laughing at?"
He would not explain—almost as if the fact of his contempt were sufficient
and required no reasons.
She could not suspect him of malice: he was too patiently generous about
her mistakes. He seemed eager to display her in the best drawing rooms of the
city, and he never uttered a word of reproach for her ignorance, for her
awkwardness, for those terrible moments when a silent exchange of glances
among the guests and a burst of blood to her cheekbones told her that she had
said the wrong thing again. He showed no embarrassment, he merely watched her
with a faint smile.
--------------------------------------- 666
When they came home after one of those evenings, his mood seemed
affectionately cheerful. He was trying to make it easier for her, she
thought—and gratitude drove her to study the harder.
She expected her reward on the evening when, by some imperceptible
transition, she found herself enjoying a party for the first time. She felt
free to act, not by rules, but at her own pleasure, with sudden confidence
that the rules had fused into a natural habit—she knew that she was
attracting attention, but now, for the first time, it was not the attention
of ridicule, but of admiration—she was sought after, on her own merit, she
was Mrs. Taggart, she had ceased being an object of charity weighing Jim
down, painfully tolerated for his sake—she was laughing gaily and seeing the
smiles of response, of appreciation on the faces around her—and she kept
glancing at him across the room, radiantly, like a child handing him a report
card with a perfect score, begging him to be proud of her. Jim sat alone in a
corner, watching her with an undecipherable glance.
He would not speak to her on their way home. "I don't know why I keep
dragging myself to those parties," he snapped suddenly, tearing off his dress
tie in the middle of their living room, "I've never sat through such a
vulgar, boring waste of time!" "Why, Jim," she said, stunned, "I thought it
was wonderful." "You would! You seemed to be quite at home—quite as if it
were Coney Island. I wish you'd learn to keep your place and not to embarrass
me in public." "[ embarrassed you? Tonight?" "You did!" "How?" "If you don't
understand it, I can't explain," he said in the tone of a mystic who implies
that a lack of understanding is the confession of a shameful inferiority. "I
don't understand it," she said firmly. He walked out of the room, slamming
the door.
She felt that the inexplicable was not a mere blank, this time: it had a
tinge of evil. From that night on, a small, hard point of fear remained
within her, like the spot of a distant headlight advancing upon her down an
invisible track.
Knowledge did not seem to bring her a clearer vision of Jim's world, but
to make the mystery greater. She could not believe that she was supposed to
feel respect for the dreary senselessness of the art shows which his friends
attended, of the novels they read, of the political magazines they discussed—
the art shows, where she saw the kind of drawings she had seen chalked on any
pavement of her childhood's slums—the novels, that purported to prove the
futility of science, industry, civilization and love, using language that her
father would not have used in his drunkenest moments—the magazines, that
propounded cowardly generalities, less clear and more stale than the sermons
for which she had condemned the preacher of the slum mission as a mealy-
mouthed old fraud.
She could not believe that these things were the culture she had so
reverently looked up to and so eagerly waited to discover. She felt as if she
had climbed a mountain toward a jagged shape that had looked like a castle
and had found it to be the crumbling ruin of a gutted warehouse.
"Jim," she said once, after an evening spent among the men who were called
the intellectual leaders of the country, "Dr. Simon Pritchett is a phony—a
mean, scared old phony." "Now, really," he answered, "do you think you're
qualified to pass judgment on philosophers?"
"I'm qualified to pass judgment on con men. I've seen enough of them to
know one when I see him." "Now this is why I say that you'll never outgrow
your background. If you had, you would have learned to appreciate Dr.
Pritchett's philosophy." "What philosophy?" "If you don't understand it, I
can't explain." She would not let him end the conversation on that favorite
formula of his. "Jim," she said, "he's a phony, he and Balph Eubank and that
whole gang of theirs—and I think you've been taken in by them." Instead of
--------------------------------------- 667
the anger she expected, she saw a brief flash of amusement in the lift of his
eyelids. "That's what you think," he answered.
She felt an instant of terror at the first touch of a concept she had not
known to be possible: What if Jim was not taken in by them? She could
understand the phoniness of Dr. Pritchett, she thought—it was a racket that
gave him an undeserved income; she could even admit the possibility, by now,
that Jim might be a phony in his own business; what she could not hold inside
her mind was the concept of Jim as a phony in a racket from which he gained
nothing, an unpaid phony, an unvenal phony; the phoniness of a cardsharp or a
con man seemed innocently wholesome by comparison. She could not conceive of
his motive; she felt only that the headlight moving upon her had grown
larger.
She could not remember by what steps, what accumulation of pain, first as
small scratches of uneasiness, then as stabs of bewilderment, then as the
chronic, nagging pull of fear, she had begun to doubt Jim's position on the
railroad. It was his sudden, angry "so you don't trust me?" snapped in answer
to her first, innocent questions that made her realize that she did not—when
the doubt had not yet formed in her mind and she had fully expected that his
answers would reassure her. She had learned, in the slums of her childhood,
that honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted, "I
don't care to talk shop," was his answer whenever she mentioned the railroad.
She tried to plead with him once. "Jim, you know what I think of your work
and how much I admire you for it." "Oh, really?
What is it you married, a man or a railroad president?" "I . . . I never
thought of separating the two." "Well, it is not very flattering to me." She
looked at him, baffled: she had thought it was. "I'd like to believe," he
said, "that you love me for myself, and not for my railroad." "Oh God, Jim,"
she gasped, "you didn't think that I—!" "No,"
he said, with a sadly generous smile, "I didn't think that you married me
for my money or my position. I have never doubted you." Realizing, in stunned
confusion and in tortured fairness, that she might have given him ground to
misinterpret her feeling, that she had forgotten how many bitter
disappointments he must have suffered at the hands of fortune-hunting women,
she could do nothing but shake her head and moan, "Oh, Jim, that's not what I
meant!" He chuckled softly, as at a child, and slipped his arm around her.
"Do you love me?" he asked. "Yes," she whispered. "Then you must have faith
in me. Love is faith, you know. Don't you see that I need it? I don't trust
anyone around me, I have nothing but enemies, I am very lonely. Don't you
know that I need you?"
The thing that made her pace her room—hours later, in tortured
restlessness—was that she wished desperately to believe him and did not
believe a word of it, yet knew that it was true.
It was true, but not in the manner he implied, not in any manner or
meaning she could ever hope to grasp. It was true that he needed her, but the
nature of his need kept slipping past her every effort to define it. She did
not know what he wanted of her. It was not flattery that he wanted, she had
seen him listening to the obsequious compliments of liars, listening with a
look of resentful inertness—almost the look of a drug addict at a dose
inadequate to rouse him. But she had seen him look at her as if he were
waiting for some reviving shot and, at times, as if he were begging. She had
seen a flicker of life in his eyes whenever she granted him some sign of
admiration—yet a burst of anger was his answer, whenever she named a reason
for admiring him.
He seemed to want her to consider him great, but never dare ascribe any
specific content to his greatness.
She did not understand the night, in mid-April, when he returned from a
trip to Washington. "Hi, kid!" he said loudly, dropping a sheaf of lilac into
--------------------------------------- 668
her arms. "Happy days are here again! Just saw those flowers and thought of
you. Spring is coming, baby!"
He poured himself a drink and paced the room, talking with too light, too
brash a manner of gaiety. There was a feverish sparkle in his eyes, and his
voice seemed shredded by some unnatural excitement. She began to wonder
whether he was elated or crushed.
"I know what it is that they're planning!" he said suddenly, without
transition, and she glanced up at him swiftly: she knew the sound of one of
his inner explosions. "There's not a dozen people in the whole country who
know it, but I do! The top boys are keeping it secret till they're ready to
spring it on the nation. Will it surprise a lot of people!
Will it knock them flat! A lot of people? Hell, every single person in
this country! It will affect every single person. That's how important it
is."
"Affect—how, Jim?"
"It will affect them! And they don't know what's coming, but I do.
There they sit tonight"—he waved at the lighted windows of the city—
"making plans, counting their money, hugging their children or their
dreams, and they don't know, but I do, that all of it will be struck,
stopped, changed!"
"Changed—for the worse or the better?"
"For the better, of course," he answered impatiently, as if it were
irrelevant; his voice seemed to lose its fire and to slip into the fraudulent
sound of duty. "It's a plan to save the country, to stop our economic
decline, to hold things still, to achieve stability and security."
"What plan?"
"I can't tell you. It's secret. Top secret. You have no idea how many
people would like to know it. There's no industrialist who wouldn't give a
dozen of his best furnaces for just one hint of warning, which he's not going
to get! Like Hank Rearden, for instance, whom you admire so much." He
chuckled, looking off into the future.
"Jim," she asked, the sound of fear in her voice telling him what the
sound of his chuckle had been like, "why do you hate Hank Rearden?"
"I don't hate him!" He whirled to her, and his face, incredibly, looked
anxious, almost frightened. "I never said I hated him. Don't worry, he'll
approve of the plan. Everybody will. It's for everybody's good." He sounded
as if he were pleading. She felt the dizzying certainty that he was lying,
yet that the plea was sincere—as if he had a desperate need to reassure her,
but not about the things he said.
She forced herself to smile. "Yes, Jim, of course," she answered,
wondering what instinct in what impossible kind of chaos had made her say it
as if it were her part to reassure him.
The look she saw on his face was almost a smile and almost of gratitude.
"1 had to tell you about it tonight. I had to tell you. I wanted you to know
what tremendous issues I deal with. You always talk about my work, but you
don't understand it at all, it's so much wider than you imagine. You think
that running a railroad is a matter of track laying and fancy metals and
getting trains there on time. But it's not.
Any underling can do that. The real heart of a railroad is in Washington.
My job is politics. Politics. Decisions made on a national scale, affecting
everything, controlling everybody. A few words on paper, a directive—changing
the life of every person in every nook, cranny and penthouse of this
country!"
"Yes, Jim," she said, wishing to believe that he was, perhaps, a man of
stature in the mysterious realm of Washington.
"You'll see," he said, pacing the room. "You think they're powerful —those
giants of industry who're so clever with motors and furnaces?
--------------------------------------- 669
They'll be stopped! They'll be stripped! They'll be brought down! They'll
be—" He noticed the way she was staring at him. "It's not for ourselves," he
snapped hastily, "it's for the people. That's the difference between business
and politics—we have no selfish ends in view, no private motives, we're not
after profit, we don't spend our lives scrambling for money, we don't have
to! That's why we're slandered and misunderstood by all the greedy profit-
chasers who can't conceive of a spiritual motive or a moral ideal or . . . We
couldn't help it!" he cried suddenly, whirling to her. "We had to have that
plan! With everything falling to pieces and stopping, something had to be
done! We had to stop them from stopping! We couldn't help it!"
His eyes were desperate; she did not know whether he was boasting or
begging for forgiveness; she did not know whether this was triumph or terror.
"Jim, don't you feel well? Maybe you've worked too hard and you're worn out
and—"
"I've never felt better in my life!" he snapped, resuming his pacing.
"You bet I've worked hard. My work is bigger than any job you can hope to
imagine. It's above anything that grubbing mechanics like Rearden and my
sister, are doing. Whatever they do, I can undo it. Let them build a track—I
can come and break it, just like that!"
He snapped his fingers. "Just like breaking a spine'"
"You want to break spines?" she whispered, trembling.
"I haven't said that!" he screamed. "What's the matter with you? I haven't
said it!"
"I'm sorry, Jim!" she gasped, shocked by her own words and by the terror
in his eyes. "It's just that I don't understand, but . . . but I know I
shouldn't bother you with questions when you're so tired"—
she was struggling desperately to convince herself—"when you have so many
things on your mind . . . such . . . such great things . . .
things I can't even begin to think of . . ."
His shoulders sagged, relaxing. He approached her and dropped wearily down
on his knees, slipping his arms around her. "You poor little fool," he said
affectionately.
She held onto him, moved by something that felt like tenderness and almost
like pity. But he raised his head to glance up at her face, and it seemed to
her that the look she saw in his eyes was part-gratification, part-contempt—
almost as if, by some unknown kind of sanction, she had absolved him and
damned herself.
It was useless—she found in the days that followed—to tell herself that
these things were beyond her understanding, that it was her duty to believe
in him, that love was faith. Her doubt kept growing—doubt of his
incomprehensible work and of his relation to the railroad. She wondered why
it kept growing in direct proportion to her self-admonitions that faith was
the duty she owed him. Then, one sleepless night, she realized that her
effort to fulfill that duty consisted of turning away whenever people
discussed his job, of refusing to look at newspaper mentions of Taggart
Transcontinental, of slamming her mind shut against any evidence and every
contradiction. She stopped, aghast, struck by the question: What is it, then—
faith versus truth? And realizing that part of her zeal to believe was her
fear to know, she set out to learn the truth, with a cleaner, calmer sense of
Tightness than the effort at dutiful self-fraud had ever given her.
It did not take her long to learn. The evasiveness of the Taggart
executives, when she asked a few casual questions, the stale generalities of
their answers, the strain of their manner at the mention of their boss, and
their obvious reluctance to discuss him—told her nothing concrete, but gave
her a feeling equivalent to knowing the worst. The railroad workers were more
specific—the switchmen, the gatemen, the ticket sellers whom she drew into
chance conversations in the Taggart Terminal and who did not know her. "Jim
--------------------------------------- 670
Taggart? That whining, sniveling, speech-making deadhead!" "Jimmy the
President? Well, I'll tell you: he's the hobo on the gravy train." "The boss?
Mr. Taggart? You mean Miss Taggart, don't you?"
It was Eddie Willers who told her the whole truth. She heard that he had
known Jim since childhood, and she asked him to lunch with her.
When she faced him at the table, when she saw the earnest, questioning
directness of his eyes and the severely literal simplicity of his words, she
dropped all attempts at casual prodding, she told him what she wanted to know
and why, briefly, impersonally, not appealing for help or for pity, only for
truth. He answered her in the same manner. He told her the whole story,
quietly, impersonally, pronouncing no verdict, expressing no opinion, never
encroaching on her emotions by any sign of concern for them, speaking with
the shining austerity and the awesome power of facts. He told her who ran
Taggart Transcontinental.
He told her the story of the John Galt Line. She listened, and what she
felt was not shock, but worse: the lack of shock, as if she had always known
it. "Thank you, Mr. Willers," was all that she said when he finished.
She waited for Jim to come home, that evening, and the thing that eroded
any pain or indignation, was a feeling of her own detachment, as if it did
not matter to her any longer, as if some action were required of her, but it
made no difference what the action would be or the consequences.
It was not anger that she felt when she saw Jim enter the room, but a
murky astonishment, almost as if she wondered who he was and why it should
now be necessary to speak to him. She told him what she knew, briefly, in a
tired, extinguished voice. It seemed to her that he understood it from her
first few sentences, as if he had expected this to come sooner or later.
"Why didn't you tell me the truth?" she asked.
"So that's your idea of gratitude?" he screamed. "So that's how you feel
after everything I've done for you? Everybody told me that crudeness and
selfishness was all I could expect for lifting a cheap little alley cat by
the scruff of her neck!"
She looked at him as if he were making inarticulate sounds that connected
to nothing inside her mind. "Why didn't you tell me the truth?"
"Is that all the love you felt for me, you sneaky little hypocrite? Is.
that all I get in return for my faith in you?"
"Why did you lie? Why did you let me think what I thought?"
"You should be ashamed of yourself, you should be ashamed to face me or
speak to me!"
"1?" The inarticulate sounds had connected, but she could not believe the
sum they made. "What are you trying to do, Jim?" she asked, her voice
incredulous and distant.
"Have you thought of my feelings? Have you thought of what this.
would do to my feelings? You should have considered my feelings first!
That's the first obligation of any wife—and of a woman in your position in
particular! There's nothing lower and uglier than ingratitude!"
For the flash of one instant, she grasped the unthinkable fact of a man
who was guilty and knew it and was trying to escape by inducing an emotion of
guilt in his victim. But she could not hold the fact inside her brain. She
felt a stab of horror, the convulsion of a mind rejecting a sight that would
destroy it—a stab like a swift recoil from the edge of insanity. By the time
she dropped her head, closing her eyes, she knew only that she felt disgust,
a sickening disgust for a nameless reason.
When she raised her head, it seemed to her-that she caught a glimpse of
him watching her with the uncertain, retreating, calculating look of a man
whose trick has not worked. But before she had time to believe it, his face
was hidden again under an expression of injury and anger.
--------------------------------------- 671
She said, as if she were naming her thoughts for the benefit of the
rational being who was not present, but whose presence she had to assume,
since no other could be addressed, "That night . . . those headlines . . .
that glory . . . it was not you at all . . . it was Dagny."
"Shut up, you rotten little bitch!"
She looked at him blankly, without reaction. She looked as if nothing
could reach her, because her dying words had been uttered.
He made the sound of a sob. "Cherryl, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it, I take
it back, I didn't mean it . . ."
She remained standing, leaning against the wall, as she had stood from the
first.
He dropped down on the edge of a couch, in a posture of helpless
dejection. "How could I have explained it to you?" he said in the tone of
abandoning hope. "It's all so big and so complex. How could I have told you
anything about a transcontinental railroad, unless you knew all the details
and ramifications? How could I have explained to you my years of work, my . .
. Oh, what's the use? I've always been misunderstood and I should have been
accustomed to it by now, only I thought that you were different and that I
had a chance."
"Jim, why did you marry me?"
He chuckled sadly. "That's what everybody kept asking me. I didn't think
you'd ever ask it. Why? Because I love you."
She wondered at how strange it was that this word—which was supposed to be
the simplest in the human language, the word understood by all, the universal
bond among men—conveyed to her no meaning whatever. She did not know what it
was that it named in his mind.
"Nobody's ever loved me," he said. "There isn't any love in the world.
People don't feel. I feel things. Who cares about that? All they care for is
time schedules and freight loads and money. I can't live among those people.
I'm very lonely. I've always longed to find understanding. Maybe I'm just a
hopeless idealist, looking for the impossible.
Nobody will ever understand me."
"Jim," she said, with an odd little note of severity in her voice, "what
I've struggled for all this time is to understand you."
He dropped his hand in a motion of brushing her words aside, not
offensively, but sadly. "I thought you could. You're all I have. But maybe
understanding is just not possible between human beings."
"Why should it be impossible? Why don't you tell me what it is that you
want? Why don't you help me to understand you?"
He sighed. "That's it. That's the trouble—your asking all those why's.
Your constant asking of a why for everything. What I'm talking about can't be
put into words. It can't be named. It has to be felt.
Either you feel it or you don't. It's not a thing of the mind, but of the
heart. Don't you ever feel? Just feel, without asking all those questions?
Can't you understand me as a human being, not as if I were a scientific
object in a laboratory? The great understanding that transcends our shabby
words and helpless minds . . . No, I guess I shouldn't look for it. But I'll
always seek and hope. You're my last hope. You're all I have."
She stood at the wall, without moving.
"I need you," he wailed softly. "Fm all alone. You're not like the others.
I believe in you. I trust you. What has all that money and fame and business
and struggle given me? You're all I have . . . "
She stood without moving and the direction of her glance, lowered to look
down at him, was the only form of recognition she gave him.
The things he said about his suffering were lies, she thought; but the
suffering was real; he was a man torn by some continual anguish, which he
seemed unable to tell her, but which, perhaps, she could learn to understand.
--------------------------------------- 672
She still owed him this much—she thought, with the grayness of a sense of
duty—in payment for the position he had given her, which, perhaps, was all he
had to give, she owed him an effort to understand him.
It was strange to feel, in the days that followed, that she had become a
stranger to herself, a stranger who had nothing to want or to seek. In place
of a love made by the brilliant fire of hero worship, she was left with the
gnawing drabness of pity. In place of the men she had struggled to find, men
who fought for their goals and refused to suffer—she was left with a man
whose suffering was his only claim to value and his only offer in exchange
for her life. But it made no difference to her any longer. The one who was
she, had looked with eagerness at the turn of every corner ahead; the passive
stranger who had taken her place, was like all the over groomed people around
her, the people who said that they were adult because they did not try to
think or to desire.
But the stranger was still haunted by a ghost who was herself, and the
ghost had a mission to accomplish. She had to learn to understand the things
that had destroyed her. She had to know, and she lived with a sense of
ceaseless waiting. She had to know, even though she felt that the headlight
was closer and in the moment of knowledge she would be struck by the wheels.
What do you want of me?—was the question that kept beating in her mind as
a clue. What do you want of me?—she kept crying soundlessly, at dinner
tables, in drawing rooms, on sleepless nights— crying it to Jim and those who
seemed to share his secret, to Balph Eubank, to Dr. Simon Pritchett—what do
you want of me? She did not ask it aloud; she knew that they would not
answer. What do you want of me?
—she asked, feeling as if she were running, but no way were open to
escape. What do you want of me?—she asked, looking at the whole long torture
of her marriage that had not lasted the full span of one year.
"What do you want of me?" she asked aloud—and saw that she was sitting at
the table in her dining room, looking at Jim, at his feverish face, and at a
drying stain of water on the table.
She did not know how long a span of silence had stretched between them,
she was startled by her own voice and by the--question she had not intended
to utter. She did not expect him to understand it, he had never seemed to
understand much simpler queries—and she shook her head, struggling to
recapture the reality of the present.
She was startled to see him looking at her with a touch of derision, as if
he were mocking her estimate of his understanding.
"Love," he answered.
She felt herself sagging with hopelessness, in the face of that answer
which was at once so simple and so meaningless.
"You don't love me," he said accusingly. She did not answer. "You don't
love me or you wouldn't ask such a question."
"I did love you once," she said dully, "but it wasn't what you wanted. I
loved you for your courage, your ambition, your ability. But it wasn't real,
any of it."
His lower lip swelled a little in a faint, contemptuous thrust. "What a
shabby idea of love!" he said.
"Jim, what is it that you want to be loved for?"
"What a cheap shopkeeper's attitude!"
She did not speak; she looked at him, her eyes stretched by a silent
question.
"To be loved for!" he said, his voice grating with mockery and
righteousness. "So you think that love is a matter of mathematics, of
exchange, of weighing and measuring, like a pound of butter on a grocery
counter? I don't want to be loved for anything. I want to be loved for
--------------------------------------- 673
myself—not for anything I do or have or say or think. For myself—not for my
body or mind or words or works or actions."
"But then . . . what is yourself?"
"If you loved me, you wouldn't ask it." His voice had a shrill note of
nervousness, as if he were swaying dangerously between caution and some
blindly heedless impulse. "You wouldn't ask. You'd know. You'd feel it. Why
do you always try to tag and label everything? Can't you rise above those
petty materialistic definitions? Don't you ever feel—
just feel?"
"Yes. Jim, I do," she said, her voice low. "But I am trying not to,
because . . . because what T feel is fear."
"Of me?" he asked hopefully.
"No, not exactly. Not fear of what you can do to me, but of what you are."
He dropped his eyelids with the swiftness of slamming a door—but she
caught a flash of his eyes and the flash, incredibly, was terror.
"You're not capable of love, you cheap little gold-digger!" he cried
suddenly, in a tone stripped of all color but the desire "to hurt. "Yes, I
said gold-digger. There are many forms of it, other than greed for money,
other and worse. You're a gold-digger of the spirit. You didn't marry me for
my cash—but you married me for my ability or courage or whatever value it was
that you set as the price of your love!"
"Do you want . . . love . . . to be . . . causeless?"
"Love is its own cause! Love is above causes and reasons. Love is blind.
But you wouldn't be capable of it. You have the mean, scheming, calculating
little soul of a shopkeeper who trades', but never gives!
Love is a gift—a great, free, unconditional gift that transcends and
forgives everything. What's the generosity of loving a man for his virtues?
What do you give him? Nothing. It's no more than cold justice. No more
than he's earned."
Her eyes were dark with the dangerous intensity of glimpsing her goal.
"You want it to be unearned," she said, not in the tone of a question, but of
a verdict.
"Oh, you don't understand!"
"Yes, Jim, I do. That's what you want—that's what all of you really want—
not money, not material benefits, not economic security, not any of the
handouts you keep demanding." She spoke in a flat monotone, as if reciting
her thoughts to herself, intent upon giving the solid identity of words to
the torturous shreds of chaos twisting in her mind.
"All of you welfare preachers—it's not unearned money that you're after.
You want handouts, but of a different kind. I'm a gold-digger of the spirit,
you said, because I look for value. Then you, the welfare preachers . . .
it's the spirit that you want to loot. I never thought and nobody ever told
us how it could be thought of and what it would mean—the unearned in spirit.
But that is what you want. You want unearned love. You want unearned
admiration. You want unearned greatness. You want to be a man like Hank
Rearden without the necessity of being what he is. Without the necessity of
being anything.
Without . . . the necessity . . . of being."
"Shut up!" he screamed.
They looked at each other, both in terror, both feeling as if they were
swaying on an edge which she could not and he would not name, both knowing
that one more step would be fatal.
"What do you think you're saying?" he asked in a tone of petty anger,
which sounded almost benevolent by bringing them back into the realm of the
normal, into the near-wholesomeness of nothing worse than a family quarrel.
"What sort of metaphysical subject are you trying to deal with?"
--------------------------------------- 674
"I don't know . . ." she said wearily, dropping her head, as if some shape
she had tried to capture had slipped once more out of her grasp. "I don't
know . . . It doesn't seem possible . . ."
"You'd better not try to wade in way over your head or—" But he had to
stop, because the butler entered, bringing the glittering ice bucket with the
champagne ordered for celebration.
They remained silent, letting the room be filled by the sounds which
centuries of men and of struggle had established as the symbol of joyous
attainment: the blast of the cork, the laughing tinkle of a pale gold liquid
running into two broad cups filled with the weaving reflections of candles,
the whisper of bubbles rising through two crystal stems, almost demanding
that everything in sight rise, too, in the same aspiration.
They remained silent, till the butler had gone. Taggart sat looking down
at the bubbles, holding the stem of his glass between two limply casual
fingers. Then his hand closed suddenly about the stem into an awkwardly
convulsed fist and he raised it, not as one lifts a glass of champagne, but
as one would lift a butcher knife.
"To Francisco d'Anconia!" he said.
She put her glass down. "No," she answered.
"Drink it!" he screamed.
"No," she answered, her voice like a drop of lead.
They held each other's glances for a moment, the light playing on the
golden liquid, not reaching their faces or eyes.
"Oh, go to hell!" he cried, leaping to his feet, flinging his glass to
smash on the floor and rushing out of the room.
She sat at the table, not moving, for a long time, then rose slowly and
pressed the bell.
She walked to her room, her steps unnaturally even, she opened the door of
a closet, she reached for a suit and a pair of shoes, she took off the
housecoat, moving with cautious precision, as if her life depended on not
jarring anything about or within her. She held onto a single thought: that
she had to get out of this house—just get out of it for a while, if only for
the next hour—and then, later, she would be able to face all that had to be
faced.
The lines were blurring on the paper before her and, raising her head,
Dagny realized that it had long since grown dark.
She pushed the papers aside, unwilling to turn on the lamp, permitting
herself the luxury of idleness and darkness. It cut her off from the city
beyond the windows of her living room. The calendar in the distance said:
August 5.
The month behind her had gone, leaving nothing but the blank of dead time.
It had gone into the planless, thankless work of racing from emergency to
emergency, of delaying the collapse of a railroad—a month like a waste pile
of disconnected days, each given to averting the disaster of the moment. It
had not been a sum of achievements brought into existence, but only a sum of
zeros, of that which had not happened, a sum of prevented catastrophes—not a
task in the service of life, but only a race against death.
There had been times when an unsummoned vision—a sight of the valley—had
seemed to rise before her, not as a sudden appearance, but as a constant,
hidden presence that suddenly chose to assume an insistent reality. She had
faced it, through moments of blinded stillness, in a contest between an
unmoving decision and an unyielding pain, a pain to be fought by
acknowledgment, by saying: All right, even this.
There had been mornings when, awakening with rays of sunlight on her face,
she had thought that she must hurry to Hammond's Market to get fresh eggs for
breakfast; then, recapturing full consciousness, seeing the haze of New York
beyond the window of her bedroom, she had felt a tearing stab, like a touch
--------------------------------------- 675
of death, the touch of rejecting reality. You knew it—she had told herself
severely—you knew what it would be like when you made your choice. And
dragging her body, like an unwilling weight, out of bed to face an unwelcome
day, she would whisper: All right, even this.
The worst of the torture had been the moments when, walking down the
street, she had caught a sudden glimpse of chestnut-gold, a glowing streak of
hair among the heads of strangers, and had felt as if the city had vanished,
as if nothing but the violent stillness within her were delaying the moment
when she would rush to him and seize him; but that next moment had come as
the sight of some meaningless face—and she had stood, not wishing to live
through the following step, not wishing to generate the energy of living. She
had tried to avoid such moments; she had tried to forbid herself to look; she
had walked, keeping her eyes on the pavements. She had failed: by some will
of their own, her eyes had kept leaping to every streak of gold.
She had kept the blinds raised on the windows of her office, remembering
his promise, thinking only: If you are watching me, wherever you are . . .
There were no buildings close to the height of her office, but she had looked
at the distant towers, wondering which window was his observation post,
wondering whether some invention of his own, some device of rays and lenses,
permitted him to observe her every movement from some skyscraper a block or a
mile away. She had sat at her desk, at her uncurtained windows, thinking:
Just to know that you're seeing me, even if I'm never to see you again.
And remembering it, now, in the darkness of her room, she leaped to her
feet and snapped on the light.
Then she dropped her head for an instant, smiling in mirthless amusement
at herself. She wondered whether her lighted windows, in the black immensity
of the city, were a flare of distress, calling for his help—or a lighthouse
still protecting the rest of the world.
The doorbell rang.
When she opened the door, she saw the silhouette of a girl with a faintly
familiar face—and it took her a moment of startled astonishment to realize
that it was Cherryl Taggart. Except for a formal exchange of greetings on a
few chance encounters in the halls of the Taggart Building, they had not seen
each other since the wedding.
Cherryl's face was composed and unsmiling. "Would you permit me to speak
to you"—she hesitated and ended on—"Miss Taggart?"
"Of course," said Dagny gravely. "Come in."
She sensed some desperate emergency in the unnatural calm of Cherryl's
manner; she became certain of it when she looked at the girl's face in the
light of the living room. "Sit down," she said, but Cherryl remained
standing.
"I came to pay a debt," said Cherryl, her voice solemn with the effort to
permit herself no sound of emotion. "I want to apologize for the things I
said to you at my wedding. There's no reason why you should forgive me, but
it's my place to tell you that I know I was insulting everything I admire and
defending everything I despise. I know that admitting it now, doesn't make up
for it, and even coming here is only another presumption, there's no reason
why you should want to hear it, so I can't even cancel the debt, I can only
ask for a favor—
that you let me say the things I want to say to you."
Dagny's shock of emotion, incredulous, warm and painful, was the wordless
equivalent of the sentence: What a distance to travel in less than a year . .
. ! She answered, the unsmiling earnestness of her voice like a hand extended
in support, knowing that a smile would upset some precarious balance, "But it
does make up for it, and I do want to hear it."
"I know that it was you who ran Taggart Transcontinental. It was you who
built the John Galt Line. It was you who had the mind and the courage that
--------------------------------------- 676
kept all of it alive. I suppose you thought that I married Jim for his money—
as what shop girl wouldn't have? But, you see, I married Jim because I . . .
I thought that he was you. I thought that he was Taggart Transcontinental.
