by Ayn Rand
"Don't get up--stay there--it's so obvious that you've been waiting for me that I want to look at it longer."
He said it, from the doorway of her apartment, seeing her stretched in an armchair, seeing the eager little jolt that threw her shoulders forward as she was about to rise; he was smiling.
He noted--as if some part of him were watching his reactions with detached curiosity--that his smile and his sudden sense of gaiety were real. He grasped a feeling that he had always experienced, but never identified because it had always been absolute and immediate: a feeling that forbade him ever to face her in pain. It was much more than the pride of wishing to conceal his suffering: it was the feeling that suffering must not be granted recognition in her presence, that no form of claim between them should ever be motivated by pain and aimed at pity. It was not pity that he brought here or came here to find.
"Do you still need proof that I'm always waiting for you?" she asked, leaning obediently back in her chair; her voice was neither tender nor pleading, but bright and mocking.
"Dagny, why is it that most women would never admit that, but you do?"
"Because they're never sure that they ought to be wanted. I am."
"I do admire self-confidence."
"Self-confidence was only one part of what I said, Hank."
"What's the whole?"
"Confidence of my value--and yours." He glanced at her as if catching the spark of a sudden thought, and she laughed, adding, "I wouldn't be sure of holding a man like Orren Boyle, for instance. He wouldn't want me at all. You would."
"Are you saying," he asked slowly, "that I rose in your estimation when you found that I wanted you?"
"Of course."
"That's not the reaction of most people to being wanted."
"It isn't."
"Most people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them."
"I feel that others live up to me, if they want me. And that is the way you feel, too, Hank, about yourself--whether you admit it or not."
That's not what I said to you then, on that first morning--he thought, looking down at her. She lay stretched out lazily, her face blank, but her eyes bright with amusement. He knew that she was thinking of it and that she knew he was. He smiled, but said nothing else.
As he sat half-stretched on the couch, watching her across the room, he felt at peace-as if some temporary wall had risen between him and the things he had felt on his way here. He told her about his encounter with the man from the State Science Institute, because, even though he knew that the event held danger, an odd, glowing sense of satisfaction still remained from it in his mind.
He chuckled at her look of indignation. "Don't bother being angry at them," he said. "It's no worse than all the rest of what they're doing every day."
"Hank, do you want me to speak to Dr. Stadler about it?"
"Certainly not!"
"He ought to stop it. He could at least do that much."
"I'd rather go to jail. Dr. Stadler? You're not having anything to do with him, are you?"
"I saw him a few days ago."
"Why?"
"In regard to the motor."
"The motor ... ?" He said it slowly, in a strange way, as if the thought of the motor had suddenly brought back to him a realm he had forgotten. "Dagny ... the man who invented that motor ... he did exist, didn't he?"
"Why . . . of course. What do you mean?"
"I mean only that ... that it's a pleasant thought, isn't it? Even if he's dead now, he was alive once . . . so alive that he designed that motor...."
"What's the matter, Hank?"
"Nothing. Tell me about the motor."
She told him about her meeting with Dr. Stadler. She got up and paced the room, while speaking; she could not lie still, she always felt a surge of hope and of eagerness for action when she dealt with the subject of the motor.
The first thing he noticed were the lights of the city beyond the window: he felt as if they were being turned on, one by one, forming the great skyline he loved; he felt it, even though he knew that the lights had been there all the time. Then he understood that the thing which was returning was within him: the shape coming back drop by drop was his love for the city. Then he knew that it had come back because he was looking at the city past the taut, slender figure of a woman whose head was lifted eagerly as at a sight of distance, whose steps were a restless substitute for flight. He was looking at her as at a stranger, he was barely aware that she was a woman, but the sight was flowing into a feeling the words for which were: This is the world and the core of it, this is what made the city--they go together, the angular shapes of the buildings and the angular lines of a face stripped of everything but purpose--the rising steps of steel and the steps of a being intent upon his goal--this is what they had been, all the men who had lived to invent the lights, the steel, the furnaces, the motors-they were the world, they, not the men who crouched in dark corners, half-begging, half-threatening, boastfully displaying their open sores as their only claim on life and virtue--so long as he knew that there existed one man with the bright courage of a new thought, could he give up the world to those others?--so long as he could find a single sight to give him a life-restoring shot of admiration, could he believe that the world belonged to the sores, the moans and the guns?--the men who invented motors did exist, he would never doubt their reality, it was his vision of them that had made the contrast unbearable, so that even the loathing was the tribute of his loyalty to them and to that world which was theirs and his.
"Darling ..." he said, "darling . . ." like a man awakening suddenly, when he noticed that she had stopped speaking.
"What's the matter, Hank?" she asked softly.
"Nothing . . . Except that you shouldn't have called Stadler." His face was bright with confidence, his voice sounded amused, protective and gentle; she could discover nothing else, he looked as he had always looked, it was only the note of gentleness that seemed strange and new.
"I kept feeling that I shouldn't have," she said, "but I didn't know why."
