Atlas Shrugged

by Ayn Rand

  Galt sat on a straight-backed chair, his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. He seemed erect and relaxed, together. They could not decipher the expression on his face, except that it showed no sign of apprehension.

  "I have," he answered.

  "There's not much time left," said Mr. Thompson.

  "There isn't."

  "Are you going to let such things go on?"

  "Are you?"

  "How can you be so sure you're right?" cried James Taggart; his voice was not loud, but it had the intensity of a cry. "How can you take it upon yourself, at a terrible time like this, to stick to your own ideas at the risk of destroying the whole world?"

  "Whose ideas should I consider safer to follow?"

  "How can you be sure you're right? How can you know? Nobody can be sure of his knowledge! Nobody! You're no better than anyone else!"

  "Then why do you want me?"

  "How can you gamble with other people's lives? How can you permit yourself such a selfish luxury as to hold out, when people need you?"

  "You mean: when they need my ideas?"

  "Nobody is fully right or wrong! There isn't any black or white! You don't have a monopoly on truth!"

  There was something wrong in Taggart's manner--thought Mr. Thompson, frowning--some odd, too personal resentment, as if it were not a political issue that he had come here to solve.

  "If you had any sense of responsibility," Taggart was saying, "you wouldn't dare take such a chance on nothing but your own judgment! You would join us and consider some ideas other than your own and admit that we might be right, too! You would help us with our plans! You would--"

  Taggart went on speaking with feverish insistence, but Mr. Thompson could not tell whether Galt was listening: Galt had risen and was pacing the room, not in a manner of restlessness, but in the casual manner of a man enjoying the motion of his own body. Mr. Thompson noted the lightness of the steps, the straight spine, the flat stomach, the relaxed shoulders. Galt walked as if he were both unconscious of his body and tremendously conscious of his pride in it. Mr. Thompson glanced at James Taggart, at the sloppy posture of a tall figure slumped in ungainly self-distortion, and caught him watching Galt's movements with such hatred that Mr. Thompson sat up, fearing it would become audible in the room. But Galt was not looking at Taggart.

  ".... your conscience!" Taggart was saying. "I came here to appeal to your conscience! How can you value your mind above thousands of human lives? People are perishing and--Oh, for Christ's sake," he snapped, "stop pacing!"

  Galt stopped. "Is this an order?"

  "No, no!" said Mr. Thompson hastily. "It's not an order. We don't want to give you orders.... Take it easy, Jim."

  Galt resumed his pacing. "The world is collapsing," said Taggart, his eyes following Galt irresistibly. "People are perishing--and it's you who could save them! Does it matter who's right or wrong? You should join us, even if you think we're wrong, you should sacrifice your mind to save them!"

  "By what means will I then save them?"

  "Who do you think you are?" cried Taggart.

  Galt stopped. "You know it."

  "You're an egoist!"

  "I am."

  "Do you realize what sort of egoist you are?"

  "Do you?" asked Galt, looking straight at him.

  It was the slow withdrawal of Taggart's body into the depth of his armchair, while his eyes were holding Galt.'s, that made Mr. Thompson unaccountably afraid of the next moment.

  "Say," Mr. Thompson interrupted in a brightly casual voice, "what sort of cigarette are you smoking?"

  Galt turned to him and smiled. "I don't know."

  "Where did you get it?"

  "One of your guards brought me a package of them. He said some man asked him to give it to me as a present.... Don't worry," he added, "your boys have put it through every kind of test. There were no hidden messages. It was just a present from an anonymous admirer."

  The cigarette between Galt's fingers bore the sign of the dollar.

  James Taggart was no good at the job of persuasion, Mr. Thompson concluded. But Chick Morrison, whom he brought the next day, did no better.

  "I ... I'll just throw myself on your mercy, Mr. Galt," said Chick Morrison with a frantic smile. "You're right. I'll concede that you're right--and all I can appeal to is your pity. Deep down in my heart, I can't believe that you're a total egoist who feels no pity for the people." He pointed to a pile of papers he had spread on a table. "Here's a plea signed by ten thousand schoolchildren, begging you to join us and save them. Here's a plea from a home for the crippled. Here's a petition sent by the ministers of two hundred different faiths. Here's an appeal from the mothers of the country. Read them."

  "Is this an order?"

  "No!" cried Mr. Thompson. "It's not an order!"

  Galt remained motionless, not extending his hand for the papers.

  "These are just plain, ordinary people, Mr. Galt," said Chick Morrison in a tone intended to project their abject humility. "They can't tell you what to do. They wouldn't know. They're merely begging you. They may be weak, helpless, blind, ignorant. But you, who are so intelligent and strong, can't you take pity on them? Can't you help them?"

  "By dropping my intelligence and following their blindness?"

  "They may be wrong, but they don't know any better!"

  "But I, who do, should obey them?"

  "I can't argue, Mr. Galt. I'm just begging for your pity. They're suffering. I'm begging you to pity those who suffer. I'm ... Mr. Galt," he asked, noticing that Galt was looking off at the distance beyond the window and that his eyes were suddenly implacable, "what's the matter? What are you thinking of?"

  "Hank Rearden."

  "Uh ... why?"

  "Did they feel any pity for Hank Rearden?"

  "Oh, but that's different! He--"

  "Shut up," said Galt evenly.

  "I only--"

  "Shut up!" snapped Mr. Thompson. "Don't mind him, Mr. Galt. He hasn't slept for two nights. He's scared out of his wits."

  Dr. Floyd Ferris, next day, did not seem to be scared--but it was worse, thought Mr. Thompson. He observed that Gait remained silent and would not answer Ferris at all.

  "It's the question of moral responsibility that you might not have studied sufficiently, Mr. Galt," Dr. Ferris was drawling in too airy, too forced a tone of casual informality. "You seem to have talked on the radio about nothing but sins of commission. But there are also the sins of omission to consider. To fail to save a life is as immoral as to murder. The consequences are the same--and since we must judge actions by their consequences, the moral responsibility is the same. ... For instance, in view of the desperate shortage of food, it has been suggested that it might become necessary to issue a directive ordering that every third one of all children under the age of ten and of all adults over the age of sixty be put to death, to secure the survival of the rest. You wouldn't want this to happen, would you? You can prevent it. One word from you would prevent it. If you refuse and all those people are executed--it will be your fault and your moral responsibility!"

  "You're crazy!" screamed Mr. Thompson, recovering from shock and leaping to his feet. "Nobody's ever suggested any such thing! Nobody's ever considered it! Please, Mr. Galt! Don't believe him! He doesn't mean it!"

  "Oh yes, he does," said Galt. "Tell the bastard to look at me, then look in the mirror, then ask himself whether I would ever think that my moral stature is at the mercy of his actions."

  "Get out of here!" cried Mr. Thompson, yanking Ferris to his feet. "Get out! Don't let me hear another squeak out of you!" He flung the door open and pushed Ferris at the startled face of a guard outside.

  Turning to Galt, he spread his arms and let them drop with a gesture of drained helplessness. Galt's face was expressionless.

  "Look," said Mr. Thompson pleadingly, "isn't there anybody who can talk to you?"

  "There's nothing to talk about."

  "We've got to. We've got to convince yo
u. Is there anyone you'd want to talk to?"

  "No."

  "I thought maybe ... it's because she talks--used to talk--like you, at times ... maybe if I sent Miss Dagny Taggart to tell you--"

  "That one? Sure, she used to talk like me. She's my only failure. I thought she was the kind who belonged on my side. But she double-crossed me, to keep her railroad. She'd sell her soul for her railroad. Send her in, if you want me to slap her face."

  "No, no, no! You don't have to see her, if that's how you feel. I don't want to waste more time on people who rub you the wrong way.... Only ... only if it's not Miss Taggart, I don't know whom to pick. ... If ... if I could find somebody you'd be willing to consider or ..."

  "I've changed my mind," said Galt. "There is somebody I'd like to speak to."

  "Who?" cried Mr. Thompson eagerly.

  "Dr. Robert Stadler."

  Mr. Thompson emitted a long whistle and shook his head apprehensively. "That one is no friend of yours," he said in a tone of honest warning.

  "He's the one I want to see."

  "Okay, if you wish. If you say so. Anything you wish. I'll have him here tomorrow morning."

  That evening, dining with Wesley Mouch in his own suite, Mr. Thompson glared angrily at a glass of tomato juice placed before him. "What? No grapefruit juice?" he snapped; his doctor had prescribed grapefruit juice as protection against an epidemic of colds.

  "No grapefruit juice," said the waiter, with an odd kind of emphasis.

  "Fact is," said Mouch bleakly, "that a gang of raiders attacked a train at the Taggart Bridge on the Mississippi. They blew up the track and damaged the bridge. Nothing serious. It's being repaired--but all traffic is held up and the trains from Arizona can't get through."

  "That's ridiculous! Aren't there any other--?" Mr. Thompson stopped; he knew that there were no other railroad bridges across the Mississippi. After a moment, he spoke up in a staccato voice. "Order army detachments to guard the bridge. Day and night. Tell them to pick their best men for it. If anything happened to that bridge--"

  He did not finish; he sat hunched, staring down at the costly china plates and the delicate hors d.'oeuvres before him. The absence of so prosaic a commodity as grapefruit juice had suddenly made real to him, for the first time, what it was that would happen to the city of New York if anything happened to the Taggart Bridge.

  "Dagny," said Eddie Willers, that evening, "the bridge is not the only problem." He snapped on her desk lamp which, in forced concentration on her work, she had neglected to turn on at the approach of dusk. "No transcontinental trains can leave San Francisco. One of the fighting factions out there--I don't know which one--has seized our terminal and imposed a .'departure tax' on trains. Meaning that they're holding trains for ransom. Our terminal manager has quit. Nobody knows what to do there now."

  "I can't leave New York," she answered stonily.

  "I know," he said softly. "That's why it's I who'll go there to straighten things out. At least, to find a man to put in charge."

  "No! I don't want you to. It's too dangerous. And what for? It doesn't matter now. There's nothing to save."

  "It's still Taggart Transcontinental. I'll stand by it. Dagny, wherever you go, you'll always be able to build a railroad. I couldn't. I don't even want to make a new start. Not any more. Not after what I've seen. You should. I can't. Let me do what I can."

  "Eddie! Don't you want--" She stopped, knowing that it was useless. "All right, Eddie. If you wish."

  "I'm flying to California tonight. I've arranged for space on an army plane.... I know that you will quit as soon as ... as soon as you can leave New York. You might be gone by the time I return. When you're ready, just go. Don't worry about me. Don't wait to tell me. Go as fast as you can. I ... I'll say good-bye to you, now."

  She rose to her feet. They stood facing each other; in the dim half-light of the office, the picture of Nathaniel Taggart hung on the wall between them. They were both seeing the years since that distant day when they had first learned to walk down the track of a railroad. He inclined his head and held it lowered for a long moment.

  She extended her hand. "Good-bye, Eddie."

  He clasped her hand firmly, not looking down at his fingers; he was looking at her face.

  He started to go, but stopped, turned to her and asked, his voice low, but steady, neither as plea nor as despair, but as a last gesture of conscientious clarity to close a long ledger, "Dagny ... did you know ... how I felt about you?"

  "Yes," she said softly, realizing in this moment that she had known it wordlessly for years, "I knew it."

  "Good-bye, Dagny."

  The faint rumble of an underground train went through the walls of the building and swallowed the sound of the door closing after him.

  It was snowing, next morning, and melting drops were like an icy, cutting touch on the temples of Dr. Robert Stadler, as he walked down the long corridor of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, toward the door of the royal suite. Two husky men walked by his sides; they were from the department of Morale Conditioning, but did not trouble to hide what method of conditioning they would welcome a chance to employ.

  "Just remember Mr. Thompson's orders," one of them told him contemptuously. "One wrong squawk out of you--and you'll regret it, brother."

  It was not the snow on his temples--thought Dr. Stadler--it was a burning pressure, it had been there since that scene, last night, when he had screamed to Mr. Thompson that he could not see John Galt. He had screamed in blind terror, begging a circle of impassive faces not to make him do it, sobbing that he would do anything but that. The faces had not condescended to argue or even to threaten him; they had merely given him orders. He had spent a sleepless night, telling himself that he would not obey; but he was walking toward that door. The burning pressure on his temples and the faint, dizzying nausea of unreality came from the fact that he could not recapture the sense of being Dr. Robert Stadler.

  He noticed the metallic gleam of the bayonets held by the guards at the door, and the sound of a key being turned in a lock. He found himself walking forward and heard the door being locked behind him.

