Atlas Shrugged

by Ayn Rand

  There were people rushing into the office, the telephones were screaming and, alternating between pleas and curses, Jim kept yelling into one receiver, "Get me Santiago! ... Get Washington to get me Santiago!"

  Distantly, as on the margin of her mind, she could see what sort of game the men behind the shrieking phones had played and lost. They seemed far away, like tiny commas squirming on the white field under the lens of a microscope. She wondered how they could ever expect to be taken seriously when a Francisco d.'Anconia was possible on earth.

  She saw the glare of the explosion in every face she met through the rest of the day--and in every face she passed in the darkness of the streets, that evening. If Francisco had wanted a worthy funeral pyre for d.'Anconia Copper, she thought, he had succeeded. There it was, in the streets of New York City, the only city on earth still able to understand it--in the faces of people, in their whispers, the whispers crackling tensely like small tongues of fire, the faces lighted by a look that was both solemn and frantic, the shadings of expressions appearing to sway and weave, as if cast by a distant flame, some frightened, some angry, most of them uneasy, uncertain, expectant, but all of them acknowledging a fact much beyond an industrial catastrophe, all of them knowing what it meant, though none would name its meaning, all of them carrying a touch of laughter, a laughter of amusement and defiance, the bitter laughter of perishing victims who feel that they are avenged.

  She saw it in the face of Hank Rearden, when she met him for dinner that evening. As his tall, confident figure walked toward her-the only figure that seemed at home in the costly setting of a distinguished restaurant--she saw the look of eagerness fighting the sternness of his features, the look of a young boy still open to the enchantment of the unexpected. He did not speak of this day's event, but she knew that it was the only image in his mind.

  They had been meeting whenever he came to the city, spending a brief, rare evening together--with their past still alive in their silent acknowledgment--with no future in their work and in their common struggle, but with the knowledge that they were allies gaining support from the fact of each other's existence.

  He did not want to mention today's event, he did not want to speak of Francisco, but she noticed, as they sat at the table, that the strain of a resisted smile kept pulling at the hollows of his cheeks. She knew whom he meant, when he said suddenly, his voice soft and low with the weight of admiration, "He did keep his oath, didn't he?"

  "His oath?" she asked, startled, thinking of the inscription on the temple of Atlantis.

  "He said to me, 'I swear--by the woman I love--that I am your friend.' He was."

  ."He is."

  He shook his head. "I have no right to think of him. I have no right to accept what he's done as an act in my defense. And yet ..." He stopped.

  "But it was, Hank. In defense of all of us--and of you, most of all."

  He looked away, out at the city. They sat at the side of the room, with a sheet of glass as an invisible protection against the sweep of space and streets sixty floors below. The city seemed abnormally distant: it lay flattened down to the pool of its lowest stories. A few blocks away, its tower merging into darkness, the calendar hung at the level of their faces, not as a small, disturbing rectangle, but as an enormous screen, eerily close and large, flooded by the dead, white glow of light projected through an empty film, empty but for the letters: September 2.

  "Rearden Steel is now working at capacity," he was saying indifferently. "They've lifted the production quotas off my mills--for the next five minutes, I guess. I don't know how many of their own regulations they've suspended, I don't think they know it, either, they don't bother keeping track of legality any longer, I'm sure I'm a law-breaker on five or six counts, which nobody could prove or disprove--all I know is that the gangster of the moment told me to go full steam ahead." He shrugged. "When another gangster kicks him out tomorrow, I'll probably be shut down, as penalty for illegal operation. But according to the plan of the present split-second, they've begged me to keep pouring my Metal, in any amount and by any means I choose."

  She noticed the occasional, surreptitious glances that people were throwing in their direction. She had noticed it before, ever since her broadcast, ever since the two of them had begun to appear in public together. Instead of the disgrace he had dreaded, there was an air of awed uncertainty in people's manner--uncertainty of their own moral precepts, awe in the presence of two persons who dared to be certain of being right. People were looking at them with anxious curiosity, with envy, with respect, with the fear of offending an unknown, proudly rigorous standard, some almost with an air of apology that seemed to say: "Please forgive us for being married." There were some who had a look of angry malice, and a few who had a look of admiration.

  "Dagny," he asked suddenly, "do you suppose he's in New York?"

  "No. I've called the Wayne-Falkland. They told me that the lease on his suite had expired a month ago and he did not renew it."

  "They're looking for him all over the world," he said, smiling. "They'll never find him." The smile vanished. "Neither will I." His voice slipped back to the flat, gray tone of duty: "Well, the mills are working, but I'm not. I'm doing nothing but running around the country like a scavenger, searching for illegal ways to purchase raw materials. Hiding, sneaking, lying--just to get a few tons of ore or coal or copper. They haven't lifted their regulations off my raw materials. They know that I'm pouring more Metal than the quotas they give me could produce. They don't care." He added, "They think I do."

  "Tired, Hank?"

  "Bored to death."

  There was a time, she thought, when his mind, his energy, his inexhaustible resourcefulness had been given to the task of a producer devising better ways to deal with nature; now, they were switched to the task of a criminal outwitting men. She wondered how long a man could endure a change of that kind.

  "It's becoming almost impossible to get iron ore," he said indifferently, then added, his voice suddenly alive, "Now it's going to be completely impossible to get copper." He was grinning.

  She wondered how long a man could continue to work against himself, to work when his deepest desire was not to succeed, but to fail.

  She understood the connection of his thoughts when he said, "I've never told you, but I've met Ragnar Danneskjold."

  "He told me."

  "What? Where did you ever--" He stopped. "Of course," he said, his voice tense and low. "He would be one of them. You would have met him. Dagny, what are they like, those men who ... No. Don't answer me." In a moment he added, "So I've met one of their agents."

  "You've met two of them."

  His response was a span of total stillness. "Of course," he said dully. "I knew it ... I just wouldn't admit to myself that I knew ... He was their recruiting agent, wasn't he?"

  "One of their earliest and best."

  He chuckled; it was a sound of bitterness and longing. "That night ... when they got Ken Danagger ... I thought that they had not sent anyone after me...."

  The effort by which he made his face grow rigid, was almost like the slow, resisted turn of a key locking a sunlit room he could not permit himself to examine. Aftei a while, he said impassively, "Dagny, that new rail we discussed last month--I don't think I'll be able to deliver it. They haven't lifted their regulations off my output, they're still controlling my sales and disposing of my Metal as they please. But the bookkeeping is in such a snarl that I'm smuggling a few thousand tons into the black market every week. I think they know it. They're pretending not to. They don't want to antagonize me, right now. But, you see, I've been shipping every ton I could snatch, to some emergency customers of mine. Dagny, I was in Minnesota last month. I've seen what's going on there. The country will starve, not next year, but this winter, unless a few of us act and act fast. There are no grain reserves left anywhere. With Nebraska gone, Oklahoma wrecked, North Dakota abandoned, Kansas barely subsisting--there isn't going to be any wheat this winter, not for the ci
ty of New York nor for any Eastern city. Minnesota is our last granary. They've had two bad years in succession, but they have a bumper crop this fall--and they have to be able to harvest it. Have you had a chance to take a look at the condition of the farm-equipment industry? They're not big enough, any of them, to keep a staff of efficient gangsters in Washington or to pay percentages to pull-peddlers. So they haven't been getting many allocations of materials. Two-thirds of them have shut down and the rest are about to. And farms are perishing all over the country--for lack of tools. You should have seen those farmers in Minnesota. They've been spending more time fixing old tractors that can't be fixed than plowing their fields. I don't know how they managed to survive till last spring. I don't know how they managed to plant their wheat. But they did. They did." There was a look of intensity on his face, as if he were contemplating a rare, forgotten sight: a vision of men--and she knew what motive was still holding him to his job. "Dagny, they had to have tools for their harvest. I've been selling all the Metal I could steal out of my own mills to the manufacturers of farm equipment. On credit. They've been sending the equipment to Minnesota as fast as they could put it out. Selling it in the same way--illegally and on credit. But they will be paid, this fall, and so will I. Charity, hell! We're helping producers--and what tenacious producers!--not lousy, mooching 'consumers.' We're giving loans, not alms. We're supporting ability, not need. I'll be damned if I'll stand by and let those men be destroyed while the pull-peddlers grow rich!"