"I'll tell you why." He leaned forward. "What he wanted from you was a recognition that he was still the Dr. Robert Stadler he should have been, but wasn't and knew he wasn't. He wanted you to grant him your respect, in spite of and in contradiction to his actions. He wanted you to juggle reality for him, so that his greatness would remain, but the State Science Institute would be wiped out, as if it had never existed--and you're the only one who could do it for him."
"Why I?"
"Because you're the victim."
She looked at him, startled. He spoke intently; he felt a sudden, violent clarity of perception, as if a surge of energy were rushing into the activity of sight, fusing the half-seen and half-grasped into a single shape and direction.
"Dagny, they're doing something that we've never understood. They know something which we don't, but should discover. I can't see it fully yet, but I'm beginning to see parts of it. That looter from the State Science Institute was scared when I refused to help him pretend that he was just an honest buyer of my Metal. He was scared way deep. Of what? I don't know--public opinion was just his name for it, but it's not the full name. Why should he have been scared? He has the guns, the jails, the laws--he could have seized the whole of my mills, if he wished, and nobody would have risen to defend me, and he knew it--so why should he have cared what I thought? But he did. It was I who had to tell him that he wasn't a looter, but my customer and friend. That's what he needed from me. And that's what Dr. Stadler needed from you--it was you who had to act as if he were a great man who had never tried to destroy your rail and my Metal. I don't know what it is that they think they accomplish--but they want us to pretend that we see the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us. I don't know the nature of that sanction--but, Dagny, I know that if we value our lives, we must not give it to them. If they put you on a torture rack, don't give it to them. Let them destroy your railroad and my
mills, but don't give it to them. Because I know this much: I know that that's our only chance."
She had remained standing still before him, looking attentively at the faint outline of some shape she, too, had tried to grasp.
"Yes ..." she said, "yes, I know what you've seen in them.... I've felt it, too--but it's only like something brushing past that's gone before I know I've seen it, like a touch of cold air, and what's left is always the feeling that I should have stopped it.... I know that you're right. I can't understand their game, but this much is right: We must not see the world as they want us to see it. It's some sort of fraud, very ancient and very vast--and the key to break it is: to check every premise they teach us, to question every precept, to--"
She whirled to him at a sudden thought, but she cut the motion and the words in the same instant: the next words-would have been the ones she did not want to say to him. She stood looking at him with a slow, bright smile of curiosity.
Somewhere within him, he knew the thought she would not name, but he knew it only in that prenatal shape which has to find its words in the future. He did not pause to grasp it now--because in the flooding brightness of what he felt, another thought, which was its predecessor, had become clear to him and had been holding him for many minutes past. He rose, approached her and took her in his arms.
He held the length of her body pressed to his, as if their bodies were two currents rising upward together, each to a single point, each carrying the whole of their consciousness to the meeting of their lips.
What she felt in that moment contained, as one nameless part of it, the knowledge of the beauty in the posture of his body as he held her, as they stood in the middle of a room high above the lights of the city.
What he knew, what he had discovered tonight, was that his recaptured love of existence had not been given back to him by the return of his desire for her--but that the desire had returned after he had regained his world, the love, the value and the sense of his world--and that the desire was not an answer to her body, but a celebration of himself and of his will to live.
He did not know it, he did not think of it, he was past the need of words, but in the moment when he felt the response of her body to his, he felt also the unadmitted knowledge that that which he had called her depravity was her highest virtue--this capacity of hers to feel the joy of being, as he felt it.
CHAPTER II
THE ARISTOCRACY OF PULL
The calendar in the sky beyond the window of her office said: September 2. Dagny leaned wearily across her desk. The first light to snap on at the approach of dusk was always the ray that hit the calendar; when the white-glowing page appeared above the roofs, it blurred the city, hastening the darkness.
She had looked at that distant page every evening of the months behind her. Your days are numbered, it had seemed to say--as if it were marking a progression toward something it knew, but she didn't. Once, it had clocked her race to build the John Gait Line; now it was clocking her race against an unknown destroyer.
One by one, the men who had built new towns in Colorado, had departed into some silent unknown, from which no voice or person had yet returned. The towns they had left were dying. Some of the factories they built had remained ownerless and locked; others had been seized by the local authorities; the machines in both stood still.
She had felt as if a dark map of Colorado were spread before her like a traffic control panel, with a few lights scattered through its mountains. One after another, the lights had gone out. One after another, the men had vanished. There had been a pattern about it, which she felt, but could not define; she had become able to predict, almost with certainty, who would go next and when; she was unable to grasp the "why?"
