Atlas Shrugged

by Ayn Rand

  A sheaf of sparks went up in the depth of the fog--and she saw the broad back of a foreman whose arm made the sweeping gesture of a signal, directing some invisible task. He jerked his head to snap an order--she caught a glimpse of his profile--and she caught her breath. Stockton saw it, chuckled and called into the fog:

  "Hey, Ken! Come here! Here's an old friend of yours!"

  She looked at Ken Danagger as he approached them. The great industrialist, whom she had tried so desperately to hold to his desk, was now dressed in smudged overalls.

  "Hello, Miss Taggart. I told you we'd soon meet again."

  Her head dropped, as if in assent and in greeting, but her hand bore down heavily upon her cane, for a moment, while she stood reliving their last encounter: the tortured hour of waiting, then the gently distant face at the desk and the tinkling of a glass-paneled door closing upon a stranger.

  It was so brief a moment that two of the men before her could take it only as a greeting--but it was at Gait that she looked when she raised her head, and she saw him looking at her as if he knew what she felt--she saw him seeing in her face the realization that it was he who had walked out of Danagger's office, that day. His face gave her nothing in answer: it had that look of respectful severity with which a man stands before the fact that the truth is the truth.

  "I didn't expect it," she said softly, to Danagger. "I never expected to see you again."

  Danagger was watching her as if she were a promising child he had once discovered and was now affectionately amused to watch. "I know," he said. "But why are you so shocked?"

  "I ... oh, it's just that it's preposterous!" She pointed at his clothes.

  "What's wrong with it?"

  "Is this, then, the end of your road?"

  "Hell, no! The beginning."

  "What are you aiming at?"

  "Mining. Not coal, though. Iron."

  "Where?"

  He pointed toward the mountains. "Right here. Did you ever know Midas Mulligan to make a bad investment? You'd be surprised what one can find in that stretch of rock, if one knows how to look. That's what I've been doing--looking."

  "And if you don't find any iron ore?"

  He shrugged. "There's other things to do. I've always been short on time in my life, never on what to use it for."

  She glanced at Stockton with curiosity. "Aren't you training a man who could become your most dangerous competitor?"

  "That's the only sort of men I like to hire. Dagny, have you lived too long among the looters? Have you come to think that one man's ability is a threat to another?"

  "Oh no! But I thought I was almost the only one left who didn't think that."

  "Any man who's afraid of hiring the best ability he can find, is a cheat who's in a business where he doesn't belong. To me--the foulest man on earth, more contemptible than a criminal, is the employer who rejects men for being too good. That's what I've always thought and--say, what are you laughing at?"

  She was listening to him with an eager, incredulous smile. "It's so startling to hear," she said, "because it's so right!"

  "What else can one think?"

  She chuckled softly. "You know, when I was a child, I expected every businessman to think it."

  "And since then?"

  "Since then, I've learned not to expect it."

  "But it's right, isn't it?"

  "I've learned not to expect the right."

  "But it stands to reason, doesn't it?"

  "I've given up expecting reason."

  "That's what one must never give up," said Ken Danagger.

  They had returned to the car and had started down the last, descending curves of the road, when she glanced at Galt and he turned to her at once, as if he had expected it.

  "It was you in Danagger's office that day, wasn't it?" she asked.

  "Yes."

  "Did you know, then, that I was waiting outside?"

  "Yes."

  "Did you know what it was like, to wait behind that closed door?"

  She could not name the nature of the glance with which he looked at her. It was not pity, because she did not seem to be its object; it was the kind of glance with which one looks at suffering, but it was not her suffering that he seemed to be seeing.

  "Oh yes," he answered quietly, almost lightly.

  The first shop to rise by the side of the valley's single street was like the sudden sight of an open theater: a frame box without front wall, its stage set in the bright colors of a musical comedy--with red cubes, green circles, gold triangles, which were bins of tomatoes, barrels of lettuce, pyramids of oranges, and a spangled backdrop where the sun hit shelves of metal containers. The name on the marquee said: Hammond Grocery Market. A distinguished man in shirt sleeves, with a stern profile and gray temples, was weighing a chunk of butter for an attractive young woman who stood at the counter, her posture light as a show girl.'s, the skirt of her cotton dress swelling faintly in the wind, like a dance costume. Dagny smiled involuntarily, even though the man was Lawrence Hammond.

