by Ayn Rand
"Hank, what does this look like?" she asked, pointing at an odd piece of wreckage at her feet; her voice had the intense, obsessed tone of a person stunned by a shock, cut off from reality. "What does it look like?"
"Are you hurt? What happened?"
"No! ... Oh, never mind, don't look at me! I'm all right. Look at this. Do you know what that is?"
"What did you do to yourself?"
"I had to dig it out of there. I'm all right."
"You're shaking."
"You will, too, in a moment. Hank! Look at it. Just look and tell me what you think it is."
He glanced down, then looked attentively--then he was sitting on the floor, studying the object intently. "It's a queer way to put a motor together," he said, frowning.
"Read this," she said, extending the pages.
He read, looked up and said, "Good God!"
She was sitting on the floor beside him, and for a moment they could say nothing else.
"It was the coil," she said. She felt as if her mind were racing, she could not keep up with all the things which a sudden blast had opened to her vision, and her words came hurtling against one another. "It was the coil that I noticed first--because I had seen drawings like it, not quite, but something like it, years ago, when I was in school--it was in an old book, it was given up as impossible long, long ago--but I liked to read everything I could find about railroad motors. That book said that there was a time when men were thinking of it--they worked on it, they spent years on experiments, but they couldn't solve it and they gave it up. It was forgotten for generations. I didn't think that any living scientist ever thought of it now. But someone did. Someone has solved it, now, today! ... Hank, do you understand? Those men, long ago, tried to invent a motor that would draw static electricity from the atmosphere, convert it and create its own power as it went along. They couldn't do it. They gave it up." She pointed at the broken shape. "But there it is."
He nodded. He was not smiling. He sat looking at the remnant, intent on some thought of his own; it did not seem to be a happy thought.
"Hank! Don't you understand what this means? It's the greatest revolution in power motors since the internal-combustion engine--greater than that! It wipes everything out--and makes everything possible. To hell with Dwight Sanders and all of them! Who'll want to look at a Diesel? Who'll want to worry about oil, coal or refueling stations ? Do you see what I see? A brand-new locomotive half the size of a single Diesel unit, and with ten times the power. A self-generator, working on a few drops of fuel, with no limits to its energy. The cleanest, swiftest, cheapest means of motion ever devised. Do you see what this will do to our transportation systems and to the country--in about one year?"
There was no spark of excitement in his face. He said slowly, "Who designed it? Why was it left here?"
"We'll find out."
He weighed the pages in his hand reflectively. "Dagny," he asked, "if you don't find the man who made it, will you be able to reconstruct that motor from what is left?"
She took a long moment, then the word fell with a sinking sound: "No."
"Nobody will. He had it all right. It worked--judging by what he writes here. It is the greatest thing I've ever laid eyes on. It was. We can't make it work again. To supply what's missing would take a mind as great as his."
"I'll find him--if I have to drop every other thing I'm doing."
"--and if he's still alive."
She heard the unstated guess in the tone of his voice. "Why do you say it like that?"
"I don't think he is. If he were, would he leave an invention of this kind to rot on a junk pile? Would he abandon an achievement of this size? If he were still alive, you would have had the locomotives with the self-generators years ago. And you wouldn't have had to look for him, because the whole world would know his name by now."
"I don't think this model was made so very long ago."
He looked at the paper of the manuscript and at the rusty tarnish of the motor. "About ten years ago, I'd guess. Maybe a little longer."
"We've got to find him or somebody who knew him. This is more important--"
"--than anything owned or manufactured by anyone today. I don't think we'll find him. And if we don't, nobody will be able to repeat his performance. Nobody will rebuild his motor. There's not enough of it left. It's only a lead, an invaluable lead, but it would take the sort of mind that's born once in a century, to complete it. Do you see our present-day motor designers attempting it?"
"No."
"There's not a first-rate designer left. There hasn't been a new idea in motors for years. That's one profession that seems to be dying--or dead."