Of the men who had once greeted her descent from the cab of an engine on the platform of Wyatt Junction, only Ted Nielsen was left, still running the plant of Nielsen Motors. "Ted, you won't be the next one to go?" she had asked him, on his recent visit to New York; she had asked it, trying to smile. He had answered grimly, "I hope not." "What do you mean, you hope?--aren't you sure?" He had said slowly, heavily, "Dagny, I've always thought that I'd rather die than stop working. But so did the men who're gone. It seems impossible to me that I could ever want to quit. But a year ago, it seemed impossible that they ever could. Those men were my friends. They knew what their going would do to us, the survivors. They would not have gone like that, without a word, leaving to us the added terror of the inexplicable-unless they had some reason of supreme importance. A month ago, Roger Marsh, of Marsh Electric, told me that he'd have himself chained to his desk, so that he wouldn't be able to leave it, no matter what ghastly temptation struck him. He was furious with anger at the men who'd left. He swore to me that he'd never do it. 'And if it's something that I can't resist,' he said, 'I swear that I'll keep enough of my mind to leave you a letter and give you some hint of what it is, so that you won't have to rack your brain in the kind of dread we're both feeling now.' That's what he swore. Two weeks ago, he went. He left me no letter.... Dagny, I can't tell what I'll do when I see it--whatever it was that they saw when they went."
It seemed to her that some destroyer was moving soundlessly through the country and the lights were dying at his touch--someone, she thought bitterly, who had reversed the principle of the Twentieth Century motor and was now turning kinetic energy into static.
That was the enemy--she thought, as she sat at her desk in the gathering twilight--with whom she was running a race. The monthly report from Quentin Daniels lay on her desk. She could not be certain, as yet, that Daniels would solve the secret of the motor; but the destroyer, she thought, was moving swiftly, surely, at an ever accelerating tempo; she wondered whether, by the time she rebuilt the motor, there would be any world left to use it.
She had liked Quentin Daniels from the moment he entered her office on their first interview. He was a lanky man in his early thirties, with a homely, angular face and an attractive smile. A hint of the smile remained in his features at all times, particularly when he listened; it was a look of good-natured amusement, as if he were swiftly and patiently discarding the irrelevant in the words he heard and going straight to the point a moment ahead of the speaker.
"Why did you refuse to work for Dr. Stadler?" she asked.
The hint of his smile grew harder and more stressed; this was as near as he came to showing an emotion; the emotion was anger. But he answered in his even, unhurried drawl, "You know, Dr. Stadler once said that the first word of 'Free, scientific inquiry' was redundant. He seems to have forgotten it. Well, I'll just say that 'Governmental scientific inquiry' is a contradiction in terms."
She asked him what position he held at the Utah Institute of Technology. "Night watchman," he answered. "What?" she gasped. "Night watchman," he repeated politely, as if she had not caught the words, as if there were no cause for astonishment.
Under her questioning, he explained that he did not like any of the scientific foundations left in existence, that he would have liked a job in the research laboratory of some big industrial concern--"But which one of them can afford to undertake any long-range work nowadays, and why should they?"--so when the Utah Institute of Technology was closed for lack of funds, he had remained there as night watchman and sole inhabitant of the place; the salary was sufficient to pay for his needs--and the Institute's laboratory was there, intact, for his own private, undisturbed use.
"So you're doing research work of your own?"
"That's right."
"For what purpose?"
"For my own pleasure."
"What do you intend to do, if you discover something of scientific importance or commercial value? Do you intend to put it to some public use?"
"I don't know. I don't think so."
"Haven't you any desire to be of service to humanity?"
"I don't talk that kind of language, Miss Taggart. I don't think you do, either."
She laughed. "I think we'll get along together, you and I."
When she had told him the story of the motor, when he had studied the manuscript, he made no comment, but merely said that he would take the job on any terms she named.
She asked him to choose his own terms. She protested, in astonishment, against the low monthly salary he quoted. "Miss Taggart," he said, "if there's something that I won't take, it's something for nothing. I don't know how long you might have to pay me, or whether you'll get anything at all in return. I'll gamble on my own mind. I won't let anybody else do it. I don't collect for an intention. But I sure do intend to collect for goods delivered. If I succeed, that's when I'll skin you alive, because what I want then is a percentage, and it's going to be high, but it's going to be worth your while."
When he named the percentage he wanted, she laughed. "That is skinning me alive and it will be worth my while. Okay."
They agreed that it was to be her private project and that he was to be her private employee; neither of them wanted to have to deal with the interference of the Taggart Research Department. He asked to remain in Utah, in his post of watchman, where he had all the laboratory equipment and all the privacy he needed. The project was to remain confidential between them, until and unless he succeeded.
"Miss Taggart," he said in conclusion, "I don't know how many years it will take me to solve this, if ever. But I know that if I spend the rest of my life on it and succeed, I will die satisfied." He added, "There's only one thing that I want more than to solve it: it's to meet the man who has."
Once a month, since his return to Utah, she had sent him a check and he had sent her a report on his work. It was too early to hope, but his reports were the only bright points in the stagnant fog of her days in the office.
She raised her head, as she finished reading his pages. The calendar in the distance said: September 2. The lights of the city had grown beneath it, spreading and glittering. She thought of Rearden. She wished he were in the city; she wished she would see him tonight.