  The shops were small one-story structures, and as they moved past her, she caught familiar names on their signs, like headings on the pages of a book riffled by the car's motion: Mulligan General Store--Atwood Leather Goods--Nielsen Lumber--then the sign of the dollar above the door of a small brick factory with the inscription: Mulligan Tobacco Company. "Who's the Company, besides Midas Mulligan?" she asked. "Dr. Akston," he answered.

  There were few passers-by, some men, fewer women, and they walked with purposeful swiftness, as if bound on specific errands. One after another, they stopped at the sight of the car, they waved to Galt and they looked at her with the unastonished curiosity of recognition. "Have I been expected here for a long time?" she asked. "You still are," he answered.

  On the edge of the road, she saw a structure made of glass sheets held together by a wooden framework, but for one instant it seemed to her that it was only a frame for the painting of a woman--a tall, fragile woman with pale blond hair and a face of such beauty that it seemed veiled by distance, as if the artist had been merely able to suggest it, not to make it quite real. In the next instant the woman moved her head--and Dagny realized that there were people at the tables inside the structure, that it was a cafeteria, that the woman stood behind the counter, and that she was Kay Ludlow, the movie star who, once seen, could never be forgotten; the star who had retired and vanished five years ago, to be replaced by girls of indistinguishable names and interchangeable faces. But at the shock of the realization, Dagny thought of the sort of movies that were now being made--and then she felt that the glass cafeteria was a cleaner use for Kay Ludlow's beauty than a role in a picture glorifying the commonplace for possessing no glory.

  The building that came next was a small, squat block of rough granite, sturdy, solid, neatly built, the lines of its rectangular bulk as severely precise as the creases of a formal garment--but she saw, like an instant's ghost, the long streak of a skyscraper rising into the coils of Chicago's fog, the skyscraper that had once borne the sign she now saw written in gold letters above a modest pine-wood door: Mulligan Bank.

  Gait slowed the car while moving past the bank, as if placing the motion in some special italics.

  A small brick structure came next, bearing the sign: Mulligan Mint. "A mint?" she asked. "What's Mulligan doing with a mint?" Galt reached into his pocket and dropped two small coins into the palm of her hand. They were miniature disks of shining gold, smaller than pennies, the kind that had not been in circulation since the days of Nat Taggart; they bore the head of the Statue of Liberty on one side, the words "United States of America--One Dollar" on the other, but the dates stamped upon them were of the past two years.

  "That's the money we use here," he said. "It's minted by Midas Mulligan."

  "But . . . on whose authority?"

  "That's stated on the coin--on both sides of it."

  "What do you use for small change?"

  "Mulligan mints that, too, in silver. We
don't accept any other currency in this valley. We accept nothing but objective values."

  She was studying the coins. "This looks like... like something from the first morning in the age of my ancestors."

  He pointed at the valley. "Yes, doesn't it?"

  She sat looking at the two thin, delicate, almost weightless drops of gold in the palm of her hand, knowing that the whole of the Taggart Transcontinental system had rested upon them, that this had been the keystone supporting all the keystones, all the arches, all the girders of the Taggart track, the Taggart Bridge, the Taggart Building.... She shook her head and slipped the coins back into his hand.

  "You're not making it easier for me," she said, her voice low.

  "I'm making it as hard as possible."

  "Why don't you say it? Why don't you tell me all the things you want me to learn?"

  The gesture of his arm pointed at the town, at the road behind them. "What have I been doing?" he asked.

  They drove on in silence. After a while, she asked, in the tone of a dryly statistical inquiry, "How much of a fortune has Midas Mulligan amassed in this valley?"

  He pointed ahead. "Judge for yourself."

  The road was winding through stretches of unleveled soil toward the homes of the valley. The homes were not lined along a street, they were spread at irregular intervals over the rises and hollows of the ground, they were small and simple, built of local materials, mostly of granite and pine, with a prodigal ingenuity of thought and a tight economy of physical effort. Every house looked as if it had been put up by the labor of one man, no two houses were alike, and the only quality they had in common was the stamp of a mind grasping a problem and solving it. Galt pointed out a house, once in a while, choosing the names she knew--and it sounded to her like a list of quotations from the richest stock exchange in the world, or like a roll call of honor: "Ken Danagger . . . Ted Nielsen ... Lawrence Hammond... Roger Marsh ... Ellis Wyatt... Owen Kellogg ... Dr. Akston."