"Hank, do you know what that motor would have meant, if built?"
He chuckled briefly. "I'd say: about ten years added to the life of every person in this country--if you consider how many things it would have made easier and cheaper to produce, how many hours of human labor it would have released for other work, and how much more anyone's work would have brought him. Locomotives? What about automobiles and ships and airplanes with a motor of this kind? And tractors. And power plants. All hooked to an unlimited supply of energy, with no fuel to pay for, except a few pennies' worth to keep the converter going. That motor could have set the whole country in motion and on fire. It would have brought an electric light bulb into every hole, even into the homes of those people we saw down in the valley."
"It would have? It will. I'm going to find the man who made it."
"We'll try."
He rose abruptly, but stopped to glance down at the broken remnant and said, with a chuckle that was not gay, "There was the motor for the John Galt Line."
Then he spoke in the brusque manner of an executive. "First, we'll try to see if we can find their personnel office here. We'll look for their records, if there's any left. We want the names of their research staff and their engineers. I don't know who owns this place now, and I suspect that the owners will be hard to find, or they wouldn't have let it come to this. Then we'll go over every room in the laboratory. Later, we'll get a few engineers to fly here and comb the rest of the place."
They started out, but she stopped for a moment on the threshold. "Hank, that motor was the most valuable thing inside this factory," she said, her voice low. "It was more valuable than the whole factory and everything it ever contained. Yet it was passed up and left in the refuse. It was the one thing nobody found worth the trouble of taking."
"That's what frightens me about this," he answered.
The personnel office did not take them long. They found it by the sign which was left on the door, but it was the only thing left. There was no furniture inside, no papers, nothing but the splinters of smashed windows.
They went back to the room of the motor. Crawling on hands and knees, they examined every scrap of the junk that littered the floor. There was little to find. They put aside the papers that seemed to contain laboratory notes, but none referred to the motor, and there were no pages of the manuscript among them. The popcorn wrappers and the whiskey bottle testified to the kind of invading hordes that had rolled through the room, like waves washing the remnants of destruction away to unknown bottoms.
They put aside a few bits of metal that could have belonged to the motor, but these were too small to be of value. The motor looked as if parts of it had been ripped off, perhaps by someone who thought he could put them to some customary use. What had remained was too unfamiliar to interest anybody.
On aching knees, her palms spread flat upon the gritty floor, she felt the anger trembling within her, the hurting, helpless anger that answers the sight of desecration. She wondered whether someone's diapers hung on a clothesline made of the motor's missing wires--whether its wheels had become a rope pulley over a communal well--whether its cylinder was now a pot containing geraniums on the window sill of the sweetheart of the man with the whiskey bottle.
There was a remnant of light on the hill, but a blue haze was moving in upon the vall
eys, and the red and gold of the leaves was spreading to the sky in strips of sunset.
It was dark when they finished. She rose and leaned against the empty frame of the window for a touch of cool air on her forehead. The sky was dark blue. "It could have set the whole country in motion and on fire." She looked down at the motor. She looked out at the country. She moaned suddenly, hit by a single long shudder, and dropped her head on her arm, standing pressed to the frame of the window.
"What's the matter?" he asked.
She did not answer.
He looked out. Far below, in the valley, in the gathering night, there trembled a few pale smears which were the lights of tallow candles.
CHAPTER X
WYATT'S TORCH
"God have mercy on us, ma'am!" said the clerk of the Hall of Records. "Nobody knows who owns that factory now. I guess nobody will ever know it."
The clerk sat at a desk in a ground-floor office, where dust lay undisturbed on the files and few visitors ever called. He looked at the shining automobile parked outside his window, in the muddy square that had once been the center of a prosperous county seat; he looked with a faint, wistful wonder at his two unknown visitors.
"Why?" asked Dagny.
He pointed helplessly at the mass of papers he had taken out of the files. "The court will have to decide who owns it, which I don't think any court can do. If a court ever gets to it. I don't think it will."