Now I know that he's"—
she hesitated, then went on firmly, as if not to spare herself anything—
"he's some sort of vicious moocher, though I can't understand of what kind
or why. When I spoke to you at my wedding, I thought that I was defending
greatness and attacking its enemy . . . but it was in reverse . . . it was in
such horrible, unbelievable reverse! . . . So I wanted to tell you that I
know the truth . . . not so much for your sake, I have no right to presume
that you'd care, but . . . but for the sake of the things I loved."
Dagny said slowly, "Of course I forgive it."
"Thank you," she whispered, and turned to go.
"Sit down."
She shook her head. "That . . . that was all, Miss Taggart."
Dagny allowed herself the first touch of a smile, no more than in the look
of her eyes, as she said, "Cherryl, my name is Dagny."
Cherryl's answer was no more than a faint, tremulous crease of her mouth,
as if, together, they had completed a single smile. "I . . .
I didn't know whether I should—"
"We're sisters, aren't we?"
"No! Not through Jim!" It was an involuntary cry.
"No, through our own choice. Sit down, Cherryl." The girl obeyed,
struggling not to show the eagerness of her acceptance, not to grasp for
support, not to break. "You've had a terrible time, haven't you?"
"Yes . . . but that doesn't matter . . . that's my own problem . . . and
my own fault."
"I don't think it was your own fault."
Cherryl did not answer, then said suddenly, desperately, "Look . . .
what I don't want is charity."
"Jim must have told you—and it's true—that I never engage in charity."
"Yes, he did . . . But what I mean is—"
"I know what you mean."
"But there's no reason why you should have to feel concern for me . . . I
didn't come here to complain and . . . and load another burden on your
shoulders . . . That I happen to suffer, doesn't give me a claim on you."
"No, it doesn't. But that you value all the things I value, does."
"You mean . . . if you want to talk to me, it's not alms? Not just because
you feel sorry for me?"
"I feel terribly sorry for you, Cherryl, and I'd like to help you—
not because you suffer, but because you haven't deserved to suffer."
"You mean, you wouldn't be kind to anything weak or whining or rotten
about me? Only to whatever you see in me that's good?"
"Of course."
Cherryl did not move her head, but she looked as if it were lifted—
as if some bracing current were relaxing her features into that rare look
which combines pain and dignity.
"It's not alms, Cherryl. Don't be afraid to speak to me."
"It's strange . . . You're the first person I can talk to . . . and it
feels so easy . . . yet I . . . I was afraid to speak to you. I wanted to ask
your forgiveness long ago . . . ever since I learned the truth, I went as far
as the door of your office, but I stopped and stood there in the hall and
didn't have the courage to go in. . . . I didn't intend to come here tonight.
I went out only to . . . to think something over, and then, suddenly, I knew
that I wanted to see you, that in the whole of the city this was the only
place for me to go and the only thing still left for me to do."
"I'm glad you did."
--------------------------------------- 677
"You know, Miss Tag—Dagny," she said softly, in wonder, "you're not as I
expected you to be at all. . . . They, Jim and his friends, they said you
were hard and cold and unfeeling."
"But it's true, Cherryl. I am, in the sense they mean—only have they ever
told you in just what sense they mean it?"
"No. They never do. They only sneer at me when I ask them what they mean
by anything . . . about anything. What did they mean about you?"
"Whenever anyone accuses some person of being 'unfeeling,' he means that
that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and
will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that 'to
feel' is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality. He
means . . . What's the matter?" she asked, seeing the abnormal intensity of
the girl's face.
"It's . . . it's something I've tried so hard to understand . . . for such
a long time. . . ."
"Well, observe that you never hear that accusation in defense of
innocence, but always in defense of guilt. You never hear it said by a good
person about those who fail to do him justice. But you always hear it said by
a rotter about those who treat him as a rotter, those who don't feel any
sympathy for the evil he's committed or for the pain he suffers as a
consequence. Well, it's true—that is what I do not feel. But those who feel
it, feel nothing for any quality of human greatness, for any person or action
that deserves admiration, approval, esteem. These are the things 7 feel.
You'll find that it's one or the other. Those who grant sympathy to guilt,
grant none to innocence.
Ask yourself which, of the two, are the unfeeling persons. And then you'll
see what motive is the opposite of charity."
"What?" she whispered.
"Justice, Cherryl."
Cherryl shuddered suddenly and dropped her head. "Oh God!" she moaned. "If
you knew what hell Jim has been giving me because I believed just what you
said!" She raised her face in the sweep of another shudder, as if the things
she had tried to control had broken through; the look in her eyes was terror.
"Dagny," she whispered, "Dagny, I'm afraid of them . . . of Jim and all the
others . . . not afraid of something they'll do . . . if it were that, I
could escape . . .
but afraid, as if there's no way out . . . afraid of what they are and . .
. and that they exist."
Dagny came forward swiftly to sit on the arm of her chair and seize her
shoulder in a steadying grasp. "Quiet, kid," she said. "You're wrong. You
must never feel afraid of people in that way. You must never think that their
existence is a reflection on yours—yet that's what you're thinking."
"Yes . . . Yes, I feel that there's no chance for me to exist, if they do
. . . no chance, no room, no world I can cope with. . . . I don't want to
feel it, I keep pushing it back, but it's coming closer and 1
know I have no place to run. . . . I can't explain what it feels like, I
can't catch hold of it—and that's part of the terror, that you can't catch
hold of anything—it's as if the whole world were suddenly destroyed, but not
by an explosion—an explosion is something hard and solid—but destroyed by . .
. by some horrible kind of softening . . .
as if nothing were solid, nothing held any shape at all, and you could
poke your finger through stone walls and the stone would give, like jelly,
and mountains would slither, and buildings would switch their shapes like
clouds—and that would be the end of the world, not fire and brimstone, but
goo."
--------------------------------------- 678
"Cherryl . . . Cherryl, you poor kid, there have been centuries of
philosophers plotting to turn the world into just that—to destroy people's
minds by making them believe that that's what they're seeing.
But you don't have to accept it. You don't have to see through the eyes of
others, hold onto yours, stand on your own judgment, you know that what is,
is—say it aloud, like the holiest of prayers, and don't let anyone tell you
otherwise."
"But . . . but nothing is, any more. Jim and his friends—they're not. I
don't know what I'm looking at, when I'm among them, I don't know what I'm
hearing when they speak . . . it's not real, any of it, it's some ghastly
sort of act that they're all going through . . . and I don't know what
they're after. . . . Dagny! We've always been told that human beings have
such a great power of knowledge, so much greater than animals, but I—I feel
blinder than any animal right now, blinder and more helpless. An animal knows
who are its friends and who are its enemies, and when to defend itself. It
doesn't expect a friend to step on it or to cut its throat. It doesn't expect
to be told that love is blind, that plunder is achievement, that gangsters
are statesmen and that it's great to break the spine of Hank Rearden!—oh God,
what am I saying?"
"I know what you're saying."
"I mean, how am I to deal with people? I mean, if nothing held firm for
the length of one hour—we couldn't go on, could we? Well, I know that things
are solid—but people? Dagny! They're nothing and anything, they're not
beings, they're only switches, just constant switches without any shape. But
I have to live among them. How am I to do it?"
"Cherryl, what you've been struggling with is the greatest problem in
history, the one that has caused ail of human suffering. You've understood
much more than most people, who suffer and die, never knowing what killed
them. I'll help you to understand. It's a big subject and a hard battle—but
first, above all, don't be afraid."
The look on Cherryl's face was an odd, wistful longing, as if, seeing
Dagny from a great distance, she were straining and failing to come closer,
"I wish I could wish to fight," she said softly, "but I don't. I don't even
want to win any longer. There's one change that I don't seem to have the
strength to make. You see, I had never expected anything like my marriage to
Jim, Then when it happened, I thought that life was much more wonderful than
I had expected. And now to get used to the idea that life and people are much
more horrible than anything I had imagined and that my marriage was not a
glorious miracle, but some unspeakable kind of evil which I'm still afraid to
learn fully—that is what I can't force myself to take. I can't get past it."
She glanced up suddenly. "Dagny, how did you do it? How did you manage to
remain unmangled?"
"By holding to just one rule."
"Which?"
"To place nothing—nothing—above the verdict of my own mind."
"You've taken some terrible beatings . . . maybe worse than I did . . .
worse than any of us. . . . What held you through it?"
"The knowledge that my life is the highest of values, too high to give up
without a fight."
She saw a look of astonishment, of incredulous recognition on Cherryl's
face, as if the girl were struggling to recapture some sensation across a
span of years. "Dagny"—her voice was a whisper—"that's . . . that's what I
felt when I was a child . . . that's what I seem to remember most about
myself . . . that kind of feeling . . . and I never lost it, it's there, it's
always been there, but as I grew up, I thought it was something that I must
hide. . . . I never had any name for it, but just now, when you said it, it
--------------------------------------- 679
struck me that that's what it was. . . . Dagny, to feel that way about your
own life—is that good?"
"Cherryl, listen to me carefully: that feeling—with everything which it
requires and implies—is the highest, noblest and only good on earth."
"The reason I ask is because I . . . I wouldn't have dared to think that.
Somehow, people always made me feel as if they thought it was a sin . . . as
if that were the thing in me which they resented and . . . and wanted to
destroy."
"It's true. Some people do want to destroy it. And when you learn to
understand their motive, you'll know the darkest, ugliest and only evil in
the world, but you'll be safely out of its reach."
Cherryl's smile was like a feeble flicker struggling to retain its hold
upon a few drops of fuel, to catch them, to flare up. "It's the first time in
months," she whispered, "that I've felt as if . . . as if there's still a
chance." She saw Dagny's eyes watching her with attentive concern, and she
added, "I'll be all right . . . Let me get used to it—to you, to all the
things you said. I think I'll come to believe it . . . to believe that it's
real . . . and that Jim doesn't matter." She rose to her feet, as if trying
to retain the moment of assurance.
Prompted by a sudden, causeless certainty, Dagny said sharply, "Cherryl, I
don't want you to go home tonight."
"Oh no! I'm all right. I'm not afraid, that way. Not of going home."
"Didn't something happen there tonight?"
"No . . . not really . . . nothing worse than usual. It was just that I
began to see things a little more clearly, that was all . . . I'm all right.
I have to think, think harder than I ever did before . . . and then I'll
decide what I must do. May I—" She hesitated.
"Yes?'1
"May I come back to talk to you again?"
"Of course."
"Thank you, I . . . I'm very grateful to you."
"Will you promise me that you'll come back?"
"I promise."
Dagny saw her walking off down the hall toward the elevator, saw the slump
of her shoulders, then the effort that lifted them, saw the slender figure
that seemed to sway then marshal all of its strength to remain erect. She
looked like a plant with a broken stem, still held together by a single
fiber, struggling to heal the breach, which one more gust of wind would
finish.
Through the open door of his study, James Taggart had seen Cherryl cross
the anteroom and walk out of the apartment. He had slammed his door and
slumped down on the davenport, with patches of spilled champagne still
soaking the cloth of his trousers, as if his own discomfort were a revenge
upon his wife and upon a universe that would not provide him with the
celebration he had wanted.
After a while, he leaped to his feet, tore off his coat and threw it
across the room. He reached for a cigarette, but snapped it in half and flung
it at a painting over the fireplace.
He noticed a vase of Venetian glass—a museum piece, centuries old, with an
intricate system of blue and gold arteries twisting through its transparent
body. He seized it and flung it at the wall; it burst into a rain of glass as
thin as a shattered light bulb.
He had bought that vase for the satisfaction of thinking of all the
connoisseurs who could not afford it. Now he experienced the satisfaction of
a revenge upon the centuries which had prized it—and the satisfaction of
thinking that there were millions of desperate families, any one of whom
could have lived for a year on the price of that vase.
--------------------------------------- 680
He kicked off his shoes, and fell back on the davenport, letting his
stocking feet dangle in mid-air.
The sound of the doorbell startled him: it seemed to match his mood.
It was the kind of brusque, demanding, impatient snap of sound he would
have produced if he were now jabbing his finger at someone's doorbell.
He listened to the butler's steps, promising himself the pleasure of
refusing admittance to whoever was seeking it. In a moment, he heard the
knock at his door and the butler entered to announce, "Mrs.
Rearden to see you, sir."
"What? . . . Oh . . . Well! Have her come in!"
He swung his feet down to the floor, but made no other concession, and
waited with half a smile of alerted curiosity, choosing not to rise until a
moment after Lillian had entered the room.
She wore a wine-colored dinner gown, an imitation of an Empire traveling
suit, with a miniature double-breasted jacket gripping her high waistline
over the long sweep of the skirt, and a small hat clinging to one ear, with a
feather sweeping down to curl under her chin. She entered with a brusque,
unrhythmical motion, the train of her dress and the feather of her hat
swirling, then flapping against her legs and throat, like pennants signaling
nervousness.
"Lillian, my dear, am I to be flattered, delighted or just plain
flabbergasted?"
"Oh, don't make a fuss about it! I had to see you, and it had to be
immediately, that's all."
The impatient tone, the peremptory movement with which she sat down were a
confession of weakness: by the rules of their unwritten language, one did not
assume a demanding manner unless one were seeking a favor and had no value—no
threat—to barter.
"Why didn't you stay at the Gonzales reception?" she asked, her casual
smile failing to hide the tone of irritation. "I dropped in on them after
dinner, just to catch hold of you—but they said you hadn't been feeling well
and had gone home."
He crossed the room and picked up a cigarette, for the pleasure of padding
in his stocking feet past the formal elegance of her costume.
"I was bored," he answered.
"I can't stand them," she said, with a little shudder; he glanced at her
in astonishment: the words sounded involuntary and sincere. "I can't stand
Senor Gonzales and that whore he's got himself for a wife.
It's disgusting that they've become so fashionable, they and their
parties. I don't feel like going anywhere any longer. It's not the same
style any more, not the same spirit. I haven't run into Balph Eubank for
months, or Dr. Pritchett, or any of the boys. And all those new faces that
look like butcher's assistants! After all, our crowd were gentlemen."
"Yeah," he said reflectively. "Yeah, there's some funny kind of
difference. It's like on the railroad, too: I could get along with Gem
Weatherby, he was civilized, but Cuffy Meigs—that's something else again,
that's . . ."He stopped abruptly.
"It's perfectly preposterous," she said, in the tone of a challenge to the
space at large. "They can't get away with it."
She did not explain "who" or "with what." He knew what she meant. Through
a moment of silence, they looked as if they were clinging to each other for
reassurance.
In the next moment, he was thinking with pleasurable amusement that
Lillian was beginning to show her age. The deep burgundy color of her gown
was unbecoming, it seemed to draw a purplish tinge out of her skin, a tinge
that gathered, like twilight, in the small gullies of her face, softening her
--------------------------------------- 681
flesh to a texture of tired slackness, changing her look of bright mockery
into a look of stale malice.
He saw her studying him, smiling and saying crisply, with the smile as
license for insult, "You are unwell, aren't you, Jim? You look like a
disorganized stable boy."
He chuckled. "I can afford it."
"I know it, darling. You're one of the most powerful men in New York
City." She added, "It's a good joke on New York City."
"It is."
"I concede that you're in a position to do anything. That's why I had to
see you." She added a small, grunt like sound of amusement, to dilute her
statement's frankness.
"Good," he said, his voice comfortable and noncommittal.
"I had to come here, because I thought it best, in this particular matter,
not to be seen together in public."
"That is always wise."
"I seem to remember having been useful to you in the past."
"In the past—yes."
"I am sure that I can count on you."
"Of course—only isn't that an old-fashioned, unphilosophical remark? How
can we ever be sure of anything?"
"Jim," she snapped suddenly, "you've got to help me!"
"My dear, I'm at your disposal, I'd do anything to help you," he answered,
the rules of their language requiring that any open statement be answered by
a blatant lie. Lillian was slipping, he thought—and he experienced the
pleasure of dealing with an inadequate adversary.
She was neglecting, he noted, even the perfection of her particular
trademark: her grooming. A few strands were escaping from the drilled waves
of her hair—her nails, matching her gown, were the deep shade of coagulated
blood, which made it easy to notice the chipped polish at their tips—and
against the broad, smooth, creamy expanse of her skin in the low, square cut
of her gown, he observed the tiny glitter of a safety pin holding the strap
of her slip.
"You've got to prevent it!" she said, in the belligerent tone of a plea
disguised as a command. "You've got to stop it!"
"Really? What?"
"My divorce."
"Oh . . . !" His features dropped into sudden earnestness.
"You know that he's going to divorce me, don't you?"
"I've heard some rumors about it."
"It's set for next month. And when I say set, that's just what I mean.
Oh, it's cost him plenty—but he's bought the judge, the clerks, the
bailiffs, their backers, their backers1 backers, a few legislators, half a
dozen administrators—he's bought the whole legal process, like a private
thoroughfare, and there's no single crossroad left for me to squeeze through
to stop it!"
"I see."
"You know, of course, what made him start divorce proceedings?"
"I can guess."
"And I did it as a favor to you!" Her voice was growing anxiously shrill.
"I told you about your sister in order to let you get that Gift Certificate
for your friends, which—"
"I swear I don't know who let it out!" he cried hastily. "Only a very few
at the top knew that you'd been our informer, and I'm sure nobody would dare
mention—"
"Oh, I'm sure nobody did. He'd have the brains to guess it, wouldn't he?"
"Yes, I suppose so. Well, then you knew that you were taking a chance."
--------------------------------------- 682
"I didn't think he'd go that far. I didn't think he'd ever divorce me.
I didn't—"
He chuckled suddenly, with a glance of astonishing perceptiveness.
"You didn't think that guilt is a rope that wears thin, did you, Lillian?"
She looked at him, startled, then answered stonily, "I don't think it
does."
"It does, my dear—for men such as your husband."
"I don't want him to divorce me!" It was a sudden scream. "I don't want to
let him go free! I won't permit it! I won't let the whole of my life be a
total failure!" She stopped abruptly, as if she had admitted too much.
He was chuckling softly, nodding his head with a slow movement that had an
air of intelligence, almost of dignity, by signifying a complete
understanding.
"I mean . . . after all, he's my husband," she said defensively.
"Yes, Lillian, yes, I know."
"Do you know what he's planning? He's going to get the decree and he's
going to cut me off without a penny—no settlement, no alimony, nothing! He's
going to have the last word. Don't you see? If he gets away with it, then . .
. then the Gift Certificate was no victory for me at all!"
"Yes, my dear, I see."
"And besides . . . It's preposterous that I should have to think of it,
but what am I going to live on? The little money I had of my own is worth
nothing nowadays. It's mainly stock in factories of my father's time, that
have closed long ago. What am I going to do?"
"But, Lillian," he said softly, "I thought you had no concern for money or
for any material rewards."
"You don't understand! I'm not talking about money—I'm talking about
poverty! Real, stinking, hall-bedroom poverty! That's out of bounds for any
civilized person! I—I to have to worry about food and rent?"
He was watching her with a faint smile; for once, his soft, aging face
seemed tightened into a look of wisdom; he was discovering the pleasure of
full perception—in a reality which he could permit himself to perceive.
"Jim, you've got to help me! My lawyer is powerless. I've spent the little
I had, on him and on his investigators, friends and fixers—but all they could
do for me was find out that they can do nothing. My lawyer gave me his final
report this afternoon. He told me bluntly that I haven't a chance. I don't
seem to know anyone who can help against a setup of this kind. I had counted
on Bertram Scudder, but . . .
well, you know what happened to Bertram. And that, too, was because I had
tried to help you. You pulled yourself out of that one. Jim, you're the only
person who can pull me out now. You've got your gopher-hole pipe line
straight up to the top. You can reach the big boys. Slip a word to your
friends to slip a word to their friends. One word from Wesley would do it.
Have them order that divorce decree to be refused. Just have it be refused."
He shook his head slowly, almost compassionately, like a tired
professional at an overzealous amateur. "It can't be done, Lillian," he said
firmly. "I'd like to do it—for the same reasons as yours—and I think you know
it. But whatever power I have is not enough in this case."
She was looking at him, her eyes dark with an odd, lifeless stillness;
when she spoke, the motion of her lips was twisted by so evil a contempt that
he did not dare identify it beyond knowing that it embraced them both; she
said, "I know that you'd like to do it."
He felt no desire to pretend; oddly, for the first time, for this one
chance, truth seemed much more pleasurable—truth, for once, serving his
particular kind of enjoyment. "I think you know that it can't be done," he
said. "Nobody does favors nowadays, if there's nothing to gain in return. And
the stakes are getting higher and higher. The gopher holes, as you called
--------------------------------------- 683
them, are so complex, so twisted and intertwisted that everybody has
something on everybody else, and nobody dares move because he can't tell
who'll crack which way or when. So he'll move only when he has to, when the
stakes are life or death—and that's practically the only kind of stakes we're
playing for now. Well, what's your private life to any of those boys? That
you'd like to hold your husband—what's in it for them, one way or another?
And my personal stock-in-trade—well, there's nothing I could offer them at
the moment in exchange for trying to blast a whole court clique out of a
highly profitable deal. Besides, right now, the top boys wouldn't do it at
any price. They have to be mighty careful of your husband—he's the man who's
safe from them right now—ever since that radio broadcast of my sister's."
"You asked me to force her to speak on that broadcast!"
"I know, Lillian. We lost, both of us, that time. And we lose, both of us,
now."
"Yes," she said, with the same darkness of contempt in her eyes, "both of
us."
It was the contempt that pleased him; it was the strange, heedless,
unfamiliar pleasure of knowing that this woman saw him as he was, yet
remained held by his presence, remained and leaned back in her chair, as if
declaring her bondage.
"You're a wonderful person, Jim," she said. It had the sound of damnation.
Yet it was a tribute, and she meant it as such, and his pleasure came from
the knowledge that they were in a realm where damnation was value.
"You know," he said suddenly, "you're wrong about those butcher's
assistants, like Gonzales. They have their uses. Have you ever liked
Francisco d'Anconia?"
"I can't stand him."
"Well, do you know the real purpose of that cocktail-swilling occasion
staged by Senor Gonzales tonight? It was to celebrate the agreement to
nationalize d'Anconia Copper in about a month."
She looked at him for a moment, the corners of her lips lifting slowly
into a smile. "He was your friend, wasn't he?"
Her voice had a tone he had never earned before, the tone of an emotion
which he had drawn from people only by fraud, but which now, for the first
time, was granted with full awareness to the real, the actual nature of his
deed: a tone of admiration.
Suddenly, he knew that this was the goal of his restless hours, this was
the pleasure he had despaired of finding, this was the celebration he had
wanted.
"Let's have a drink, Lil." he said.
Pouring the liquor, he glanced at her across the room, as she lay
stretched limply in her chair. "Let him get his divorce," he said, "He won't
have the last word. They will. The butcher's assistants. Senor Gonzales and
Cuffy Meigs."
She did not answer. When he approached, she took the glass from him with a
sloppily indifferent sweep of her hand. She drank, not in the manner of a
social gesture, but like a lonely drinker in a saloon—for the physical sake
of the liquor.
He sat down on the arm of the davenport, improperly close to her, and
sipped his drink, watching her face. After a while, he asked, "What does he
think of me?"
The question did not seem to astonish her. "He thinks you're a fool," she
answered. "He thinks life's too short to have to notice your existence."
"He'd notice it, if—" He stopped.
"—if you bashed him over the head with a club? I'm not too sure.
He'd merely blame himself for not having moved out of the club's reach.
Still, that would be your only chance."
--------------------------------------- 684
She shifted her body, sliding lower in the armchair, stomach forward, as
if relaxation were ugliness, as if she were granting him the kind of intimacy
that required no poise and no respect.
"That was the first thing I noticed about him," she said, "when I met him
for the first time: that he was not afraid. He looked as if he felt certain
that there was nothing any of us could do to him—so certain that he didn't
even know the issue or the nature of what he felt."
"How long since you saw him last?"
"Three months. I haven't seen him since . . . since the Gift Certificate .
. ."
"I saw him at an industrial meeting two weeks ago. He still looks that
way—only more so. Now, he looks as if he knows it." He added, "You have
failed, Lillian."
She did not answer. She pushed her hat off with the back of her hand; it
rolled down to the carpet, its feather curling like a question mark. "I
remember the first time I saw his mills," she said. "His mills!
You can't imagine what he felt about them. You wouldn't know the kind of
intellectual arrogance it takes to feel as if anything pertaining to him,
anything he touched, were made sacred by the touch. His mills, his Metal, his
money, his bed, his wife!" She glanced up at him, a small flicker piercing
the lethargic emptiness of her eyes. "He never noticed your existence. He did
notice mine. I'm still Mrs. Rearden—at least for another month."
"Yes . . ." he said, looking down at her with a sudden, new interest.
"Mrs. Rearden!" she chuckled. "You wouldn't know what that meant to him.
No feudal lord ever felt or demanded such reverence for the title of his
wife—or held it as such a symbol of honor. Of his unbending, untouchable,
inviolate, stainless honor!" She waved her hand in a vague motion, indicating
the length of her sprawled body. "Caesar's wife!" she chuckled. "Do you
remember what she was supposed to be?
No, you wouldn't. She was supposed to be above reproach,"
He was staring down at her with the heavy, blind stare of impotent hatred—
a hatred of which she was the sudden symbol, not the object.
"He didn't like it when his Metal was thrown into common, public use, for
any chance passer-by to make . . . did he?"
"No, he didn't."
His words were blurring a little, as if weighted with drops of the liquor
he had swallowed: "Don't tell me that you helped us to get that Gift
Certificate as a favor to me and that you gained nothing. . . . I know why
you did it."
"You knew it at the time."
"Sure. That's why I like you, Lillian."
His eyes kept coming back to the low cut of her gown. It was not the
smooth skin that attracted his glance, not the exposed rise of her breasts,
but the fraud of the safety pin beyond the edge.
"I'd like to see him beaten," he said. "I'd like to hear him scream with
pain, just once."
"You won't, Jimmy."
"Why does he think he's better than the rest of us—he and that sister of
mine?"
She chuckled, He rose as if she had slapped him. He went to the bar and
poured himself another drink, not offering to refill her glass.
She was speaking into space, staring past him. "He did notice my
existence—even though I can't lay railroad tracks for him and erect bridges
to the glory of his Metal. I can't build his mills—but I can destroy them. I
can't produce his Metal—but I can take it away from him. I can't bring men
down to their knees in admiration—but I can bring them down to their knees."
--------------------------------------- 685
"Shut up!" he screamed in terror, as if she were coming too close to that
fogbound alley which had to remain unseen.
She glanced up at his face. "You're such a coward, Jim."
"Why don't you get drunk?" he snapped, sticking his unfinished drink at
her mouth, as if he wanted to strike her.
Her fingers half-closed limply about the glass, and she drank, spilling
the liquor down her chin, her breast and her gown.
"Oh hell, Lillian, you're a mess!" he said and, not troubling to reach for
his handkerchief, he stretched out his hand to wipe the liquor with the flat
of his palm. His fingers slipped under the gown's neckline, closing over her
breast, his breath catching in a sudden gulp, like a hiccough. His eyelids
were drawing closed, but he caught a glimpse of her face leaning back
unresistingly, her mouth swollen with revulsion.
When he reached for her mouth, her arms embraced him obediently and her
mouth responded, but the response was just a pressure, not a kiss.
He raised his head to glance at her face. Her teeth were bared in a smile,
but she was staring past him, as if mocking some invisible presence, her
smile lifeless, yet loud with malice, like the grin of a fleshless skull.
He jerked her closer, to stifle the sight and his own shudder. His hands
were going through the automatic motions of intimacy—and she complied, but in
a manner that made him feel as if the beats of her arteries under his touch
were snickering giggles. They were both performing an expected routine, a
routine invented by someone and imposed upon them, performing it in mockery,
in hatred, in defiling parody on its inventors.
He felt a sightless, heedless fury, part-horror, part-pleasure—the horror
of committing an act he would never dare confess to anyone—
the pleasure of committing it in blasphemous defiance of those to whom he
would not dare confess it. He was himself!—the only conscious part of his
rage seemed to be screaming to him—he was, at last, himself!
They did not speak. They knew each other's motive. Only two words were
pronounced between them. "Mrs. Rearden," he said.
They did not look at each other when he pushed her into his bedroom and
onto his bed, falling against her body, as against a soft.
stuffed object. Their faces had a look of secrecy, the look of partners in
guilt, the furtive, smutty look of children defiling someone's clean fence by
chalking sneaky scratches intended as symbols of obscenity.
Afterward, it did not disappoint him that what he had possessed was an
inanimate body without resistance or response. It was not a woman that he had
wanted to possess. It was not an act in celebration of life that he had
wanted to perform—but an act in celebration of the triumph of impotence.
Cherryl unlocked the door and slipped in quietly, almost surreptitiously,
as if hoping not to be seen or to see the place which was her home. The sense
of Dagny's presence—of Dagny's world—had supported her on her way back, but
when she entered her own apartment the walls seemed to swallow her again into
the suffocation of a trap.
The apartment was silent; a wedge of light cut across the anteroom from a
door left half-open. She dragged herself mechanically in the direction of her
room. Then she stopped.
The open band of light was the door of Jim's study, and on the illuminated
strip of its carpet she saw a woman's hat with a feather stirring faintly in
a draft.
She took a step forward. The room was empty, she saw two glasses, one on a
table, the other on the floor, and a woman's purse lying on the seat of an
armchair. She stood, in unexacting stupor, until she heard the muffled drawl
of two voices behind the door of Jim's bedroom; she could not distinguish the
words, only the quality of the sounds: Jim's voice had a tone of irritation,
the woman's—of contempt.
--------------------------------------- 686
Then she found herself in her own room, fumbling frantically to lock her
door. She had been flung here by the blind panic of escape, as if it were she
who had to hide, she who had to run from the ugliness of being seen in the
act of seeing them—a panic made of revulsion, of pity, of embarrassment, of
that mental chastity which recoils from confronting a man with the
unanswerable proof of his evil.
She stood in the middle of her room, unable to grasp what action was now
possible to her. Then her knees gave way, folding gently, she found herself
sitting on the floor and she stayed there, staring at the carpet, shaking.
It was neither anger nor jealousy nor indignation, but the blank horror of
dealing with the grotesquely senseless. It was the knowledge that neither
their marriage nor his love for her nor his insistence on holding her nor his
love for that other woman nor this gratuitous adultery had any meaning
whatever, that there was no shred of sense in any of it and no use to grope
for explanations. She had always thought of evil as purposeful, as a means to
some end; what she was seeing now was evil for evil's sake.
She did not know how long she had sat there, when she heard their steps
and voices, then the sound of the front door closing. She got up, with no
purpose in mind, but impelled by some instinct from the past, as if acting in
a vacuum where honesty was not relevant any longer, but knowing no other way
to act.
She met Jim in the anteroom. For a moment, they looked at each other as if
neither could believe the other's reality.
"When did you come back?" he snapped. "How long have you been home?"
"I don't know . . ."
He was looking at her face. "What's the matter with you?"
"Jim, I—" She struggled, gave up and waved her hand toward his bedroom.
"Jim, I know."
"What do you know?"
"You were there . . . with a woman."
His first action was to push her into his study and slam the door, as if
to hide them both, he could no longer say from whom. An unadmitted rage was
boiling in his mind, struggling between escape and explosion, and it blew up
into the sensation that this negligible little wife of his was depriving him
of his triumph, that he would not surrender to her his new enjoyment.
"Sure!" he screamed. "So what? What are you going to do about it?"
She stared at him blankly.
"Sure! I was there with a woman! That's what I did, because that's what I
felt like doing! Do you think you're going to scare me with your gasps, your
stares, your whimpering virtue?" He snapped his fingers.
"That for your opinion! I don't give a hoot in hell about your opinion!
