Atlas Shrugged

by Ayn Rand

  He had handed to his attorney a signed blank check and said, "Get me a divorce. On any grounds and at any cost. I don't care what means you use, how many of their judges you purchase or whether you find it necessary to stage a frame-up of my wife. Do whatever you wish. But there is to be no alimony and no property settlement." The attorney had looked at him with the hint of a wise, sad smile, as if this were an event he had expected to happen long ago. He had answered, "Okay, Hank. It can be done. But it will take some time." "Make it as fast as you can."

  No one had questioned him about his signature on the Gift Certificate. But he had noticed that the men at the mills looked at him with a kind of searching curiosity, almost as if they expected to find the scars of some physical torture on his body.

  He felt nothing--nothing but the sense of an even, restful twilight, like a spread of slag over a molten metal, when it crusts and swallows the last brilliant spurt of the white glow within. He felt nothing at the thought of the looters who were now going to manufacture Rearden Metal. His desire to hold his right to it and proudly to be the only one to sell it, had been his form of respect for his fellow men, his belief that to trade with them was an act of honor. The belief, the respect and the desire were gone. He did not care what men made, what they sold, where they bought his Metal or whether any of them would know that it had been his. The human shapes moving past him in the streets of the city were physical objects without any meaning. The countryside -with the darkness washing away all traces of human activity, leaving only an untouched earth which he had once been able to handle--was real.

  He carried a gun in his pocket, as advised by the policemen of the radio car that patrolled the roads; they had warned him that no road was safe after dark, these days. He felt, with a touch of mirthless amusement, that the gun had been needed at the mills, not in the peaceful safety of loneliness and night; what could some starving vagrant take from him, compared to what had been taken by men who claimed to be his protectors?

  He walked with an effortless speed, feeling relaxed by a form of activity that was natural to him. This was his period of training for solitude, he thought; he had to learn to live without any awareness of people, the awareness that now paralyzed him with revulsion. He had once built his fortune, starting out with empty hands; now he had to rebuild his life, starting out with an empty spirit.

  He would give himself a short span of time for the training, he thought, and then he would claim the one incomparable value still left to him, the one desire that had remained pure and whole: he would go to Dagny. Two commandments had grown in his mind; one was a duty, the other a passionate wish. The first was never to let her learn the reason of his surrender to the looters; the second was to say to her the words which he should have known at their first meeting and should have said on the gallery of Ellis Wyatt's house.

  There was nothing but the strong summer starlight to guide him, as he walked, but he could distinguish the highway and the remnant of a stone fence ahead, at the corner of a country crossroad. The fence had nothing to protect any longer, only a spread of weeds, a willow tree bending over the road and, farther in the distance, the ruin of a farmhouse with the starlight showing through its roof.

  He walked, thinking that even this sight still retained the power to be of value: it gave him the promise of a long stretch of space undisturbed by human intrusion.

  The man who stepped suddenly out into the road must have come from behind the willow tree, but so swiftly that it seemed as if he had sprung up from the middle of the highway. Rearden's hand went to the gun in his pocket, but stopped: he knew--by the proud posture of the body standing in the open, by the straight line of the shoulders against the starlit sky--that the man was not a bandit. When he heard the voice, he knew that the man was not a beggar.

  "I should like to speak to you, Mr. Rearden."

  The voice had the firmness, the clarity and the special courtesy peculiar to men who are accustomed to giving orders.

  "Go ahead," said Rearden, "provided you don't intend to ask me for help or money."

  The man's garments were rough, but efficiently trim. He wore dark trousers and a dark blue windbreaker closed tight at his throat, prolonging the lines of his long, slender figure. He wore a dark blue cap, and all that could be seen of him in the night were his hands, his face and a patch of gold-blond hair on his temple. The hands held no weapon, only a package wrapped in burlap, the size of a carton of cigarettes.

  "No, Mr. Rearden," he said, "I don't intend to ask you for money, but to return it to you."

  "To return money?"

  "Yes."

  "What money?"

  "A small refund on a very large debt."

  "Owed by you?"

  "No, not by me. It is only a token payment, but I want you to accept it as proof that if we live long enough, you and I, every dollar of that debt will be returned to you."

  "What debt?"

  "The money that was taken from you by force."

  He extended the package to Rearden, flipping the burlap open. Rearden saw the starlight run like fire along a mirror-smooth surface. He knew, by its weight and texture, that what he held was a bar of solid gold.

  He looked from the bar to the man's face, but the face seemed harder and less revealing than the surface of the metal.

  "Who are you?" asked Rearden.

  "The friend of the friendless."

  "Did you come here to give this to me?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you mean that you had to stalk me at night, on a lonely road, in order, not to rob me, but to hand me a bar of gold?"

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "When robbery is done in open daylight by sanction of the law, as it is done today, then any act of honor or restitution has to be hidden underground."

  "What made you think that I'd accept a gift of this kind?"

