by Ayn Rand
"Get this straight," said Dr. Ferris, addressing him for the first time. "We want you to take full power over the economy of the country. We want you to become a dictator. We want you to rule. Understand? We want you to give orders and to figure out the right orders to give. What we want, we mean to get. Speeches, logic, arguments or passive obedience won't save you now. We want ideas--or else. We won't let you out of here until you tell us the exact measures you'll take to save our system. Then we'll have you tell it to the country over the radio." He raised his wrist, displaying a stop-watch. "I'll give you thirty seconds to decide whether you want to start talking right now. If not, then we'll start. Do you understand?"
Galt was looking straight at them, his face expressionless, as if he understood too much. He did not answer.
They heard the sound of the stop-watch in the silence, counting off the seconds, and the sound of Mouch's choked, irregular breathing as he gripped the arms of his chair.
Ferris waved a signal to the mechanic at the machine. The mechanic threw the switch; it lighted the red glass button and set off two sounds: one was the low, humming drone of an electric generator, the other was a peculiar beat, as regular as the ticking of a clock, but with an oddly muffled resonance. It took them a moment to realize that it came from the amplifier and that they were hearing the beat of Galt's heart.
"Number three," said Ferris, raising a finger in signal.
The mechanic pressed a button under one of the dials. A long shudder ran through Galt's body; his left arm shook in jerking spasms, convulsed by the electric current that circled between his wrist and shoulder. His head fell back, his eyes closed, his lips drawn tight. He made .no sound.
When the mechanic lifted his finger off the button, Galt's arm stopped shaking. He did not move.
The three men glanced about them with an instant's look of groping. Ferris' eyes were blank, Mouch's terrified, Taggart's disappointed. The sound of the thumping beat went on through the silence.
"Number two," said Ferris.
It was Galt's right leg that twisted in convulsions, with the current now circling between his hip and ankle. His hands gripped the edges of the mattress. His head jerked once, from side to side, then lay still. The beating of the heart grew faintly faster.
Mouch was drawing away, pressing against the back of his armchair. Taggart was sitting on the edge of his, leaning forward.
"Number one, gradual," said Ferris.
Galt's torso jerked upward and fell back and twisted in long shudders, straining against his strapped wrists--as the current was now running from his one wrist to the other, across his lungs. The mechanic was slowly turning a knob, increasing the voltage of the current; the needle on the dial was moving toward the red segment that marked danger. Galt's breath was coming in broken, panting sounds out of convulsed lungs.
"Had enough?" snarled Ferris, when the current went off.
Galt did not answer. His lips moved faintly, opening for air. The beat from the stethoscope was racing. But his breath was falling to an even rhythm, by a controlled effort at relaxation.
"You're too easy on him!" yelled Taggart, staring at the naked body on the mattress.
Galt opened his eyes and glanced at them for a moment. They could tell nothing, except that his glance was steady and fully conscious. Then he dropped his head again and lay still, as if he had forgotten them.
His naked body looked strangely out of place in this cellar. They knew it, though none of them would identify that knowledge. The long lines of his body, running from his ankles to the flat hips, to the angle of the waist, to the straight shoulders, looked like a statue of ancient Greece, sharing that statue's meaning, but stylized to a longer, lighter, more active form and a gaunter strength, suggesting more restless an energy--the body, not of a chariot driver, but of a builder of airplanes. And as the meaning of a statue of ancient Greece--the statue of man as a god--clashed with the spirit of this century's halls, so his body clashed with a cellar devoted to prehistorical activities. The clash was the greater, because he seemed to belong with electric wires, with stainless steel, with precision instruments, with the levers of a control board. Perhaps--this was the thought most fiercely resisted and most deeply buried at the bottom of his watchers' sensations, the thought they knew only as a diffused hatred and an unfocused terror--perhaps it was the absence of such statues from the modern world that had transformed a generator into an octopus and brought a body such as his into its tentacles.