"Why? What happened?"
"Well, it was sold out--the Twentieth Century, I mean. The Twentieth Century Motor Company. It was sold twice, at the same time and to two different sets of owners. That was sort of a big scandal at the time, two years ago, and now it's just"--he pointed--"just a bunch of paper lying around, waiting for a court hearing. I don't see how any judge will be able to untangle any property rights out of it--or any right at all."
"Would you tell me please just what happened?"
"Well, the last legal owner of the factory was The People's Mortgage Company, of Rome, Wisconsin. That's the town the other side of the factory, thirty miles north. That Mortgage Company was a sort of noisy outfit that did a lot of advertising about easy credit. Mark Yonts was the head of it. Nobody knew where he came from and nobody knows where he's gone to now, but what they discovered, the morning after The People's Mortgage Company collapsed, was that Mark Yonts had sold the Twentieth Century Motor factory to a bunch of suckers from South Dakota, and that he'd also given it as collateral for a loan from a bank in Illinois. And when they took a look at the factory, they discovered that he'd moved all the machinery out and sold it piecemeal, God only knows where and to whom. So it seems like everybody owns the place--and nobody. That's how it stands now--the South Dakotans and the bank and the attorney for the creditors of The People's Mortgage Company all suing one another, all claiming this factory, and nobody having the right to move a wheel in it, except that there's no wheels left to move."
"Did Mark Yonts operate the factory before he sold it?"
"Lord, no, ma'am! He wasn't the kind that ever operates anything. He didn't want to make money, only to get it. Guess he got it, too--more than anyone could have made out of that factory."
He wondered why the blond, hard-faced man, who sat with the woman in front of his desk, looked grimly out the window at their car, at a large object wrapped in canvas, roped tightly under the raised cover of the car's luggage compartment.
"What happened to the factory records?"
"Which do you mean, ma'am?"
"Their production records. Their work records. Their... personnel files."
"Oh, there's nothing left of that now. There's been a lot of looting going on. All the mixed owners grabbed what furniture or things they could haul out of there, even if the sheriff did put a padlock on the door. The papers and stuff like that--I guess it was all taken by the scavengers from Starnesville, that's the place down in the valley, where they're having it pretty tough these days. They burned the stuff for kindling, most likely."
"Is there anyone left here who used to work in the factory?" asked Rearden.
"No, sir. Not around here. They all lived down in Starnesville."
"All of them?" whispered Dagny; she was thinking of the ruins. "The ... engineers, too?"
"Yes, ma'am. That was the factory town. They've all gone, long ago."
"Do you happen to remember the names of any men who worked there?"
"No, ma'am."
"What owner was the last to operate the factory?" asked Rearden.
"I couldn't say, sir. There's been so much trouble up there and the place has changed hands so many times, since old Jed Starnes died. He's the man who built the factory. He made this whole part of the country, I guess. He died twelve years ago."
"Can you give us the names of all the owners since?"
"No, sir. We had a fire in the old courthouse, about three years ago, and all the old records are gone. I don't know where you could trace them now."
"You don't know how this Mark Yonts happened to acquire the factory?"
"Yes, I know that. He bought it from Mayor Bascom of Rome. How Mayor Bascom happened to own it, I don't know."
"Where is Mayor Bascom now?"
"Still there, in Rome."
"Thank you very much," said Rearden, rising. "We'll call on him."
They were at the door when the clerk asked, "What is it you're looking for, sir?"
"We're looking for a friend of ours," said Rearden. "A friend we've lost, who used to work in that factory."
Mayor Bascom of Rome, Wisconsin, leaned back in his chair; his chest and stomach formed a pear-shaped outline under his soiled shirt. The air was a mixture of sun and dust, pressing heavily upon the porch of his house. He waved his arm, the ring on his finger flashing a large topaz of poor quality.
"No use, no use, lady, absolutely no use," he said. "Would be just a waste of your time, trying to question the folks around here. There's no factory people left, and nobody that would remember much about them. So many families have moved away that what's left here is plain no good, if I do say so myself, plain no good, just being Mayor of a bunch of trash."
