Atlas Shrugged

by Ayn Rand

  Haven't I?--he thought. Haven't I thought of it since the first time I saw you? Haven't I thought of nothing else for two years? ... He sat motionless, looking at her. He heard the words he had never allowed himself to form, the words he had felt, known, yet had not faced, had hoped to destroy by never letting them be said within his own mind. Now it was as sudden and shocking as if he were saying it to her.... Since the first time I saw you . . . Nothing but your body, that mouth of yours, and the way your eyes would look at me, if ... Through every sentence I ever said to you, through every conference you thought so safe, through the importance of all the issues we discussed . . . You trusted me, didn't you? To recognize your greatness? To think of you as you deserved--as if you were a man? ... Don't you suppose I know how much I've betrayed? The only bright encounter of my life--the only person I respected--the best businessman I know--my ally--my partner in a desperate battle . . . The lowest of all desires--as my answer to the highest I've met . . . Do you know what I am? I thought of it, because it should have been unthinkable. For that degrading need, which should never touch you, I have never wanted anyone but you . . . I hadn't known what it was like, to want it, until I saw you for the first time. I had thought: Not I, I couldn't be broken by it ... Since then . . . for two years ... with not a moment's respite . . . Do you know what it's like, to want it? Would you wish to hear what I thought when I looked at you ... when I lay awake at night . . . when I heard your voice over a telephone wire . . . when I worked, but could not drive it away? ... To bring you down to things you can't conceive--and to know that it's I who have done it. To reduce you to a body, to teach you an animal's pleasure, to see you need it, to see you asking me for it, to see your wonderful spirit dependent upon the obscenity of your need. To watch you as you are, as you face the world with your clean, proud strength--then to see you, in my bed, submitting to any infamous whim I may devise, to any act which I'll perform for the sole purpose of watching your dishonor and to which you'll submit for the sake of an unspeakable sensation . . . I want you--and may I be damned for it! . . .

  She was reading the papers, leaning back in the darkness--he saw the reflection of the fire touching her hair, moving to her shoulder, down her arm, to the naked skin of her wrist.

  ... Do you know what I'm thinking now, in this moment? ... Your gray suit and your open collar . . . you look so young, so austere, so sure of yourself . . . What would you be like if I knocked your head back, if I threw you down in that formal suit of yours, if I raised your skirt--

  She glanced up at him. He looked down at the papers on his desk. In a moment, he said, "The actual cost of the bridge is less than our original estimate. You will note that the strength of the bridge allows for the eventual addition of a second track, which, I think, that section of the country will justify in a very few years. If you spread the cost over a period of--"

  He spoke, and she looked at his face in the lamplight, against the black emptiness of the office. The lamp was outside her field of vision, and she felt as if it were his face that illuminated the papers on the desk. His face, she thought, and the cold, radiant clarity of his voice, of his mind, of his drive to a single purpose. The face was like his words--as if the line of a single theme ran from the steady glance of the eyes, through the gaunt muscles of the cheeks, to the faintly scornful, downward curve of the mouth--the line of a ruthless asceticism.

  The day began with the news of a disaster: a freight train of the Atlantic Southern had crashed head-on into a passenger train, in New Mexico, on a sharp curve in the mountains, scattering freight cars all over the slopes. The cars carried five thousand tons of copper, bound from a mine in Arizona to the Rearden mills.

  Rearden telephoned the general manager of the Atlantic Southern, but the answer he received was: "Oh God, Mr. Rearden, how can we tell? How can anybody tell how long it will take to clear that wreck? One of the worst we've ever had . . . I don't know, Mr. Rearden. There are no other lines anywhere in that section. The track is torn for twelve hundred feet. There's been a rockslide. Our wrecking train can't get through. I don't know how we'll ever get those freight cars back on rails, or when. Can't expect it sooner than two weeks . . . Three days? Impossible, Mr. Rearden! ... But we can't help it! ... But surely you can tell your customers that it's an act of God! What if you do hold them up? Nobody can blame you in a case of this kind!"