  "It is not a gift, Mr. Rearden. It is your own money. But I have one favor to ask of you. It is a request, not a condition, because there can be no such thing as conditional property. The gold is yours, so you are free to use it as you please. But I risked my life to bring it to you tonight, so I am asking, as a favor, that you save it for the future or spend it on yourself. On nothing but your own comfort and pleasure. Do not give it away and, above all, do not put it into your business."

  "Why?"

  "Because I don't want it to be of any benefit to anybody but you. Otherwise, I will have broken an oath taken long ago--as I am breaking every rule I had set for myself by speaking to you tonight."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I have been collecting this money for you for a long time. But I did not intend to see you or tell you about it or give it to you until much later."

  "Then why did you?"

  "Because I couldn't stand it any longer."

  "Stand what?"

  "I thought that I had seen everything one could see and that there was nothing I could not stand seeing. But when they took Rearden Metal away from you, it was too much, even for me. I know that you don't need this gold at present. What you need is the justice which it represents, and the knowledge that there are men who care for justice."

  Struggling not to give in to an emotion which he felt rising through his bewilderment, past all his doubts, Rearden tried to study the man's face, searching for some clue to help him understand. But the face had no expression; it had not changed once while speaking; it looked as if the man had lost the capacity to feel long ago, and what remained of him were only features that seemed implacable and dead. With a shudder of astonishment, Rearden found himself thinking that it was not the face of a man, but of an avenging angel.

  "Why did you care?" asked Rearden. "What do I mean to you?"

  "Much more than you have reason to suspect. And I have a friend to whom you mean much more than you will ever learn. He would have given anything to stand by you today. But he can't come to you. So I came in his place."

  "What friend?"

  "I prefer not to name
him."

  "Did you say that you've spent a long time collecting this money for .me?"

  "I have collected much more than this." He pointed at the gold. "I am holding it in your name and I will turn it over to you when the time comes. This is only a sample, as proof that it does exist. And if you reach the day when you find yourself robbed of the last of your fortune, I want you to remember that you have a large bank account waiting for you."

  "What account?"

  "If you try to think of all the money that has been taken from you by force, you will know that your account represents a considerable sum."

  "How did you collect it? Where did this gold come from?"

  "It was taken from those who robbed you."

  "Taken by whom?"

  "By me."

  "Who are you?"

  "Ragnar Danneskjold."

  Rearden looked at him for a long, still moment, then let the gold fall out of his hands.

  Danneskjold's eyes did not follow it to the ground, but remained fixed on Rearden with no change of expression. "Would you rather I were a law-abiding citizen, Mr. Rearden? If so, which law should I abide by? Directive 10-289?"

  "Ragnar Danneskjold ..." said Rearden, as if he were seeing the whole of the past decade, as if he were looking at the enormity of a crime spread through ten years and held within two words.

  "Look more carefully, Mr. Rearden. There are only two modes of living left to us today: to be a looter who robs disarmed victims or to be a victim who works for the benefit of his own despoilers. I did not choose to be either."

  "You chose to live by means of force, like the rest of them."

  "Yes--openly. Honestly, if you will. I do not rob men who are tied and gagged, I do not demand that my victims help me, I do not tell them that I am acting for their own good. I stake my life in every encounter with men, and they have a chance to match their guns and their brains against mine in fair battle. Fair? It's I against the organized strength, the guns, the planes, the battleships of five continents. If it's a moral judgment that you wish to pronounce, Mr. Rearden, then who is the man of higher morality: I or Wesley Mouch?"

  "I have no answer to give you," said Rearden, his voice low.

  "Why should you be shocked, Mr. Rearden? I am merely complying with the system which my fellow men have established. If they believe that force is the proper means to deal with one another, I am giving them what they ask for. If they believe that the purpose of my life is to serve them, let them try to enforce their creed. If they believe that my mind is their property--let them come and get it."

  "But what sort of life have you chosen? To what purpose are you giving your mind?"

  "To the cause of my love."

  "Which is what?"

  "Justice."

  "Served by being a pirate?"

  "By working for the day when I won't have to be a pirate any longer."

  "Which day is that?"

  "The day when you'll be free to make a profit on Rearden Metal."

  "Oh God!" said Rearden, laughing, his voice desperate. "Is that your ambition?"

  Danneskjold's face did not change. "It is."

  "Do you expect to live to see that day?"

  "Yes. Don't you?"

  ."No."

  "Then what are you looking forward to, Mr. Rearden?"

  "Nothing."

  "What are you working for?"

  Rearden glanced at him. "Why do you ask that?"

  "To make you understand why I'm not."

  "Don't expect me ever to approve of a criminal."

  "I don't expect it. But there are a few things I want to help you to see."

  "Even if they're true, the things you said, why did you choose to be a. bandit? Why didn't you simply step out, like--" He stopped.

  "Like Ellis Wyatt, Mr. Rearden? Like Andrew Stockton? Like your friend Ken Danagger?"

  "Yes!"

  "Would you approve of that?"

  "I--" He stopped, shocked by his own words.