He had offered chairs to his two visitors, but he did not mind it if the lady preferred to stand at the porch railing. He leaned back, studying her long-lined figure; high-class merchandise, he thought; but then, the man with her was obviously rich.
Dagny stood looking at the streets of Rome. There were houses, sidewalks, lampposts, even a sign advertising soft drinks; but they looked as if it were now only a matter of inches and hours before the town would reach the stage of Starnesville.
"Naw, there's no factory records left," said Mayor Bascom. "If that's what you want to find, lady, give it up. It's like chasing leaves in a storm now. Just like leaves in a storm. Who cares about papers? At a time like this, what people save is good, solid, material objects. One's got to be practical."
Through the dusty windowpanes, they could see the living room of his house: there were Persian rugs on a buckled wooden floor, a portable bar with chromium strips against a wall stained by the seepage of last year's rains, an expensive radio with an old kerosene lamp placed on top of it.
"Sure, it's me that sold the factory to Mark Yonts. Mark was a nice fellow, a nice, lively, energetic fellow. Sure, he did trim a few corners, but who doesn't? Of course, he went a bit too far. That, I didn't expect. I thought he was smart enough to stay within the law--whatever's left of it nowadays."
Mayor Bascom smiled, looking at them in a manner of placid frankness. His eyes were shrewd without intelligence, his smile good-natured without kindness.
"I don't think you folks are detectives," he said, "but even if you were, it wouldn't matter to me. I didn't get any rake-off from Mark, he didn't let me in on any of his deals, I haven't any idea where he's gone to now." He sighed. "I liked that fellow. Wish he'd stayed around. Never mind the Sunday sermons. He had to live, didn't he? He was no worse than anybody, only smarter. Some get caught at it and some don't--that
's the only difference.... Nope, I didn't know what he was going to do with it, when he bought that factory. Sure, he paid me quite a bit more than the old booby trap was worth. Sure, he was doing me a favor when he bought it. Nope, I didn't put any pressure on him to make him buy it. Wasn't necessary. I'd done him a few favors before. There's plenty of laws that's sort of made of rubber, and a mayor's in a position to stretch them a bit for a friend. Well, what the hell? That's the only way anybody ever gets rich in this world"--he glanced at the luxurious black car--"as you ought to know."
"You were telling us about the factory," said Rearden, trying to control himself.
"What I can't stand," said Mayor Bascom, "is people who talk about principles. No principle ever filled anybody's milk bottle. The only thing that counts in life is solid, material assets. It's no time for theories, when everything is falling to pieces around us. Well, me--I don't aim to go under. Let them keep their ideas and I'll take the factory. I don't want ideas, I just want my three square meals a day."
"Why did you buy that factory?"
"Why does anybody buy any business? To squeeze whatever can be squeezed out of it. I know a good chance when I see it. It was a bankruptcy sale and nobody much who'd want to bid on the old mess. So I got the place for peanuts. Didn't have to hold it long, either--Mark took it off my hands in two-three months. Sure, it was a smart deal, if I say so myself. No big business tycoon could have done any better with it."
"Was the factory operating when you took it over?"
"Naw. It was shut down."
"Did you attempt to reopen it?"
"Not me. I'm a practical person."
"Can you recall the names of any men who worked there?"
"No. Never met 'em."
"Did you move anything out of the factory?"
"Well, I'll tell you. I took a look around--and what I liked was old Jed's desk. Old Jed Starnes. He was a real big shot in his time. Wonderful desk, solid mahogany. So I carted it home. And some executive, don't know who he was, had a stall shower in his bathroom, the like of which I never saw. A glass door with a mermaid cut in the glass, real art work, and hot stuff, too, hotter than any oil painting. So I had that shower lifted and moved here. What the hell, I owned it, didn't I? I was entitled to get something valuable out of that factory."