Take it and like it!" It was her white, defenseless face that drove him
on, lashing him into a state of pleasure, the pleasure of feeling as if his
words were blows disfiguring a human face. "Do you think you're going to make
me hide? I'm sick of having to put on an act for your righteous satisfaction!
Who the hell are you, you cheap little nobody?
I'll do as I please, and you'll keep your mouth shut and go through the
right tricks in public, like everybody else, and stop demanding that I act in
my own home!—nobody is virtuous in his own home, the show is only for
company!—but if you expect me to mean it—to mean it, you damn little fool!—
you'd better grow up in a hurry!"
It was not her face that he was seeing, it was the face of the man at whom
he wanted and would never be able to throw his deed of this night—but she had
always stood as the worshipper, the defender, the agent of that man in his
eyes, he had married her for it, so she could serve his purpose now, and he
screamed, "Do you know who she was, the woman I laid? It was—"
"No!" she cried. "Jim! I don't have to know it!"
--------------------------------------- 687
"It was Mrs. Rearden! Mrs. Hank Rearden!"
She stepped back. He felt a brief flash of terror—because she was looking
at him as if she were seeing that which had to remain unadmitted to himself.
She asked, in a dead voice that had the incongruous sound of common sense, "I
suppose you will now want us to get divorced?"
He burst out laughing. "You goddamn fool! You still mean it! You still
want it big and pure' I wouldn't think of divorcing you—and don't go
imagining that I'll let you divorce me! You think it's as important as that?
Listen, you fool, there isn't a husband who doesn't sleep with other women
and there isn't a wife who doesn't know it, but they don't talk about it!
I'll lay anybody I please, and you go and do the same, like all those
bitches, and keep your mouth shut!"
He saw the sudden, startling sight of a look of hard, unclouded,
unfeeling, almost inhuman intelligence in her eyes. "Jim, if I were the kind
who did or would, you wouldn't have married me."
"No. I wouldn't have."
"Why did you marry me?"
He felt himself drawn as by a whirlpool, part in relief that the moment of
danger was past, part in irresistible defiance of the same danger. "Because
you were a cheap, helpless, preposterous little guttersnipe, who'd never have
a chance at anything to equal me! Because I thought you'd love me! I thought
you'd know that you had to love me!"
"As you are?"
"Without daring to ask what I am! Without reasons! Without putting me on
the spot always to live up to reason after reason after reason, like being on
some goddamn dress parade to the end of my days!"
"You loved me . . . because I was worthless?"
"Well, what did you think you were?"
"You loved me for being rotten?"
"What else did you have to offer? But you didn't have the humility to
appreciate it. I wanted to be generous, I wanted to give you security—what
security is there in being loved for one's virtues? The competition's wide
open, like a jungle market place, a better person will always come along to
beat you! But I—I was willing to love you for your flaws, for your faults and
weaknesses, for your ignorance, your crudeness, your vulgarity—and that's
safe, you'd have nothing to fear, nothing to hide, you could be yourself,
your real, stinking, sinful, ugly self—everybody's self is a gutter—but you
could hold my love, with nothing demanded of you!"
"You wanted me to . . . accept your love . . . as alms'"'
"Did you imagine that you could earn it? Did you imagine that you could
deserve to marry me, you poor little tramp? I used to buy the likes of you
for the price of a meal! I wanted you to know, with every step you took, with
every mouthful of caviar you swallowed, that you owed it all to me, that you
had nothing and were nothing and could never hope to equal, deserve or
repay!"
"I . . . tried . . . to deserve it."
"Of what use would you be to me, if you had?"
"You didn't want me to?"
"Oh, you goddamn fool!"
"You didn't want me to improve? You didn't want me to rise? You thought me
rotten and you wanted me to stay rotten?"
"Of what use would you be to me, if you earned it all, and I had to work
to hold you, and you could trade elsewhere if you chose?"
"You wanted it to be alms . . . for both of us and from both?
You wanted us to be two beggars chained to each other?"
"Yes, you goddamn evangelist! Yes, you goddamn hero worshipper!
Yes!"
--------------------------------------- 688
"You chose me because I was worthless?"
"Yes!"
"You're lying, Jim."
His answer was only a startled glance of astonishment.
"Those girls that you used to buy for the price of a meal, they would have
been glad to let their real selves become a gutter, they would have taken
your alms and never tried to rise, but you would not marry one of them. You
married me, because you knew that I did not accept the gutter, inside or out,
that I was struggling to rise and would go on struggling—didn't you?"
"Yes!" he cried.
Then the headlight she had felt rushing upon her, hit its goal—and she
screamed in the bright explosion of the impact—she screamed in physical
terror, backing away from him.
"What's the matter with you?" he cried, shaking, not daring to see in her
eyes the thing she had seen.
She moved her hands in groping gestures, half-waving it away, half trying
to grasp it; when she answered, her words did not quite name it, but they
were the only words she could find: "You . . . you're a killer . . . for the
sake of killing . . ."
It was too close to the unnamed; shaking with terror, he swung out blindly
and struck her in the face.
She fell against the side of an armchair, her head striking the floor, but
she raised her head in a moment and looked up at him blankly, without
astonishment, as if physical reality were merely taking the form she had
expected. A single pear-shaped drop of blood went slithering slowly from the
corner of her mouth.
He stood motionless—and for a moment they looked at each other, as if
neither dared to move.
She moved first. She sprang to her feet—and ran. She ran out of the room,
out of the apartment—he heard her running down the hall, tearing open the
iron door of the emergency stairway, not waiting to ring for the elevator.
She ran down the stairs, opening doors on random landings, running through
the twisting hallways of the building, then down the stairs again, until she
found herself in the lobby and ran to the street.
After a while, she saw that she was walking down a littered sidewalk in a
dark neighborhood, with an electric bulb glaring in the cave of a subway
entrance and a lighted billboard advertising soda crackers on the black roof
of a laundry. She did not remember how she had come here. Her mind seemed to
work in broken spurts, without connections.
She knew only that she had to escape and that escape was impossible.
She had to escape from Jim, she thought. Where?—she asked, looking around
her with a glance like a cry of prayer. She would have seized upon a job in a
five-and-ten, or in that laundry, or in any of the dismal shops she passed.
But she would work, she thought, and the harder she worked, the more
malevolence she would draw from the people around her, and she would not know
when truth would be expected of her and when a lie, but the stricter her
honesty, the greater the fraud she would be asked to suffer at their hands.
She had seen it before and had borne it, in the home of her family, in the
shops of the slums, but she had thought that these were vicious exceptions,
chance evils, to escape and forget. Now she knew that they were not
exceptions, that theirs was the code accepted by the world, that it was a
creed of living, known by all, but kept unnamed, leering at her from people's
eyes in that sly, guilty look she had never been able to understand—and at
the root of the creed, hidden by silence, lying in wait for her in the
cellars of the city and in the cellars of their souls, there was a thing with
which one could not live.
--------------------------------------- 689
Why are you doing it to me?—she cried soundlessly to the darkness around
her. Because you're good—some enormous laughter seemed to be answering from
the roof tops and from the sewers. Then I won't want to be good any longer—
But you will—I don't have to—You will—
I can't bear it—You will.
She shuddered and walked faster—but ahead of her, in the foggy distance,
she saw the calendar above the roofs of the city—it was long past midnight
and the calendar said: August 6, but it seemed to her suddenly that she saw
September 2 written above the city in letters of blood—and she thought: If
she worked, if she struggled, if she rose., she would take a harder beating
with each step of her climb, until, at the end, whatever she reached, be it a
copper company or an unmortgaged cottage, she would see it seized by Jim on
some September 2
and she would see it vanish to pay for the parties where Jim made his
deals with his friends.
Then I won't!—she screamed and whirled around and went running back along
the street—but it seemed to her that in the black sky.
grinning at her from the steam of the laundry, there weaved an enormous
figure that would hold no shape, but its grin remained the same on its
changing faces, and its face was Jim's and her childhood preacher's and the
woman social worker's from the personnel department of the five-and-ten—and
the grin seemed to say to her: People like you will always stay honest,
people like you will always struggle to rise, people like you will always
work, so we're safe and you have no choice.
She ran. When she looked around her once more, she was walking down a
quiet street, past the glass doorways where lights were burning in the
carpeted lobbies of luxurious buildings. She noticed that she was limping,
and saw that the heel of her pump was loose; she had broken it somewhere in
her blank span of running.
From the sudden space of a broad intersection, she looked at the great
skyscrapers in the distance. They were vanishing quietly into a veil of fog,
with the faint breath of a glow behind them, with a few lights like a smile
of farewell. Once, they had been a promise, and from the midst of the
stagnant sloth around her she had looked to them for proof that another kind
of men existed. Now she knew that they were tombstones, slender obelisks
soaring in memory of the men who had been destroyed for having created them,
they were the frozen shape of the silent cry that the reward of achievement
was martyrdom.
Somewhere in one of those vanishing towers, she thought, there was Dagny—
but Dagny was a lonely victim, fighting a losing battle, to be destroyed and
to sink into fog like the others.
There is no place to go, she thought and stumbled on—T can't stand still,
nor move much longer—I can neither work nor rest—I can neither surrender nor
fight—but this . . . this is what they want of me, this is where they want
me—neither living nor dead, neither thinking nor insane, but just a chunk of
pulp that screams with fear, to be shaped by them as they please, they who
have no shape of their own.
She plunged into the darkness behind a corner, shrinking in dread from any
human figure. No, she thought, they're not evil, not all people . . . they're
only their own first victims, but they all believe in Jim's creed, and I
can't deal with them, once I know it . . . and if I spoke to them, they would
try to grant me their good will, but I'd know what it is that they hold as
the good and I would see death staring out of their eyes.
The sidewalk had shrunk to a broken strip, and splashes of garbage ran
over from the cans at the stoops of crumbling houses. Beyond the dusty glow
of a saloon, she saw a lighted sign "Young Women's Rest Club" above a locked
door.
--------------------------------------- 690
She knew the institutions of that kind and the women who ran them, the
women who said that theirs was the job of helping sufferers.
If she went in—she thought, stumbling past—if she faced them and begged
them for help, "What is your guilt?" they would ask her.
"Drink? Dope? Pregnancy? Shoplifting?" She would answer, "I have no guilt,
I am innocent, but I'm—" "Sorry. We have no concern for the pain of the
innocent."
She ran. She stopped, regaining her eyesight, on the corner of a long,
wide street. The buildings and pavements merged with the sky—and two lines of
green lights hung in open space, going off into an endless distance, as if
stretching into other towns and oceans and foreign lands, to encircle the
earth. The green glow had a look of serenity, like an inviting, unlimited
path open to confident travel. Then the lights switched to red, dropping
heavily lower, turning from sharp circles into foggy smears, into a warning
of unlimited danger. She stood and watched a giant truck-go by, its enormous
wheels crushing one more layer of shiny polish into the flattened cobbles of
the street.
The lights went back to the green of safety—but she stood trembling,
unable to move. That's how it works for the travel of one's body, she
thought, but what have they done to the traffic of the soul? They have set
the signals in reverse—and the road is safe when the lights are the red of
evil—but when the lights are the green of virtue, promising that yours is the
right-of-way, you venture forth and are ground by the wheels. All over the
world, she thought—those inverted lights go reaching into every land, they go
on, encircling the earth. And the earth is littered with mangled cripples,
who don't know what has hit them or why, who crawl as best they can on their
crushed limbs through their lightless days, with no answer save that pain is
the core of existence—
and the traffic cops of morality chortle and tell them that man, by his
nature, is unable to walk.
These were not words in her mind, these were the words which would have
named, had she had the power to find them, what she knew only as a sudden
fury that made her beat her fists in futile horror against the iron post of
the traffic light beside her, against the hollow tube where the hoarse, rusty
chuckle of a relentless mechanism went grating on and on.
She could not smash it with her fists, she could not batter one by one all
the posts of the street stretching off beyond eyesight—as she could not smash
that creed from the souls of the men she would encounter, one by one. She
could not deal with people any longer, she could not take the paths they
took—but what could she say to them, she who had no words to name the thing
she knew and no voice that people would hear? What could she tell them? How
could she reach them all?
Where were the men who could have spoken?
These were not words in her mind, these were only the blows of: her fists
against metal—then she saw herself suddenly, battering her knuckles to blood
against an immovable post, and the sight made her shudder—and she stumbled
away. She went on, seeing nothing around her, feeling trapped in a maze with
no exit.
No exit—her shreds of awareness were saying, beating it into the pavements
in the sound of her steps—no exit . . . no refuge . . . no signals . . . no
way to tell destruction from safety, or enemy from friend. . . . Like that
dog she had heard about, she thought . . .
somebody's dog in somebody's laboratory . . . the dog who got his signals
switched on him, and saw no way to tell satisfaction from torture, saw food
changed to beatings and beatings to food, saw his eyes and ears deceiving him
and his judgment futile and his consciousness impotent in a shifting,
--------------------------------------- 691
swimming, shapeless world—and gave up, refusing to eat at that price or to
live in a world of that kind. . . . No!—
was the only conscious word in her brain—no!—no!—no!—not your way, not
your world—even if this "no" is all that's to be left of mine!
It was in the darkest hour of the night, in an alley among wharfs and
warehouses that the social worker saw her. The social worker was a woman
whose gray face and gray coat blended with the walls of the district. She saw
a young girl wearing a suit too smart and expensive for the neighborhood,
with no hat, no purse, with a broken heel, disheveled hair and a bruise at
the corner of her mouth, a girl staggering blindly, not knowing sidewalks
from pavements. The street was only a narrow crack between the sheer, blank
walls of storage structures, but a ray of light fell through a fog dank with
the odor of rotting water; a stone parapet ended the street on the edge of a
vast black hole merging river and sky.
The social worker approached her and asked severely, "Are you in
trouble?"—and saw one wary eye, the other hidden by a lock of hair, and the
face of a wild creature who has forgotten the sound of human voices, but
listens as to a distant echo, with suspicion, yet almost with hope.
The social worker seized her arm. "It's a disgrace to come to such a state
. . . if you society girls had something to do besides indulging your desires
and chasing pleasures, you wouldn't be wandering, drunk as a tramp, at this
hour of the night . . . if you stopped living for your own enjoyment, stopped
thinking of yourself and found some higher—"
Then the girl screamed—and the scream went beating against the blank walls
of the street as in a chamber of torture, an animal scream of terror. She
tore her arm loose and sprang back, then screamed in articulate sounds: "No!
No! Not your kind of world!"
Then she ran, ran by the sudden propulsion of a burst of power, the power
of a creature running for its life, she ran straight down the street that
ended at the river—and in a single streak of speed, with no break, no moment
of doubt, with full consciousness of acting in self-preservation, she kept
running till the parapet barred her way and, not stopping, went over into
space.
--------------------------------------- 692
CHAPTER V
THEIR BROTHERS' KEEPERS
On the morning of September 2, a copper wire broke in California, between
two telephone poles by the track of the Pacific branch line of Taggart
Transcontinental.
A slow, thin rain had been falling since midnight, and there had been no
sunrise, only a gray light seeping through a soggy sky—and the brilliant
raindrops hanging on the telephone wires had been the only sparks glittering
against the chalk of the clouds, the lead of the ocean and the steel of the
oil derricks descending as lone bristles down a desolate hillside. The wires
had been worn by more rains and years than they had been intended to carry;
one of them had kept sagging, through the hours of that morning, under the
fragile load of raindrops; then its one last drop had grown on the wire's
curve and had hung like a crystal bead, gathering the weight of many seconds;
the bead and the wire had given up together and, as soundless as the fall of
tears, the wire had broken and fallen with the fall of the bead.
The men at the Division Headquarters of Taggart Transcontinental avoided
looking at one another, when the break of the telephone line was discovered
and reported. They made statements painfully miscalculated to seem to refer
to the problem, yet to state nothing, none fooling the others. They knew that
copper wire was a vanishing commodity, more precious than gold or honor; they
knew that the division storekeeper had sold their stock of wire weeks ago, to
unknown dealers who came by night and were not businessmen in the daytime,
but only men who had friends in Sacramento and in Washington—just as the
storekeeper, recently appointed to the division, had a friend in New York,
named Cuffy Meigs, about whom one asked no questions. They knew that the man
who would now assume the responsibility of ordering repairs and initiating
the action which would lead to the discovery that the repairs could not be
made, would incur retaliation from unknown enemies, that his fellow workers
would become mysteriously silent and would not testify to help him, that he
would prove nothing, and if he attempted to do his job, it would not be his
any longer. They did not know what was safe or dangerous these days, when the
guilty were not punished, but the accusers were; and, like animals, they knew
that immobility was the only protection when in doubt and in danger. They
remained immobile; they spoke about the appropriate procedure of sending
reports to the appropriate authorities on the appropriate dates.
A young roadmaster walked out of the room and out of the headquarters
building to the safety of a telephone booth in a drugstore and, at his own
expense, ignoring the continent and the tiers of appropriate executives
between, he telephoned Dagny Taggart in New York.
She received the call in her brother's office, interrupting an emergency
conference. The young roadmaster told her only that the telephone line was
broken and that there was no wire to repair it; he said nothing else and he
did not explain why he had found it necessary to call her in person. She did
not question him; she understood. "Thank you," was all that she answered.
An emergency file in her office kept a record of all the crucial materials
still on hand, on every division of Taggart Transcontinental.
Like the file of a bankrupt, it kept registering losses, while the rare
additions of new supplies seemed like the malicious chuckles of some
tormentor throwing crumbs at a starving continent. She looked through the
file, closed it, sighed and said, "Montana, Eddie. Phone the Montana Line to
ship half their stock of wire to California. Montana might be able to last
without it—for another week." And as Eddie Willers was about to protest, she
added, "Oil, Eddie. California is one of the last producers of oil left in
--------------------------------------- 693
the country. We don't dare lose the Pacific Line." Then she went back to the
conference in her brother's office.
"Copper wire?" said James Taggart, with an odd glance that went from her
face to the city beyond the window. "In a very short while, we won't have any
trouble about copper."
"Why?" she asked, but he did not answer. There was nothing special to see
beyond the window, only the clear sky of a sunny day, the quiet light of
early afternoon on the roofs of the city and, above them, the page of the
calendar, saying: September 2.
She did not know why he had insisted on holding this conference in his own
office, why he had insisted on speaking to her alone, which he had always
tried to avoid, or why he kept glancing at his wrist watch.
"Things are, it seems to me, going wrong," he said. "Something has to be
done. There appears to exist a state of dislocation and confusion tending
toward an uncoordinated, unbalanced policy. What I mean is, there's a
tremendous national demand for transportation, yet we're losing money. It
seems to me—"
She sat looking at the ancestral map of Taggart Transcontinental on the
wall of his office, at the red arteries winding across a yellowed continent.
There had been a time when the railroad was called the blood system of the
nation, and the stream of trains had been like a living circuit of blood,
bringing growth and wealth to every patch of wilderness it touched. Now. it
was still like a stream of blood, but like the one-way stream that runs from
a wound, draining the last of a body's sustenance and life. One-way traffic—
she thought indifferently—consumers' traffic.
There was Train Number 193, she thought. Six weeks ago, Train Number 193
had been sent with a load of steel, not to Faulkton, Nebraska, where the
Spencer Machine Tool Company, the best machine tool concern still in
existence, had been idle for two weeks, waiting for the shipment—but to Sand
Creek, Illinois, where Confederated Machines had been wallowing in debt for
over a year, producing unreliable goods at unpredictable times. The steel had
been allocated by a directive which explained that the Spencer Machine Tool
Company was a rich concern, able to wait, while Confederated Machines was
bankrupt and could not be allowed to collapse, being the sole source of
livelihood of the community of Sand Creek, Illinois. The Spencer Machine Tool
Company had closed a month ago. Confederated Machines had closed two weeks
later.
The people of Sand Creek, Illinois, had been placed on national relief,
but no food could be found for them in the empty granaries of the nation at
the frantic call of the moment—so the seed grain of the farmers of Nebraska
had been seized by order of the Unification Board—and Train Number 194 had
carried the unplanted harvest and the future of the people of Nebraska to be
consumed by the people of Illinois. "In this enlightened age," Eugene Lawson
had said in a radio broadcast, "we have come, at last, to realize that each
one of us is his brother's keeper."
"In a precarious period of emergency, like the present," James Taggart was
saying, while she looked at the map, "it is dangerous to find ourselves
forced to miss pay days and accumulate wage arrears on some of our divisions,
a temporary condition, of course, but—"
She chuckled. "The Railroad Unification Plan isn't working, is it, Jim?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"You're to receive a big cut of the Atlantic Southern's gross income, out
of the common pool at the end of the year—only there won't be any gross
income left for the pool to seize, will there?"
"That's not true! It's just that the bankers are sabotaging the Plan.
Those bastards—who used to give us loans in the old days, with no security
at all except our own railroad—now refuse to let me have a few measly
--------------------------------------- 694
hundred-thousands, on short term, just to take care of a few payrolls, when I
have the entire plant of all the railroads of the country to offer them as
security for my loan!"
She chuckled.
"We couldn't help it!" he cried. "It's not the fault of the Plan that some
people refuse to carry their fair share of our burdens!"
"Jim, was this all you wanted to tell me? If it is, I'll go. I have work
to do."
His eyes shot to his wrist watch. "No, no, that's not all! It's most
urgent that we discuss the situation and arrive at some decision, which—"
She listened blankly to the next stream of generalities, wondering about
his motive. He was marking time, yet he wasn't, not fully; she felt certain
that he was holding her here for some specific purpose and, simultaneously,
that he was holding her for the mere sake of her presence.
It was some new trait in him, which she had begun to notice ever since
Cherryl's death. He had come running to her, rushing, unannounced, into her
apartment on the evening of the day when Cherryl's body had been found and
the story of her suicide had filled the newspapers, given by some social
worker who had witnessed it; "an. inexplicable suicide," the newspapers had
called it, unable to discover any motive. "It wasn't my fault!" he had
screamed to her, as if she were the only judge whom he had to placate. "I'm
not to blame for it! I'm not to blame!" He had been shaking with terror—yet
she had caught a few glances thrown shrewdly at her face, which had seemed,
inconceivably, to convey a touch of triumph. "Get out of here, Jim," was all
she had said to him.
He had never spoken to her again about Cherry], but he had started coming
to her office more often than usual, he had stopped her in the halls for
snatches of pointless discussions—and such moments had grown into a sum that
gave her an incomprehensible sensation: as if, while clinging to her for
support and protection against some nameless terror, his arms were sliding to
embrace her and to plunge a knife into her back.
"I am eager to know your views," he was saying insistently, as she looked
away. "It is most urgent that we discuss the situation and . . .
and you haven't said anything." She did not turn. "It's not as if there
were no money to be had out of the railroad business, but—"
She glanced at him sharply; his eyes scurried away.
"What I mean is, some constructive policy has to be devised," he droned on
hastily. "Something has to be done . . . by somebody. In times of emergency—"
She knew what thought he had scurried to avoid, what hint he had given
her, yet did not want her to acknowledge or discuss. She knew that no train
schedules could be maintained any longer, no promises kept, no contracts
observed, that regular trains were cancelled at a moment's notice and
transformed into emergency specials sent by unexplained orders to unexpected
destinations—and that the orders came from Cuffy Meigs, sole judge of
emergencies and of the public welfare.
She knew that factories were closing, some with their machinery stilled
for lack of supplies that had not been received, others with their warehouses
full of goods that could not be delivered. She knew that the old industries—
the giants who had built their power by a purposeful course projected over a
span of time—were left to exist at the whim of the moment, a moment they
could not foresee or control. She knew that the best among them, those of the
longest range and most complex function, had long since gone—and those still
struggling to produce, struggling savagely to preserve the code of an age
when production had been possible, were now inserting into their contracts a
line shameful to a descendant of Nat Taggart: "Transportation permitting."
--------------------------------------- 695
And yet there were men—and she knew it—who were able to obtain
transportation whenever they wished, as by a mystic secret, as by the grace
of some power which one was not to question or explain.
They were the men whose dealings with Cuffy Meigs were regarded by people
as that unknowable of mystic creeds which smites the observer for the sin of
looking, so people kept their eyes closed, dreading, not ignorance, but
knowledge. She knew that deals were made whereby those men sold a commodity
known as "transportation pull"—a term which all understood, but none would
dare define. She knew that these were the men of the emergency specials, the
men who could cancel her scheduled trains and send them to any random spot of
the continent which they chose to strike with their voodoo stamp, the stamp
superseding contract, property, justice, reason and lives, the stamp stating
that "the public welfare" required the immediate salvation of that spot.
These were the men who sent trains to the relief of the Smather Brothers and
their grapefruit in Arizona—to the relief of a factory in Florida engaged in
the production of pin-ball machines—
to the relief of a horse farm in Kentucky—to the relief of Orren Boyle's
Associated Steel.
These were the men who made deals with desperate industrialists to provide
transportation for the goods stalled in their warehouses—or, failing to
obtain the percentage demanded, made deals to purchase the goods, when the
factory closed, at the bankruptcy sale, at ten cents on the dollar, and to
speed the goods away in freight cars suddenly available, away to markets
where dealers of the same kind were ready for the kill. These were the men
who hovered over factories, waiting for the last breath of a furnace, to
pounce upon the equipment—and over desolate sidings, to pounce upon the
freight cars of undelivered goods—
these were a new biological species, the hit-and-run businessmen, who did
not stay in any line of business longer than the span of one deal, who had no
payrolls to meet, no overhead to carry, no real estate to own, no equipment
to build, whose only asset and sole investment consisted of an item known as
"friendship." These were the men whom official speeches described as "the
progressive businessmen of our dynamic age," but whom people called "the pull
peddlers"—the species included many breeds, those of "transportation pull,"
and of "steel pull" and "oil pull'1 and "wage-raise pull" and "suspended
sentence pull"—men who were dynamic, who kept darting all over the country
while no one else could move, men who were active and mindless, active, not
like animals, but like that which breeds, feeds and moves upon the stillness
of a corpse.
She knew that there was money to be had out of the railroad business and
she knew who was now obtaining it Cuffy Meigs was selling trains as he was
selling the last of the railroad's supplies, whenever he could rig a setup
which would not let it be discovered or proved—
selling rail to roads in Guatemala or to trolley companies in Canada,
selling wire to manufacturers of juke boxes, selling crossties for fuel in
resort hotels.
Did it matter—she thought, looking at the map—which part of the corpse had
been consumed by which type of maggot, by those who gorged themselves or by
those who gave the food to other maggots? So long as living flesh was prey to
be devoured, did it matter whose stomachs it had gone to fill? There was no
way to tell which devastation had been accomplished by the humanitarians and
which by undisguised gangsters. There was no way to tell which acts of
plunder had been prompted by the charity-lust of the Lawsons and which by the
gluttony of Cuffy Meigs—no way to tell which communities had been immolated
to feed another community one week closer to starvation and which to provide
yachts for the pull-peddlers. Did it matter? Both were alike in fact as they
were alike in spirit, both were in need and need was regarded as sole title
--------------------------------------- 696
to property, both were acting in strictest accordance with the same code of
morality. Both held the immolation of men as proper and both were achieving
it. There wasn't even any way to tell who were the cannibals and who the
victims—the communities that accepted as their rightful due the confiscated
clothing or fuel of a town to the east of them, found, next week, their
granaries confiscated to feed a town to the west—men had achieved the ideal
of the centuries, they were practicing it in unobstructed perfection, they
were serving need as their highest ruler, need as first claim upon them, need
as their standard of value, as the coin of their realm, as more sacred than
right and life. Men had been pushed into a pit where, shouting that man is
his brother's keeper, each was devouring his neighbor and was being devoured
by his neighbor's brother, each was proclaiming the righteousness of the
unearned and wondering who was stripping the skin off his back, each was
devouring himself, while screaming in terror that some unknowable evil was
destroying the earth.
"What complaint do they now have to make?" she heard Hugh Akston's voice
in her mind. "That the universe is irrational? Is it?"
She sat looking at the map, her glance dispassionately solemn, as if no
emotion save respect were permissible when observing the awesome power of
logic. She was seeing—in the chaos of a perishing continent —the precise,
mathematical execution of all the ideas men had held.
They had not wanted to know that this was what they wanted, they had not
wanted to see that they had the power to wish, but not the power to fake—and
they had achieved their wish to the letter, to the last bloodstained comma of
it.
What were they thinking now, the champions of need and the lechers of
pity?—she wondered. What were they counting on? Those who had once simpered:
"I don't want to destroy the rich, I only want to seize a little of their
surplus to help the poor, just a little, they'll never miss it!"—then, later,
had snapped: "The tycoons can stand being squeezed, they've amassed enough to
last them for three generations"—
then, later, had yelled: "Why should the people suffer while businessmen
have reserves to last a year?"—now were screaming: "Why should we starve
while some people have reserves to last a week?" What were they counting on?—
she wondered.
"You must do something!" cried James Taggart.
She whirled to face him. "I?"
"It's your job, it's your province, it's your duty!"
"What is?"
"To act. To do."
"To do—what?"
"How should I know? It's your special talent. You're the doer."
She glanced at him: the statement was so oddly perceptive and so
incongruously irrelevant. She rose to her feet.
"Is this all, Jim?"
"No! No! I want a discussion!"
"Go ahead."
"But you haven't said anything!"
"You haven't, either."
"But . . . What I mean is, there are practical problems to solve, which .
. . For instance, what was that matter of our last allocation of new rail
vanishing from the storehouse in Pittsburgh?"
"Cuffy Meigs stole it and sold it."
"Can you prove it?" he snapped defensively.
"Have your friends left any means, methods, rules or agencies of proof?"
"Then don't talk about it, don't be theoretical, we've got to deal with
facts! We've got to deal with facts as they are today . . . I mean, we've got
--------------------------------------- 697
to be realistic and devise some practical means to protect our supplies under
existing conditions, not under unprovable assumptions, which—"
She chuckled. There was the form of the formless, she thought, there was
the method of his consciousness: he wanted her to protect him from Cuffy
Meigs without acknowledging Meigs' existence, to fight it without admitting
its reality, to defeat it without disturbing its game.
"What do you find so damn funny?" he snapped angrily.
"You know it"
"I don't know what's the matter with you! I don't know what's happened to
you . . . in the last two months . . . ever since you came back. . . . You've
never been so uncooperative!"
"Why, Jim, I haven't argued with you in the last two months."
"That's what I mean!" He caught himself hastily, but not fast enough to
miss her smile. "I mean, I wanted to have a conference, I wanted to know your
view of the situation—"
"You know it."
"But you haven't said a word!"
"I said everything I had to say, three years ago. I told you where your
course would take you. It has."
"Now there you go again! What's the use of theorizing? We're here, we're
not back three years ago. We've got to deal with the present, not the past.
Maybe things would have been different, if we had followed your opinion,
maybe, but the fact is that we didn't—and we've got to deal with facts. We've
got to take reality as it is now, today!"
"Well, take it."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Take your reality. I'll merely take your orders."
"That's unfair! I'm asking for your opinion—"
"You're asking for reassurance, Jim. You're not going to get it."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I'm not going to help you pretend—by arguing with you—that the reality
you're talking about is not what it is, that there's still a way to make it
work and to save your neck. There isn't."
"Well . . ." There was no explosion, no anger—only the feebly uncertain
voice of a man on the verge of abdication. "Well . . . what would you want me
to do?"
"Give up." He looked at her blankly. "Give up—all of you, you and your
Washington friends and your looting planners and the whole of your cannibal
philosophy. Give up and get out of the way and let those of us who can, start
from scratch out of the ruins."
"No!" The explosion came, oddly, now; it was the scream of a man who would
die rather than betray his idea, and it came from a man who had spent his
life evading the existence of ideas, acting with the expediency of a
criminal. She wondered whether she had ever understood the essence of
criminals. She wondered about the nature of the loyalty to the idea of
denying ideas.
"No!" he cried, his voice lower, hoarser and more normal, sinking from the
tone of a zealot to the tone of an overbearing executive.
"That's impossible! That's out of the question!"
"Who said so?"
"Never mind! It's so! Why do you always think of the impractical?
Why don't you accept reality as it is and do something about it?
You're the realist, you're the doer, the mover, the producer, the Nat
Taggart, you're the person who's able to achieve any goal she chooses!
You could save us now, you could find a way to make things work—if you
wanted to!"
She burst out laughing.
--------------------------------------- 698
There, she thought, was the ultimate goal of all that loose academic
prattle which businessmen had ignored for years, the goal of all the slipshod
definitions, the sloppy generalities, the soupy abstractions, all claiming
that obedience to objective reality is the same as obedience to the State,
that there is no difference between a law of nature and a bureaucrat's
directive, that a hungry man is not free, that man must be released from the
tyranny of food, shelter and clothing—all of it, for years, that the day
might come when Nat Taggart, the realist, would be asked to consider the will
of Cuffy Meigs as a fact of nature, irrevocable and absolute like steel,
rails and gravitation, to accept the Meigs made world as an objective,
unchangeable reality—then to continue producing abundance in that world.
There was the goal of all those con men of library and classroom, who sold
their revelations as reason, their "instincts" as science, their cravings as
knowledge, the goal of all the savages of the non-objective, the non-
absolute, the relative, the tentative, the probable—the savages who, seeing a
farmer gather a harvest, can consider it only as a mystic phenomenon unbound
by the law of causality and created by the farmer's omnipotent whim, who then
proceed to seize the farmer, to chain him, to deprive him of tools, of seeds,
of water, of soil, to push him out on a barren rock and to command: "Now grow
a harvest and feed us!"
No—she thought, expecting Jim to ask it—it would be useless to try to
explain what she was laughing at, he would not be able to understand it.
But he did not ask it. Instead, she saw him slumping and heard him say—
terrifyingly, because his words were so irrelevant, if he did not understand,
and so monstrous, if he did, "Dagny, I'm your brother . . ."
She drew herself up, her muscles growing rigid, as if she were about to
face a killer's gun.
"Dagny"—his voice was the soft, nasal, monotonous whine of a beggar—"I
want to be president of a railroad. I want it. Why can't I have my wish as
you always have yours? Why shouldn't I be given the fulfillment of my desires
as you always fulfill any desire of your own? Why should you be happy while I
suffer? Oh yes, the world is yours, you're the one who has the brains to run
it. Then why do you permit suffering in your world? You proclaim the pursuit
of happiness, but you doom me to frustration. Don't I have the right to
demand any form of happiness I choose? Isn't that a debt which you owe me? Am
I not your brother?"
His glance was like a prowler's flashlight searching her face for a shred
of pity. It found nothing but a look of revulsion.
"It's your sin if I suffer! It's your moral failure! I'm your brother,
therefore I'm your responsibility, but you've failed to supply my wants,
therefore you're guilty! All of mankind's moral leaders have said so for
centuries—who are you to say otherwise? You're so proud of yourself, you
think that you're pure and good—but you can't be good, so long as I'm
wretched. My misery is the measure of your sin. My contentment is the measure
of your virtue. I want this kind of world, today's world, it gives me my
share of authority, it allows me to feel important-make it work for me!—do
something!—how do I know what?—it's your problem and your duty! You have the
privilege of strength, but I—I have the right of weakness! That's a moral
absolute!
Don't you know it? Don't you? Don't you?"
His glance was now like the hands of a man hanging over an abyss, groping
frantically for the slightest fissure of doubt, but slipping on the clean,
polished rock of her face.
"You bastard," she said evenly, without emotion, since the words were not
addressed to anything human.
--------------------------------------- 699
It seemed to her that she saw him fall into the abyss—even though there
was nothing to see in his face except the look of a con man whose trick has
not worked.
There was no reason to feel more revulsion than usual, she thought; he had
merely uttered the things which were preached, heard and accepted everywhere;
but this creed was usually expounded in the third person, and Jim had had the
open effrontery to expound it in the first.
She wondered whether people accepted the doctrine of sacrifice provided
its recipients did not identify the nature of their own claims and actions.
She turned to leave.
"No! No! Wait!" he cried, leaping to his feet, with a glance at his wrist
watch. "It's time now! There's a particular news broadcast that I want you to
hear!"
She stopped, held by curiosity.
He pressed the switch of the radio, watching her face openly, intently,
almost insolently. His eyes had a look of fear and of oddly lecherous
anticipation.
"Ladies and gentlemen!" the voice of the radio speaker leaped forth
abruptly; it had a tone of panic. "News of a shocking development has just
reached us from Santiago, Chile!"
She saw the jerk of Taggart's head and a sudden anxiety in his bewildered
frown, as if something about the words and voice were not what he had
expected.
"A special session of the legislature of the People's State of Chile had
been called for ten o'clock this morning, to pass an act of utmost importance
to the people of Chile, Argentina and other South American People's States.
In line with the enlightened policy of Senior Ramirez, the new Head of the
Chilean State—who came to power on the moral slogan that man is his brother's
keeper—the legislature was to nationalize the Chilean properties of d'Anconia
Copper, thus opening the way for the People's State of Argentina to
nationalize the rest of the d'Anconia properties the world over. This,
however, was known only to a very few of the top-level leaders of both
nations. The measure had been kept secret in order to avoid debate and
reactionary opposition.
The seizure of the multi-billion dollar d'Anconia Copper was to come as a
munificent surprise to the country.
"On the stroke of ten, in the exact moment when the chairman's gavel
struck the rostrum, opening the session—almost as if the gavel's blow had set
it off—the sound of a tremendous explosion rocked the hall, shattering the
glass of its windows. It came from the harbor, a few streets away—and when
the legislators rushed to the windows, they saw a long column of flame where
once there had risen the familiar silhouettes of the ore docks of d'Anconia
Copper. The ore docks had been blown to bits.
"The chairman averted panic and called the session to order. The act of
nationalization was read to the assembly, to the sound of fire alarm sirens
and distant cries. It was a gray morning, dark with rain clouds, the
explosion had broken an electric transmitter—so that the assembly voted on
the measure by the light of candles, while the red glow of the fire kept
sweeping over the great vaulted ceiling above their heads.
"But more terrible a shock came later, when the legislators called a hasty
recess to announce to the nation the good news that the people now owned
d'Anconia Copper. While they were voting, word had come from the closest and
farthest points of the globe that there was no d'Anconia Copper left on
earth. Ladies and gentlemen, not anywhere.
In that same instant, on the stroke of ten, by an infernal marvel of
synchronization, every property of d'Anconia Copper on the face of the globe,
--------------------------------------- 700
from Chile to Siam to Spain to Pottsville, Montana, had been blown up and
swept away.
"The d'Anconia workers everywhere had been handed their last pay checks,
in cash, at nine A.M., and by nine-thirty had been moved off the premises.
The ore docks, the smelters, the laboratories, the office buildings were
demolished. Nothing was left of the d'Anconia ore ships which had been in
port—and only lifeboats carrying the crews were left of those ships which had
been at sea. As to the d'Anconia mines, some were buried under tons of
blasted rock, while others were found not to be worth the price of blasting.
An astounding number of these mines, as reports pouring in seem to indicate,
had continued to be run, even though exhausted years ago.
"Among the thousands of d'Anconia employees, the police have found no one
with any knowledge of how this monstrous plot had been conceived, organized
and carried out. But the cream of the d'Anconia staff are not here any
longer. The most efficient of the executives, mineralogists, engineers,
superintendents have vanished—all the men upon whom the People's State had
been counting to carry on the work and cushion the process of readjustment.
The most able—correction: the most selfish—of the men are gone. Reports from
the various banks indicate that there are no d'Anconia accounts left
anywhere; the money has been spent down to the last penny, "Ladies and
gentlemen, the d'Anconia fortune—the greatest fortune on earth, the legendary
fortune of the centuries—has ceased to exist.
In place of the golden dawn of a new age, the People's States of Chile and
Argentina are left with a pile of rubble and hordes of unemployed on their
hands.
"No clue has been found to the fate or the whereabouts of Senor Francisco
d'Anconia. He has vanished, leaving nothing behind him, not even a message of
farewell."
Thank you, my darling—thank you in the name of the last of us, even if you
will not hear it and will not care to hear. . . . It was not a sentence, but
the silent emotion of a prayer in her mind, addressed to the laughing face of
a boy she had known at sixteen.
Then she noticed that she was clinging to the radio, as if the faint
electric beat within it still held a tie to the only living force on earth,
which it had transmitted for a few brief moments and which now filled the
room where all else was dead.
As distant remnants of the explosion's wreckage, she noticed a sound that
came from Jim, part-moan, part-scream, part-growl—then the sight of Jim's
shoulders shaking over a telephone and his distorted voice screaming, "But,
Rodrigo, you said it was safe! Rodrigo—oh God!—do you know how much I'd sunk
into it?"—then the shriek of another phone on his desk, and his voice
snarling into another receiver, his hand still clutching the first, "Shut
your trap, Orren! What are you to do? What do I care, God damn you!"
There were people rushing into the office, the telephones were screaming
and, alternating between pleas and curses, Jim kept yelling into one
receiver, "Get me Santiago! . . . Get Washington to get me Santiago!"
Distantly, as on the margin of her mind, she could see what sort of game
the men behind the shrieking phones had played and lost. They seemed far
away, like tiny commas squirming on the white field under the lens of a
microscope. She wondered how they could ever expect to be taken seriously
when a Francisco d'Anconia was possible on earth.
She saw the glare of the explosion in every face she met through the rest
of the day—and in every face she passed in the darkness of the streets, that
evening. If Francisco had wanted a worthy funeral pyre for d'Anconia Copper,
she thought, he -had succeeded. There it was, in the streets of New York
City, the only city on earth still able to understand it—in the faces of
people, in their whispers, the whispers crackling tensely like small tongues
--------------------------------------- 701
of fire, the faces lighted by a look that was both solemn and frantic, the
shadings of expressions appearing to sway and weave, as if cast by a distant
flame, some frightened, some angry, most of them uneasy, uncertain,
expectant, but all of them acknowledging a fact much beyond an industrial
catastrophe, all of them knowing what it meant, though none would name Us
meaning, all of them carrying a touch of laughter, a laughter of amusement
and defiance, the bitter laughter of perishing victims who feel that they are
avenged.
She saw it in the face of Hank Rearden, when she met him for dinner that
evening. As his tall, confident figure walked toward her—
the only figure that seemed at home in the costly setting of a
distinguished restaurant—she saw the look of eagerness fighting the sternness
of his features, the look of a young boy still open to the enchantment of the
unexpected. He did not speak of this day's event, but she knew that it was
the only image in his mind.
They had been meeting whenever he came to the city, spending a brief, rare
evening together—with their past still alive in their silent acknowledgment—
with no future in their work and in their common struggle, but with the
knowledge that they were allies gaining support from the fact of each other's
existence.
He did not want to mention today's event, he did not want to speak of
Francisco, but she noticed, as they sat at the table, that the strain of a
resisted smile kept pulling at the hollows of his cheeks. She knew whom he
meant, when he said suddenly, his voice soft and low with the weight of
admiration, "He did keep his oath, didn't he?"
"His oath?" she asked, startled, thinking of the inscription on the temple
of Atlantis.
"He said to me, 'I swear—by the woman I love—that I am your friend,' He
was."
"He is."
He shook his head. "I have no right to think of him. I have no right to
accept what he's done as an act in my defense. And yet . . ."
He stopped.
"But it was, Hank. In defense of all of us—and of you, most of all."
He looked away, out at the city. They sat at the side of the room, with a
sheet of glass as an invisible protection against the sweep of space and
streets sixty floors below. The city seemed abnormally distant: it lay
flattened down to the pool of its lowest stories. A few blocks away, its
tower merging into darkness, the calendar hung at the level of their faces,
not as a small, disturbing rectangle, but as an enormous screen, eerily close
and large, flooded by the dead, white glow of light projected through an
empty film, empty but for the letters: September 2.
"Rearden Steel is now working at capacity," he was saying indifferently.
"They've lifted the production quotas off my mills—for the next five minutes,
I guess. I don't know how many of their own regulations they've suspended, I
don't think they know it, either, they don't bother keeping track of legality
any longer, I'm sure I'm a law-breaker on five or six counts, which nobody
could prove or disprove—all I know is that the gangster of the moment told me
to go full steam ahead." He shrugged. "When another gangster kicks him out
tomorrow, I'll probably be shut down, as penalty for illegal operation. But
according to the plan of the present split-second, they've begged me to keep
pouring my Metal, in any amount and by any means I choose."
She noticed the occasional, surreptitious glances that people were
throwing in their direction. She had noticed it before, ever since her
broadcast, ever since the two of them had begun to appear in public together.
Instead of the disgrace he had dreaded, there was an air of awed uncertainty
in people's manner—uncertainty of their own moral precepts, awe in the
--------------------------------------- 702
presence of two persons who dared to be certain of being right. People were
looking at them with anxious curiosity, with envy, with respect, with the
fear of offending an unknown, proudly rigorous standard, some almost with an
air of apology that seemed to say: "Please forgive us for being married."
There were some who had a look of angry malice, and a few who had a look of
admiration.
"Dagny," he asked suddenly, "do you suppose he's in New York?"
"No. I've called the Wayne-Falkland. They told me that the lease on his
suite had expired a month ago and he did not renew it."
"They're looking for him all over the world," he said, smiling.
"They'll never find him." The smile vanished. "Neither will I." His voice
slipped back to the flat, gray tone of duty: "Well, the mills are working,
but I'm not. I'm doing nothing but running around the country like a
scavenger, searching for illegal ways to purchase raw materials.
Hiding, sneaking, lying—just to get a few tons of ore or coal or copper.
They haven't lifted their regulations off my raw materials. They know that
I'm pouring more Metal than the quotas they give me could produce. They don't
care." He added, "They think I do."
"Tired, Hank?"
"Bored to death."
There was a time, she thought, when his mind, his energy, his
inexhaustible resourcefulness had been given to the task of a producer
devising better ways to deal with nature; now, they were switched to the task
of a criminal outwitting men. She wondered how long a man could endure a
change of that kind.
"It's becoming almost impossible to get iron ore," he said indifferently,
then added, his voice suddenly alive, "Now it's going to be completely
impossible to get copper." He was grinning.
She wondered how long a man could continue to work against himself, to
work when his deepest desire was not to succeed, but to fail.
She understood the connection of his thoughts when he said, "I've never
told you, but I've met Ragnar Danneskjold."
"He told me."
"What? Where did you ever—" He stopped. "Of course," he said, his voice
tense and low. "He would be one of them. You would have met him. Dagny, what
are they like, those men who . . . No. Don't answer me." In a moment he
added, "So I've met one of their agents."
"You've met two of them."
His response was a span of total stillness. "Of course," he said dully.
"I knew it . . . I just wouldn't admit to myself that I knew . . . He was
their recruiting agent, wasn't he?"
"One of their earliest and best."
He chuckled; it was a sound of bitterness and longing. 'That night . . .
when they got Ken Danagger . . . I thought that they had not sent anyone
after me. . . ."
The effort by which he made his face grow rigid, was almost like the slow,
resisted turn of a key locking a sunlit room he could not permit himself to
examine. After a while, he said impassively, "Dagny, that new rail we
discussed last month—I don't think I'll be able to deliver it. They haven't
lifted their regulations off my output, they're still controlling my sales
and disposing of my Metal as they please. But the bookkeeping is in such a
snarl that I'm smuggling a few thousand tons into the black market every
week. I think they know it. They're pretending not to. They don't want to
antagonize me, right now. But, you see, I've been shipping every ton I could
snatch, to some emergency customers of mine. Dagny, I was in Minnesota last
month. I've seen what's going on there. The country will starve, not next
year, but this winter, unless a few of us act and act fast. There are no
--------------------------------------- 703
grain reserves left anywhere. With Nebraska gone, Oklahoma wrecked, North
Dakota abandoned, Kansas barely subsisting—there isn't going to be any wheat
this winter, not for the city of New York nor for any Eastern city.
Minnesota is our last granary. They've had two bad years in succession,
but they have a bumper crop this fall—and they have to be able to harvest it.
Have you had a chance to take a look at the condition of the farm-equipment
industry? They're not big enough, any of them, to keep a staff of efficient
gangsters in Washington or to pay percentages to pull-peddlers. So they
haven't been getting many allocations of materials. Two-thirds of them have
shut down and the rest are about to.
And farms are perishing all over the country—for lack of tools. You should
have seen those farmers in Minnesota. They've been spending more time fixing
old tractors that can't be fixed than plowing their fields.
I don't know how they managed to survive till last spring. I don't know
how they managed to plant their wheat. But they did. They did." There was a
look of intensity on his face, as if he were contemplating a rare, forgotten
sight: a vision of men—and she knew what motive was still holding him to his
job. "Dagny, they had to have tools for their harvest. I've been selling all
the Metal I could steal out of my own mills to the manufacturers of farm
equipment. On credit. They've been sending the equipment to Minnesota as fast
as they could put it out.
Selling it in the same way—illegally and on credit. But they will be paid,
this fall, and so will I. Charity, hell! We're helping producers—
and what tenacious producers!—not lousy, mooching 'consumers.1
We're giving loans, not alms. We're supporting ability, not need. I'll be
damned if I'll stand by and let those men be destroyed while the pull
peddlers grow rich!"
He was looking at the image of a sight he had seen in Minnesota: the
silhouette of an abandoned factory, with the light of the sunset streaming,
unopposed, through the holes of its windows and the cracks of its roof, with
the remnant of a sign: Ward Harvester Company.
"Oh, I know," he said. "We'll save them this winter, but the looters will
devour them next year. Still, we'll save them this winter. . . .
Well, that's why I won't be able to smuggle any rail for you. Not in the
immediate future—and there's nothing left to us but the immediate future. I
don't know what is the use of feeding a country, if it loses its railroads—
but what is the use of railroads where there is no food?
What is the use, anyway?"
"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. "[ 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.
--------------------------------------- 704
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 o£ 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?"
"f 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: Brother, you asked for it!
Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Anconia 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,
--------------------------------------- 705
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
--------------------------------------- 706
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 slumming.
"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, bat 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."
--------------------------------------- 707
"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?"
"What's more important, that your damn steel gets poured or that I eat?"
"How do you propose to eat if the steel doesn't get poured?"
Philip's face assumed a look of reproach. "I'm not in a position to argue
with you right now, since you hold the upper hand."
"Then don't argue."
"Uh?"
"Keep your mouth shut and get out of here."
"But I meant—" He stopped.
Rearden chuckled. "You meant that it's I who should keep my mouth shut,
because I hold the upper hand, and should give in to you, because you hold no
hand at all?"
"That's a peculiarly crude way of stating a moral principle."
"But that's what your moral principle amounts to, doesn't it?"
"You can't discuss morality in materialistic terms."
"We're discussing a job in a steel plant—and, boy! is that a materialistic
place!"
Philip's 'body drew a shade tighter together and his eyes became a shade
more glazed, as if in fear of the place around him, in resentment of its
sight, in an effort not to concede its reality. He said, in the soft,
stubborn whine of a voodoo incantation, "It's a moral imperative, universally
conceded in our day and age, that every man is entitled to a job." His voice
rose: "I'm entitled to it!"
"You are? Go on, then, collect your claim."
"Uh?"
"Collect your job. Pick it off the bush where you think it grows."
"I mean—"
"You mean that it doesn't? You mean that you need it, but can't create it?
You mean that you're entitled to a job which I must create for you?"
"Yes!"
"And if I don't?"
The silence went stretching through second after second. "I don't
understand you," said Philip; his voice had the angry bewilderment of a man
who recites the formulas of a well-tested role, but keeps getting the wrong
cues in answer. "I don't understand why one can't talk to you any more. I
don't understand what sort of theory you're propounding and—"
"Oh yes, you do."
--------------------------------------- 708
As if refusing to believe that the formulas could fail, Philip burst out
with: "Since when did you take to abstract philosophy? You're only a
businessman, you're not qualified to deal with questions of principle, you
ought to leave it to the experts who have conceded for centuries—"
"Cut it, Philip. What's the gimmick?"
“Gimmick?"
"Why the sudden ambition?"
"Well, at a time like this . . ."
"Like what?"
"Well, every man has the right to have some means of support and . . . and
not be left to be tossed aside . . . When things are so uncertain, a man's
got to have some security . . . some foothold . . . I mean, at a time like
this, if anything happened to you, I'd have no—"
"What do you expect to happen to me?"
"Oh, I don't! I don't!" The cry was oddly, incomprehensibly genuine.
"I don't expect anything to happen] . . . Do you?"
"Such as what?"
"How do I know? . . . But I've got nothing except the pittance you give me
and . . . and you might change your mind any time."
"I might."
"And I haven't any hold on you at all."
"Why did it take you that many years to realize it and start worrying?
Why now?"
"Because . . . because you've changed. You . . . you used to have a sense
of duty and moral responsibility, but . . . you're losing it.
You're losing it, aren't you?"
Rearden stood studying him silently; there was something peculiar in
Philip's manner of sliding toward questions, as if his words were accidental,
but the too casual, the faintly Insistent questions were the key to his
purpose.
"Well, I'll be glad to take the burden off your shoulders, if I'm a burden
to you!" Philip snapped suddenly. "Just give me a job, and your conscience
won't have to bother you about me any longer!"
"It doesn't."
"That's what I mean! You don't care. You don't care what becomes of any of
us, do you?"
"Of whom?"
"Why . . . Mother and me and . . . and mankind in general. But I'm not
going to appeal to your better self. I know that you're ready to ditch me at
a moment's notice, so—"
"You're lying, Philip. That's not what you're worried about. If it were,
you'd be angling for a chunk of cash, not for a job, not—"
"No! I want a job!" The cry was immediate and almost frantic. "Don't try
to buy me off with cash! I want a job!"
"Pull yourself together, you poor louse. Do you hear what you're saying?"
Philip spit out his answer with impotent hatred: "You can't talk to me
that way!"
"Can you?"
"I only—"
"To buy you off? Why should I try to buy you off—instead of kicking you
out, as I should have, years ago?"
"Well, after all, I'm your brother!”
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"One's supposed to have some sort of feeling for one's brother."
"Do you?"
--------------------------------------- 709
Philip's mouth swelled petulantly; he did not answer; he waited; Rearden
let him wait. Philip muttered, "You're supposed . . . at least . . . to have
some consideration for my feelings . . . but you haven't."
"Have you for mine?"
"Yours? Your feelings?" It was not malice in Philip's voice, but worse: it
was a genuine, indignant astonishment. "You haven't any feelings. You've
never felt anything at all. You've never suffered!"
It was as if a sum of years hit Rearden in the face, by means of a
sensation and a sight: the exact sensation of what he had felt in the cab of
the first train's engine on the John Galt Line—and the sight of Philip's
eyes, the pale, half-liquid eyes presenting the uttermost of human
degradation: an uncontested pain, and, with the obscene insolence of a
skeleton toward a living being, demanding that this pain be held as the
highest of values. You've never suffered, the eyes were saying to him
accusingly—while he was seeing the night in his office when his ore mines
were taken away from him—the moment when he had signed the Gift Certificate
surrendering Rearden Metal—the month of days inside a plane that searched for
the remains of Dagny's body. You've never suffered, the eyes were saying with
self-righteous scorn—while he remembered the sensation of proud chastity with
which he had fought through those moments, refusing to surrender to pain, a
sensation made of his love, of his loyalty, of his knowledge that joy is the
goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved,
and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the
moment's torture. You've never suffered, the dead stare of the eyes was
saying, you've never felt anything, because only to suffer is to feel—there's
no such thing as joy, there's only pain and the absence of pain, only pain
and the zero, when one feels nothing—I suffer, I'm twisted by suffering, I'm
made of undiluted suffering, that's my purity, that's my virtue—and yours,
you the untwisted one, you the uncomplaining, yours is to relieve me of my
pain—cut your unsuffering body to patch up mine, cut your unfeeling soul to
stop mine from feeling—and we'll achieve the ultimate ideal, the triumph over
life, the zero! He was seeing the nature of those who, for centuries, had not
recoiled from the preachers of annihilation—he was seeing the nature of the
enemies he had been fighting all his life.
"Philip," he said, "get out of here." His voice was like a ray of sunlight
in a morgue, it was the plain, dry, daily voice of a businessman, the sound
of health, addressed to an enemy one could not honor by anger, nor even by
horror. "And don't ever try to enter these mills again, because there will be
orders at every gate to throw you out, if you try it.'1
"Well, after all," said Philip, in the angry and cautious tone of a
tentative threat, "I could have my friends assign me to a job here and compel
you to accept it!"
Rearden had started to go, but he stopped and turned to look at his
brother.
Philip's moment of grasping a sudden revelation was not accomplished by
means of thought, but by means of that dark sensation which was his only mode
of consciousness: he felt a sensation of terror, squeezing his throat,
shivering down into his stomach—he was seeing the spread of the mills, with
the roving streamers of flame, with the ladles of molten metal sailing
through space on delicate cables, with open pits the color of glowing coal,
with cranes coming at his head, pounding past, holding tons of steel by the
invisible power of magnets—and he knew that he was afraid of this place,
afraid to the death, that he dared not move without the protection and
guidance of the man before him—
then he looked at the tall, straight figure standing casually still, the
figure with the unflinching eyes whose sight had cut through rock and flame
to build this place—and then he knew how easily the man he was proposing to
--------------------------------------- 710
compel could let a single bucket of metal tilt over a second ahead of its
time or let a single crane drop its load a foot short of its goal, and there
would be nothing left of him, of Philip the claimant—
and his only protection lay in the fact that his mind would think of such
actions, but the mind of Hank Rearden would not.
"But we'd better keep it on a friendly basis," said Philip.
"You'd better," said Rearden and walked away.
Men who worship pain—thought Rearden, staring at the image of the enemies
he had never been able to understand—they're men who worship pain. It seemed
monstrous, yet peculiarly devoid of importance.
He felt nothing. It was like trying to summon emotion toward inanimate
objects, toward refuse sliding down a mountainside to crush him. One could
flee from the slide or build retaining walls against it or be crushed —but
one could not grant any anger, indignation or moral concern to the senseless
motions of the un-living; no, worse, he thought—the antiliving.
The same sense of detached unconcern remained with him while he sat in a
Philadelphia courtroom and watched men perform the motions which were to
grant him his divorce. He watched them utter mechanical generalities, recite
vague phrases of fraudulent evidence, play an intricate game of stretching
words to convey no facts and no meaning. He had paid them to do it—he whom
the law permitted no other way to gain his freedom, no right to state the
facts and plead the truth—the law which delivered his fate, not to objective
rules objectively defined, but to the arbitrary mercy of a judge with a
wizened face and a look of empty cunning.
Lillian was not present in the courtroom; her attorney made gestures once
in a while, with the energy of letting water run through his fingers. They
all knew the verdict in advance and they knew its reason; no other reason had
existed for years, where no standards, save whim, had existed. They seemed to
regard it as their rightful prerogative; they acted as if the purpose of the
procedure were not to try a case, but to give them jobs, as if their jobs
were to recite the appropriate formulas with no responsibility to know what
the formulas accomplished, as if a courtroom were the one place where
questions of right and wrong were irrelevant and they, the men in charge of
dispensing justice, were safely wise enough to know that no justice existed.
They acted like savages performing a ritual devised to set them free of
objective reality.
But the ten years of his marriage had been real, he thought—and these were
the men who assumed the power to dispose of it, to decide whether he would
have a chance of contentment on earth or be condemned to torture for the rest
of his lifetime. He remembered the austerely pitiless respect he had felt for
his contract of marriage, for all his contracts and all his legal
obligations—and he saw what sort of legality his scrupulous observance was
expected to serve.
He noticed that the puppets of the courtroom had started by glancing at
him in the sly, wise manner of fellow conspirators sharing a common guilt,
mutually safe from moral condemnation. Then, when they observed that he was
the only man in the room who looked steadily straight at anyone's face, he
saw resentment growing in their eyes. Incredulously, he realized what it was
that had been expected of him: he, the victim, chained, bound, gagged and
left with no recourse save to bribery, had been expected to believe that the
farce he had purchased was a process of law, that the edicts enslaving him
had moral validity, that he was guilty of corrupting the integrity of the
guardians of justice, and that the blame was his, not theirs. It was like
blaming the victim of a holdup for corrupting the integrity of the thug. And
yet—he thought —through all the generations of political extortion, it was
not the looting bureaucrats who had taken the blame, but the chained
industrialists, not the men who peddled legal favors, but the men who were
--------------------------------------- 711
forced to buy them; and through all those generations of crusades against
corruption, the remedy had always been, not the liberating of the victims,
but the granting of wider powers for extortion to the extortionists. The only
guilt of the victims, he thought, had been that they accepted it as guilt.
When he walked out of the courtroom into the chilly drizzle of a gray
afternoon, he felt as if he had been divorced, not only from Lillian, but
from the whole of the human society that supported the procedure he had
witnessed.
The face of his attorney, an elderly man of the old-fashioned school, wore
an expression that made it look as if he longed to take a bath.
"Say, Hank,” he asked as sole comment, "is there something the looters are
anxious to get from you right now?" "Not that I know of. Why?"
"The thing went too smoothly. There were a few points at which I expected
pressure and hints for some extras, but the boys sailed past and took no
advantage of it. Looks to me as if orders had come from on high to treat you
gently and let you have your way. Are they planning something new against
your mills?" "Not that I know of," said Rearden —and was astonished to hear
in his mind: Not that I care.
It was on the same afternoon, at the mills, that he saw the Wet Nurse
hurrying toward him—a gangling, coltish figure with a peculiar mixture of
brusqueness, awkwardness and decisiveness.
"Mr. Rearden, I would like to speak to you." His voice was diffident, yet
oddly firm.
"Go ahead."
"There's something I want to ask you." The boy's face was solemn and taut.
"I want you to know that I know you should refuse me, but I want to ask it
just the same . . . and . . . and if it's presumptuous, then just tell me to
go to hell."
"Okay. Try it."
"Mr. Rearden, would you give me a job?" It was the effort to sound normal
that betrayed the days of struggle behind the question. "I want to quit what
I'm doing and go to work. I mean, real work—in steel making, like I thought
I'd started to, once. I want to earn my keep. I'm tired of being a bedbug."
Rearden could not resist smiling and reminding him, in the tone of a
quotation, "Now why use such words, Non-Absolute? If we don't use ugly words,
we won't have any ugliness and—" But he saw the desperate earnestness of the
boy's face and stopped, his smile vanishing.
"I mean it, Mr. Rearden. And I know what the word means and it's the right
word. I'm tired of being paid, with your money, to do nothing except make it
impossible for you to make any money at all. I know that anyone who works
today is only a sucker for bastards like me, but . . .
well, God damn it, I'd rather be a sucker, if that's all there's left to
be!"
His voice had risen to a cry. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Rearden," he said
stiffly, looking away. In a moment, he went on in his woodenly unemotional
tone. "I want to get out of the Deputy-Director-of-Distribution racket. I
don't know that I'd be of much use to you, I've got a college diploma in
metallurgy, but that's not worth the paper it's printed on. But I think I've
learned a little about the work in the two years I've been here—and if you
could use me at all, as sweeper or scrap man or whatever you'd trust me with,
I'd tell them where to put the deputy directorship and I'd go to work for you
tomorrow, next week, this minute or whenever you say." He avoided looking at
Rearden, not in a manner of evasion, but as if he had no right to do it.
"Why were you afraid to ask me?" said Rearden gently.
The boy glanced at him with indignant astonishment, as if the answer were
self-evident. "Because after the way I started here and the way I acted and
--------------------------------------- 712
what I'm deputy of, if I come asking you for favors, you ought to kick me in
the teeth!"
"You have learned a great deal in the two years you've been here."
"No, I—" He glanced at Rearden, understood, looked away and said woodenly,
"Yeah . . . if that's what you mean."
"Listen, kid, I'd give you a job this minute and I'd trust you with more
than a sweeper's job, if it were up to me. But have you forgotten the
Unification Board? I'm not allowed to hire you and you're not allowed to
quit. Sure, men are quitting all the time, and we're hiring others under
phony names and fancy papers proving that they've worked here for years. You
know it, and thanks for keeping your mouth shut. But do you think that if I
hired you that way, your friends in Washington would miss it?"
The boy shook his head slowly.
"Do you think that if you quit their service to become a sweeper, they
wouldn't understand your reason?"
The boy nodded.
"Would they let you go?"
The boy shook his head. After a moment, he said in a tone of forlorn
astonishment, "I hadn't thought of that at all, Mr. Rearden. I forgot them. I
kept thinking of whether you'd want me or not and that the only thing that
counted was your decision.”
"I know."
"And . . . it is the only thing that counts, in fact."
"Yes, Non-Absolute, in fact."
The boy's mouth jerked suddenly into the brief, mirthless twist of a
smile. "I guess I'm tied worse than any sucker . . ."
"Yes. There's nothing you can do now, except apply to the Unification
Board for permission to change your job. I'll support your application, if
you want to try—only I don't think they'll grant it. I don't think they'll
let you work for me."
"No. They won't."
"If you maneuver enough and lie enough, they might permit you to transfer
to a private job—with some other steel company."
"No! I don't want to go anywhere else! I don't want to leave this place!”
He stood looking off at the invisible vapor of rain over the flame of the
furnaces. After a while, he said quietly, "I'd better stay put, I guess. I'd
better go on being a deputy looter. Besides, if I left, God only knows what
sort of bastard they'd saddle you with in my place!"
He turned. "They're up to something, Mr. Rearden. I don't know what it is,
but they're getting ready to spring something on you."
"What?"
"I don't know. But they've been watching every opening here, in the last
few weeks, every desertion, and slipping their own gang in. A queer sort of
gang, too—real goons, some of them, that I'd swear never stepped inside a
steel plant before. I've had orders to get as many of 'our boys' in as
possible. They wouldn't tell me why. I don't know what it is they're
planning. I've tried to pump them, but they're acting pretty cagey about it.
I don't think they trust me any more. I'm losing the right touch, I guess.
All I know is they're getting set to pull something here."
"Thanks for warning me."
"I'll try to get the dope on it. I'll try my damndest to get it in time."
He turned brusquely and started off, but stopped. "Mr. Rearden, if it were up
to you, you would have hired me?"
"I would have, gladly and at once."
"Thank you, Mr. Rearden," he said, his voice solemn and low, then walked
away.
--------------------------------------- 713
Rearden stood looking after him, seeing, with a tearing smile of pity,
what it was that the ex-relativist, the ex-pragmatist, the ex-amoralist was
carrying away with him for consolation.
On the afternoon of September 11, a copper wire broke in Minnesota,
stopping the belts of a grain elevator at a small country station of Taggart
Transcontinental.
A flood of wheat was moving down the highways, the roads, the abandoned
trails of the countryside, emptying thousands of acres of farmland upon the
fragile dams of the railroad's stations. It was moving day and night, the
first trickles growing into streams, then rivers, then torrents—moving on
palsied trucks with coughing, tubercular motors—on wagons pulled by the rusty
skeletons of starving horses—on carts pulled by oxen—on the nerves and last
energy of men who had lived through two years of disaster for the triumphant
reward of this autumn's giant harvest, men who had patched their trucks and
carts with wire, blankets, ropes and sleepless nights, to make them hold
together for this one more journey, to carry the grain and collapse at
destination, but to give their owners a chance at survival.
Every year, at this season, another movement had gone clicking across the
country, drawing freight cars from all corners of the continent to the
Minnesota Division of Taggart Transcontinental, the beat of train wheels
preceding the creak of the wagons, like an advance echo rigorously planned,
ordered and timed to meet the flood. The Minnesota Division drowsed through
the year, to come to violent life for the weeks of the harvest; fourteen
thousand freight cars had jammed its yards each year; fifteen thousand were
expected this time. The first of the wheat trains had started to channel the
flood into the hungry flour mills, then bakeries, then stomachs of the
nation—but every train, car and storage elevator counted, and there was no
minute or inch of space to spare.
Eddie Willers watched Dagny's face as she went through the cards of her
emergency file; he could tell the content of the cards by her expression.
"The Terminal," she said quietly, closing the file. "Phone the Terminal
downstairs and have them ship half their stock of wire to Minnesota." Eddie
said nothing and obeyed.
He said nothing, the morning when he put on her desk a telegram from the
Taggart office in Washington, informing them of the directive which, due to
the critical shortage of copper, ordered government agents to seize all
copper mines and operate them as a public utility.
"Well," she said, dropping the telegram into the wastebasket, "that's the
end of Montana."
She said nothing when James Taggart announced to her that he was issuing
an order to discontinue all dining cars on Taggart trains. "We can't afford
it any longer," he explained, "we've always lost money on those goddamn
diners, and when there's no food to get, when restaurants are closing because
they can't grab hold of a pound of horse meat anywhere, how can railroads be
expected to do it? Why in hell should we have to feed the passengers, anyway?
They're lucky if we give them transportation, they'd travel in cattle cars if
necessary, let 'em pack their own box lunches, what do we care?—they've got
no other trains to take!"
The telephone on her desk had become, not a voice of business, but an
alarm siren for the desperate appeals of disaster. "Miss Taggart.
we have no copper wire!" "Nails, Miss Taggart, plain nails, could you tell
somebody to send us a keg of nails?" "Can you find any paint.
Miss Taggart, any sort of waterproof paint anywhere?"
But thirty million dollars of subsidy money from Washington had been
plowed into Project Soybean—an enormous acreage in Louisiana, where a harvest
of soybeans was ripening, as advocated and organized by Emma Chalmers, for
the purpose of reconditioning the dietary habits of the nation. Emma
--------------------------------------- 714
Chalmers, better known as Kip's Ma, was an old sociologist who had hung about
Washington for years, as other women of her age and type hang about barrooms.
For some reason which nobody could define, the death of her son in the tunnel
catastrophe had given her in Washington an aura of martyrdom, heightened by
her recent conversion to Buddhism. "The soybean is a much more sturdy,
nutritious and economical plant than all the extravagant foods which our
wasteful, self-indulgent diet has conditioned us to expect," Kip's Ma had
said over the radio; her voice always sounded as if it were falling in drops,
not of water, but of mayonnaise.
"Soybeans make an excellent substitute for bread, meat, cereals and
coffee—and if all of us were compelled to adopt soybeans as our staple diet,
it would solve the national food crisis and make it possible to feed more
people. The greatest food for the greatest number—that's my slogan. At a time
of desperate public need, it's our duty to sacrifice our luxurious tastes and
eat our way back to prosperity by adapting ourselves to the simple, wholesome
foodstuff on which the peoples of the Orient have so nobly subsisted for
centuries. There's a great deal that we could learn from the peoples of the
Orient."
"Copper tubing, Miss Taggart, could you get some copper tubing for us
somewhere?" the voices were pleading over her telephone. "Rail spikes, Miss
Taggart!" "Screwdrivers, Miss Taggart!" "Light bulbs, Miss Taggart, there's
no electric light bulbs to be had anywhere within two hundred miles of us!"
But five million dollars was being spent by the office of Morale
Conditioning on the People's Opera Company, which traveled through the
country, giving free performances to people who, on one meal a day, could not
afford the energy to walk to the opera house. Seven million dollars had been
granted to a psychologist in charge of a project to solve the world crisis by
research into the nature of brother-love. Ten million dollars had been
granted to the manufacturer of a new electronic cigarette lighter—but there
were no cigarettes in the shops of the country. There were flashlights on the
market, but no batteries; there were radios, but no tubes; there were
cameras, but no film. The production of airplanes had been declared
"temporarily suspended." Air travel for private purposes had been forbidden,
and reserved exclusively for missions of "public need." An industrialist
traveling to save his factory was not considered as publicly needed and could
not get aboard a plane; an official traveling to collect taxes was and could.
"People are stealing nuts and bolts out of rail plates, Miss Taggart,
stealing them at night, and our stock is running out, the division storehouse
is bare, what are we to do, Miss Taggart?"
But a super-color-four-foot-screen television set was being erected for
tourists in a People's Park in Washington—and a super-cyclotron for the study
of cosmic rays was being erected at the State Science Institute, to be
completed in ten years.
"The trouble with our modern world," Dr. Robert Stadler said over the
radio, at the ceremonies launching the construction of the cyclotron, "is
that too many people think too much. It is the cause of all our current fears
and doubts. An enlightened citizenry should abandon the superstitious worship
of logic and the outmoded reliance on reason.
Just as laymen leave medicine to doctors and electronics to engineers, so
people who are not qualified to think should leave all thinking to the
experts and have faith in the experts' higher authority. Only experts are
able to understand the discoveries of modern science, which have proved that
thought is an illusion and that the mind is a myth."
"This age of misery is God's punishment to man for the sin of relying on
his mind!" snarled the triumphant voices of mystics of every sect and sort,
on street corners, in rain-soaked tents, in crumbling temples. "This world
ordeal is the result of man's attempt to live by reason! This is where
--------------------------------------- 715
thinking, logic and science have brought you! And there's to be no salvation
until men realize that their mortal mind is impotent to solve their problems
and go back to faith, faith in God, faith in a higher authority!"
And confronting her daily there was the final product of it all, the heir
and collector—Cuffy Meigs, the man impervious to thought.
Cuffy Meigs strode through the offices of Taggart Transcontinental,
wearing a semi-military tunic and slapping a shiny leather briefcase against
his shiny leather leggings. He carried an automatic pistol in one pocket and
a rabbit's foot in the other.
Cuffy Meigs tried to avoid her; his manner was part scorn, as if he
considered her an impractical idealist, part superstitious awe, as if she
possessed some incomprehensible power with which he preferred not to tangle.
He acted as if her presence did not belong to his view of a railroad, yet as
if hers were the one presence he dared not challenge.
There was a touch of impatient resentment in his manner toward Jim, as if
it were Jim's duty to deal with her and to protect him; just as he expected
Jim to keep the railroad in running order and leave him free for activities
of more practical a nature, so he expected Jim to keep her in line, as part
of the equipment.
Beyond the window of her office, like a patch of adhesive plaster stuck
over a wound on the sky, the page of the calendar hung blank in the distance.
The calendar had never been repaired since the night of Francisco's farewell.
The officials who had rushed to the tower, that night, had knocked the
calendar's motor to a stop, while tearing the film out of the projector. They
had found the small square of Francisco's message, pasted into the strip of
numbered days, but who had pasted it there, who had entered the locked room
and when and how, was never discovered by the three commissions still
investigating the case. Pending the outcome of their efforts, the page hung
blank and still above the city.
It was blank on the afternoon of September 14, when the telephone rang in
her office. "A man from Minnesota," said the voice of her secretary.
She had told her secretary that she would accept all calls of this kind.
They were the appeals for help and her only source of information. At a time
when the voices of railroad officials uttered nothing but sounds designed to
avoid communication, the voices of nameless men were her last link to the
system, the last sparks of reason and tortured honesty flashing briefly
through the miles of Taggart track.
"Miss Taggart, it is not my place to call you, but nobody else will,"
said the voice that came on the wire, this time; the voice sounded young
and too calm. "In another day or two, a disaster's going to happen here the
like of which they've never seen, and they won't be able to hide it any
longer, only it will be too late by then, and maybe it's too late already."
"What is it? Who are you?"
"One of your employees of the Minnesota Division, Miss Taggart.
In another day or two, the trains will stop running out of here—and you
know what that means, at the height of the harvest. At the height of the
biggest harvest we've ever had. They'll stop, because we have no cars. The
harvest freight cars have not been sent to us this year."
"What did you say?" She felt as if minutes went by between the words of
the unnatural voice that did not sound like her own.
"The cars have not been sent. Fifteen thousand should have been here by
now. As far as I could learn, about eight thousand cars is all we got. I've
been calling Division Headquarters for a week. They've been telling me not to
worry. Last time, they told me to mind my own damn business. Every shed,
silo, elevator, warehouse, garage and dance hall along the track is filled
with wheat. At the Sherman elevators, there's a line of farmers' trucks and
wagons two miles long, waiting on the road. At Lakewood Station, the square
--------------------------------------- 716
is packed solid and has been for three nights. They keep telling us it's only
temporary, the cars are coming and we'll catch up. We won't. There aren't any
cars coming.
I've called everyone I could. I know, by the way they answer. They know,
and not one of them wants to admit it. They're scared, scared to move or
speak or ask or answer. All they're thinking of is who will be blamed when
that harvest rots here around the stations—and not of who's going to move it.
Maybe nobody can, now. Maybe there's nothing you can do about it, either. But
I thought you're the only person left who'd want to know and that somebody
had to tell you."
"I . . ." She made an effort to breathe. "I see . . . Who are you?"
"The name wouldn't matter. When I hang up, I will have become a deserter.
I don't want to stay here to see it when it happens. I don't want any part of
it any more. Good luck to you, Miss Taggart."
She heard the click. "Thank you," she said over a dead wire.
The next time she noticed the office around her and permitted herself to
feel, it was noon of the following day. She stood in the middle of the
office, running stiff, spread fingers through a strand of hair, brushing it
back off her face—and for an instant, she wondered where she was and what was
the unbelievable thing that had happened in the last twenty hours. What she
felt was horror, and she knew that she had felt it from the first words of
the man on the wire, only there had been no time to know it.
There was not much that remained in her mind of the last twenty hours,
only disconnected bits, held together by the single constant that had made
them possible—by the soft, loose faces of men who fought to hide from
themselves that they knew the answers to the questions she asked.
From the moment when she was told that the manager of the Car Service
Department had been out of town for a week and had left no address where one
could reach him—she knew that the report of the man from Minnesota was true.
Then came the faces of the assistants in the Car Service Department, who
would neither confirm the report nor deny it, but kept showing her papers,
orders, forms, file cards that bore words in the English language, but no
connection to intelligible facts. "Were the freight cars sent to Minnesota?"
"Form 357W is filled out in every particular, as required by the office of
the Co-ordinator in conformance with the instructions of the comptroller and
by Directive 11-493."
"Were the freight cars sent to Minnesota?" "The entries for the months of
August and September have been processed by—" "Were the freight cars sent to
Minnesota?" "My files indicate the locations of freight cars by state, date,
classification and—" "Do you know whether the cars were sent to Minnesota?"
"As to the interstate motion of freight cars, I would have to refer you to
the files of Mr. Benson and of—"
There was nothing to learn from the files. There were careful entries,
each conveying four possible meanings, with references which led to
references which led to a final reference which was missing from the files.
It did not take her long to discover that the cars had not been sent to
Minnesota and that the order had come from Cuffy Meigs—
but who had carried it out, who had tangled the trail, what steps had been
taken by what compliant men to preserve the appearance of a safely normal
operation, without a single cry of protest to arouse some braver man's
attention, who had falsified the reports, and where the cars had gone—seemed,
at first, impossible to learn.
Through the hours of that night—while a small, desperate crew under the
command of Eddie Willers kept calling every division point, every yard,
depot, station, spur and siding of Taggart Transcontinental for every freight
car in sight or reach, ordering them to unload, drop, dump, scuttle anything
and proceed to Minnesota at once, while they kept calling the yards, stations
--------------------------------------- 717
and presidents of every railroad still half in existence anywhere across the
map, begging for cars for Minnesota—she went through the task of tracing from
face to coward's face the destination of the freight cars that had vanished.
She went from railroad executives to wealthy shippers to Washington
officials and back to the railroad—by cab, by phone, by wire—pursuing a trail
of half-uttered hints. The trail approached its end when she heard the pinch-
lipped voice of a public relations, woman in a Washington office, saying
resentfully over the telephone wire, "Well, after all, it is a matter of
opinion whether wheat is essential to a nation's welfare—
there are those of more progressive views who feel that the soybean is,
perhaps, of far greater value"—and then, by noon, she stood in the middle of
her office, knowing that the freight cars intended for the wheat of Minnesota
had been sent, instead, to carry the soybeans from the Louisiana swamps of
Kip's Ma's project.
The first story of the Minnesota disaster appeared in the newspapers three
days later. It reported that the farmers who had waited in. the streets of
Lakewood for six days, with no place to store their wheat and no trains to
carry it, had demolished the local courthouse, the mayor's home and the
railroad station. Then the stories vanished abruptly and the newspapers kept
silent, then began to print admonitions urging people not to believe
unpatriotic rumors.
While the flour mills and grain markets of the country were screaming over
the phones and the telegraph wires, sending pleas to New York and delegations
to Washington, while strings of freight cars from random corners of the
continent were crawling like rusty caterpillars across the map in the
direction of Minnesota—the wheat and hope of the country were waiting to
perish along an empty track, under the unchanging green lights of signals
that called for motion to trains that were not there.
At the communication desks of Taggart Transcontinental, a small crew kept
calling for freight cars, repeating, like the crew of a sinking ship, an
S.O.S, that remained unheard. There were freight cars held loaded for months
in the yards of the companies owned by the friends of pull-peddlers, who
ignored the frantic demands to unload the cars and release them. "You can
tell that railroad to—" followed by untransmissible words, was the message of
the Smather Brothers of Arizona in answer to the S.O.S. of New York.
In Minnesota, they were seizing cars from every siding, from the Mesabi
Range, from the ore mines of Paul Larkin where the cars had stood waiting for
a dribble of iron. They were pouring wheat into ore cars, into coal cars,
into boarded stock cars that went spilling thin gold trickles along the track
as they clattered off. They were pouring wheat into passenger coaches, over
seats, racks and fixtures, to send it off, to get it moving, even if it went
moving into track-side ditches in the sudden crash of breaking springs, in
the explosions set off by burning journal boxes.
They fought for movement, for movement with no thought of destination, for
movement as such, like a paralytic under a stroke, struggling in wild, stiff,
incredulous jerks against the realization that movement was suddenly
impossible. There were no other railroads: James Taggart had killed them;
there were no boats on the Lakes: Paul Larkin had destroyed them. There was
only the single line of rail and a net of neglected highways.
The trucks and wagons of waiting farmers started trickling blindly down
the roads, with no maps, no gas, no feed for horses—moving south, south
toward the vision of flour mills awaiting them somewhere, with no knowledge
of the distances ahead, but with the knowledge of death behind them—moving,
to collapse on the roads, in the gullies, in the breaks of rotted bridges.
One farmer was found, half a mile south of the wreck of his truck, lying dead
in a ditch, face down, still clutching a sack of wheat on his shoulders. Then
rain clouds burst over the prairies of Minnesota; the rain went eating the
--------------------------------------- 718
wheat into rot at the waiting railroad stations; it went hammering the piles
spilled along the roads, washing gold kernels into the soil.
The men in Washington were last to be reached by the panic. They watched,
not the news from Minnesota, but the precarious balance of their friendships
and commitments; they weighed, not the fate of the harvest, but the
unknowable result of unpredictable emotions in
unthinking men of unlimited power. They waited, they evaded all pleas,
they declared, "Oh, ridiculous, there's nothing to worry about! Those Taggart
people have always moved that wheat on schedule, they'll find some way to
move it!"
Then, when the State Chief Executive of Minnesota sent a request to
Washington for the assistance of the Army against the riots he was unable to
control—three directives burst forth within two hours, stopping all trains in
the country, commandeering all cars to speed to Minnesota.
An order signed by Wesley Mouch demanded the immediate release of the
freight cars held in the service of Kip's Ma. But by that time, it was too
late. Ma's freight cars were in California, where the soybeans had been sent
to a progressive concern made up of sociologists preaching the cult of
Oriental austerity, and of businessmen formerly in the numbers racket.
In Minnesota, farmers were setting fire to their own farms, they were
demolishing grain elevators and the homes of county officials, they were
fighting along the track of the railroad, some to tear it up, some to defend
it with their lives—and, with no goal to reach save violence, they were dying
in the streets of gutted towns and in the silent gullies of a roadless night.
Then there was only the acrid stench of grain rotting in half-smouldering
piles—a few columns of smoke rising from the plains, standing still in the
air over blackened ruins—and, in an office in Pennsylvania, Hank Rearden
sitting at his desk, looking at a list of men who had gone bankrupt: they
were the manufacturers of farm equipment, who could not be paid and would not
be able to pay him.
The harvest of soybeans did not reach the markets of the country: it had
been reaped prematurely, it was moldy and unfit for consumption.
On the night of October 15, a copper wire broke in New York City, in an
underground control tower of the Taggart Terminal, extinguishing the lights
of the signals.
It was only the breach of one wire, but it produced a short circuit in the
interlocking traffic system, and the signals of motion or danger disappeared
from the panels of the control towers and from among the strands of rail. The
red and green lenses remained red and green, not with the living radiance of
sight, but with the dead stare of glass eyes. On the edge of the city, a
cluster of trains gathered at the entrance to the Terminal tunnels and grew
through the minutes of stillness, like blood dammed by a clot inside a vein,
unable to rush into the chambers of the heart.
Dagny, that night, was sitting at a table in a private dining room of the
Wayne-Falkland. The wax of candles was dripping down on the white camellias
and laurel leaves at the base of the silver candlesticks, arithmetical
calculations were penciled on the damask linen tablecloth, and a cigar butt
was swimming in a finger bowl. The six men in formal dinner jackets, facing
her about the table, were Wesley Mouch, Eugene Lawson, Dr. Floyd Ferris, Clem
Weatherby, James Taggart and Cuffy Meigs.
"Why?" she had asked, when Jim had told her that she had to attend that
dinner. "Well . . . because our Board of Directors is to meet next week."
"And?" "You're interested in what's going to be decided about our Minnesota
Line, aren't you?" "Is that going to be decided at the Board meeting?'1
"Well, not exactly." "Is it going to be decided at this dinner?" "Not
exactly, but . . . oh, why do you always have to be so definite? Nothing's
--------------------------------------- 719
ever definite. Besides, they insisted that they wanted you to come." "Why?"
"Isn't that sufficient?"
She did not ask why those men chose to make all their crucial decisions at
parties of this kind; she knew that they did. She knew that behind the
clattering, lumbering pretense of their council sessions, committee meetings
and mass debates, the decisions were made in advance, in furtive informality,
at luncheons, dinners and bars, the graver the issue, the more casual the
method of settling it. It was the first time that they had asked her, the
outsider, the enemy, to one of those secret sessions; it was, she thought, an
acknowledgment of the fact that they needed her and, perhaps, the first step
of their surrender; it was a chance she could not leave untaken.
But as she sat in the candlelight of the dining room, she felt certain
that she had no chance; she felt restlessly unable to accept that certainty,
since she could not grasp its reason, yet lethargically reluctant to pursue
any inquiry.
"As, I think, you will concede, Miss Taggart, there now seems to be no
economic justification for the continued existence of a railroad line in
Minnesota, which . . ." "And even Miss Taggart will, I'm sure, agree that
certain temporary retrenchments seem to be indicated, until . . ." "Nobody,
not even Miss Taggart, will deny that there are times when it is necessary to
sacrifice the parts for the sake of the whole . . ." As she listened to the
mentions of her name tossed into the conversation at half-hour intervals,
tossed perfunctorily, with the speaker's eyes never glancing in her
direction, she wondered what motive had made them want her to be present. It
was not an attempt to delude her into believing that they were consulting
her, but worse: an attempt to delude themselves into believing that she had
agreed. They asked her questions at times and interrupted her before she had
completed the first sentence of the answer. They seemed to want her approval,
without having to know whether she approved or not.
Some crudely childish form of self-deception had made them choose to give
to this occasion the decorous setting of a formal dinner. They acted as if
they hoped to gain, from the objects of gracious luxury, the power and the
honor of which those objects had once been the product and symbol—they acted,
she thought, like those savages who devour the corpse of an adversary in the
hope of acquiring his strength and his virtue.
She regretted that she was dressed as she was. "It's formal," Jim had told
her, "but don't overdo it . . . what I mean is, don't look too rich . . .
business people should avoid any appearance of arrogance these days . . . not
that you should look shabby, but if you could just seem to suggest . . .
well, humility . . . it would please them, you know, it would make them feel
big." "Really?" she had said, turning away.
She wore a black dress that looked as if it were no more than a piece of
cloth crossed over her breasts and falling to her feet in the soft folds of a
Grecian tunic; it was made of satin, a satin so light and thin that it could
have served as the stuff of a nightgown. The luster of the cloth, streaming
and shifting with her movements, made it look as if the light of the room she
entered were her personal property, sensitively obedient to-the motions of
her body, wrapping her in a sheet of radiance more luxurious than the texture
of brocade, underscoring the pliant fragility of her figure, giving her an
air of so natural an elegance that it could afford to be scornfully casual.
She wore a single piece of jewelry, a diamond clip at the edge of the black
neckline, that kept flashing with the imperceptible motion of her breath,
like a transformer converting a flicker into fire, making one conscious, not
of the gems, but of the living beat behind them; it flashed like a military
decoration, like wealth worn as a badge of honor. She wore no other ornament,
only the sweep of a black velvet cape, more arrogantly, ostentatiously
patrician than any spread of sables.
--------------------------------------- 720
She regretted it now, as she looked at the men before her; she felt the
embarrassing guilt of pointlessness, as if she had tried to defy the figures
in a waxworks. She saw a mindless resentment in their eyes and a sneaking
trace of the lifeless, sexless, smutty leer with which men look at a poster
advertising burlesque.
"It's a great responsibility," said Eugene Lawson, "to hold the decision
of life or death over thousands of people and to sacrifice them when
necessary, but we mast have the courage to do it." His soft lips seemed to
twist into a smile.
"The only factors to consider are land acreage and population figures,"
said Dr. Ferris in a statistical voice, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling.
"Since it is no longer possible to maintain both the Minnesota Line and the
transcontinental traffic of this railroad, the choice is between Minnesota
and those states west of the Rockies which were cut off by the failure of the
Taggart Tunnel, as well as the neighboring states of Montana, Idaho, Oregon,
which means, practically speaking, the whole of the Northwest. When you
compute the acreage and the number of heads in both areas, it's obvious that
we should scuttle Minnesota rather than give up our lines of communication
over a third of a continent."
"1 won't give up the continent," said Wesley Mouch, staring down at his
dish of ice cream, his voice hurt and stubborn.
She was thinking of the Mesabi Range, the last of the major sources of
iron ore, she was thinking of the Minnesota farmers, such as were left of
them, the best producers of wheat in the country—she was thinking that the
end of Minnesota would end Wisconsin, then Michigan, then Illinois—she was
seeing the red breath of the factories dying out over the industrial East—as
against the empty miles of western sands, of scraggly pastures and abandoned
ranches.
"The figures indicate," said Mr. Weatherby primly, "that the continued
maintenance of both areas seems to be impossible. The railway track and
equipment of one has to be dismantled to provide the material for the
maintenance of the other."
She noticed that Clem Weatherby, their technical expert on railroads, was
the man of least influence among them, and Cuffy Meigs—of most.
Cuffy Meigs sat sprawled in his chair, with a look of patronizing
tolerance for their game of wasting time on discussions. He spoke little, but
when he did, it was to snap decisively, with a contemptuous grin, "Pipe down,
Jimmy!" or, "Nuts, Wes, you're talking through your hat!" She noticed that
neither Jim nor Mouch resented it. They seemed to welcome the authority of
his assurance; they were accepting him as their master.
"We have to be practical," Dr. Ferris kept saying. "We have to. be
scientific."
"I need the economy of the country as a whole," Wesley Mouch kept
repeating. "I need the production of a nation."
"Is it economics that you're talking about? Is it production?" she said,
whenever her cold, measured voice was able to seize a brief stretch of their
tune. "If it is, then give us leeway to save the Eastern states. That's all
that's left of the country—and of the world. If you let us save that, we'll
have a chance to rebuild the rest. If not, it's the end.
Let the Atlantic Southern take care of such transcontinental traffic as
still exists. Let the local railroads take care of the Northwest. But let
Taggart Transcontinental drop everything else—yes, everything—and devote all
our resources, equipment and rail to the traffic of the Eastern states. Let
us shrink back to the start of this country, but let us hold that start.
We'll run no trains west of the Missouri. We'll become a local railroad—the
local of the industrial East. Let us save our industries.
--------------------------------------- 721
There's nothing left to save in the West. You can run agriculture for
centuries by manual labor and oxcarts. But destroy the last of this country's
industrial plant—and centuries of effort won't be able to rebuild it or to
gather the economic strength to make a start. How do you expect our
industries—or railroads—to survive without steel? How do you expect any steel
to be produced if you cut off the supply of iron ore? Save Minnesota,
whatever's left of it. The country? You have no country to save, if its
industries perish. You can sacrifice a leg or an arm. You can't save a body
by sacrificing its heart and brain. Save our industries. Save Minnesota. Save
the Eastern Seaboard."
It was no use. She said it as many times, with as many details,
statistics, figures, proofs, as she could force out of her weary mind into
their evasive hearing. It was no use. They neither refuted nor agreed; they
merely looked as if her arguments were beside the point. There was a sound of
hidden emphasis in their answers, as if they were giving her an explanation,
but in a code to which she had no key.
"There's trouble in California," said Wesley Mouch sullenly. "Their state
legislature's been acting pretty huffy. There's talk of seceding from the
Union."
"Oregon is overrun by gangs of deserters," said Clem Weatherby cautiously.
"They murdered two tax collectors within the last three months."
"The importance of industry to a civilization has been grossly
overemphasized," said Dr. Ferris dreamily. "What is now known as the People's
State of India has existed for centuries without any industrial development
whatever."
"People could do with fewer material gadgets and a sterner discipline of
privations," said Eugene Lawson eagerly. "It would be good for them."
"Oh hell, are you going to let that dame talk you into letting the richest
country on earth slip through your fingers?" said Cuffy Meigs, leaping to his
feet. "It's a fine time to give up a whole continent—and in exchange for
what? For a dinky little state that's milked dry, anyway!
I say ditch Minnesota, but hold onto your transcontinental dragnet.
With trouble and riots everywhere, you won't be able to keep people in
line unless you have transportation—troop transportation—unless you hold your
soldiers within a few days' journey of any point on the continent. This is no
time to retrench. Don't get yellow, listening to all that talk. You've got
the country in your pocket. Just keep it there."
"In the long run—" Mouch started uncertainly.
"In the long run, we'll all be dead," snapped Cuffy Meigs. He was pacing
restlessly. "Retrenching, hell! There's plenty of pickings left in California
and Oregon and all those places. What I've been thinking is, we ought to
think of expanding—the way things are, there's nobody to stop us, it's there
for the taking—Mexico, and Canada maybe—it ought to be a cinch."
Then she saw the answer; she saw the secret premise behind their words.
With all of their noisy devotion to the age of science, their hysterically
technological jargon, their cyclotrons, their sound rays, these men were
moved forward, not by the image of an industrial skyline, but by the vision
of that form of existence which the industrialists had swept away—the vision
of a fat, unhygienic rajah of India, with vacant eyes staring in indolent
stupor out of stagnant layers of flesh, with nothing to do but run precious
gems through his fingers and, once in a while, stick a knife into the body of
a starved, toil-dazed, germeaten creature, as a claim to a few grains of the
creature's rice, then claim it from hundreds of millions of such creatures
and thus let the rice grains gather into gems.
She had thought that industrial production was a value not to be
questioned by anyone; she had thought that these men's urge to expropriate
the factories of others was their acknowledgment of the factories value. She,
--------------------------------------- 722
born of the industrial revolution, had not held as conceivable, had forgotten
along with the tales of astrology and alchemy, what these men knew in their
secret, furtive souls, knew not by means of thought, but by means of that
nameless muck which they called their instincts and emotions: that so long as
men struggle to stay alive, they'll never produce so little but that the man
with the club won't be able to seize it and leave them still less, provided
millions of them are willing to submit—that the harder their work and the
less their gain, the more submissive the fiber of their spirit—that men who
live by pulling levers at an electric switchboard, are not easily ruled, but
men who live by digging the soil with their naked fingers, are—that the
feudal baron did not need electronic factories in order to drink his brains
away out of jeweled goblets, and neither did the rajahs of the People's State
of India.
She saw what they wanted and to what goal their "instincts," which they
called unaccountable, were leading them. She saw that Eugene Lawson, the
humanitarian, took pleasure at the prospect of human starvation—and Dr.
Ferris, the scientist, was dreaming of the day when men would return to the
hand-plow.
Incredulity and indifference were her only reaction: incredulity, because
she could not conceive of what would bring human beings to such a state—
indifference, 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—" "111 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 ultimately 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,
--------------------------------------- 723
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,'1 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?"
--------------------------------------- 724
"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.
"Calf 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?"
--------------------------------------- 725
"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
--------------------------------------- 726
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.
"The tower director will assign switchmen to their posts. He will select
men for the job of signaling trains by means of lanterns and for the task of
transmitting his orders. Trains will—"
She was fighting to drown a bitter voice that seemed to be saying: That's
all they're fit for, these men, if even that . . . there's not a single mind
left anywhere on Taggart Transcontinental. . . .
"Trains will continue to be moved in and out of the Terminal. You will
remain at your posts until—"
Then she stopped. It was his eyes and hair that she saw first—the
ruthlessly perceptive eyes, the streaks of hair shaded from gold to copper
that seemed to reflect the glow of sunlight in the murk of the underground—
she saw John Galt among the chain gang of the mindless, John Galt in greasy
overalls and rolled shirt sleeves, she saw his weightless way of standing,
his face held lifted, his eyes looking at her as if he had seen this moment
many moments ago.
"What's the matter, Miss Taggart?"
It was the soft voice of the tower director, who stood by her side, with
some sort of paper in his hand—and she thought it was strange to emerge from
a span of unconsciousness which had been the span of the sharpest awareness
she had ever experienced, only she did not know how long it had lasted or
where she was or why. She had been aware of Galt's face, she had been seeing,
in the shape of his mouth, in the planes of his cheeks, the crackup of that
implacable serenity which had always been his, but he still retained it in
his look of acknowledging the breach, of admitting that this moment was too
much even for him.
She knew that she went on speaking, because those around her looked as if
they were listening, though she could not hear a sound, she went on speaking
as if carrying out a hypnotic order given to herself some endless time ago,
knowing only that the completion of that order was a form of defiance against
him, neither knowing nor hearing her own words.
She felt as if she were standing in a radiant silence where sight was her
only capacity and his face was its only object, and the sight of his face was
like a speech in the form of a pressure at the base of her throat. It seemed
so natural that he should be here, it seemed so unendurably simple—she felt
as if the shock were not his presence, but the presence of others on the
tracks of her railroad, where he belonged and they did not. She was seeing
those moments aboard a train when, at its plunge into the tunnels, she had
felt a sudden, solemn tension, as if this place were showing her in naked
--------------------------------------- 727
simplicity the essence of her railroad and of her life, the union of
consciousness and matter, the frozen form of a mind's ingenuity giving
physical existence to its purpose; she had felt a sense of sudden hope, as if
this place held the meaning of all of her values, and a sense of secret
excitement, as if a nameless promise were awaiting her under the ground—it
was right that she should now meet him here, he had been the meaning and the
promise—she was not seeing his clothing any longer, nor to what level her
railroad had reduced him—she was seeing only the vanishing torture of the
months when he had been outside her reach—she was seeing in his face the
confession of what those months had cost him —the only speech she heard was
as if she were saying to him: This is the reward for all my days—and as if he
were answering: For all of mine.
She knew that she had finished speaking to the strangers when she saw that
the tower director had stepped forward and was saying something to them,
glancing at a list in his hand. Then, drawn by a sense of irresistible
certainty, she found herself descending the stairs, slipping away from the
crowd, not toward the platforms and the exit, but into the darkness of the
abandoned tunnels. You will follow me, she thought —and felt as if the
thought were not in words, but in the tension of her muscles, the tension of
her will to accomplish a thing she knew to be outside her power, yet she knew
with certainty that it would be accomplished and by her wish . . . no, she
thought, not by her wish, but by its total Tightness. You will follow me—it
was neither plea nor prayer nor demand., but the quiet statement of a fact,
it contained the whole of her power of knowledge and the whole of the
knowledge she had earned through the years. You will follow me, if we are
what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the
meaning of this moment and can't let it slip by, as others let it slip, into
the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached. You will follow me—she felt
an exultant assurance, which was neither hope nor faith, but an act of
worship for the logic of existence.
She was hurrying down the remnants of abandoned rails, down the long, dark
corridors twisting through granite. She lost the sound of the director's
voice behind her. Then she felt the beat of her arteries and heard, in
answering rhythm, the beat of the city above her head, but she felt as if she
heard the motion of her blood as a sound filling the silence, and the motion
of the city as the beat inside her body—and, far behind her, she heard the
sound of steps. She did not glance back.
She went faster.
She went past the locked iron door where the remnant of his motor was
still hidden, she did not stop, but a faint shudder was her answer to the
sudden glimpse of the unity and logic in the events of the last two years. A
string of blue lights went on into the darkness, over patches of glistening
granite, over broken sandbags spilling drifts on the rails, over rusty piles
of scrap metal. When she heard the steps coming closer, she stopped and
turned to look back.
She saw a sweep of blue light flash briefly on the shining strands of
Galt's hair, she caught the pale outline of his face and the dark hollows of
his eyes. The face disappeared, but the sound of his steps served as the link
to the next blue light that swept across the line of his eyes, the eyes that
remained held level, directed ahead—and she felt certain that she had stayed
in his sight from the moment he had seen her at the tower.
She heard the beat of the city above them—these tunnels, she had once
thought, were the roots of the city and of all the motion reaching to the
sky—but they, she thought, John Galt and she, were the living power within
these roots, they were the start and aim and meaning—he, too, she thought,
heard the beat of the city as the beat of his body.
--------------------------------------- 728
She threw her cape back, she stood defiantly straight, as he had seen her
stand on the steps of the tower—as he had seen her for the first time, ten
years ago, here, under the ground—she was hearing the words of his
confession, not as words, but by means of that beating which made it so
difficult to breathe: You looked like a symbol of luxury and you belonged in
the place that was its source . . . you seemed to bring the enjoyment of life
back to its rightful owners . . .
you had a look of energy and of its reward, together . . . and I was the
first man who had ever stated in what manner these two were inseparable. . .
.
The next span of moments was like flashes of light in stretches of blinded
unconsciousness—the moment when she saw his face, as he stopped beside her,
when she saw the unastonished calm, the leashed intensity, the laughter of
understanding in the dark green eyes—the moment when she knew what he saw in
her face, by the tight, drawn harshness of his lips—the moment when she felt
his mouth on hers, when she felt the shape of his mouth both as an absolute
shape and as a liquid filling her body—then the motion of his lips down the
line of her throat, a drinking motion that left a trail of bruises—then the
sparkle of her diamond clip against the trembling copper of his hair.
Then she was conscious of nothing but the sensations of her body, because
her body acquired the sudden power to let her know her most complex values by
direct perception. Just as her eyes had the power to translate wave lengths
of energy into sight, just as her ears had the power to translate vibrations
into sound, so her body now had the power to translate the energy that had
moved all the choices of her life, into immediate sensory perception. It was
not the pressure of a hand that made her tremble, but the instantaneous sum
of its meaning, the knowledge that it was his hand, that it moved as if her
flesh were his possession, that its movement was his signature of acceptance
under the whole of that achievement which was herself—it was only a sensation
of physical pleasure, but it contained her worship of him, of everything that
was his person and his life—from the night of the mass meeting in a factory
in Wisconsin, to the Atlantis of a valley hidden in the Rocky Mountains, to
the triumphant mockery of the green eyes of the superlative intelligence
above a worker's figure at the foot of the tower—it contained her pride in
herself and that it should be she whom he had chosen as his mirror, that it
should be her body which was now giving him the sum of his existence, as his
body was giving her the sum of hers. These were the things it contained—but
what she knew was only the sensation of the movement of his hand on her
breasts.
He tore off her cape and she felt the slenderness of her own body by means
of the circle of his arms, as if his person were only a tool for her
triumphant awareness of herself, but that self were only a tool for her
awareness of him. It was as if she were reaching the limit of her capacity to
feel, yet what she felt was like a cry of impatient demand, which she was now
incapable of naming, except that it had the same quality of ambition as the
course of her life, the same inexhaustible quality of radiant greed.
He pulled her head back for a moment, to look straight into her eyes, to
let her see his, to let her know the full meaning of their actions, as if
throwing the spotlight of consciousness upon them for the meeting of their
eyes in a moment of intimacy greater than the one to come.
Then she felt the mesh of burlap striking the skin of her shoulders, she
found herself lying on the broken sandbags, she saw the long, tight gleam of
her stockings, she felt his mouth pressed to her ankle, then rising in a
tortured motion up the line of her leg, as if he wished to own its shape by
means of his lips, then she felt her teeth sinking into the flesh of his arm,
she felt the sweep of his elbow knocking her head aside and his mouth seizing
her lips with a pressure more viciously painful than hers—then she felt, when
--------------------------------------- 729
it hit her throat, that which she knew only as an upward streak of motion
that released and united her body into a single shock of pleasure—then she
knew nothing but the motion of his body and the driving greed that went
reaching on and on, as if she were not a person any longer, only a sensation
of endless reaching for the impossible—then she knew that it was possible,
and she gasped and lay still, knowing that nothing more could be desired,
ever.
He lay beside her, on his back, looking up at the darkness of the granite
vault above them, she saw him stretched on the jagged slant of sandbags as if
his body were fluid in relaxation, she saw the black wedge of her cape flung
across the rails at their feet, there were beads of moisture twinkling on the
vault, shifting slowly, running into invisible cracks, like the lights of a
distant traffic. When he spoke, his voice sounded as if he were quietly
continuing a sentence in answer to the questions in her mind, as if he had
nothing to hide from her any longer and what he owed her now was only the act
of undressing his soul, as simply as he would have undressed his body: ". . .
this is how I've watched you for ten years . . . from here, from under the
ground under your feet . . . knowing every move you made in your office at
the top of the building, but never seeing you, never enough . . . ten years
of nights, spent waiting to catch a glimpse of you, here, on the platforms,
when you boarded a train. . . .
Whenever the order came down to couple your car, I'd know of it and wait
and see you come down the ramp, and wish you didn't walk so fast . . . it was
so much like you, that walk, I'd know it anywhere . . .
your walk and those legs of yours . . . it was always your legs that I'd
see first, hurrying down the ramp, going past me as I looked up at you from a
dark side track below. . . . I think I could have molded a sculpture of your
legs, I knew them, not with my eyes, but with the palms of my hands when I
watched you go by . . . when I turned back to my work . . . when I went home
just before sunrise for the three hours of sleep which I didn't get . . ."
"I love you," she said, her voice quiet and almost toneless except for a
fragile sound of youth.
He closed his eyes, as if letting the sound travel through the years
behind them. "Ten years, Dagny . . ., except that once there were a few weeks
when I had you before me, in plain sight, within reach, not hurrying away,
but held still, as on a lighted stage, a private stage for me to watch . . .
and I watched you for hours through many evenings . . . in the lighted window
of an office that was called the John Galt Line. . . . And one night—"
Her breath was a faint gasp. "Was it you, that night?"
"Did you see me?"
"I saw your shadow . . . on the pavement . . . pacing back and forth . . .
it looked like a struggle . . . it looked like—" She stopped; she did not
want to say "torture."
"It was," he said quietly. "That night, I wanted to walk in, to face you,
to speak, to . . . That was the night I came closest to breaking my oath,
when I saw you slumped across your desk, when I saw you broken by the burden
you were carrying—"
"John, that night, it was you that I was thinking of . . . only I didn't
know it . . ."
"But, you see, 7 knew it,"
". . . it was you, all my life, through everything I did and everything I
wanted . . . "
"I know it."
"John, the hardest was not when I left you in the valley . . . it was—"
"Your radio speech, the day you returned?"
"Yes! Were you listening?"
--------------------------------------- 730
"Of course. I'm glad you did it. It was a magnificent thing to do. And I—I
knew it, anyway."
"You knew . . . about Hank Rearden?"
"Before I saw you in the valley."
"Was it . . . when you learned about him, had you expected it?"
"No."
"Was it . . . ?" she stopped.
"Hard? Yes. But only for the first few days. That next night . . . Do you
want me to tell you what I did the night after I learned it?"
"Yes."
"I had never seen Hank Rearden, only pictures of him in the newspapers.
I knew that he was in New York, that night, at some conference of big
industrialists. I wanted to have just one look at him. I went to wait at the
entrance of the hotel where that conference was held. There were bright
lights under the marquee of the entrance, but it was dark beyond, on the
pavement, so I could see without being seen, there were a few loafers and
vagrants hanging around, there was a drizzle of rain and we clung to the
walls of the building. One could tell the members of the conference when they
began filing out, by their clothes and their manner—ostentatiously prosperous
clothes and a manner of overbearing timidity, as if they were guiltily trying
to pretend that they were what they appeared to be for that moment. There
were chauffeurs driving up their cars, there were a few reporters delaying
them for questions and hangers-on trying to catch a word from them. They were
worn men, those industrialists, aging, flabby, frantic with the effort to
disguise uncertainty. And then I saw him. He wore an expensive trenchcoat and
a hat slanting across his eyes. He walked swiftly, with the kind of assurance
that has to be earned, as he'd earned it. Some of his fellow industrialists
pounced on him with questions, and those tycoons were acting like hangers-on
around him. I caught a glimpse of him as he stood with his hand on the door
of his car, his head lifted, I saw the brief flare of a smile under the
slanting brim, a confident smile, impatient and a little amused. And then,
for one instant, I did what I had never done before, what most men wreck
their lives on doing—I saw that moment out of context, I saw the world as he
made it look, as if it matched him, as if he were its symbol—I saw a world of
achievement, of unenslaved energy, of unobstructed drive through purposeful
years to the enjoyment of one's reward—I saw, as I stood in the rain in a
crowd of vagrants, what my years would have brought me, if that world had
existed, and I felt a desperate longing—he was the image of everything I
should have been . . . and he had everything that should have been mine. . .
. But it was only a moment. Then I saw the scene in full context again and in
all of its actual meaning—I saw what price he was paying for his brilliant
ability, what torture he was enduring in silent bewilderment, struggling to
understand what I had understood—I saw that the world he suggested, did not
exist and was yet to be made, I saw him again for what he was, the symbol of
my battle, the unrewarded hero whom I was to avenge and to release—and then .
. . then I accepted what I had learned about you and him. I saw that it
changed nothing, that I should have expected it—that it was right."
He heard the faint sound of her moan and he chuckled softly.
"Dagny, it's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of
suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be
accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of
existence. Don't feel sorry for me. It was gone right then."
She turned her head to look at him in silence, and he smiled, lifting
himself on an elbow to look down at her face as she lay helplessly still.
She whispered, "You've been a track laborer, here—here!—for twelve years .
. .”
"Yes."
--------------------------------------- 731
"Ever since—"
"Ever since I quit the Twentieth Century."
"The night when you saw me for the first time . . . you were working here,
then?"
"Yes. And the morning when you offered to work for me as my cook, I was
only your track laborer on leave of absence. Do you see why I laughed as I
did?"
She was looking up at his face; hers was a smile of pain, his—of pure
gaiety, "John . . ."
"Say it. But say it all."
"You were here . . . all those years . . ."
"Yes."
". . . all those years . . . while the railroad was perishing . . .
while I was searching for men of intelligence . . . while I was struggling
to hold onto any scrap of it I could find . . ."
". . . while you were combing the country for the inventor of my motor,
while you were feeding James Taggart and Wesley Mouch, while you were naming
your best achievement after the enemy whom you wanted to destroy.”
She closed her eyes.
"I was here all those years," he said, "within your reach, inside your own
realm, watching your struggle, your loneliness, your longing, watching you in
a battle you thought you were fighting for me, a battle in which you were
supporting my enemies and taking an endless defeat —I was here, hidden by
nothing but an error of your sight, as Atlantis is hidden from men by nothing
but an optical illusion—I was here, waiting for the day when you would see,
when you would know that by the code of the world you were supporting, it's
to the darkest bottom of the underground that all the things you valued would
have to be consigned and that it's there that you would have to look. I was
here. I was waiting for you. I love you, Dagny. I love you more than my life,
I who have taught men how life is to be loved. I've taught them also never to
expect the unpaid for—and what I did tonight, I did it with full knowledge
that I would pay for it and that my life might have to be the price,"
"No!"
He smiled, nodding. "Oh yes. You know that you've broken me for once, that
I broke the decision I had set for myself—but I did it consciously, knowing
what it meant, I did it, not in blind surrender to the moment, but with full
sight of the consequences and full willingness to bear them. I could not let
this kind of moment pass us by, it was ours, my love, we had earned it. But
you're not ready to quit and join me—
you don't have to tell me, I know—and since I chose to take what I wanted
before it was fully mine, I'll have to pay for it, I have no way of knowing
how or when, I know only that if I give in to an enemy, I'll take the
consequences." He smiled in answer to the look on her face.
"No, Dagny, you're not my enemy in mind—and that is what brought me to
this—but you are in fact, in the course you're pursuing, though you don't see
it yet, but I do. My actual enemies are of no danger to me.
You are. You're the only one who can lead them to find me. They would
never have the capacity to know what I am, but with your help —they will."
"No!"
"No, not by your intention. And you're free to change your course, but so
long as you follow it, you're not free to escape its logic. Don't frown, the
choice was mine and it's a danger I chose to accept. I am a trader, Dagny, in
all things. I wanted you, I had no power to change your decision, I had only
the power to consider the price and decide whether I could afford it. I
could. My life is mine to spend or to invest —and you, you're"—as if his
gesture were continuing his sentence, he raised her across his arm and kissed
her mouth, while her body hung limply in surrender, her hair streaming down,
--------------------------------------- 732
her head falling back, held only by the pressure of his lips—"you're the one
reward I had to have and chose to buy. I wanted you, and if my life is the
price, I'll give it. My life—but not my mind."
There was a sudden glint of hardness in his eyes, as he sat up and smiled
and asked, "Would you want me to join you and go to work?
Would you like me to repair that interlocking signal system of yours
within an hour?"
"No!" The cry was immediate—in answer to the flash of a sudden image, the
image of the men in the private dining room of the Wayne Falkland.
He laughed. "Why not?"
"I don't want to see you working as their serf!"
"And yourself?"
"I think that they're crumbling and that I'll win. I can stand it just a
little longer."
"True, it's just a little longer—not till you win, but till you learn."
"I can't let it go!" It was a cry of despair.
"Not yet," he said quietly.
He got up, and she rose obediently, unable to speak.
"I will remain here, on my job," he said. "But don't try to see me.
You'll have to endure what I've endured and wanted to spare you—
you'll have to go on, knowing where I am, wanting me as I'll want you, but
never permitting yourself to approach me. Don't seek me here.
Don't come to my home. Don't ever let them see us together. And when you
reach the end, when you're ready to quit, don't tell them, just chalk a
dollar sign on the pedestal of Nat Taggart's statue—where it belongs —then go
home and wait. I'll come for you in twenty-four hours."
She inclined her head in silent promise.
But when he turned to go, a sudden shudder ran through her body, like a
first jolt of awakening or a last convulsion of life, and it ended in an
involuntary cry: "Where are you going?"
"To be a lamppost and stand holding a lantern till dawn—which is the only
work your world relegates me to and the only work it's going to get."
She seized his arm, to hold him, to follow, to follow him blindly,
abandoning everything but the sight of his face. "John!"
He gripped her wrist, twisted her hand and threw it off. "No," he said.
Then he took her hand and raised it to his lips and the pressure of his
mouth was more passionate a statement than any he had chosen to confess. Then
he walked away, down the vanishing line of rail, and it seemed to her that
both the rail and the figure were abandoning her at the same time.
When she staggered out into the concourse of the Terminal, the first blast
of rolling wheels went shuddering through the walls of the building, like the
sudden beat of a heart that had stopped. The temple of Nathaniel Taggart was
silent and empty, its changeless light beating down on a deserted stretch of
marble. Some shabby figures shuffled across it, as if lost in its shining
expanse. On the steps of the pedestal, under the statue of the austere,
exultant figure, a ragged bum sat slumped in passive resignation, like a
wing-plucked bird with no place to go, resting on any chance cornice.
She fell down on the steps of the pedestal, like another derelict, her
dust-smeared cape wrapped tightly about her, she sat still, her head on her
arm, past crying or reeling or moving.
It seemed to her only that she kept seeing a figure with a raised arm
holding a light, and it looked at times like the Statue of Liberty and then
it looked like a man with sun-streaked hair, holding a lantern against a
midnight sky, a red lantern that stopped the movement of the world.
"Don't take it to heart, lady, whatever it is," said the bum, in a tone of
exhausted compassion. "Nothing's to be done about it, anyway. . . .
What's the use, lady? Who is John Galt?"
--------------------------------------- 733
CHAPTER VI
THE CONCERTO OF DELIVERANCE
On October 20, the steel workers' union of Rearden Steel demanded a raise
in wages.
Hank Rearden learned it from the newspaper; no demand had been presented
to him and it had not been considered necessary to inform him. The demand was
made to the Unification Board; it was not explained why no other steel
company was presented with a similar claim.
He was unable to tell whether the demanders did or did not represent his
workers, the Board's rules on union elections having made it a matter
impossible to define. He learned only that the group consisted of those
newcomers whom the Board had slipped into his mills in the past few months.
On October 23, the Unification Board rejected the union's petition,
refusing to grant the raise. If any hearings had been held on the matter,
Rearden had not known about it. He had not been consulted, informed or
notified. He had waited, volunteering no questions.
On October 25, the newspapers of the country, controlled by the same men
who controlled the Board, began a campaign of commiseration with the workers
of Rearden Steel. They printed stories about the refusal of the wage raise,
omitting any mention of who had refused it or who held the exclusive legal
power to refuse, as if counting on the public to forget legal technicalities
under a barrage of stories implying that an employer was the natural cause of
all miseries suffered by employees. They printed a story describing the
hardships of the workers of Rearden Steel under the present rise in the cost
of their living—next to a story describing Hank Rearden's profits, of five
years ago. They printed a story on the plight of a Rearden worker's wife
trudging from store to store in a hopeless quest for food—next to a story
about a champagne bottle broken over somebody's head at a drunken party given
by an unnamed steel tycoon at a fashionable hotel; the steel tycoon had been
Orren Boyle, but the story mentioned no names. "Inequalities still exist
among us," the newspapers were saying, "and cheat us of the benefits of our
enlightened age." "Privations have worn the nerves and temper of the people.
The situation is reaching the danger point. We fear an outbreak of violence."
"We fear an outbreak of violence," the newspapers kept repeating, On October
28, a group of the new workers at Rearden Steel attacked a foreman and
knocked the tuyeres off a blast furnace. Two days later, a similar group
broke the ground-floor windows of the administration building. A new worker
smashed the gears of a crane, upsetting a ladle of molten metal within a yard
of five bystanders. "Guess I went nuts, worrying about my hungry kids," he
said, when arrested. "This is no time to theorize about who's right or
wrong," the newspapers commented. "Our sole concern is the fact that an
inflammatory situation is endangering the steel output of the country."
Rearden watched, asking no questions. He waited, as if some final
knowledge were in the process of unraveling before him, a process not to be
hastened or stopped. No—he thought through the early dusk of autumn evenings,
looking out the window of his office—no, he was not indifferent to his
mills;4but the feeling which had once been passion for a living entity was
now like the wistful tenderness one feels for the memory of the loved and
dead. The special quality of what one feels for the dead, he thought, is that
no action is possible any longer.
On the morning of October 31, he received a notice informing him that all
of his property, including his bank accounts and safety deposit boxes, had
been attached to satisfy a delinquent judgment obtained against him in a
trial involving a deficiency in his personal income tax of three years ago.
It was a formal notice, complying with every requirement of the law—except
--------------------------------------- 734
that no such deficiency had ever existed and no such trial had ever taken
place.
"No," he said to his indignation-choked attorney, "don't question them,
don't answer, don't object." "But this is fantastic!" "Any more fantastic
than the rest?" "Hank, do you want me to do nothing? To take it lying down?"
"No, standing up. And I mean, standing. Don't move. Don't act." "But they've
left you helpless." "Have they?" he asked softly, smiling.
He had a few hundred dollars in cash, left in his wallet, nothing else.
But the odd, glowing warmth in his mind, like the feel of a distant
handshake, was the thought that in a secret safe of his bedroom there lay a
bar of solid gold, given to him by a gold-haired pirate.
Next day, on November 1, he received a telephone call from Washington,
from a bureaucrat whose voice seemed to come sliding down the wire on its
knees in protestations of apology. "A mistake, Mr. Rearden! It was nothing
but an unfortunate mistake! That attachment was not intended for you. You
know how it is nowadays, with the inefficiency of all office help and with
the amount of red tape we're tangled in, some bungling fool mixed the records
and processed the attachment order against you—when it wasn't your case at
all, it was, in fact, the case of a soap manufacturer! Please accept our
apologies, Mr. Rearden, our deepest personal apologies at the top level." The
voice slid to a slight, expectant pause. "Mr. Rearden . . . ?" "I'm
listening." "I can't tell you how sorry we are to have caused you any
embarrassment or inconvenience. And with all those damn formalities that we
have to go through—you know how it is, red tape!—it will take a few days,
perhaps a week, to de-process that order and to lift the attachment.
. . . Mr. Rearden?" "I heard you." "We're desperately sorry and ready to
make any amends within our power. You will, of course, be entitled to claim
damages for any inconvenience this might cause you, and we are prepared to
pay. We won't contest it. You will, of course, file such a claim and—" "I
have not said that." "Uh? No, you haven't . . . that
is . . . well, what have you said, Mr. Rearden?" "I have said nothing."
Late on the next afternoon, another voice came pleading from Washington.
This one did not seem to slide, but to bounce on the telephone wire with the
gay virtuosity of a tight-rope walker. It introduced itself as Tinky Holloway
and pleaded that Rearden attend a conference, "an informal little conference,
just a few of us, the top-level few," to be held in New York, at the Wayne-
Falkland Hotel, day after next.
"There have been so many misunderstandings in the past few weeks!" said
Tinky Holloway. "Such unfortunate misunderstandings—
and so unnecessary! We could straighten everything out in a jiffy, Mr.
Rearden, if we had a chance to have a little talk with you. We're
extremely anxious to see you."
"You can issue a subpoena for me any time you wish."
"Oh, no! no! no!" The voice sounded frightened. "No, Mr. Rearden —why
think of such things? You don't understand us, we're anxious to meet you on a
friendly basis, we're seeking nothing but your voluntary co-operation."
Holloway paused tensely, wondering whether he had heard the faint sound of a
distant chuckle; he waited, but heard nothing else.
"Mr. Rearden?"
"Yes?"
"Surely, Mr. Rearden, at a time like this, a conference with us could be
to your great advantage."
"A conference—about what?"
"You've encountered so many difficulties—and we're anxious to help you in
any way we can."
"I have not asked for help."
--------------------------------------- 735
"These are precarious times, Mr. Rearden, the public mood is so uncertain
and inflammatory, so . . . so dangerous . . . and we want to be able to
protect you."
"I have not asked for protection."
"But surely you realize that we're in a position to be of value to you.
and if there's anything you want from us, any . . ."
"There isn't."
"But you must have problems you'd like to discuss with us."
"I haven't."
"Then . . . well, then" —giving up the attempt at the play of granting a
favor, Holloway switched to an open plea—"then won't you just give us a
hearing?"
"If you have anything to say to me,"
"We have, Mr. Rearden, we certainly have! That's all we're asking for—a
hearing. Just give us a chance. Just come to this conference.
You wouldn't be committing yourself to anything—" He said it
involuntarily, and stopped, hearing a bright, mocking stab of life in
Rearden's voice, an unpromising-sound, as Rearden answered: "I know it."
"Well, I mean . . . that is . . . well, then, will you come?"
"All Tight," said Rearden. "I'll come."
He did not listen to Holloway's assurances of gratitude, he noted only
that Holloway kept repeating, "At seven P.M., November fourth, Mr. Rearden .
. . November fourth . . ." as if the date had some special significance.
Rearden dropped the receiver and lay back in his chair, looking at the
glow of furnace flames on the ceiling of his office. He knew that the
conference was a trap; he knew also that he was walking into it with nothing
for any trappers to gain.
Tinky Holloway dropped the receiver, in his Washington office, and sat up
tensely, frowning. Claude Slagenhop, president of Friends of Global Progress,
who had sat in an armchair, nervously chewing a matchstick, glanced up at him
and asked, "Not so good?"
Holloway shook his head. "He'll come, but . . . no, not so good."
He added, "I don't think he'll take it."
"That's what my punk told me."
"I know."
"The punk said we'd better not try it."
"God damn your punk! We've got to! We'll have to risk it!"
The punk was Philip Rearden who, weeks ago, had reported to Claude
Slagenhop: "No, he won't let me in, he won't give me a job, I've tried, as
you wanted me to, I've tried my best, but it's no use, he won't let me set
foot inside his mills. And as to his frame of mind—
listen, it's bad. It's worse than anything I expected. I know him and I
can tell you that you won't have a chance. He's pretty much at the end of his
rope. One more squeeze will snap it. You said the big boys wanted to know.
Tell them not to do it. Tell them he . . . Claude, God help us, if they do
it, they'll lose him!" "Well, you're not of much help,"
Slagenhop had said dryly, turning away. Philip had seized his sleeve and
asked, his voice shrinking suddenly into open anxiety, "Say, Claude - . .
according to . . . to Directive 10-289 . . . if he goes, there's . . .
there's to be no heirs?" "That's right." "They'd seize the mills and . . .
and everything?" 'That's the law." "But . . . Claude, they wouldn't do that
to me, would they?" "They don't want him to go. You know that. Hold him, if
you can." "But I can't! You know I can't! Because of my political ideas and .
. . and everything I've done for you, you know what he thinks of me! I have
no hold on him at all!" "Well, that's your tough luck." "Claude!" Philip had
cried in panic. "Claude, they won't leave me out in the cold, will they? I
belong, don't I?
--------------------------------------- 736
They've always said I belonged, they've always said they needed me . . .
they said they needed men like me, not like him, men with my . . . my sort of
spirit, remember? And after all I've done for them, after all my faith and
service and loyalty to the cause—" "You damn fool," Slagenhop had snapped,
"of what use are you to us without him?"
On the morning of November 4, Hank Rearden was awakened by the ringing of
the telephone. He opened his eyes to the sight of a clear, pale sky, the sky
of early dawn, in the window of his bedroom, a sky the delicate color of
aquamarine, with the first rays of an invisible sun giving a shade of
porcelain pink to Philadelphia's ancient roof tops.
For a moment, while his consciousness had a purity to equal the sky's,
while he was aware of nothing but himself and had not yet reharnessed his
soul to the burden of alien memories, he lay still, held by the sight and by
the enchantment of a world to match it, a world where the style of existence
would be a continuous morning.
The telephone threw him back into exile: it was screaming at spaced
intervals, like a nagging, chronic cry for help, the kind of cry that did not
belong in his world. He lifted the receiver, frowning. "Hello?"
"Good morning, Henry," said a quavering voice; it was his mother.
"Mother—at this hour?" he asked dryly.
"Oh, you're always up at dawn, and I wanted to catch you before you went
to the office."
"Yes? What is it?"
"I've got to see you, Henry. I've got to speak to you. Today. Sometime
today. It's important."
"Has anything happened?"
"No . . . yes . . . that is . . . I've got to have a talk with you in
person. Will you come?"
"I'm sorry, I can't. I have an appointment in New York tonight. If you
want me to come tomorrow—"
"No! No, not tomorrow. It's got to be today. It's got to." There was a dim
tone of panic in her voice, but it was the stale panic of chronic
helplessness, not the sound of an emergency—except for an odd echo of fear in
her mechanical insistence.
"What is it, Mother?"
"I can't talk about it over the telephone, I've got to see you."
"Then if you wish to come to the office—"
"No! Not at the office! I've got to sec you alone, where we can talk.
Can't you come here today, as a favor? It's your mother who's asking you a
favor. You've never come to see us at all. And maybe you're not the one to
blame for it, either. But can't you do it for me this once, if I beg you to?"
"All right, Mother. I'll be there at four o'clock this afternoon."
"That will be fine, Henry. Thank you, Henry. That will be fine.”
It seemed to him that there was a touch of tension in the air of the
mills, that day. It was a touch too slight to define—but the mills, to him,
were like the face of a loved wife where he could catch shades of feeling
almost ahead of expression. He noticed small clusters of the new workers,
just three or four of them huddling together in conversation —once or twice
too often. He noticed their manner, a manner suggesting a poolroom corner,
not a factory. He noticed a few glances thrown at him as he went by, glances
a shade too pointed and lingering. He dismissed it; it was not quite enough
to wonder about—and he had no time to wonder.
When he drove up to his former home, that afternoon, he stopped his car
abruptly at the foot of the hill. He had not seen the house since that May
15, six months ago, when he had walked out of it—
and the sight brought back to him the sum of all he had felt in ten years
of daily home-coming: the strain, the bewilderment, the gray weight of
--------------------------------------- 737
unconfessed unhappiness, the stern endurance that forbade him to confess it,
the desperate innocence of the effort to understand his family . . . the
effort to be just.
He walked slowly up the path toward the door. He felt no emotion, only the
sense of a great, solemn clarity. He knew that this house was a monument of
guilt—of his guilt toward himself.
He had expected to see his mother and Philip; he had not expected the
third person who rose, as they did, at his entrance into the living room: it
was Lillian.
He stopped on the threshold. They stood looking at his face and at the
open door behind him. Their faces had a look of fear and cunning, the look of
that blackmail-through-virtue which he had learned to understand, as if they
hoped to get away with it by means of nothing but his pity, to hold him
trapped, when a single step back could take him out of their reach.
They had counted on his pity and dreaded his anger; they had not dared
consider the third alternative; his indifference.
"What is she doing here?" he asked, turning to his mother, his voice
dispassionately flat.
"Lillian's been living here ever since your divorce," she answered
defensively. "I couldn't let her starve on the city pavements, could I?"
The look in his mother's eyes was half-plea, as if she were begging him
not to slap her face, half-triumph, as if she had slapped his. He knew her
motive: it was not compassion, there had never been much love between Lillian
and her, it was their common revenge against him, it was the secret
satisfaction of spending his money on the ex-wife he had refused to support.
Lillian's head was poised to bow in greeting, with the tentative hint of a
smile on her lips, half-timid, half-brash. He did not pretend to ignore her;
he looked at her, as if he were seeing her fully, yet as if no presence were
being registered in his mind. He said nothing, closed the door and stepped
into the room.
His mother gave a small sigh of uneasy relief and dropped hastily into the
nearest chair, watching him, nervously uncertain of whether he would follow
her example.
"What was it you wanted?" he asked, sitting down.
His mother sat erect and oddly hunched, her shoulders raised, her head
half-lowered. "Mercy, Henry," she whispered.
"What do you mean?"
"Don't you understand me?"
"No."
"Well"—she spread her hands in an untidily fluttering gesture of
helplessness—"well . . . " Her eyes darted about, struggling to escape his
attentive glance. "Well, there are so many things to say and . . .
and I don't know how to say them, but . . . well, there's one practical
matter, but it's not important by itself . . . it's not why I called you here
. . . "
"What is it?"
"The practical matter? Our allowance checks—Philip's and mine. It's the
first of the month, but on account of that attachment order, the checks
couldn't come through. You know that, don't you?"
"I know it."
"Well, what are we going to do?"
"I don't know."
"I mean, what are you going to do about it?"
"Nothing,"
His mother sat staring at him, as if counting the seconds of silence.
"Nothing, Henry?"
"I have no power to do anything."
--------------------------------------- 738
They were watching his face with a kind of searching intensity; he felt
certain that his mother had told him the truth, that immediate financial
worry was not their purpose, that it was only the symbol of a much wider
issue.
"But, Henry, we're caught short."
"So was I."
"But can't you send us some cash or something?"
"They gave me no warning, no time to get any cash."
"Then . . . Look, Henry, the thing was so unexpected, it scared people, I
guess—the grocery store refuses to give us credit, unless you ask for it. I
think they want you to sign a credit card or something. So will you speak to
them and arrange it?"
"I will not."
"You won't?" She choked on a small gasp. "Why?"
"I will not assume obligations that I can't fulfill."
"What do you mean?"
"I will not assume debts I have no way of repaying."
"What do you mean, no way? That attachment is only some sort of
technicality, it's only temporary, everybody knows that!"
"Do they? I don't."
"But, Henry—a grocery bill! You're not sure you'll be able to pay a
grocery bill, you, with all the millions you own?"
"I'm not going to defraud the grocer by pretending that I own those
millions."
"What are you talking about? Who owns them?"
"Nobody."
"What do you mean?"
"Mother, I think you understand me fully. I think you understood it before
I did. There isn't any ownership left in existence or any property. It's what
you've approved of and believed in for years. You wanted me tied. I'm tied.
Now it's too late to play any games about it."
"Are you going to let some political ideas of yours—" She saw the look on
his face and stopped abruptly.
Lillian sat looking down at the floor, as if afraid to glance up at this
moment. Philip sat cracking his knuckles.
His mother dragged her eyes into focus again and whispered, "Don't abandon
us, Henry." Some faint stab of life in her voice told him that the lid of her
real purpose was cracking open. "These are terrible times, and we're scared.
That's the truth of it, Henry, we're scared, because you're turning away from
us. Oh, I don't mean just that grocery bill, but that's a sign—a year ago you
wouldn't have let that happen to us. Now . . . now you don't care." She made
an expectant pause.
"Do you?"
"No."
"Well . . . well, I guess the blame is ours. That's what I wanted to tell
you—that we know we're to blame. We haven't treated you right, all these
years. We've been unfair to you, we've made you suffer, we've used you and
given you no thanks in return. We're guilty, Henry, we've sinned against you,
and we confess it. What more can we say to you now? Will you find it in your
heart to forgive us?"
"What is it you want me to do?" he asked, in the clear, flat tone of a
business conference.
"I don't know! Who am I to know? But that's not what I'm talking of right
now. Not of doing, only of feeling. It's your feeling that I'm begging you
for, Henry—just your feeling—even if we don't deserve it. You're generous and
strong. Will you cancel the past, Henry? Will you forgive us?"
--------------------------------------- 739
The look of terror in her eyes was real. A year ago, he would have told
himself that this was her way of making amends; he would have choked his
revulsion against her words, words which conveyed nothing to him but the fog
of the meaningless; he would have violated his mind to give them meaning,
even if he did not understand; he would have ascribed to her the virtue of
sincerity in her own terms, even if they were not his. But he was through
with granting respect to any terms other than his own.
"Will you forgive us?"
"Mother, it would be best not to speak of that. Don't press me to tell you
why. I think you know it as well as I do. If there's anything you want done,
tell me what it is. There's nothing else to discuss.
"But I don't understand you! I don't! That's what I called you here for—to
ask your forgiveness! Are you going to refuse to answer me?"
"Very well. What would it mean, my forgiveness?"
"Uh?"
"I said, what would it mean?"
. She spread her hands out in an astonished gesture to indicate the self-
evident. "Why, it . . . it would make us feel better."
"Will it change the past?"
"It would make us feel better to know that you've forgiven it."
"Do you wish me to pretend that the past has not existed?"
"Oh God, Henry, can't you see? All we want is only to know that you . . .
that you feel some concern for us."
"I don't feel it. Do you wish me to fake it?"
"But that's what I'm begging you for—to feel it!"
"On what ground?"
"Ground?"
"In exchange for what?"
"Henry, Henry, it's not business we're talking about, not steel tonnages
and bank balances, it's feelings—and you talk like a trader!"
"I am one."
What he saw in her eyes was terror—not the helpless terror of struggling
and failing to understand, but the terror of being pushed toward the edge
where to avoid understanding would no longer be possible.
"Look, Henry," said Philip hastily, "Mother can't understand those things.
We don't know how to approach you. We can't speak your language."
"I don't speak yours."
"What she's trying to say is that we're sorry. We're terribly sorry that
we've hurt you. You think we're not paying for it, but we are.
We're suffering remorse."
The pain in Philip's face was real. A year ago, Rearden would have felt
pity. Now, he knew that they had held him through nothing but his reluctance
to hurt them, his fear of their pain. He was not afraid of it any longer,
"We're sorry, Henry. We know we've harmed you. We wish we could atone for it.
But what can we do? The past is past. We can't undo it."
"Neither can I."
"You can accept our repentance," said Lillian, in a voice glassy with
caution. "I have nothing to gain from you now. I only want you to know that
whatever I've done, I've done it because I loved you."
He turned away, without answering.
"Henry!" cried his mother. "What's happened to you? What's changed you
like that? You don't seem to be human any more! You keep pressing us for
answers, when we haven't any answers to give. You keep beating us with logic—
what's logic at a time like this?—what's logic when people are suffering?"
"We can't help it!" cried Philip.
"We're at your mercy," said Lillian.
They were throwing their pleas at a face that could not be reached.
--------------------------------------- 740
They did not know—and their panic was the last of their struggle to escape
the knowledge—that his merciless sense of justice, which had been their only
hold on him, which had made him take any punishment and give them the benefit
of every doubt, was now turned against them—that the same force that had made
him tolerant, was now the force that made him ruthless—that the justice which
would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a
single step taken in conscious evil.
"Henry, don't you understand us?" his mother was pleading.
"I do," he said quietly.
She looked away, avoiding the clarity of his eyes. "Don't you care what
becomes of us?"
"I don't."
"Aren't you human?" Her voice grew shrill with anger. "Aren't you capable
of any love at all? It's your heart I'm trying to reach, not your mind! Love
is not something to argue and reason and bargain about!
It's something to give! To feel! Oh God, Henry, can't you feel without
thinking?"
"I never have."
In a moment, her voice came back, low and droning: "We're not as smart as
you are, not as strong. If we've sinned and blundered, it's because we're
helpless. We need you, you're all we've got—and we're losing you—and we're
afraid. These are terrible times, and getting worse, people are scared to
death, scared and blind and not knowing what to do. How are we to cope with
it, if you leave us? We're small and weak and we'll be swept like driftwood
in that terror that's running loose in the world. Maybe we had our share of
guilt for it, maybe we helped to bring it about, not knowing any better, but
what's done is done—and we can't stop it now. If you abandon us, we're lost.
If you give up and vanish, like all those men who—"
It was not a sound that stopped her, it was only a movement of his
eyebrows, the brief, swift movement of a check mark. Then they saw him smile;
the nature of the smile was the most terrifying of answers.
"So that's what you're afraid of," he said slowly.
"You can't quit!" his mother screamed in blind panic. "You can't quit now!
You could have, last year, but not now! Not today! You can't turn deserter,
because now they take it out on your family! They'll leave us penniless,
they'll seize everything, they'll leave us to starve, they'll—"
"Keep still!" cried Lillian, more adept than the others at reading danger
signs in Rearden's face.
His face held the remnant of a smile, and they knew that he was not seeing
them any longer, but it was not in their power to know why his smile now
seemed to hold pain and an almost wistful longing, or why he was looking
across the room, at the niche of the farthest window.
He was seeing a finely sculptured face held composed under the lashing of
his insults, he was hearing a voice that had said to him quietly, here, in
this room: "It is against the sin of forgiveness that I wanted to warn you."
You who had known it then, he thought . . . but he did not finish the
sentence in his mind, he let it end in the bitter twist of his smile, because
he knew what he had been about to think: You who had known it then—forgive
me.
There it was—he thought, looking at his family—the nature of their pleas
for mercy, the logic of those feelings they so righteously proclaimed as non-
logical—there was the simple, brutal essence of all men who speak of being
able to feel without thought and of placing mercy over justice.
They had known what to fear; they had grasped and named, before he had,
the only way of deliverance left open to him; they had understood the
hopelessness of his industrial position, the futility of his struggle, the
impossible burdens descending to crush him; they had known that in reason, in
--------------------------------------- 741
justice, in self-preservation, his only course was to drop it all and run—yet
they wanted to hold him, to keep him in the sacrificial furnace, to make him
let them devour the last of him in the name of mercy, forgiveness and
brother-cannibal love.
"If you still want me to explain it, Mother," he said very quietly, "if
you're still hoping that I won't be cruel enough to name what you're
pretending not to know, then here's what's wrong with your idea of
forgiveness: You regret that you've hurt me and, as your atonement for it,
you ask that I offer myself to total immolation."
"Logic!" she screamed. "There you go again with your damn logic!
It's pity that we need, pity, not logic!"
He rose to his feet.
"Wait! Don't go! Henry, don't abandon us! Don't sentence us to perish!
Whatever we are, we're human! We want to live!"
"Why, no—" he started in quiet astonishment and ended in quiet horror, as
the thought struck him fully, "I don't think you do. If you did, you would
have known how to value me."
As if in silent proof and answer, Philip's face went slowly into an
expression intended as a smile of amusement, yet holding nothing but fear and
malice. "You won't be able to quit and run away," said Philip. "You can't run
away without money."
It seemed to strike its goal; Rearden stopped short, then chuckled,
"Thanks, Philip," he said.
"Uh?" Philip gave a nervous jerk of bewilderment.
"So that's the purpose of the attachment order. That's what your friends
are afraid of. I knew they were getting set to spring something on me today.
I didn't know that the attachment was their idea of cutting off escape." He
turned incredulously to look at his mother. "And that's why you had to see me
today, before the conference in New York."
"Mother didn't know it!" cried Philip, then caught himself and cried
louder, "I don't know what you're talking about! I haven't said anything! I
haven't said it!" His fear now seemed to have some much less mystic and much
more practical quality.
"Don't worry, you poor little louse, I won't tell them that you've told me
anything. And if you were trying—"
He did not finish; he looked at the three faces before him, and a sudden
smile ended his sentence, a smile of weariness, of pity, of incredulous
revulsion. He was seeing the final contradiction, the grotesque absurdity at
the end of the irrationalists' game: the men in Washington had hoped to hold
him by prompting these three to try for the role of hostages.
"You think you're so good, don't you?" It was a sudden cry and it came
from Lillian; she had leaped to her feet to bar his exit; her face was
distorted, as he had seen it once before, on that morning when she had
learned the name of his mistress. "You're so good! You're so proud of
yourself! Well, I have something to tell you!"
She looked as if she had not believed until this moment that her game was
lost. The sight of her face struck him like a last shred completing a
circuit, and in sudden clarity he knew what her game had been and why she had
married him.
If to choose a person as the constant center of one's concern, as the
focus of one's view of life, was to love—he thought—then it was true that she
loved him; but if, to him, love was a celebration of one's self and of
existence—then, to the self-haters and life-haters, the pursuit of
destruction was the only form and equivalent of love. It was for the best of
his virtues that Lillian had chosen him, for his strength, his confidence,
his pride—she had chosen him as one chooses an object of love, as the symbol
of man's living power, but the destruction of that power had been her goal.
--------------------------------------- 742
He saw them as they had been at their first meeting: he, the man of
violent energy and passionate ambition, the man of achievement, lighted by
the flame of his success and flung into the midst of those pretentious ashes
who called themselves an intellectual elite, the burned out remnants of
undigested culture, feeding on the afterglow of the minds of others, offering
their denial of the mind as their only claim to distinction, and a craving to
control the world as their only lust—she, the woman hanger-on of that elite,
wearing their shopworn sneer as her answer to the universe, holding impotence
as superiority and emptiness as virtue—he, unaware of their hatred,
innocently scornful of their posturing fraud—she, seeing him as the danger to
their world, as a threat, as a challenge, as a reproach.
The lust that drives others to enslave an empire, had become, in her
limits, a passion for power over him. She had set out to break him, as if,
unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the
measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if—he
thought with a shudder—as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater
than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were
greater than the mother who had given it birth.
He remembered her hammering derision of his work, his mills, his Metal,
his success, he remembered her desire to see him drunk, just once, her
attempts to push him into infidelity, her pleasure at the thought that he had
fallen to the level of some sordid romance, her terror on discovering that
that romance had been an attainment, not a degradation. Her line of attack,
which he had found so baffling, had been constant and clear—it was his self-
esteem she had sought to destroy, knowing that a man who surrenders his value
is at the mercy of anyone's will; it was his moral purity she had struggled
to breach, it was his confident rectitude she had wanted to shatter by means
of the poison of guilt—as if, were he to collapse, his depravity would give
her a right to hers.
For the same purpose and motive, for the same satisfaction, as others
weave complex systems of philosophy to destroy generations, of establish
dictatorships to destroy a country, so she, possessing no weapons except
femininity, had made it her goal to destroy one man.
Yours was the code of life—he remembered the voice of his lost young
teacher—what, then, is theirs?
"I have something to tell you!" cried Lillian, with the sound of that
impotent rage which wishes that words were brass knuckles. "You're so proud
of yourself, aren't you? You're so proud of your name!
Rearden Steel, Rearden Metal, Rearden Wife! That's what I was, wasn't I?
Mrs. Rearden! Mrs. Henry Rearden!" The sounds she was making were now a
string of cackling gasps, an unrecognizable corruption of laughter. "Well, I
think you'd like to know that your wife's been laid by another man! I've been
unfaithful to you, do you hear me? I've been unfaithful, not with some great,
noble lover, but with the scummiest louse, with Jim Taggart! Three months
ago! Before your divorce!
While I was your wife! While I was still your wife!"
He stood listening like a scientist studying a subject of no personal
relevance whatever. There, he thought, was the final abortion of the creed of
collective interdependence, the creed of non-identity, nonproperty, non-fact:
the belief that the moral stature of one is at the mercy of the action of
another.
"I've been unfaithful to you! Don't you hear me, you stainless Puritan?
I've slept with Jim Taggart, you incorruptible hero! Don't you hear me? . . .
Don't you hear me? . . . Don't you . . . ?"
He was looking at her as he would have looked if a strange woman had
approached him on the street with a personal confession—a look like the
equivalent of the words: Why tell it to me?
--------------------------------------- 743
Her voice trailed off. He had not known what the destruction of a person
would be like; but he knew that he was seeing the destruction of Lillian. He
saw it in the collapse of her face, in the sudden slackening of features, as
if there were nothing to hold them together, in the eyes, blind, yet staring,
staring inward, filled with that terror which no outer threat can equal. It
was not the look of a person losing her mind, but the look of a mind seeing
total defeat and, in the same instant, seeing, her own nature for the first
time—the look of a person seeing that after years of preaching non-existence,
she had achieved it.
He turned to go. His mother stopped him at the door, seizing his arm. With
a look of stubborn bewilderment, with the last of her effort at self-deceit,
she moaned in a voice of tearfully petulant reproach, "Are you really
incapable of forgiveness?"
"No, Mother," he answered, "I'm not. I would have forgiven the past—if,
today, you had urged me to quit and disappear."
There was a cold wind outside, tightening his overcoat about him like an
embrace, there was the great, fresh sweep of country stretching at the foot
of the hill, and the clear, receding sky of twilight. Like two sunsets ending
the day, the red glow of the sun was a straight, still band in the west, and
the breathing red band in the east was the glow of his mills.
The feel of the steering wheel under his hands and of the smooth highway
streaming past, as he sped to New York, had an oddly bracing quality. It was
a sense of extreme precision and of relaxation, together, a sense of action
without strain, which seemed inexplicably youthful—until he realized that
this was the way he had acted and had expected always to act, in his youth—
and what he now felt was like the simple, astonished question: Why should one
ever have to act in any other manner?
It seemed to him that the skyline of New York, when it rose before him,
had a strangely luminous clarity, though its shapes were veiled by distance,
a clarity that did not seem to rest in the object, but felt as if the
illumination came from him. He looked at the great city, with no tie to any
view or usage others had made of it, it was not a city of gangsters or
panhandlers or derelicts or whores, it was the greatest industrial
achievement in the history of man, its only meaning was that which it meant
to him, there was a personal quality in his sight of it, a quality of
possessiveness and of unhesitant perception, as if he were seeing it for the
first time—or the last.
He paused in the silent corridor of the Wayne-Falkland, at the door of the
suite he was to enter; it took him a long moment's effort to lift his hand
and knock; it was the suite that had belonged to Francisco d'Anconia.
There were coils of cigarette smoke weaving through the air of the drawing
room, among the velvet drapes and bare, polished tables.
With its costly furniture and the absence of all personal belongings, the
room had that air of dreary luxury which pertains to transient occupancy, as
dismal as the air of a flophouse. Five figures rose in. the fog at his
entrance: Wesley Mouch, Eugene Lawson, James Taggart, Dr. Floyd Ferris and a
slim, slouching man who looked like a rat-faced tennis player and was
introduced to him as Tinky Holloway.
"All right," said Rearden, cutting off the greetings, the smiles, the
offers of drinks and the comments on the national emergency, "what did you
want?"
"We're here as your friends, Mr. Rearden," said Tinky Holloway, "purely as
your friends, for an informal conversation with a view to closer mutual
teamwork."
"We're anxious to avail ourselves of your outstanding ability," said
Lawson, "and your expert advice on the country's industrial problems."
"It's men like you that we need in Washington," said Dr. Ferris.
--------------------------------------- 744
"There's no reason why you should have remained an outsider for so long,
when your voice is needed at the top level of national leadership.”
The sickening thing about it, thought Rearden, was that the speeches were
only half-lies; the other half, in their tone of hysterical urgency, was the
unstated wish to have it somehow be true. "What did you want?" he asked.
"Why . . . to listen to you, Mr. Rearden," said Wesley Mouch, the jerk of
his features imitating a frightened smile; the smile was faked, the fear was
real. "We . . . we want the benefit of your opinion on the nation's
industrial crisis."
"I have nothing to say."
"But, Mr. Rearden," said Dr. Ferris, "all we want is a chance to co-
operate with you."
"I've told you once, publicly, that I don't co-operate at the point of a
gun."
"Can't we bury the hatchet at a time like this?" said Lawson beseechingly.
"The gun? Go ahead."
"Uh?"
"It's you who're holding it. Bury it, if you think you can."
"That . . . that was just a figure of speech," Lawson explained, blinking,
"I was speaking metaphorically."
>78
"I wasn't."
"Can't we all stand together for the sake of the country in this hour of
emergency?" said Dr. Ferris. "Can't we disregard our differences of opinion?
We're willing to meet you halfway. If there's any aspect of our policy which
you oppose, just tell us and we'll issue a directive to—"
"Cut it, boys. I didn't come here to help you pretend that I'm not in the
position I'm in and that any halfway is possible between us.
Now come to the point. You've prepared some new gimmick to spring on the
steel industry. What is it?"
"As a matter of fact," said Mouch, "we do have a vital question to discuss
in regard to the steel industry, but . . . but your language, Mr. Rearden!"
"We don't want to spring anything on you," said Holloway. "We asked you
here to discuss it with you."
"I came here to take orders. Give them."
"But, Mr. Rearden, we don't want to look at it that way. We don't want to
give you orders. We want your voluntary consent."
Rearden smiled. "I know it."
"You do?" Holloway started eagerly, but something about Rearden's smile
made him slide into uncertainty. "Well, then—"
"And you, brother," said Rearden, "know that that is the flaw in your
game, the fatal flaw that will blast it sky-high. Now do you tell me what
clout on my head you're working so hard not to let me notice—or do I go
home?"
"Oh no, Mr. Rearden!" cried Lawson, with a sudden dart of his eyes to his
wrist watch. "You can't go now!—That is, I mean, you wouldn't want to go
without hearing what we have to say."
"Then let me hear it."
He saw them glancing at one another. Wesley Mouch seemed afraid to address
him; Mouch's face assumed an expression of petulant stubbornness, like a
signal of command pushing the others forward; whatever their qualifications
to dispose of the fate of the steel industry, they had been brought here to
act as Mouch's conversational bodyguards.
Rearden wondered about the reason for the presence of James Taggart;
Taggart sat in gloomy silence, sullenly sipping a drink, never glancing in
his direction.
--------------------------------------- 745
"We have worked out a plan," said Dr. Ferris too cheerfully, "which will
solve the problems of the steel industry and which will meet with your full
approval, as a measure providing for the general welfare, while protecting
your interests and insuring your safety in a—"
"Don't try to tell me what I'm going to think. Give me the facts."
"It is a plan which is fair, sound, equitable and—"
"Don't tell me your evaluation. Give me the facts."
"It is a plan which—" Dr. Ferris stopped; he had lost the habit of naming
facts.
"Under this plan," said Wesley Mouch, "we will grant the industry a five
per cent increase in the price of steel." He paused triumphantly.
Rearden said nothing.
"Of course, some minor adjustments will be necessary," said Holloway
airily, leaping into the silence as onto a vacant tennis court. "A certain
increase in prices will have to be granted to the producers of iron ore—oh,
three per cent at most—in view of the added hardships which some of them, Mr.
Larkin of Minnesota, for instance, will now encounter, inasmuch as they'll
have to ship their ore by the costly means of trucks, since Mr. James Taggart
has had to sacrifice his Minnesota branch line to the public welfare. And, of
course, an increase in freight rates will have to be granted to the country's
railroads—let's say, seven per cent, roughly speaking—in view of the
absolutely essential need for—"
Holloway stopped, like a player emerging from a whirlwind activity to
notice suddenly that no opponent was answering his shots.
"But there will be no increase in wages," said Dr. Ferris hastily. "An
essential point of the plan is that we will grant no increase in wages to the
steel workers, in spite of their insistent demands. We do wish to be fair to
you, Mr. Rearden, and to protect your interests—even at the risk of popular
resentment and indignation."
"Of course, if we expect labor to make a sacrifice," said Lawson, "we must
show them that management, too, is making certain sacrifices for the sake of
the country. The mood of labor in the steel industry is extremely tense at
present, Mr. Rearden, it is dangerously explosive and . . . and in order to
protect you from . . . from . . . " He stopped.
"Yes?" said Rearden. "From?"
"From possible . . . violence, certain measures are necessary, which . . .
Look, Jim"—he turned suddenly to James Taggart—"why don't you explain it to
Mr. Rearden, as a fellow industrialist?"
"Well, somebody's got to support the railroads," said Taggart sullenly,
not looking at him. "The country needs railroads and somebody's got to help
us carry the load, and if we don't get an increase in freight rates—"
"No, no, no!" snapped Wesley Mouch. "Tell Mr. Rearden about the working of
the Railroad Unification Plan."
"Well, the Plan is a full success," said Taggart lethargically, "except
for the not fully controllable element of time. It is only a question of time
before our unified teamwork puts every railroad in the country back on its
feet. The Plan, I'm in a position to assure you, would work as successfully
for any other industry."
"No doubt about that," said Rearden, and turned to Mouch. "Why do you ask
the stooge to waste my time? What has the Railroad Unification Plan to do
with me?"
"But, Mr. Rearden," cried Mouch with desperate cheerfulness, "that's the
pattern we're to follow! That's what we called you here to discuss!"
"What?"
"The Steel Unification Plan!"
There was an instant of silence, as of breaths drawn after a plunge.
--------------------------------------- 746
Rearden sat looking at them with a glance that seemed to be a glance of
interest.
"In view of the critical plight of the steel industry," said Mouch with a
sudden rush, as if not to give himself time to know what made him uneasy
about the nature of Rearden's glance, "and since steel is the most vitally,
crucially basic commodity, the foundation of our entire industrial structure,
drastic measures must be taken to preserve the country's steel-making
facilities, equipment and plant." The tone and impetus of public speaking
carried him that far and no farther. "With this objective in view, our Plan
is . . . our Plan is . . ."
"Our Plan Is really very simple," said Tinky Holloway, striving to prove
it by the gaily bouncing simplicity of his voice. "We'll lift all
restrictions from the production of steel and every company will produce all
it can, according to its ability. But to avoid the waste and danger of dog-
eat-dog competition, all the companies will deposit their gross earnings into
a common pool, to be known as the Steel Unification Pool, in charge of a
special Board. At the end of the year, the Board will distribute these
earnings by totaling the nation's steel output and dividing it by the number
of open-hearth furnaces in existence, thus arriving at an average which will
be fair to all—and every company will be paid according to its need. The
preservation of its furnaces being its basic need, every company will be paid
according to the number of furnaces it owns."
He stopped, waited, then added, "That's it, Mr. Rearden," and getting no
answer, said, "Oh, there's a lot of wrinkles to be ironed out, but . . . but
that's it."
Whatever reaction they had expected, it was not the one they saw.
Rearden leaned back in his chair, his eyes attentive, but fixed on space,
as if looking at a not too distant distance, then he asked, with an odd note
of quietly impersonal amusement, "Will you tell me just one thing, boys: what
is it you're counting on?"
He knew that they understood. He saw, on their faces, that stubbornly
evasive look which he had once thought to be the look of a liar cheating a
victim, but which he now knew to be worse: the look of a man cheating himself
of his own consciousness. They did not answer. They remained silent, as if
struggling, not to make him forget his question, but to make themselves
forget that they had heard it.
"It's a sound, practical Plan!" snapped James Taggart unexpectedly, with
an angry edge of sudden animation in his voice. "It will work!
It has to work! We want it to work!"
No one answered him.
"Mr. Rearden . . . ?" said Holloway timidly.
"Well, let me see," said Rearden. "Orren Boyle's Associated Steel owns 60
open-hearth furnaces, one-third of them standing idle and the rest producing
an average of 300 tons of steel per furnace per day.
I own 20 open-hearth furnaces, working at capacity, producing tons of
Rearden Metal per furnace per day. So we own SO 'pooled'
furnaces with a 'pooled' output of 27,000 tons, which makes an average of
337.5 tons per furnace. Each day of the year, I, producing 15,000 tons, will
be paid for 6,750 tons. Boyle, producing 12,000 tons, will be paid for 20,250
tons. Never mind the other members of the pool, they won't change the scale,
except to bring the average still lower, most of them doing worse than Boyle,
none of them producing as much as I. Now how long do you expect me to last
under your Plan?"