  The shock that came next was to see Danneskjold smile: it was like seeing the first green of spring on the sculptured planes of an ice-berg. Rearden realized suddenly, for the first time, that Danneskjold's face was more than handsome, that it had the startling beauty of physical perfection--the hard, proud features, the scornful mouth of a Viking's statue--yet he had not been aware of it, almost as if the dead sternness of the face had forbidden the impertinence of an appraisal. But the smile was brilliantly alive.

  "I do approve of it, Mr. Rearden. But I've chosen a special mission of my own. I'm after a man whom I want to destroy. He died many centuries ago, but until the last trace of him is wiped out of men's minds, we will not have a decent world to live in."

  "What man?"

  "Robin Hood."

  Rearden looked at him blankly, not understanding.

  "He was the man who robbed the rich and gave to the poor. Well, I'm the man who robs the poor and gives to the rich--or, to be exact, the man who robs the thieving poor and gives back to the productive rich."

  "What in blazes do you mean?"

  "If you remember the stories you've read about me in the newspapers, before they stopped printing them, you know that I have never robbed a private ship and never taken any private property. Nor have I ever robbed a military vessel--because the purpose of a military fleet is to protect from violence the citizens who paid for it, which is the proper function of a government. But I have seized every loot-carrier that came within range of my guns, every government relief ship, subsidy ship, loan ship, gift ship, every vessel with a cargo of goods taken by force from some men for the unpaid, unearned benefit of others. I seized the boats that sailed under the flag of the idea which I am fighting: the idea that need is a sacred idol requiring human sacrinces--that the need of some men is the knife of a guillotine hanging over others--that all of us must live with our work, our hopes, our plans, our efforts at the mercy of the moment when that knife will descend upon us--and that the extent of our ability is the extent of our danger, so that success will bring our heads down on the block, while failure will give us the right to pull the cord. This is the horror which Robin Hood immortalized as an ideal of righteousness. It is said that he fought against the looting rulers and returned the loot to those who had been robbed, but that is not the meaning of the legend which has survived. He is remembered, not as a champion of property, but as a champion of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor. He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became the symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don't have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does. He became a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, has demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors at the price of robbing his superiors. It is this foulest of creatures--the double-parasite who lives on the sores of the poor and the blood of the rich--whom men have come to regard as a moral ideal. And this has brought us to a world where the more a man produces, the closer he comes to the loss of all his rights, until, if his ability is great enough, he becomes a rightless creature delivered as prey to any claimant--while in order to be placed above rights, above principles, above morality, placed where anything is permitted to him, even plunder and murder, all a man has to do is to be in need. Do you wonder why the world is collapsing around us? That is what I am fighting, Mr. Rearden. Until men learn that of all human symbols, Robin Hood is the most immoral and the most contemptible, there will be no justice on earth and no way for mankind to survive."

  Rearden listened, feeling numb. But under the numbness, like the first thrust of a seed breaking through, he felt an emotion he could not identify except that it seemed familiar and very distant, like some
thing experienced and renounced long ago.

  "What I actually am, Mr. Rearden, is a policeman. It is a policeman's duty to protect men from criminals--criminals being those who seize wealth by force. It is a policeman's duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman's duty becomes, not the protection, but the plunder of property--then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman. I have been selling the cargoes I retrieved to some special customers of mine in this country, who pay me in gold. Also, I have been selling my cargoes to the smugglers and the black-market traders of the People's States of Europe. Do you know the conditions of existence in those People's States? Since production and trade--not violence--were decreed to be crimes, the best men of Europe had no choice but to become criminals. The slave-drivers of those States are kept in power by the handouts from their fellow looters in countries not yet fully drained, such as this country. I do not let the handouts reach them. I sell the goods to Europe's law-breakers, at the highest prices I can get, and I make them pay me in gold. Gold is the objective value, the means of preserving one's wealth and one's future. Nobody is permitted to have gold in Europe, except the whip-wielding friends of humanity, who claim that they spend it for the welfare of their victims. That is the gold which my smuggler-customers obtain to pay me. How? By the same method I use to obtain the goods. And then I return the gold to those from whom the goods were stolen--to you, Mr. Rearden, and to other men like you."

  Rearden grasped the nature of the emotion he had forgotten. It was the emotion he had felt when, at the age of fourteen, he had looked at his first pay check--when, at the age of twenty-four, he had been made superintendent of the ore mines--when, as the owner of the mines, he had placed, in his own name, his first order for new equipment from the best concern of the time, Twentieth Century Motors--an emotion of solemn, joyous excitement, the sense of winning his place in a world he respected and earning the recognition of men he admired. For almost two decades, that emotion had been buried under a mount of wreckage, as the years had added layer upon gray layer of contempt, of indignation, of his struggle not to look around him, not to see those he dealt with, not to expect anything from men and to keep, as a private vision within the four walls of his office, the sense of that world into which he had hoped to rise. Yet there it was again, breaking through from under the wreckage, that feeling of quickened interest, of listening to the luminous voice of reason, with which one could communicate and deal and live. But it was the voice of a pirate speaking about acts of violence, offering him this substitute for his world of reason and justice. He could not accept it; he could not lose whatever remnant of his vision he still retained. He listened, wishing he could escape, yet knowing that he would not miss a word of it.