Atlas Shrugged

by Ayn Rand

  She let him look at it for a moment, almost as an act of condescending mercy to an adversary struggling to refuel his strength, then she asked, with a note of imperious pride in her voice, pointing at the inscription, "What's that?"

  "It's the oath that was taken by every person in this valley, but you."

  She said, looking at the words, "This has always been my own rule of living."

  "I know it."

  "But I don't think that yours is the way to practice it."

  "Then you'll have to learn which one of us is wrong."

  She walked up to the steel door of the structure, with a sudden confidence faintly stressed in the movements of her body, a mere hint of stress, no more than her awareness of the power she held by means of his pain--and she tried, asking no permission, to turn the knob of the door. But the door was locked, and she felt no tremor under the pressure of her hand, as if the lock were poured and sealed to the stone with the solid steel of the sheet.

  "Don't try to open that door, Miss Taggart."

  He approached her, his steps a shade too slow, as if stressing his knowledge of her awareness of every step. "No amount of physical force will do it," he said. "Only a thought can open that door. If you tried to break it down by means of the best explosives in the world, the machinery inside would collapse into rubble long before the door would give way. But reach the thought which it requires--and the secret of the motor will be yours, as well as"--it was the first break she had heard in his voice--"as well as any other secret you might wish to know."

  He faced her for a moment, as if leaving himself open to her full understanding, then smiled oddly, quietly at some thought of his own, and added, "I'll show you how it's done."

  He stepped back. Then, standing still, his face raised to the words carved in the stone, he repeated them slowly, evenly, as if taking that oath once more. There was no emotion in his voice, nothing but the spaced clarity of the sounds he pronounced with full knowledge of their meaning--but she knew that she was witnessing the most solemn moment it would ever be given her to witness, she was seeing a man's naked soul and the cost it had paid to utter these words, she was hearing an echo of the day when he had pronounced that oath for the first time and with full knowledge of the years ahead--she knew what manner of man had stood up to face six thousand others on a dark spring night and why they had been afraid of him, she knew that this was the birth and the core of all the things that had happened to the world in the twelve years since, she knew that this was of far greater import than the motor hidden inside the structure--she knew it, to the sound of a man's voice pronouncing in self-reminder and rededication:

  "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."

  It did not startle her, it seemed unastonishing and almost unimportant, that at the end of the last sound, she saw the door opening slowly, without human touch, moving inward upon a growing strip of darkness. In the moment when an electric light went on inside the structure, he seized the knob and pulled the door shut, its lock clicking sealed once .more.

  "It's a sound lock," he said; his face was serene. "That sentence is the combination of sounds needed to open it. I don't mind telling you this secret--because I know that you won't pronounce those words until you mean them the way I intended them to be meant."

  She inclined her head. "I won't."

  She followed him down to the car, slowly, feeling suddenly too exhausted to move. She fell back against the seat, closing her eyes, barely hearing the sound of the starter. The accumulated strain and shock of her sleepless hours hit her at once, breaking through the barrier of the tension her nerves had held to delay it. She lay still, unable to think, to react or to struggle, drained of all emotions but one.

  She did not speak. She did not open her eyes until the car stopped in front of his house.

  "You'd better rest," he said, "and go to sleep right now, if you want to attend Mulligan's dinner tonight."

  She nodded obediently. She staggered to the house, avoiding his help. She made an effort to tell him, "I'll be all right," then to escape to the safety of her room and last long enough to close the door.

  She collapsed, face down, on the bed. It was not the mere fact of physical exhaustion. It was the sudden monomania of a sensation too complete to endure. While the strength of her body was gone, while her mind had lost the faculty of consciousness, a single emotion drew on her remnants of energy, of understanding, of judgment, of control, leaving her nothing to resist it with or to direct it, making her unable to desire, only to feel, reducing her to a mere sensation--a static sensation without start or goal. She kept seeing his figure in her mind--his figure as he had stood at the door of the structure--she felt nothing else, no wish, no hope, no estimate of her feeling, no name for it, no relation to herself--there was no entity such as herself, she was not a person, only a function, the function of seeing him, and the sight was its own meaning and purpose, with no further end to reach.

  Her face buried in the pillow, she recalled dimly, as a faint sensation, the moment of her take-off from the floodlighted strip of the Kansas airfield. She felt the beat of the engine, the streak of accelerating motion gathering power in a straight-line run to a single goal--and in the moment when the wheels left the ground, she was asleep.

  The floor of the valley was like a pool still reflecting the glow of the sky, but the light was thickening from gold to copper, the shores were fading and the peaks were smoke-blue-when they drove to Mulligan's house.

  There was no trace of exhaustion left in her bearing and no remnant of violence. She had awakened at sundown; stepping out of her room, she had found Galt waiting, sitting idly motionless in the light of a lamp. He had glanced up at her; she had stood in the doorway, her face composed, her hair smooth, her posture relaxed and confident -she had looked as she would have looked on the threshold of her office in the Taggart Building, but for the slight angle of her body leaning on a cane. He had sat looking at her for a moment, and she had wondered why she had felt certain that this was the image he was seeing--he was seeing the doorway of her office, as if it were a sight long-imagined and long-forbidden.