  In the next two hours, with the assistance of his secretary, two young engineers from his shipping department, a road map, and the long-distance telephone, Rearden arranged for a fleet of trucks to proceed to the scene of the wreck, and for a chain of hopper cars to meet them at the nearest station of the Atlantic Southern. The hopper cars had been borrowed from Taggart Transcontinental. The trucks had been recruited from all over New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado. Rearden's engineers had hunted by telephone for private truck owners and had offered payments that cut all arguments short.

  It was the third of three shipments of copper that Rearden had expected ; two orders had not been delivered: one company had gone out of business, the other was still pleading delays that it could not help.

  He had attended to the matter without breaking his chain of appointments, without raising his voice, without sign of strain, uncertainty or apprehension; he had acted with the swift precision of a military commander under sudden fire--and Gwen Ives, his secretary, had acted as his calmest lieutenant. She was a girl in her late twenties, whose quietly harmonious, impenetrable face had a quality matching the best-designed office equipment; she was one of his most ruthlessly competent employees; her manner of performing her duties suggested the kind of rational cleanliness that would consider any element of emotion, while at work, as an unpardonable immorality.

  When the emergency was over, her sole comment was, "Mr. Rearden, I think we should ask all our suppliers to ship via Taggart Transcontinental." "I'm thinking that, too," he answered; then added, "Wire Fleming in Colorado. Tell him I'm taking an option on that copper mine property."

  He was back at his desk, speaking to his superintendent on one phone and to his purchasing manager on another, checking every date and ton of ore on hand--he could not leave to chance or to another person the possibility of a single hour's delay in the flow of a furnace: it was the last of the rail for the John Gait Line that was being poured--when the buzzer rang and Miss Ives' voice announced that his mother was outside, demanding to see him.

  He had asked his family never to come to the mills without appointment. He had been glad that they hated the place and seldom appeared in his office. What he now felt was a violent impulse to order his mother off the premises. Instead, with a greater effort than the problem of the train wreck had required of him, he said quietly, "All right. Ask her to come in."

  His mother came in with an air of belligerent defensiveness. She looked at his office as if she knew what it meant to him and as if she were declaring her resentment against anything being of greater importance to him than her own person. She took a long time settling down in an armchair, arranging and rearranging her bag, her gloves, the folds of her dress, while droning, "It's a fine thing when a mother has to wait in an anteroom and ask permission of a stenographer before she's allowed to see her own son who--"

  "Mother, is it anything important? I am very rushed today."

  "You're not the only one who's got problems. Of course, it's important. Do you think I'd go to the trouble of driving way out here, if it wasn't important?"

  "What is it?"

  "It's about Philip."

  "Yes?"

  "Philip is unhappy."

  "Well?"

  "He feels it's not right that he should have to depend on your charity and live on handouts and never be able to count on a single dollar of his own."

  "Well!" he said with a startled smile. "I've been waiting for him to realize that."

  "It isn't right for a sensitive man to be in such a position."

  "It certainly isn't."

  "I'm glad you agree with me. So wh
at you have to do is give him a job."

  "A ... what?"

  "You must give him a job, here, at the mills--but a nice, clean job, of course, with a desk and an office and a decent salary, where he wouldn't have to be among your day laborers and your smelly furnaces."

  He knew that he was hearing it; he could not make himself believe it. "Mother, you're not serious."

  "I certainly am. I happen to know that that's what he wants, only he's too proud to ask you for it. But if you offer it to him and make it look like it's you who're asking him a favor--why, I know he'd be happy to take it. That's why I had to come here to talk to you--so he wouldn't guess that I put you up to it."

  It was not in the nature of his consciousness to understand the nature of the things he was hearing. A single thought cut through his mind like a spotlight, making him unable to conceive how any eyes could miss it. The thought broke out of him as a cry of bewilderment: "But he knows nothing about the steel business!"