"I understand you're some sort of electrical expert," said Ferris, and chuckled. "So are we--don't you think so?"
Two sounds answered him in the silence: the drone of the generator and the beating of Galt's heart.
"The mixed series!" ordered Ferris, waving one finger at the mechanic.
The shocks now came at irregular, unpredictable intervals, one after another or minutes apart. Only the shuddering convulsions of Galt's legs, arms, torso or entire body showed whether the current was racing between two particular electrodes or through all of them at once. The needles on the dials kept coming close to the red marks, then receding: the machine was calculated to inflict the maximum intensity of pain without damaging the body of the victim.
It was the watchers who found it unbearable to wait through the minutes of the pauses filled with the sound of the heartbeat: the heart was now racing in an irregular rhythm. The pauses were calculated to let that beat slow down, but allow no relief to the victim, who had to wait for a shock at any moment.
Gait lay relaxed, as if not attempting to fight the pain, but surrendering to it, not attempting to negate it, but to bear it. When his lips parted for breath and a sudden jolt slammed them tight again, he did not resist the shaking rigidity of his body, but he let it vanish the instant the current left him. Only the skin of his face was pulled tight, and the sealed line of his lips twisted sidewise once in a while. When a shock raced through his chest, the gold-copper strands of his hair flew with the jerking of his head, as if waving in a gust of wind, beating against his face, across his eyes. The watchers wondered why his hair seemed to be growing darker, until they realized that it was drenched in sweat.
The terror of hearing one's own heart struggling as if about to burst at any moment, had been intended to be felt by the victim. It was the torturers who were trembling with terror, as they listened to the jagged, broken rhythm and missed a breath with every missing beat. It sounded now as if the heart were leaping, beating frantically against its cage of ribs, in agony and in a desperate anger. The heart was protesting; the man would not. He lay still, his eyes closed, his hands relaxed, hearing his heart as it fought for his life.
Wesley Mouch was first to break. "Oh God, Floyd!" he screamed. "Don't kill him! Don't dare kill him! If he dies, we die!"
"He won't," snarled Ferris. "He'll wish he did, but he won'.t! The machine won't let him! It's mathematically computed! It's safe!"
"Oh, isn't it enough? He'll obey us now! I'm sure he'll obey!"
"No! It's not enough! I don't want him to obey! I want him to believe! To accept! To want to accept! We've got to have him work for us voluntarily!"
"Go ahead!" cried Taggart. "What are you waiting for? Can't you make the current stronger? He hasn't even screamed yet!"
"What's the matter with you?" gasped Mouch, catching a glimpse of Taggart's face while a current was twisting Galt's body: Taggart was staring at it intently, yet his eyes seemed glazed and dead, but around that inanimate stare the muscles of his face were pulled into an obscene caricature of enjoyment.
"Had enough?" Ferris kept yelling to Galt. "Are you ready to want what we want?"
They heard no answer. Galt raised his head once in a while and looked at them. There were dark rings under his eyes, but the eyes were clear and conscious.
In mounting panic, the watchers lost their sense of context and language--and their three voices blended into a progression of indiscriminate shrieks: "We want you to take over! ... We want you to rule! ... We order
you to give orders! ... We demand that you dictate! ... We order you to save us! ... We order you to think! ..."
They heard no answer but the beating of the heart on which their own lives depended.
The current was shooting through Galt's chest and the beating was coming in irregular spurts, as if it were racing and stumbling--when suddenly his body fell still, relaxing: the beating had stopped.
The silence was like a stunning blow, and before they had time to scream, their horror was topped by another: by the fact that Galt opened his eyes and raised his head.
Then they realized that the drone of the motor had ceased, too, and that the red light had gone out on the control panel: the current had stopped; the generator was dead.
The mechanic was jabbing his finger at the button, to no avail. He yanked the lever of the switch again and again. He kicked the side of the machine. The red light would not go on; the sound did not return. .
"Well?" snapped Ferris. "Well? What's the matter?"