  He was looking at the image of a sight he had seen in Minnesota: the silhouette of an abandoned factory, with the light of the sunset streaming, unopposed, through the holes of its windows and the cracks of its roof, with the remnant of a sign: Ward Harvester Company.

  "Oh, I know," he said. "We'll save them this winter, but the looters will devour them next year. Still, we'll save them this winter.... Well, that's why I won't be able to smuggle any rail for you. Not in the immediate future--and there's nothing left to us but the immediate future. I don't know what is the use of feeding a country, if it loses its railroads--but what is the use of railroads where there is no food? What is the use, anyway?"

  "It's all right, Hank. We'll last with such rail as we have, for--" She stopped.

  "For a month?"

  "For the winter--I hope."

  Cutting across their silence, a shrill voice reached them from another table, and they turned to look at a man who had the jittery manner of a cornered gangster about to reach for his gun. "An act of anti-social destruction," he was snarling to a sullen companion, "at a time when there's such a desperate shortage of copper! ... We can't permit it! We can't permit it to be true!"

  Rearden turned abruptly to look off, at the city. "I'd give anything to know where he is," he said, his voice low. "Just to know where he is, right now, at this moment."

  "What would you do, if you knew it?"

  He dropped his hand in a gesture of futility. "I wouldn't approach him. The only homage I can still pay him is not to cry for forgiveness where no forgiveness is possible."

  They remained silent. They listened to the voices around them, to the splinters of panic trickling through the luxurious room.

  She had not been aware that the same presence seemed to be an invisible guest at every table, that the same subject kept breaking through the attempts at any other conversation. People sat in a manner, not quite of cringing, but as if they found the room too large and too exposed--a room of glass, blue velvet, aluminum and gentle lighting. They looked as if they had come to this room at the price of countless evasions, to let it help them pretend that theirs was still a civilized existence--but an act of primeval violence had blasted the nature of their world into the open and they were no longer able not to .see.

  "How could he? How could he?" a woman was demanding with petulant terror. "He had no right to do it!"

  "It was an accident," said a young man with a staccato voice and an odor of public payroll. "It was a chain of coincidences, as any statistical curve of probabilities can easily prove. It is unpatriotic to spread rumors exaggerating the power of the people's enemies."

  "Right and wrong is all very well for academic conversations," said a woman with a schoolroom voice and a barroom mouth, "but how can anybody take his own ideas seriously enough to destroy a fortune when people need it?"

  "I don't understand it," an old man was saying with quavering bitterness. "After centuries of efforts to curb man's innate brutality, after centuries of teaching, training and indoctrination with the gentle and the humane!"

  A woman's bewildered voice rose uncertainly and trailed off: "I thought we were living in an age of brotherhood ..."

  "I'm scared," a young girl was repeating, "I'm scared ... oh, I don't know! ... I'm just scared ..."

  "He couldn't have done it!" ... "He did!" ... "But why?" ... "I refuse to believe it!" ... "It's not human!" ... "But why?" ... "Just a worthless playboy!" ... "But why?"

  The muffled scream of a woman across the room and some half-grasped signal on the edge of Dagny's vision, came simultaneously and made her whirl to look at the city.

  The calendar was run by a mechanism locked in a room behind the screen, unrolling the same film year after year, projecting the dates in steady rotation, in changeless rhythm, never moving but on the stroke of midnight. The speed of Dagny's turn gave her time to see a phenomenon as unexpected as if a planet had reversed its orbit in the sky: she saw the words "September 2" moving upward and vanishing past the edge of the screen.

  Then, written across the enormous page, stopping time, as a last message to the world and to the world's motor which was New York, she saw the lines of a sharp, intransigent handwriting: . Brother, you asked for it!

  Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d.'Anconia

  She did not know which shock was greater: the sight of the message or the sound of Rearden's laughter--Rearden, standing on his feet, in full sight and hearing of the room behind him, laughing above their moans of panic, laughing in greeting, in salute, in acceptance of the gift he had tried to reject, in release, in triumph, in surrender.

  On the evening of September 7, a copper wire broke in Montana, stopping the motor of a loading crane on a spur track of Taggart Transcontinental, at the rim of the Stanford Copper Mine.

  The mine had been working on three shifts, its days and nights blending into a single stretch of struggle to lose no minute, no drop of copper it could squeeze from the shelves of a mountain into the nation's industrial desert. The crane broke down at the task of loading a train; it stopped abruptly and hung still against the evening sky, between a string of empty cars and piles of suddenly immovable ore.

  The men of the railroad and of the mine stopped in dazed bewilderment: they found that in all the complexity of their equipment, among the drills, the motors, the derricks, the delicate gauges, the ponderous floodlights beating down into the pits and ridges of a mountain--there was no wire to mend the crane. They stopped, like men on an ocean liner propelled by ten-thousand-horsepower generators, but perishing for lack of a safety pin.

  The station agent, a young man with a swift body and a brusque voice, stripped the wiring from the station building and set the crane in motion again-and while the ore went clattering to fill the cars, the light of candles came trembling through the dusk from the windows of the station.

  "Minnesota, Eddie," said Dagny grimly, closing the drawer of her special file. "Tell the Minnesota Division to ship half their stock of wire to Montana." "But good God, Dagny!--with the peak of the harvest rush approaching--" "They'll hold through it--I think. We don't dare lose a single supplier of copper."

  "But I have!" screamed James Taggart, when she reminded him once more. "I have obtained for you the top priority on copper wire, the first claim, the uppermost ration level, I've given you all the cards, certificates, documents and requisitions--what else do you want?" "The copper wire." "I've done all I could! Nobody can blame me!"

  She did not argue. The afterno
on newspaper was lying on his desk-and she was staring at an item on the back page: An Emergency State Tax had been passed in California for the relief of the state's unemployed, in the amount of fifty per cent of any local corporation's gross income ahead of other taxes; the California oil companies had gone .out of business.

  "Don't worry, Mr. Rearden," said an unctuous voice over a long-distance telephone line from Washington, "I just wanted to assure you that you will not have to worry." "About what?" asked Rearden, baffled. "About that temporary bit of confusion in California. We'll straighten it out in no time, it was an act of illegal insurrection, their state government had no right to impose local taxes detrimental to national taxes, we'll negotiate an equitable arrangement immediately--but in the meantime, if you have been disturbed by any unpatriotic rumors about the California oil companies, I just wanted to tell you that Rearden Steel has been placed in the top category of essential need, with first claim upon any oil available anywhere in the nation, very top category, Mr. Rearden--so I just wanted you to know that you won't have to worry about the problem of fuel this winter!"

  Rearden hung up the telephone receiver, with a frown of worry, not about the problem of fuel and the end of the California oil fields-- disasters of this kind had become habitual--but about the fact that the Washington planners found it necessary to placate him. This was new; he wondered what it meant. Through the years of his struggle, he had learned that an apparently causeless antagonism was not hard to deal with, but an apparently causeless solicitude was an ugly danger. The same wonder struck him again, when, walking down an alley between the mill structures, he caught sight of a slouching figure whose posture combined an air of insolence with an air of expecting to be swatted: it was his brother Philip.