  Across the long room, he saw John Galt sitting on the window sill, a tall, slender figure in slacks and shirt, one leg slanting down to the floor, the other bent, his hands clasping his knee, his head of sun-streaked hair raised against a spread of gray sky--and suddenly Dr. Stadler saw the figure of a young boy sitting on the porch-railing of his home, near the campus of the Patrick Henry University, with the sun on the chestnut hair of a head lifted against a spread of summer blue, and he heard the passionate intensity of his own voice saying twenty-two years ago: "The only sacred value in the world, John, is the human mind, the inviolate human mind ..." -and he cried to that boy's figure, across the room and across the years:

  "I couldn't help it, John! I couldn't help it!"

  He gripped the edge of a table between them, for support and as a protective barrier, even though the figure on the window sill had not moved.

  "I didn't bring you to this!" he cried. "I didn't mean to! I couldn't help it! It's not what I intended! ... John! I'm not to blame for it! I'm not! I never had a chance against them! They own the world! They left me no place in it! ... What's reason to them? What's science? You don't know how deadly they are! You don't understand them! They don't think! They're mindless animals moved by irrational feelings--by their greedy, grasping, blind, unaccountable feelings! They seize whatever they want, that's all they know: that they want it, regardless of cause, effect or logic--they want it, the bloody, grubbing pigs! ... The mind? Don't you know how futile it is, the mind, against those mindless hordes? Our weapons are so helplessly, laughably childish: truth, knowledge, reason, values, rights! Force is all they know, force, fraud and plunder! ... John! Don't look at me like that! What could I do against their fists? I had to live, didn't I? It wasn't for myself--it was for the future of science! I had to be left alone, I had to be protected, I had to make terms with them--there's no way
to live except on their terms--there isn't!--do you hear me?--there isn'.t! ... What did you want me to do? Spend my life begging for jobs? Begging my inferiors for funds and endowments? Did you want my work to depend on the mercy of the ruffians who have a knack for making money? I had no time to compete with them for money or markets or any of their miserable material pursuits! Was that your idea of justice--that they should spend their money on liquor, yachts and women, while the priceless hours of my life were wasted for lack of scientific equipment? Persuasion? How could I persuade them? What language could I speak to men who don't think? ... You don't know how lonely I was, how starved for some spark of intelligence! How lonely and tired and helpless! Why should a mind like mine have to bargain with ignorant fools? They'd never contribute a penny to science! Why shouldn't they be forced? It wasn't you that I wanted to force! That gun was not aimed at the intellect! It wasn't aimed at men like you and me, only at mindless materialists! ... Why do you look at me that way? I had no choice! There isn't any choice except to beat them at their own game! Oh yes, it is their game, they set the rules! What do we count, the few who can think? We can only hope to get by, unnoticed--and to trick them into serving our aims! ... Don't you know how noble a purpose it was--my vision of the future of science? Human knowledge set free of material bonds! An unlimited end unrestricted by means! I am not a traitor, John! I'm not! I was serving the cause of the mind! What I saw ahead, what I wanted, what I felt, was not to be measured in their miserable dollars! I wanted a laboratory! I needed it! What do I care where it came from or how? I could do so much! I could reach such heights! Don't you have any pity? I wanted it! ... What if they had to be forced? Who are they to think, anyway? Why did you teach them to rebel? It would have worked, if you hadn't withdrawn them! It would have worked, I tell you! It wouldn't be--like this! ... Don't accuse me! We can't be guilty ... all of us ... for centuries.... We can't be so totally wrong! ... We're not to be damned! We had no choice! There is no other way to live on earth! ... Why don't you answer me? What are you seeing? Are you thinking of that speech you made? I don't want to think of it! It was only logic! One can't live by logic! Do you hear me? ... Don't look at me! You're asking the impossible! Men can't exist your way! You permit no moments of weakness, you don't allow for human frailties or human feelings! What do you want of us? Rationality twenty-four hours a day, with no loophole, no rest, no escape? ... Don't look at me, God damn you! I'm not afraid of you any longer! Do you hear me? I am not afraid! Who are you to blame me, you miserable failure? Here's where your road has brought you! Here you are, caught, helpless, under guard, to be killed by those brutes at any moment--and you dare to accuse me of being impractical! Oh yes, you're going to be killed! You won't win! You can't be allowed to win! You are the man who has to be destroyed!"