"The generator's on the blink," said the mechanic helplessly.
"What's the matter with it?"
"I don't know."
"Well, find out and fix it!"
The man was not a trained electrician; he had been chosen, not for his knowledge, but for his uncritical capacity for pushing anv buttons; the effort he needed to learn his task was such that his consciousness could be relied upon to have no room for anything else. He opened the rear panel of the machine and stared in bewilderment at the intricate coils: he could find nothing visibly out of order. He put on his rubber gloves, picked up a pair of pliers, tightened a few bolts at random, and scratched his head.
"I don't know," he said; his voice had a sound of helpless docility. "Who am I to know?"
The three men were on their feet, crowding behind the machine to stare at its recalcitrant organs. They were acting merely by reflex: they knew that they did not know.
"But you've got to fix it!" yelled Ferris. "It's got to work! We've got to have electricity!"
"We must continue!" cried Taggart; he was shaking. "It's ridiculous! I won't have it! I won't be interrupted! I won't let him off!" He pointed in the direction of the mattress.
"Do something!" Ferris was crying to the mechanic. "Don't just stand there! Do something! Fix it! I order you to fix it!"
"But I don't know what's wrong with it," said the man, blinking.
"Then find out!"
"How am I to find out?"
"I order you to fix it! Do you hear me? Make it work--or I'll fire you and throw you in jail!"
"But I don't know what's wrong with it." The man sighed, bewildered. "I don't know what to do."
"It's the vibrator that's out of order," said a voice behind them; they whirled around; Galt was struggling for breath, but he was speaking in the brusque, competent tone of an engineer. "Take it out and pry off the aluminum cover. You'll find a pair of contacts fused together. Force them apart, take a small file and clean up the pitted surfaces. Then replace the cover, plug it back into the machine--and your generator will work."
There was a long moment of total silence.
The mechanic was staring at Galt; he was holding Galt's glance--and even he was able to recognize the nature of the sparkle in the dark green eyes: it was a sparkle of contemptuous mockery.
He made a step back. In the incoherent dimness of his consciousness, in some wordless, shapeless, unintelligible manner, even he suddenly grasped the meaning of what was occurring in that cellar.
He looked at Galt--he looked at the three men--he looked at the machine. He shuddered, he dropped his pliers and ran out of the room.
Galt burst out laughing.
The three men were backing slowly away from the machine. They were struggling not to allow themselves to understand what the mechanic had understood.
"No!" cried Taggart suddenly, glancing at Galt and leaping forward. "No! I won't let him get away with it!" He fell down on his knees, groping frantically to find the aluminum cylinder of the vibrator. "I'll fix it! I'll work it myself! We've got to go on! We've got to break him!"
"Take it easy, Jim," said Ferris uneasily, jerking him up to his feet.
"Hadn't we ... hadn't we better lay off for the night?" said Mouch pleadingly; he was looking at the door through which the mechanic had escaped, his glance part-envy, part-terror.
"No!" cried Taggart.
"Jim, hasn't he had enough? Don't forget, we have to be careful."
"No! He hasn't had enough! He hasn't even screamed yet!"
"Jim!" cried Mouch suddenly, terrified by something in Taggart's face. "We can't afford to kill him! You know it!"
"I don't care! I want to break him! I want to hear him scream! I want--"
And then it was Taggart who screamed. It was a long, sudden, piercing scream, as if at some sudden sight, though his eyes were staring at space and seemed blankly sightless. The sight he was confronting was within him. The protective walls of emotion, of evasion, of pretense, of semi-thinking and pseudo-words, built up by him through all of his years, had crashed in the span of one moment--the moment when he knew that he wanted Galt to die, knowing fully that.'his own death would follow.
He was suddenly seeing the motive that had directed all the actions of his life. It was not his incommunicable soul or his love for others or his social duty or any of the fraudulent sounds by which he had maintained his self-esteem: it was the lust to destroy whatever was living, for the sake of whatever was not. It was the urge to defy reality by the destruction of every living value, for the sake of proving to himself that he could exist in defiance of reality and would never have to be bound by any solid, immutable facts. A moment ago, he had been able to feel that he hated Galt above all men, that the hatred was proof of Galt's evil, which he need define no further, that he wanted Galt to be destroyed for the sake of his own survival. Now he knew that he had wanted Galt's destruction at the price of his own destruction to follow, he knew that he had never wanted to survive, he knew that it was Galt's greatness he had wanted to torture and destroy--he was seeing it as greatness by his own admission, greatness by the only standard that existed, whether anyone chose to admit it or not: the greatness of a man who was master of reality in a manner no other had equaled. In the moment when he, James Taggart, had found himself facing the ultimatum: to accept reality or die, it was death his emotions had chosen, death, rather than surrender to that realm of which Galt was so radiant a son. In the person of Galt--he knew--he had sought the destruction of all existence.
It was not by means of words that this knowledge confronted his consciousness: as all his knowledge had consisted of emotions, so now he was held by an emotion and a vision that he had no power to dispel. He was no longer able to summon the fog to conceal the sight of all those blind alleys he had struggled never to be forced to see: now, at the end of every alley, he was seeing his hatred of existence--he was seeing the face of Cherryl Taggart with her joyous eagerness to live and that it was this particular eagerness he had always wanted to defeat--he was seeing his face as the face of a killer whom all men should rightfully loathe, who destroyed values for being values, who killed in order not to discover his own irredeemable evil.
"No ..." he moaned, staring at that vision, shaking his head to escape it. "No ... No ..."
"Yes," said Galt.
He saw Galt's eyes looking straight at his, as if Galt were seeing the things he was seeing.
"I told you that on the radio, didn't I?" said Galt.
This was the stamp James Taggart had dreaded, from which there was no escape: the stamp and proof of objectivity. "No ..." he said feebly once more, but it was no longer the voice of a living consciousness. .
He stood for a moment, staring blindly at space, then his legs gave way, folding limply, and he sat on the floor, still staring, unaware of his action or surroundings.
"Jim ... !" called Mouch. There was no answer.
Mouch and Ferris did not ask themselves or wonder what it was that
had happened to Taggart: they knew that they must never attempt to discover it, under peril of sharing his fate. They knew who it was that had been broken tonight. They knew that this was the end of James Taggart, whether his physical body survived or not.
"Let's ... let's get Jim out of here," said Ferris shakily. "Let's get him to a doctor ... or somewhere ..."
They pulled Taggart to his feet; he did not resist, he obeyed lethargically, and he moved his feet when pushed. It was he who had reached the state to which he had wanted Galt to be reduced. Holding his arms at both sides, his two friends led him out of the room.
He saved them from the necessity of admitting to themselves that they wanted to escape Galt's eyes. Galt was watching them; his glance was too austerely perceptive.
"We'll be back," snapped Ferris to the chief of the guards. "Stay here and don't let anyone in. Understand? No one."
They pushed Taggart into their car, parked by the trees at the entrance. "We'll be back," said Ferris to no one in particular, to the trees and the darkness of the sky.
For the moment, their only certainty was that they had to escape from that cellar--the cellar where the living generator was left tied by the side of the dead one.
CHAPTER X
IN THE NAME OF THE BEST WITHIN US
Dagny walked straight toward the guard who stood at the door of "Project F." Her steps sounded purposeful, even and open, ringing in the silence of the path among the trees. She raised her head to a ray of moonlight, to let him recognize her face.
"Let me in," she said.
"No admittance," he answered in the voice of a robot. "By order of Dr. Ferris."
"I am here by order of Mr. Thompson."
"Huh? ... I ... I don't know about that."
"I do."
"I mean, Dr. Ferris hasn't told me ... ma.'am."
"I am telling you."
"But I'm not supposed to take any orders from anyone excepting Dr. Ferris."