  She sat beside him in the car, feeling no desire to speak, knowing that neither of them could conceal the meaning of their silence. She watched a few lights come up in the distant homes of the valley, then the lighted windows of Mulligan's house on the ledge ahead. She asked, "Who will be there?"

  "Some of your last friends," he answered, "and some of my first."

  Midas Mulligan met them at the door. She noticed that his grim, square face was not as harshly expressionless as she had thought: he had a look of satisfaction, but satisfaction could not soften his features, it merely struck them like flint and sent sparks of humor to glitter faintly in the corners of his eyes, a humor that was shrewder, more demanding, yet warmer than a smile.

  He opened the door of his house, moving his arm a shade more slowly than normal, giving an imperceptibly solemn emphasis to his gesture. Walking into the living room, she faced seven men who rose to their feet at her entrance.

  "Gentlemen--Taggart Transcontinental," said Midas Mulligan.

  He said it smiling, but only half-jesting; some quality in his voice made the name of the railroad sound as it would have sounded in the days of Nat Taggart, as a sonorous title of honor.

  She inclined her head, slowly, in acknowledgment to the men before her, knowing that these were the men whose standards of value and honor were the same as her own, the men who recognized the glory of that title as she recognized it, knowing with a sudden stab of wistfulness how much she had longed for that recognition through all her years.

  Her eyes moved slowly, in greeting, from face to face: Ellis Wyatt--Ken Danagger--Hugh Akston--Dr. Hendricks--Quentin Daniels--Mulligan's voice pronounced the names of the two others: "Richard Halley--Judge Narragansett."

  The faint smile on Richard Halley's face see
med to tell her that they had known each other for years--as, in her lonely evenings by the side of her phonograph, they had. The austerity of Judge Narragansett's white-haired figure reminded her that she had once heard him described as a marble statue--a blindfolded marble statue; it was the kind of figure that had vanished from the courtrooms of the country when the gold coins had vanished from the country's hands.

  "You have belonged here for a long time, Miss Taggart," said Midas Mulligan. "This was not the way we expected you to come, but--welcome home."

  No!--she wanted to answer, but heard herself answering softly, "Thank you."

  "Dagny, how many years is it going to take you to learn to be yourself?" It was Ellis Wyatt, grasping her elbow, leading her to a chair, grinning at her look of helplessness, at the struggle between a smile and a tightening resistance in her face. "Don't pretend that you don't understand us. You do."

  "We never make assertions, Miss Taggart," said Hugh Akston. "That is the moral crime peculiar to our enemies. We do not tell--we show. We do not claim--we prove. It is not your obedience that we seek to win, but your rational conviction. You have seen all the elements of our secret. The conclusion is now yours to draw--we can help you to name it, but not to accept it--the sight, the knowledge and the acceptance must be yours."

  "I feel as if I know it," she answered simply, "and more: I feel as if I've always known it, but never found it, and now I'm afraid, not afraid to hear it, just afraid that it's coming so close."

  Akston smiled. "What does this look like to you, Miss Taggart?" He pointed around the room.

  "This?" She laughed suddenly, looking at the faces of the men against the golden sunburst of rays filling the great windows. "This looks like... You know, I never hoped to see any of you again, I wondered at times how much I'd give for just one more glimpse or one more word--and now--now this is like that dream you imagine in childhood, when you think that some day, in heaven, you will see those great departed whom you had not seen on earth, and you choose, from all the past centuries, the great men you would like to meet."

  "Well, that's one clue to the nature of our secret," said Akston. "Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves--or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth."

  "I know," she whispered.

  "And if you met those great men in heaven," asked Ken Danagger, "what would you want to say to them?"

  "Just . . . just 'hello,' I guess."

  "That's not all," said Danagger. "There's something you'd want to hear from them. I didn't know it, either, until I saw him for the first time"--he pointed to Galt--"and he said it to me, and then I knew what it was that I had missed all my life. Miss Taggart, you'd want them to look at you and to say, 'Well done.' "She dropped her head and nodded silently, head down, not to let him see the sudden spurt of tears to her eyes. "All right, then: Well done, Dagny!--well done--too well--and now it's time for you to rest from that burden which none of us should ever have had to carry."

  "Shut up," said Midas Mulligan, looking at her bowed head with anxious concern.

  But she raised her head, smiling. "Thank you," she said to Danagger.

  "If you talk about resting, then let her rest," said Mulligan. "She's had too much for one day."

  "No." She smiled. "Go ahead, say it--whatever it is."

  "Later," said Mulligan.