  "What has that got to do with it? He needs a job."

  "But he couldn't do the work."

  "He needs to gain self-confidence and to feel important."

  "But he wouldn't be any good whatever."

  "He needs to feel that he's wanted."

  "Here? What could I want him for?"

  "You hire plenty of strangers."

  "I hire men who produce. What has he got to offer?"

  "He's your brother, isn't he?"

  "What has that got to do with it?"

  She stared incredulously, in turn, silenced by shock. For a moment, they sat looking at each other, as if across an interplanetary distance.

  "He's your brother," she said, her voice like a phonograph record repeating a magic formula she could not permit herself to doubt. "He needs a position in the world. He needs a salary, so that he'd feel that he's got money coming to him as his due, not as alms."

  "As his due? But he wouldn't be worth a nickel to me."

  "Is that what you think of first? Your profit? I'm asking you to help your brother, and you're figuring how to make a nickel on him, and you won't help him unless there's money in it for you--is that it?" She saw the expression of his eyes, and she looked away, but spoke hastily, her voice rising. "Yes, sure, you're helping him--like you'd help any stray beggar. Material help--that's all you know or understand. Have you thought about his spiritual needs and what his position is doing to his self-respect? He doesn't want to live like a beggar. He wants to be independent of you."

  "By means of getting from me a salary he can't earn for work he can't do?"

  "You'd never miss it. You've got enough people here who're making money for you."

  "Are you asking me to help him stage a fraud of that kind?"

  "You don't have to put it that way."

  "Is it a fraud--or isn't it?"

  "That's why I can't talk to you--because you're not human. You have no pity, no feeling for your brother, no compassion for his feelings."

  "Is it a fraud or not?"

  "You have no mercy for anybody."

  "Do you think that a fraud of this kind would be just?"

  "You're the most immoral man living--you think of nothing but justice! You don't feel any love at all!"

  He got up, his movement abrupt and stressed, the movement of ending an interview and ordering a visitor out of his office. "Mother, I'm running a steel plant--not a whorehouse."

  "Henry!" The gasp of indignation was at his choice of language, nothing more.

  "Don't ever speak to me again about a job for Philip. I would not give him the job of a cinder sweeper. I would not allow him inside my mills. I want you to understand that, once and for all. You may try to help him in any way you wish, but don't ever let me see you thinking of my mills as a means to that end."

  The wrinkles of her soft chin trickled into a shape resembling a sneer. "What are they, your mills--a holy temple of some kind?"

  "Why . . . yes," he said softly, astonished at the thought.

  "Don't you ever think of people and of your moral duties?"

  "I don't know what it is that you choose to call morality. No, I don't think of people--except that if I gave a job to Philip, I wouldn't be able to face any competent man who needed work and deserved it."

  She got up. Her head was drawn into her shoulders, and the righteous bitterness of her voice seemed to push the words upward at his tall, straight figure: "That's your cruelty, that's what's mean and selfish about you. If you loved your brother, you'd give him a job he didn't deserve, precisely because he didn't deserve it--that would be true love and kindness and brotherhood. Else what's love for? If a man deserves a job, there's no virtue in giving it to him. Virtue is the giving of the undeserved."

  He was looking at her like a child at an unfamiliar nightmare, incredulity preventing it from becoming horror. "Mother," he said slowly, "you don't know what you're saying. I'm not able ever to despise you enough to believe that you mean it."

  The look on her face astonished him more than all the rest: it was a look of defeat and yet of an odd, sly, cynical cunning, as if, for a moment, she held some worldly wisdom that mocked his innocence.

  The memory of that look remained in his mind, like a warning signal telling him that he had glimpsed an issue which he had to understand. But he could not grapple with it, he could not force his mind to accept it as worthy of thought, he could find no clue except his dim uneasiness and his revulsion--and he had no time to give it, he could not think of it now, he was facing his next caller seated in front of his desk--he was listening to a man who pleaded for his life.

  The man did not state it in such terms, but Rearden knew that that was the essence of the case. What the man put into words was only a plea for five hundred tons of steel.

  He was Mr. Ward, of the Ward Harvester Company of Minnesota. It was an unpretentious company with an unblemished reputation, the kind of business concern that seldom grows large, but never fails. Mr. Ward represented the fourth generation of a family that had owned the plant and had given it the conscientious best of such ability as they possessed.

  He was a man in his fifties, with a square, stolid face. Looking at him, one knew that he would consider it as indecent to let his face show suffering as to remove his clothes in public. He spoke in a dry, businesslike manner. He explained that he had always dealt, as his father had, with one of the small steel companies now taken over by Orren Boyle's Associated Steel. He had waited for his last order of steel for a year. He had spent the last month struggling to obtain a personal interview with Rearden.

  "I know that your mills are running at capacity, Mr. Rearden," he said, "and I know that you are not in a position to take care of new orders, what with your biggest, oldest customers having to wait their turn, you being the only decent--I mean, reliable--steel manufacturer left in the country. I don't know what reason to offer you as to why you should want to make an exception in my case. But there was nothing else for me to do, except close the doors of my plant for good, and I"--there was a slight break in his voice--"I can't quite see my way to closing the doors . . . as yet . . . so I thought I'd speak to you, even if I didn't have much chance . . . still, I had to try everything possible."

  This was language that Rearden could understand. "I wish I could help you out," he said, "but this is the worst possible time for me, because of a very large, very special order that has to take precedence over everything."

  "I know. But would you just give me a hearing, Mr. Rearden?"

  "Sure."

  "If it's a question of money, I'll pay anything you ask. If I could make it worth your while that way, why, charge me any extra you please, charge me double the regular price, only let me have the steel. I wouldn't care if 1 had to sell the harvester at a loss this year, just so I could keep the doors open. I've got enough, personally, to run at a loss for a couple of years, if necessary, just to hold out--because, I figure, things can't go on this way much longer, conditions are bound to improve, they've got to or else w
e'll--" He did not finish. He said firmly, "They've got to."

  "They will," said Rearden.

  The thought of the John Galt Line ran through his mind like a harmony under the confident sound of his words. The John Galt Line was moving forward. The attacks on his Metal had ceased. He felt as if, miles apart across the country, he and Dagny Taggart now stood in empty space, their way cleared, free to finish the job. They'll leave us alone to do it, he thought. The words were like a battle hymn in his mind: They'll leave us alone.

  "Our plant capacity is one thousand harvesters per year," said Mr. Ward. "Last year, we put out three hundred. I scraped the steel together from bankruptcy sales, and begging a few tons here and there from big companies, and just going around like a scavenger to all sorts of unlikely places--well, I won't bore you with that, only I never thought I'd live to see the time when I'd have to do business that way. And all the while Mr. Orren Boyle was swearing to me that he was going to deliver the steel next week. But whatever he managed to pour, it went to new customers of his, for some reason nobody would mention, only I heard it whispered that they were men with some sort of political pull. And now I can't even get to Mr. Boyle at all. He's in Washington, been there for over a month. And all his office tells me is just that they can't help it, because they can't get the ore."

  "Don't waste your time on them," said Rearden. "You'll never get anything from that outfit."

  "You know, Mr. Rearden," he said in the tone of a discovery which he could not quite bring himself to believe, "I think there's something phony about the way Mr. Boyle runs his business. I can't understand what he's after. They've got half their furnaces idle, but last month there were all those big stories about Associated Steel in all the newspapers. About their output? Why, no--about the wonderful housing project that Mr. Boyle's just built for his workers. Last week, it was colored movies that Mr. Boyle sent to all the high schools, showing how steel is made and what great service it performs for everybody. Now Mr. Boyle's got a radio program, they give talks about the importance of the steel industry to the country and they keep saying that we must preserve the steel industry as a whole. I don't understand what he means by 'as a whole.' "