  The home of Dr. Akston was the last, a small cottage with a large terrace, lifted on the crest of a wave against the rising walls of the mountains. The road went past it and climbed on into the coils of an ascending grade. The pavement shrank to a narrow path between two walls of ancient pines, their tall, straight trunks pressing against it like a grim colonnade, their branches meeting above, swallowing the path into sudden silence and twilight. There were no marks of wheels on the thin strip of earth, it looked unused and forgotten, a few minutes and a few turns seemed to take the car miles away from human habitation--and then there was nothing to break the pressure of the stillness but a rare wedge of sunlight cutting across the trunks in the depth of the forest once in a while.

  The sudden sight of a house on the edge of the path struck her like the shock of an unexpected sound: built in loneliness, cut off from all ties to human existence, it looked like the secret retreat of some great defiance or sorrow. It was the humblest home of the valley, a log cabin beaten in dark streaks by the tears of many rains, only its great windows withstanding the storms with the smooth, shining, untouched serenity of glass.

  "Whose house is ... Oh!"--she caught her breath and jerked her head away. Above the door, hit by a ray of sun, its design blurred and worn, battered smooth by the winds of centuries, hung the silver coat-of-arms of Sebastian d.'Anconia.

  As if in deliberate answer to her involuntary movement of escape, Galt stopped the car in front of the house. For a moment, they held each other's eyes: her glance was a question, his a command, her face had a defiant frankness, his an unrevealing severity; she understood his purpose, but not his motive. She obeyed. Leaning on her cane, she stepped out of the car, then stood erect, facing the house.

  She looked at the silver crest that had come from a marble palace in Spain to a shack in the Andes to a log cabin in Colorado--the crest of the men who would not submit. The door of the cabin was locked, the sun did not reach into the glazed darkness beyond the windows, and pine branches hung outstretched above the roof like arms spread in protection, in compassion, in solemn blessing. With no sound but the snap of a twig or the ring of a drop falling somewhere in the forest through long stretches of moments, the silence seemed to hold all the pain that had been hidden here, but never given voice. She stood, listening with a gentle, resigned, unlamenting respect: Let's see who'll do greater honor, you--to Nat Taggart, or I--to Sebastian d.'Anconia.... Dagny! Help me to remain. To refuse. Even though he's right! ...

  She turned to look at Galt, knowing that he was the man against whom she had had no help to offer. He sat at the wheel of the car, he had not followed her or moved to assist her, as if he had wanted her to acknowledge the past and had respected the privacy of her lonely salute. She noticed that he still sat as she had left him, his forearm leaning against the wheel at the same angle, the fingers of his hand hanging down in the same sculptured position. His eyes were watching her, but that was all she could read in his face: that he had watched her intently, without moving.

  When she was seated beside him once more, he said, "That was the first man I took away from you."

  She asked, her face stern, open and quietly defiant, "How much do you know about that?"

  "Nothing that he told me in words. Everything that the tone of his voice told me whenever he spoke of you."

  She inclined her head. She had caught the sound of suffering in the faintest exaggeration of evenness in his voice.

  He pressed the starter, the motor's explosion blasted the story contained in the silence, and they drove on.

  The path widened a little, streaming toward a pool of sunlight ahead. She saw a brief glitter of wires among the branches, as they drove out into a clearing. An unobtrusive little structure stood against a hillside, on a rising slant of rocky ground. It was a simple cube of granite, the size of a toolshed, it had no windows, no apertures of any kind, only a door of polished steel and a complex set of wire antennae branching out from the roof. Galt was driving past, leaving it unnoticed, when she asked with a sudden start, "What's that?"

  She saw the faint break of his smile. "The powerhouse."

  "Oh, stop, please!"

  He obeyed, backing the car to the foot of the hillside. It was her first few steps up the rocky incline that stopped her, as if there were no need to move forward, no further place to rise--and she stood as in the moment when she had opened her eyes on the earth of the valley, a moment uniting her beginning to her goal.

  She stood looking up at the structure, her consciousness surrendered to a single sight and a single, wordless emotion--but she had always known that an emotion was a sum totaled by an adding machine of the mind, and what she now felt was the instantaneous total of the thoughts she did not have to name, the final sum of a long progression, like a voice telling her by means of a feeling: If she had held onto Quentin Daniels, with no hope of a chance to use the motor, for the sole sake of knowing that achievement had not died on earth--if, like a weighted diver sinking in an ocean of mediocrity, under the pressure of men with gelatin eyes, rubber voices, spiral-shaped convictions, noncommittal souls and noncommitting hands, she had held, as her life line and oxygen tube, the thought of a superlative achievement of the human mind--if, at the sight of the motor's remnant, in a sudden gasp of suffocation, as a last protest from his corruption-eaten lungs, Dr. Stadler had cried for something, not to look down at, but up to, and this had been the cry, the longing and the fuel of her life--if she had moved, drawn by the hunger of her youth for a sight of clean, hard, radiant competence--then here it was before her, reached and done, the power of an incomparable mind given shape in a net of wires sparkling peacefully under a summer sky, drawing an incalculable power out of space into the secret interior of a small stone hovel.

  She thought of this structure, half the size of a boxcar, replacing the power plants of the country, the enormous conglomerations of steel, fuel and effort--she thought of the current flowing from this structure, lifting ounces, pounds, tons of strain from the shoulders of those who
would make it or use it, adding hours, days and years of liberated time to their lives, be it an extra moment to lift one's head from one's task and glance at the sunlight, or an extra pack of cigarettes bought with the money saved from one's electric bill, or an hour cut from the workday of every factory using power, or a month's journey through the whole, open width of the world, on a ticket paid for by one day of one's labor, on a train pulled by the power of this motor--with all the energy of that weight, that strain, that time replaced and paid for by the energy of a single mind who had known how to make connections of wire follow the connections of his thought. But she knew that there was no meaning in motors or factories or trains, that their only meaning was in man's enjoyment of his life, which they served--and that her swelling admiration at the sight of an achievement was for the man from whom it came, for the power and the radiant vision within him which had seen the earth as a place of enjoyment and had known that the work of achieving one's happiness was the purpose, the sanction and the meaning of life.

  The door of the structure was a straight, smooth sheet of stainless steel, softly lustrous and bluish in the sun. Above it, cut in the granite, as the only feature of the building's rectangular austerity, there stood an inscription: . I SWEAR BY MY LIFE AND MY LOVE OF IT THAT I WILL NEVER LIVE FOR THE SAKE OF ANOTHER MAN, NOR ASK ANOTHER MAN TO LIVE FOR MINE.

  She turned to Galt. He stood beside her; he had followed her, he had known that this salute was his. She was looking at the inventor of the motor, but what she saw was the easy, casual figure of a workman in his natural setting and function--she noted the uncommon lightness of his posture, a weightless way of standing that showed an expert control of the use of his body--a tall body in simple garments: a thin shirt, light slacks, a belt about a slender waistline--and loose hair made to glitter like metal by the current of a sluggish wind. She looked at him as she had looked at his structure.

  Then she knew that the first two sentences they had said to each other still hung between them, filling the silence--that everything said since, had been said over the sound of those words, that he had known it, had held it, had not let her forget it. She was suddenly aware that they were alone; it was an awareness that stressed the fact, permitting no further implication, yet holding the full meaning of the unnamed in that special stress. They were alone in a silent forest, at the foot of a structure that looked like an ancient temple--and she knew what rite was the proper form of worship to be offered on an altar of that kind. She felt a sudden pressure at the base of her throat, her head leaned back a little, no more than to feel the faint shift of a current against her hair, but it was as if she were lying back in space, against the wind, conscious of nothing but his legs and the shape of his mouth. He stood watching her, his face still but for the faint movement of his eyelids drawing narrow as if against too strong a light. It was like the beat of three instants--this was the first--and in the next, she felt a stab of ferocious triumph at the knowledge that his effort and his struggle were harder to endure than hers--and then he moved his eyes and raised his head to look at the inscription on the temple.