There was no answer, then Lawson cried suddenly, blindly, righteously, "In
time of national peril, it is your duty to serve, suffer and work for the
salvation of the country!"
--------------------------------------- 747
"I don't see why pumping my earnings into Orren Boyle's pocket is going to
save the country."
"You have to make certain sacrifices to the public welfare!"
"I don't see why Orren Boyle is more 'the public' than I am."
"Oh, it's not a question of Mr. Boyle at all! It's much wider than any one
person. It's a matter of preserving the country's natural resources—such as
factories—and saving the whole of the nation's industrial plant. We cannot
permit the ruin of an establishment as vast as Mr. Boyle's. The country needs
it."
"I think," said Rearden slowly, "that the country needs me much more than
it needs Orren Boyle."
"But of course!" cried Lawson with startled enthusiasm. "The country needs
you, Mr. Rearden! You do realize that, don't you?"
But Lawson's avid pleasure at the familiar formula of self-immolation,
vanished abruptly at the sound of Rearden's voice, a cold, trader's voice
answering: "I do."
"It's not Boyle alone who's involved," said Holloway pleadingly.
"The country's economy would not be able to stand a major dislocation at
the present moment. There are thousands of Boyle's workers, suppliers and
customers. What would happen to them if Associated Steel went bankrupt?"
"What will happen to the thousands of my workers, suppliers and customers
when I go bankrupt?"
"You, Mr. Rearden?" said Holloway incredulously. "But you're the richest,
safest and strongest industrialist in the country at this moment!"
"What about the moment after next?"
"Uh?"
"How long do you expect me to be able to produce at a loss?"
"Oh, Mr. Rearden, I have complete faith in you!"
"To hell with your faith! How do you expect me to do it?"
"You'll manage!"
"How?"
There was no answer.
"We can't theorize about the future," cried Wesley Mouch, "when here's an
immediate national collapse to avoid! We've got to save the country's
economy! We've got to do something!" Rearden's imperturbible glance of
curiosity drove him to heedlessness. "If you don't like it, do you have a
better solution to offer?"
"Sure," said Rearden easily. "If it's production that you want, then get
out of the way, junk all of your damn regulations, let Orren Boyle go broke,
let me buy the plant of Associated Steel—and it will be pouring a thousand
tons a day from every one of its sixty furnaces."
"Oh, but . . . but we couldn't!" gasped Mouch. "That would be monopoly!"
Rearden chuckled. "Okay," he said indifferently, "then let my mills
superintendent buy it. Hell do a better job than Boyle."
"Oh, but that would be letting the strong have an advantage over the weak!
We couldn't do that!"
"Then don't talk about saving the country's economy."
"All we want is—" He stopped.
"All you want is production without men who're able to produce, isn't it?"
"That . . . that's theory. That's just a theoretical extreme. All we want
is a temporary adjustment."
"You've been making those temporary adjustments for years. Don't you see
that you've run out of time?"
"That's just theo . . ." His voice trailed off and stopped.
"Well, now, look here," said Holloway cautiously, "it's not as if Mr.
Boyle were actually . . . weak. Mr. Boyle is an extremely able man.
--------------------------------------- 748
It's just that he's suffered some unfortunate reverses, quite beyond his
control. He had invested large sums in a public-spirited project to assist
the undeveloped peoples of South America, and that copper crash of theirs has
dealt him a severe financial blow. So it's only a matter of giving him a
chance to recover, a helping hand to bridge the gap, a bit of temporary
assistance, nothing more. All we have to do is just equalize the sacrifice—
then everybody will recover and prosper."
"You've been equalizing sacrifice for over a hundred"—he stopped —"for
thousands of years," said Rearden slowly. "Don't you see that you're at the
end of the road?"
"That's just theory!" snapped Wesley Mouch.
Rearden smiled. "I know your practice," he said softly. "It's your theory
that I'm trying to understand."
He knew that the specific reason behind the Plan was Orren Boyle; he knew
that the working of an intricate mechanism, operated by pull, threat,
pressure, blackmail—a mechanism like an irrational adding machine run amuck
and throwing up any chance sum at the whim of any moment—had happened to add
up to Boyle's pressure upon these men to extort for him this last piece of
plunder. He knew also that Boyle was not the cause of it or the essential to
consider, that Boyle was only a chance rider, not the builder, of the
infernal machine that had destroyed the world, that it was not Boyle who had
made it possible, nor any of the men in this room. They, too, were only
riders on a machine without a driver, they were trembling hitchhikers who
knew that their vehicle was about to crash into its final abyss—and it was
not love or fear of Boyle that made them cling to their course and press on
toward their end, it was something else, it was some one nameless element
which they knew and evaded knowing, something which was neither thought nor
hope, something he identified only as a certain look in their faces, a
furtive look saying: I can get away with it. Why?
—he thought. Why do they think they can?
"We can't afford any theories!" cried Wesley Mouch. "We've got to act!"
"Well, then, I'll offer you another solution. Why don't you take over my
mills and be done with it?"
The jolt that shook them was genuine terror.
"Oh no!" gasped Mouch.
"We wouldn't think of it!" cried Holloway.
"We stand for free enterprise!" cried Dr. Ferris.
"We don't want to harm you!" cried Lawson. "We're your friends, Mr.
Rearden. Can't we all work together? We're your friends."
There, across the room, stood a table with a telephone, the same table,
most likely, and the same instrument—and suddenly Rearden felt as if he were
seeing the convulsed figure of a man bent over that telephone, a man who had
then known what he, Rearden, was now beginning to learn, a man fighting to
refuse him the same request which he was now refusing to the present tenants
of this room—he saw the finish of that fight, a man's tortured face lifted to
confront him and a desperate voice saying steadily: "Mr. Rearden, I swear to
you . . . by the woman I love . . . that I am your friend."
This was the act he had then called treason, and this was the man he had
rejected in order to go on serving the men confronting him now.
Who, then, had been the traitor?—he thought; he thought it almost without
feeling, without right to feel, conscious of nothing but a solemnly reverent
clarity. Who had chosen to give its present tenants the means to acquire this
room? Whom had he sacrificed and to whose profit?
"Mr. Rearden!" moaned Lawson. "What's the matter?"
He turned his head, saw Lawson's eyes watching him fearfully and guessed
what look Lawson had caught in his face.
"We don't want to seize your mills!" cried Mouch.
--------------------------------------- 749
"We don't want to deprive you of your property!" cried Dr. Ferris.
"You don't understand us!"
"I'm beginning to."
A year ago, he thought, they would have shot him; two years ago, they
would have confiscated his property; generations ago, men of their kind had
been able to afford the luxury of murder and expropriation, the safety of
pretending to themselves and their victims that material loot was their only
objective. But their time was running out and his fellow victims had gone,
gone sooner than any historical schedule had promised, and they, the looters,
were now left to face the undisguised reality of their own goal.
"Look, boys," he said wearily. "I know what you want. You want to eat my
mills and have them, too. And all I want to know is this: what makes you
think it's possible?"
"I don't know what you mean," said Mouch in an injured tone of voice. "We
said we didn't want your mills."
"All right, I'll say it more precisely: You want to eat me and have me,
too. How do you propose to do it?"
"I don't know how you can say that, after we've given you every assurance
that we consider you of invaluable importance to the country, to the steel
industry, to—"
"I believe you. That's what makes the riddle Harder. You consider me of
invaluable importance to the country? Hell, you consider me of invaluable
importance even to your own necks. You sit there trembling, because you know
that I'm the last one left to save your lives—and you know that time is as
short as that. Yet you propose a plan to destroy me, a plan which demands,
with an idiot's crudeness, without loopholes, detours or escape, that I work
at a loss—that I work, with every ton I pour costing me more than I'll get
for it—that I feed the last of my wealth away until we all starve together.
That much irrationality is not possible to any man or any looter. For your
own sake—never mind the country's or mine—you must be counting on something.
What?"
He saw the getting-away-with-it look on their faces, a peculiar look that
seemed secretive, yet resentful, as if, incredibly, it were he who was hiding
some secret from them.
"I don't see why you should choose to take such a defeatist view of the
situation," said Mouch sullenly.
"Defeatist? Do you really expect me to be able to remain in business under
your Plan?"
"But it's only temporary!"
"There's no such thing as a temporary suicide."
"But it's only for the duration of the emergency! Only until the country
recovers!"
"How do you expect it to recover?"
There was no answer.
"How do you expect me to produce after I go bankrupt?"
"You won't go bankrupt. You'll always produce," said Dr. Ferris
indifferently, neither in praise nor in blame, merely in the tone of stating
a fact of nature, as he would have said to another man: You'll always be a
bum, "You can't help it. It's in your blood. Or, to be more scientific:
you're conditioned that way."
Rearden sat up: it was as if he had been struggling to find the secret
combination of a lock and felt, at those words, a faint click within, as of
the first tumbrel falling into place.
"It's only a matter of weathering this crisis," said Mouch, "of giving
people a reprieve, a chance to catch up."
"And then?"
"Then things will improve."
--------------------------------------- 750
"How?"
There was no answer.
"What will improve them?"
There was no answer.
"Who will improve them?"
"Christ, Mr. Rearden, people don't just stand still!" cried Holloway,
"They do things, they grow, they move forward!"
"What people?"
Holloway waved his hand vaguely. "People," he said.
"What people? The people to whom you're going to feed the last of Rearden
Steel, without getting anything in return? The people who'll go on consuming
more than they produce?"
"Conditions will change."
"Who'll change them?"
There was no answer.
"Have you anything left to loot? If you didn't see the nature of your
policy before—it's not possible that you don't see it now. Look around you.
All those damned People's States all over the earth have been existing only
on the handouts which you squeezed for them out of this country. But you—you
have no place left to sponge on or mooch from. No country on the face of the
globe. This was the greatest and last. You've drained it. You've milked it
dry. Of all that irretrievable splendor, I'm only one remnant, the last, What
will you do, you and your People's Globe, after you've finished me? What are
you hoping for? What do you see ahead—except plain, stark, animal
starvation?"
They did not answer. They did not look at him. Their faces wore
expressions of stubborn resentment, as if his were the plea of a liar.
Then Lawson said softly, half in reproach, half in scorn, "Well, after
all, you businessmen have kept predicting disasters for years, you've cried
catastrophe at every progressive measure and told us that we'll perish—but we
haven't." He started a smile, but drew back from the sudden intensity of
Rearden’s eyes.
Rearden had felt another click in his mind, the sharper click of the
second tumbrel connecting the circuits of the lock. He leaned forward.
"What are you counting on?" he asked; his tone had changed, it was low, it
had the steady, pressing, droning sound of a drill.
"It's only a matter of gaining time!" cried Mouch.
"There isn't any time left to gain."
"All we need is a chance!" cried Lawson.
"There are no chances left."
"It's only until we recover!" cried Holloway.
"There is no way to recover."
"Only until our policies begin to work!" cried Dr. Ferris.
"There's no way to make the irrational work.'1 There was no answer.
"What can save you now?"
"Oh, you'll do something!" cried James Taggart.
Then—even though it was only a sentence he had heard all his life—he felt
a deafening crash within him, as of a steel door dropping open at the touch
of the final tumbrel, the one small number completing the sum and releasing
the intricate lock, the answer uniting all the pieces, the questions and the
unsolved wounds of his life.
In the moment of silence after the crash, it seemed to him that he heard
Francisco's voice, asking him quietly in the ballroom of this building, yet
asking it also here and now: "Who is the guiltiest man in this room?" He
heard his own answer of the past: "I suppose—
--------------------------------------- 751
James Taggart?" and Francisco's voice saying without reproach: "No, Mr.
Rearden, it's not James Taggart,"—but here, in this room and this moment, his
mind answered: "I am."
He had cursed these looters for their stubborn blindness? It was he who
had made it possible. From the first extortion he had accepted, from the
first directive he had obeyed, he had given them cause to believe that
reality was a thing to be cheated, that one could demand the irrational and
someone somehow would provide it. If he had accepted the Equalization of
Opportunity Bill, if he had accepted Directive 10-289, if he had accepted the
law that those who could not equal his ability had the right to dispose of
it, that those who had not earned were to profit, but he who had was to lose,
that those who could not think were to command, but he who could was to obey
them—then were they illogical in believing that they existed in an irrational
universe? He had made it for them, he had provided it.
Were they illogical in believing that theirs was only to wish, to wish
with no concern for the possible—and that his was to fulfill their wishes, by
means they did not have to know or name? They, the impotent mystics,
struggling to escape the responsibility of reason, had known that he, the
rationalist, had undertaken to serve their whims.
They had known that he had given them a blank check on reality—
his was not to ask why?—theirs was not to ask how?—let them demand that he
give them a share of his wealth, then all that he owns, then more than he
owns—impossible?—no, he'll do something!
He did not know that he had leaped to his feet, that he stood staring down
at James Taggart, seeing in the unbridled shapelessness of Taggart's features
the answer to all the devastation he had witnessed through the years of his
life.
"What's the matter, Mr. Rearden? What have I said?" Taggart was asking
with rising anxiety—but he was out of the reach of Taggart's voice.
He was seeing the progression of the years, the monstrous extortions, the
impossible demands, the inexplicable victories of evil, the preposterous
plans and unintelligible goals proclaimed in volumes of muddy philosophy, the
desperate wonder of the victims who thought that some complex, malevolent
wisdom was moving the powers destroying the world—and all of it had rested on
one tenet behind the shifty eyes of the victors: he'll do something! . . .
We'll get away with it—he'll let us—he'll do something! . . .
You businessmen kept predicting that we'd perish, but we haven't.
. . . It was true, he thought. They had not been blind to reality, he had—
blind to the reality he himself had created. No, they had not perished, but
who had? Who had perished to pay for their manner of survival? Ellis Wyatt .
. . Ken Danagger . . . Francisco d'Anconia.
He was reaching for his hat and coat, when he noticed that the men in the
room were trying to stop him, that their faces had a look of panic and their
voices were crying in bewilderment: "What's the matter, Mr.
Rearden? . . . Why? . . . But why? . . . What have we said? . . .
You're not going! . . . You can't go! . . . It's too early! . . . Not yet!
Oh, not yet!"
He felt as if he were seeing them from the rear window of a speeding
express, as if they stood on the track behind him, waving their arms in
futile gestures and screaming indistinguishable sounds, their figures growing
smaller in the distance, their voices fading.
One of them tried to stop him as he turned to the door. He pushed him out
of his way, not roughly, but with a simple, smooth sweep of his arm, as one
brushes aside an obstructing curtain, then walked out.
Silence was his only sensation, as he sat at the wheel of his car,
speeding back down the road to Philadelphia. It was the silence of immobility
within him, as if, possessing knowledge, he could now afford to rest, with no
--------------------------------------- 752
further activity of soul. He felt nothing, neither anguish nor elation. It
was as if, by an effort of years, he had climbed a mountain to gain a distant
view and, having reached the top, had fallen to lie still, to rest before he
looked, free to spare himself for the first time.
He was aware of the long, empty road streaming, then curving, then
streaming straight before him, of the effortless pressure of his hands on the
wheel and the screech of the tires on the curves. But he felt as if he were
speeding down a skyway suspended and coiling in empty space.
The passers-by at the factories, the bridges, the power plants along his
road saw a sight that had once been natural among them: a trim, expensively
powerful car driven by a confident man, with the concept of success
proclaimed more loudly than by any electric sign, proclaimed by the driver's
garments, by his expert steering, by his purposeful speed.
They watched him go past and vanish into the haze equating earth with
night.
He saw his mills rising in the darkness, as a black silhouette against a
breathing glow. The glow was the color of burning gold, and "Rearden Steel"
stood written across the sky in the cool, white fire of crystal.
He looked at the long silhouette, the curves of blast furnaces standing
like triumphal arches, the smokestacks rising like a solemn colonnade along
an avenue of honor in an imperial city, the bridges hanging like garlands,
the cranes saluting like lances, the smoke waving slowly like flags. The
sight broke the stillness within him and he smiled in greeting. It was a
smile of happiness, of love, of dedication. He had never loved his mills as
he did in that moment, for—seeing them by an act of his own vision, cleared
of all but his own code of values, in a luminous reality that held no
contradictions—he was seeing the reason of his love: the mills were an
achievement of his mind, devoted to his enjoyment of existence, erected in a
rational world to deal with rational men. If those men had vanished, if that
world was gone, if his mills had ceased to serve his values—then the mills
were only a pile of dead scrap, to be left to crumble, the sooner the better—
to be left, not as an act of treason, but as an act of loyalty to their
actual meaning.
The mills were still a mile ahead when a small spurt of flame caught his
sudden attention. Among all the shades of fire in the vast spread of
structures, he could tell the abnormal and the out-of-place: this one was too
raw a shade of yellow and it was darting from a spot where no fire had reason
to be, from a structure by the gate of the main entrance.
In the next instant, he heard the dry crack of a gunshot, then three
answering cracks in swift succession, like an angry hand slapping a sudden
assailant.
Then the black mass barring the road in the distance took shape, it was
not mere darkness and it did not recede as he came closer—it was a mob
squirming at the main gate, trying to storm the mills.
He had time to distinguish waving arms, some with clubs, some with
crowbars, some with rifles—the yellow flames of burning wood gushing from the
window of the gatekeeper's office—the blue cracks of gunfire darting out of
the mob and the answers spitting from the roofs of the structures—he had time
to see a human figure twisting backward and falling from the top of a car—
then he sent his wheels into a shrieking curve, turning into the darkness of
a side road.
He was going at the rate of sixty miles an hour down the ruts of an
unpaved soil, toward the eastern gate of the mills—and the gate was in sight
when the impact of tires on a gully threw the car off the road, to the edge
of a ravine where an ancient slag heap lay at the bottom. With the weight of
his chest and elbow on the wheel, pitted against two tons of speeding metal,
the curve of his body forced the curve of the car to complete its screaming
--------------------------------------- 753
half-circle, sweeping it back onto the road and into the control of his
hands. It had taken one instant, but in the next his foot went down on the
brake, tearing the engine to a stop: for in the moment when his headlights
had swept the ravine, he had glimpsed an oblong shape, darker than the gray
of the weeds on the slope, and it had seemed to him that a brief white blur
had been a human hand waving for help.
Throwing off his overcoat, he went hurrying down the side of the ravine,
lumps of earth giving way under his feet, he went catching at the dried coils
of brush, half-running, half-sliding toward the long black form which he
could now distinguish to be a human body. A scum of cotton was swimming
against the moon, he could see the white of a hand and the shape of an arm
lying stretched in the weeds, but the body lay still, with no sign of motion.
"Mr. Rearden . . ."
It was a whisper struggling to be a cry, it was the terrible sound of
eagerness fighting against a voice that could be nothing but a moan of pain.
He did not know which came first, it felt like a single shock: his thought
that the voice was familiar, a ray of moonlight breaking through the cotton,
the movement of falling down on his knees by the white oval of a face, and
the recognition. It was the Wet Nurse.
He felt the boy's hand clutching his with the abnormal strength of agony,
while he was noticing the tortured lines of the face, the drained lips, the
glazing eyes and the thin, dark trickle from a small, black hole in too
wrong, too close a spot on the left side of the boy's chest.
"Mr. Rearden . . . I wanted to stop them . . . I wanted to save you . . ."
"What happened to you, kid?"
"They shot me, so I wouldn't talk . . . I wanted to prevent"—his hand
fumbled toward the red glare in the sky—"what they're doing . . .
I was too late, but I've tried to . . . I've tried . . . And . . . and I'm
still able . . . to talk . . . Listen, they—"
"You need help. Let's get you to a hospital and—"
"No! Wait! I . . . I don't think I have much time left to me and . . . and
I've got to tell you . . . Listen, that riot . . . it's staged . . . on
orders from Washington . . . It's not workers . . . not your workers . . .
it's those new boys of theirs and . . . and a lot of goons hired on the
outside . . . Don't believe a word they'll tell you about it . . . It's a
frame-up . . . it's their rotten kind of frame-up . . ."
There was a desperate intensity in the boy's face, the intensity of a
crusader's battle, his voice seemed to gain a sound of life from some fuel
burning in broken spurts within him—-and Rearden knew that the greatest
assistance he could now render was to listen.
"They . . . they've got a Steel Unification Plan ready . . . and they need
an excuse for it . . . because they know that the country won't take it . . .
and you won't stand for it . . . They're afraid this one's going to be too
much for everybody . . . it's just a plan to skin you alive, that's all . . .
So they want to make it look like you're starving your workers . . . and the
workers are running amuck and you're unable to control them . . . and the
government's got to step in for your own protection and for public safety . .
. That's going to be their pitch, Mr. Rearden . . ."
Rearden was noticing the torn flesh of the boy's hands, the drying mud of
blood and dust on his palms and his clothing, gray patches of dust on knees
and stomach, scrambled with the needles of burs. In the intermittent fits of
moonlight, he could see the trail of flattened weeds and glistening smears
going off into the darkness below. He dreaded to think how far the boy had
crawled and for how long.
"They didn't want you to be here tonight, Mr. Rearden . . . They didn't
want you to see their 'People's rebellion' . . . Afterwards . . .
--------------------------------------- 754
you know how they screw up the evidence . . . there won't be a straight
story to get anywhere . . . and they hope to fool the country . . . and you .
. . that they're acting to protect you from violence . . .
Don't let them get away with it, Mr. Rearden! . . . Tell the country . . .
tell the people . . . tell the newspapers . . . Tell them that I told you . .
. it's under oath . . . I swear it . . . that makes it legal, doesn't it? . .
. doesn't it? . . . that gives you a chance?"
Rearden pressed the boy's hand in his. "Thank you, kid."
"I . . . I'm sorry I'm late, Mr. Rearden, but . . . but they didn't let me
in on it till the last minute . . . till just before it started . . .
They called me in on a . . . a strategy conference . . . there was a man
there by the name of Peters . . . from the Unification Board . . . he's a
stooge of Tinky Holloway . . . who's a stooge of Orren Boyle . . . What they
wanted from me was . . . they wanted me to sign a lot of passes . . . to let
some of the goons in . . . so they'd start trouble from the inside and the
outside together . . . to make it look like they really were your workers . .
. I refused to sign the passes."
"You did? After they'd let you in on their game?"
"But . . . but, of course, Mr. Rearden . . . Did you think I'd play that
kind of game?"
"No, kid, no, I guess not. Only—"
"What?"
"Only that's when you stuck your neck out."
"But I had to! . . . I couldn't help them wreck the mills, could I?
. . . How long was I to keep from sticking my neck out? Till they broke
yours? . . . And what would I do with my neck, if that's how I had to keep
it? . . . You . . . you understand it, don't you, Mr.
Rearden?"
"Yes. I do."
"I refused them . . . I ran out of the office . . . I ran to look for the
superintendent . . . to tell him everything . . . but I couldn't find him . .
. and then I heard shots at the main gate and I knew it had started . . . I
tried to phone your home . . . the phone wires were cut . . . I ran to get my
car, I wanted to reach you or a policeman or a newspaper or somebody . . .
but they must have been following me . . . that's when they shot me . . . in
the parking lot . . .
from behind . . . all I remember is falling and . . . and then, when I
opened my eyes, they had dumped me here . . . on the slag heap . . . "
"On the slag heap?" said Rearden slowly, knowing that the heap was a
hundred feet below.
The boy nodded, pointing vaguely down into the darkness. "Yeah . . . down
there . . . And then I . . . I started crawling . . .
crawling up . . . I wanted . . . I wanted to last till I told somebody
who'd tell you." The pain-twisted lines of his face smoothed suddenly into a
smile; his voice had the sound of a lifetime's triumph as he added, "I have."
Then he jerked his head up and asked, in the tone of a child's astonishment
at a sudden discovery, "Mr. Rearden, is this how it feels to . . . to want
something very much . . . very desperately much . . . and to make it?"
"Yes, kid, that's how it feels." The boy's head dropped back against
Rearden's arm, the eyes closing, the mouth relaxing, as if to hold a moment's
profound contentment. "But you can't stop there. You're not through. You've
got to hang on till I get you to a doctor and—" He was lifting the boy
cautiously, but a convulsion of pain ran through the boy's face, his mouth
twisting to stop a cry—and Rearden had to lower him gently back to the
ground.
The boy shook his head with a glance that was almost apology. "I won't
make it, Mr. Rearden . . . No use fooling myself . . . I know I'm through."
--------------------------------------- 755
Then, as if by some dim recoil against self-pity, he added, reciting a
memorized lesson, his voice a desperate attempt at his old, cynical,
intellectual tone, "What does it matter, Mr. Rearden? . . . Man is only a
collection of . . . conditioned chemicals . . . and a man's dying doesn't
make . . . any more difference than an animal's."
"You know better than that."
"Yes," he whispered. "Yes, I guess I do."
His eyes wandered over the vast darkness, then rose to Rearden's face; the
eyes were helpless, longing, childishly bewildered. "I know . . . it's crap,
all those things they taught us . . . all of it, everything they said . . .
about living or . . . or dying . . . Dying . . . it wouldn't make any
difference to chemicals, but—" he stopped, and all of his desperate protest
was only in the intensity of his voice dropping lower to say, "—but it does,
to me . . . And . . . and, I guess, it makes a difference to an animal, too .
. . But they said there are no values . . . only social customs . . . No
values!" His hand clutched blindly at the hole in his chest, as if trying to
hold that which he was losing. "No . . . values . . .”
Then his eyes opened wider, with the sudden calm of full frankness.
"I'd like to live, Mr. Rearden. God, how I'd like to!" His voice was
passionately quiet. "Not because I'm dying . . . but because I've just
discovered it tonight, what it means, really to be alive . . . And . . . it's
funny . . . do you know when [ discovered it? . . . In the office . . .
when I stuck my neck out . . . when I told the bastards to go to hell . .
. There's . . . there's so many things I wish I'd known sooner . . . But . .
. well, it's no use crying over spilled milk." He saw Rearden's involuntary
glance at the flattened trail below and added, "Over spilled anything, Mr.
Rearden."
"Listen, kid," said Rearden sternly, "I want you to do me a favor."
"Now, Mr. Rearden?"
"Yes. Now."
"Why, of course, Mr. Rearden . . . if I can."
"You've done me a big favor tonight, but I want you to do a still bigger
one. You've done a great job, climbing out of that slag heap.
Now will you try for something still harder? You were willing to die to
save my mills. Will you try to live for me?"
"For you, Mr. Rearden?"
"For me. Because I'm asking you to. Because I want you to. Because we
still have a great distance to climb together, you and I."
"Does it . . . does it make a difference to you, Mr. Rearden?"
"It does. Will you make up your mind that you want to live—just as you did
down there on the slag heap? That you want to last and live? Will you fight
for it? You wanted to fight my battle. Will you fight this one with me, as
our first?"
He felt the clutching of the boy's hand; it conveyed the violent eagerness
of the answer; the voice was only a whisper: "I'll try, Mr.
Rearden."
"Now help me to get you to a doctor. Just relax, take it easy and let me
lift you."
"Yes, Mr. Rearden." With the jerk of a sudden effort, the boy pulled
himself up to lean on an elbow.
"Take it easy, Tony."
He saw a sudden flicker in the boy's face, an attempt at his old, bright,
impudent grin. "Not 'Non-Absolute' any more?"
"No, not any more. You're a full absolute now, and you know it."
"Yes. I know several of them, now. There's one"—he pointed at the wound in
his chest—"that's an absolute, isn't it? And"—he went on speaking while
Rearden was lifting him from the ground by imperceptible seconds and inches,
--------------------------------------- 756
speaking as if the trembling intensity of his words were serving as an
anesthetic against the pain—"and men can't live . . . if rotten bastards . .
. like the ones in Washington . . . get away with things like . . . like the
one they're doing tonight . . . if everything becomes a stinking fake . . .
and nothing is real . . . and nobody is anybody . . . men can't live that way
. . .
that's an absolute, isn't it?"
"Yes, Tony, that's an absolute."
Rearden rose to his feet by a long, cautious effort; he saw the tortured
spasm of the boy's features, as he settled him slowly against his chest, like
a baby held tight in his arms—but the spasm twisted into another echo of the
impudent grin, and the boy asked, "Who's the Wet Nurse now?"
"I guess I am."
He took the first steps up the slant of crumbling soil, his body tensed to
the task of shock absorber for his fragile burden, to the task of maintaining
a steady progression where there was no foothold to find.
The boy's head dropped on Rearden's shoulder, hesitantly, almost as if
this were a presumption. Rearden bent down and pressed his lips to the dust-
streaked forehead.
The boy jerked back, raising his head with a shock of incredulous,
indignant astonishment. "Do you know what you did?" he whispered, as if
unable to believe that it was meant for him.
"Put your head down," said Rearden, "and I'll do it again."
The boy's head dropped and Rearden kissed his forehead; it was like a
father's recognition granted to a son's battle.
The boy lay still, his face hidden, his hands clutching Rearden's
shoulders. Then, with no hint of sound, with only the sudden beat of faint,
spaced, rhythmic shudders to show it, Rearden knew that the boy was crying—
crying in surrender, in admission of all the things which he could not put
into the words he had never found.
Rearden went on moving slowly upward, step by groping step, fighting for
firmness of motion against the weeds, the drifts of dust, the chunks of scrap
metal, the refuse of a distant age. He went on, toward the line where the red
glow of his mills marked the edge of the pit above him, his movement a fierce
struggle that had to take the form of a gentle, unhurried flow.
He heard no sobs, but he felt the rhythmic shudders, and, through the
cloth of his shirt, in place of tears, he felt the small, warm, liquid spurts
flung from the wound by the shudders. He knew that the tight pressure of his
arms was the only answer which the boy was now able to hear and understand—
and he held the trembling body as if the strength of his arms could transfuse
some part of his living power into the arteries beating ever fainter against
him.
Then the sobbing stopped and the boy raised his head. His face seemed
thinner and paler, but the eyes were lustrous, and he looked up at Rearden,
straining for the strength to speak.
"Mr. Rearden . . . I . . . I liked you very much."
"I know it."
The boy's features had no power to form a smile, but it was a smile that
spoke in his glance, as he looked at Rearden's face—as he looked at that
which he had not known he had been seeking through the brief span of his
life, seeking as the image of that which he had not known to be his values.
Then his head fell back, and there was no convulsion in his face, only his
mouth relaxing to a shape of serenity—but there was a brief stab of
convulsion in his body, like a last cry of protest—and Rearden went on
slowly, not altering his pace, even though he knew that no caution was
necessary any longer because what he was carrying in his arms was now that
which had been the boy's teachers' idea of man—
--------------------------------------- 757
a collection of chemicals.
He walked, as if this were his form of last tribute and funeral procession
for the young life that had ended in his arms. He felt an anger too intense
to identify except as a pressure within him: it was a desire to kill.
The desire was not directed at the unknown thug who had sent a bullet
through the boy's body, or at the looting bureaucrats who had hired the thug
to do it, but at the boy's teachers who had delivered him, disarmed, to the
thug's gun—at the soft, safe assassins of college classrooms who, incompetent
to answer the queries of a quest for reason, took pleasure in crippling the
young minds entrusted to their care.
Somewhere, he thought, there was this boy's mother, who had trembled with
protective concern over his groping steps, while teaching him to walk, who
had measured his baby formulas with a jeweler's caution, who had obeyed with
a zealot's fervor the latest words of science on his diet and hygiene,
protecting his unhardened body from germs—then had sent him to be turned into
a tortured neurotic by the men who taught him that he had no mind and must
never attempt to think. Had she fed him tainted refuse, he thought, had she
mixed poison into his food, it would have been more kind and less fatal.
He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of
survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such
strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly—yet man, whose tool of
survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach
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