  It was Mulligan and Akston who served dinner, with Quentin Daniels to help them. They served it on small silver trays, to be placed on the arms of the chairs--and they all sat about the room, with the fire of the sky fading in the windows and sparks of electric light glittering in the wine glasses. There was an air of luxury about the room, but it was the luxury of expert simplicity; she noted the costly furniture, carefully chosen for comfort, bought somewhere at a time when luxury had still been an art. There were no superfluous objects, but she noticed a small canvas by a great master of the Renaissance, worth a fortune, she noticed an Oriental rug of a texture and color that belonged under glass in a museum. This was Mulligan's concept of wealth, she thought--the wealth of selection, not of accumulation.

  Quentin Daniels sat on the floor, with his tray on his lap; he seemed completely at home, and he glanced up at her once in a while, grinning like an impudent kid brother who had beaten her to a secret she had not discovered. He had preceded her into the valley by some ten minutes, she thought, but he was one of them, while she was still a stranger.

  Galt sat aside, beyond the circle of lamplight, on the arm of Dr. Akston's chair. He had not said a word, he had stepped back and turned her over to the others, and he sat watching it as a spectacle in which he had no further part to play. But her eyes kept coming back to him, drawn by the certainty that the spectacle was of his choice and staging, that he had set it in motion long ago, and that all the others knew it as she knew it.

  She noticed another person who was intensely aware of Galt's presence: Hugh Akston glanced up at him once in a while, involuntarily, almost surreptitiously, as if struggling not to confess the loneliness of a long separation. Akston did not speak to him, as if taking his presence for granted. But once, when Galt bent forward and a strand of hair fell down across his face, Akston reached over and brushed it back, his hand lingering for an imperceptible instant on his pupil's forehead: it was the only break of emotion he permitted himself, the only greeting; it was the gesture of a father.

  She found herself talking to the men around her, relaxing in light-hearted comfort. No, she thought, what she felt was not strain, it was a dim astonishment at the strain which she should, but did not, feel; the abnormality of it was that it seemed so normal and simple.

  She was barely aware of her questions, as she spoke to one man after another, but their answers were printing a record in her mind, moving sentence by sentence to a goal.

  "The Fifth Concerto?" said Richard Halley, in answer to her question. "I wrote it ten years ago. We call it the Concerto of Deliverance. Thank you for recognizing it from a few notes whistled in the night. ... Yes, I know about that.... Yes, since you knew my work, you would know, when you heard it, that this Concerto said everything I had been struggling to say and reach. It's dedicated to him." He pointed to Gait. "Why, no, Miss Taggart, I haven't given up music. What makes you think so? I've written more in the last ten years than in any other period of my life. I will play it for you, any of it, when you come to my house.... No, Miss Taggart, it will not be published outside. Not a note of it will be heard beyond these mountains."

  "No, Miss Taggart, I have not given up medicine," said Dr. Hendricks, in answer to her question. "I have spent the last six years on research. I have discovered a method to protect the blood vessels of the brain from that fatal rupture which is known as a brain stroke. It will remove from human existence the terrible threat of sudden paralysis. ... No, not a word of my method will be heard outside."

  "The law, Miss Taggart?" said Judge Narragansett. "What law? I did not give it up--it has ceased to exist. But I am still working in the profession I had chosen, which was that of serving the cause of justice. ... No, justice has not ceased to exist. How could it? It is possible for men to abandon their sight of it, and then it is justice that destroys them. But it is not possible for justice to go out of existence, because one is an attribute of the other, because justice is the act of acknowledging that which exists.... Yes, I am continuing in my profession. I am writing a treatise on the philosophy of law. I shall demonstrate that humanity's darkest evil, the most destructive horror machine among all the devices of men, is non-objective law.... No, Miss Taggart, my treatise will not be published outside."

  "My business, Miss Taggart?" said Midas Mulligan. "My business is blood transfusion--and I'm still doing it. My job is to feed a life-fuel into the plants that are capable of growing. But ask Dr. Hendricks whether any amount of blood will save a body that refuses to function, a rotten hulk that expects to exist without effort. My blood bank is gold. Gold is a fuel that will
perform wonders, but no fuel can work where there is no motor.... No, I haven't given up. I merely got fed up with the job of running a slaughter house, where one drains blood out of healthy living beings and pumps it into gutless half-corpses."

  "Given up?" said Hugh Akston. "Check your premises, Miss Taggart. None of us has given up. It is the world that has.... What is wrong with a philosopher running a roadside diner? Or a cigarette factory, as I am doing now? All work is an act of philosophy. And when men will learn to consider productive work--and that which is its source--as the standard of their moral values, they will reach that state of perfection which is the birthright they lost.... The source of work? Man's mind, Miss Taggart, man's reasoning mind. I am writing a book on this subject, defining a moral philosophy that I learned from my own pupil.... Yes, it could save the world.... No, it will not be published outside."

  "Why?" she cried. "Why? What are you doing, all of you?"

  "We are on strike," said John Galt.

  They all turned to him, as if they had been waiting for his voice and for that word. She heard the empty beat of time within her, which was the sudden silence of the room, as she looked at him across a span of lamplight. He sat slouched casually on the arm of a chair, leaning forward, his forearm across his knees, his hand hanging down idly--and it was the faint smile on his face that gave to his words the deadly sound of the irrevocable: