Atlas Shrugged (102 page)

“Francisco,” she asked, her voice hard, “what have you done to Hank Rearden?”

He looked startled that she should think of that name at that moment. “Why?” he asked.

“He told me once that you were the only man he’d ever liked. But last time I saw him, he said that he would kill you on sight.”

“He did not tell you why?”

“No.”

“He told you nothing about it?”

“No.” She saw him smiling strangely, a smile of sadness, gratitude and longing. “I warned him that you would hurt him—when he told me that you were the only man he liked.”

His words came like a sudden explosion: “He was the only man—with one exception—to whom I could have given my life!”

“Who is the exception?”

“The man to whom I have.”

“What do you mean?”

He shook his head, as if he had said more than he intended, and did not answer.

“What did you do to Rearden?”

“I’ll tell you some time. Not now.”

“Is that what you always do to those who ... mean a great deal to you?”

He looked at her with a smile that had the luminous sincerity of innocence and pain. “You know,” he said gently, “I could say that that is what they always do to me.” He added, “But I won’t. The actions—and the knowledge—were mine.”

He stood up. “Shall we go? I’ll take you home.”

She rose and he held her coat for her; it was a wide, loose garment, and his hands guided it to enfold her body. She felt his arm remain about her shoulders a moment longer than he intended her to notice.

She glanced back at him. But he was standing oddly still, staring intently down at the table. In rising, they had brushed aside the mats of paper lace and she saw an inscription cut into the plastic of the table top. Attempts had been made to erase it, but the inscription remained, as the graven voice of some unknown drunk’s despair: “Who is John Galt?”

With a brusque movement of anger, she flicked the mat back to cover the words. He chuckled.

“I can answer it,” he said. “I can tell you who is John Galt.”

“Really? Everybody seems to know him, but they never tell the same story twice.”

“They’re all true, though—all the stories you’ve heard about him.”

“Well, what’s yours? Who is he?”

“John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains and he withdrew his fire—until the day when men withdraw their vultures.”

The band of crossties swept in wide curves around granite corners, clinging to the mountainsides of Colorado. Dagny walked down the ties, keeping her hands in her coat pockets, and her eyes on the meaningless distance ahead; only the familiar movement of straining her steps to the spacing of the ties gave her the physical sense of an action pertaining to a railroad.

A gray cotton, which was neither quite fog nor clouds, hung in sloppy wads between sky and mountains, making the sky look like an old mattress spilling its stuffing down the sides of the peaks. A crusted snow covered the ground, belonging neither to winter nor to spring. A net of moisture hung in the air, and she felt an icy pin-prick on her face once in a while, which was neither a raindrop nor a snowflake. The weather seemed afraid to take a stand and clung noncommittally to some sort of road’s middle; Board of Directors’ weather, she thought. The light seemed drained and she could not tell whether this was the afternoon or the evening of March 31. But she was very certain that it was March 31; that was a certainty not to be escaped.

She had come to Colorado with Hank Rearden, to buy whatever machinery could still be found in the closed factories. It had been like a hurried search through the sinking hulk of a great ship before it was to vanish out of reach. They could have given the task to employees, but they had come, both prompted by the same unconfessed motive: they could not resist the desire to attend the run of the last train, as one cannot resist the desire to give a last salute by attending a funeral, even while knowing that it is only an act of self-torture.

They had been buying machinery from doubtful owners in sales of dubious legality, since nobody could tell who had the right to dispose of the great, dead properties, and nobody would come to challenge the transactions. They had bought everything that could be moved from the gutted plant of Nielsen Motors. Ted Nielsen had quit and vanished, a week after the announcement that the Line was to be closed.

She had felt like a scavenger, but the activity of the hunt had made her able to bear these past few days. When she had found that three empty hours remained before the departure of the last train, she had gone to walk through the countryside, to escape the stillness of the town. She had walked at random through twisting mountain trails, alone among rocks and snow, trying to substitute motion for thought, knowing that she had to get through this day without thinking of the summer when she had ridden the engine of the first train. But she found herself walking back along the roadbed of the John Gait Line—and she knew that she had intended it, that she had gone out for that purpose.

It was a spur track which had already been dismembered. There were no signal lights, no switches, no telephone wires, nothing but a long band of wooden strips left on the ground—a chain of ties without rail, like the remnant of a spine—and, as its lonely guardian, at an abandoned grade crossing, a pole with slanted arms saying: “Stop. Look. Listen.”

An early darkness mixed with fog was slipping down to fill the valleys, when she came upon the factory. There was an inscription high on the lustrous tile of its front wall: “Roger Marsh. Electrical Appliances.” The man who had wanted to chain himself to his desk in order not to leave this, she thought. The building stood intact, like a corpse in that instant when its eyes have just closed and one still waits to see them open again. She felt that the lights would flare up at any moment behind the great sheets of windows, under the long, flat roofs. Then she saw one broken pane, pierced by a stone for some young moron’s enjoyment—and she saw the tall, dry stem of a single weed rising from the steps of the main entrance. Hit by a sudden, blinding hatred, in rebellion against the weed’s impertinence, knowing of what enemy this was the scout, she ran forward, she fell on her knees and jerked the weed up by its roots. Then, kneeling on the steps of a closed factory, looking at the vast silence of mountains, brush and dusk, she thought: What do you think you’re doing?

It was almost dark when she reached the end of the ties that led her back to the town of Marshville. Marshville had been the end of the Line for months past; service to Wyatt Junction had been discontinued long ago; Dr. Ferris’ Reclamation Project had been abandoned this winter. .

The street lights were on, and they hung in mid-air at the intersections, in a long, diminishing line of yellow globes over the empty streets of Marshville. All the better homes were closed—the neat, sturdy houses of modest cost, well built and well kept; there were faded “For Sale” signs on their lawns. But she saw lights in the windows of the cheap, garish structures that had acquired, within a few years, the slovenly dilapidation of slum hovels; the homes of people who had not moved, the people who never looked beyond the span of one week. She saw a large new television set in the lighted room of a house with a sagging roof and cracking walls. She wondered how long they expected the electric power companies of Colorado to remain in existence. Then she shook her head: those people had never known that power companies existed.

The main street of Marshville was lined by the black windows of shops out of business. All the luxury stores are gone—she thought, looking at their signs; and then she shuddered, realizing what things she now called luxury, realizing to what extent and in what manner those things, once available to the poorest, had been luxuries: Dry Cleaning—Electrical Appliances—Gas Station—Drug Store—Five and Ten. The only ones left open were grocery stores and saloons.

The platform of the railroad station was crowded. The glaring arc lights seemed to pick it out of the mountains, to isolate and focus it, like a small stage on which every movement was naked to the sight of the unseen tiers rising in the vast, encircling night. People were carting luggage, bundling their children, haggling at ticket windows, the stifled panic of their manner suggesting that what they really wanted to do was to fall down on the ground and scream with terror. Their terror had the evasive quality of guilt: it was not the fear that comes from understanding, but from the refusal to understand.

The last train stood at the platform, its windows a long, lone streak of light. The steam of the locomotive, gasping tensely through the wheels, did not have its usual joyous sound of energy released for a sprint; it had the sound of a panting breath that one dreads to hear and dreads more to stop hearing. Far at the end of the lighted windows, she saw the small red dot of a lantern attached to her private car. Beyond the lantern, there was nothing but a black void.

The train was loaded to capacity, and the shrill notes of hysteria in the confusion of voices were the pleas for space in vestibules and aisles. Some people were not leaving, but stood in vapid curiosity, watching the show; they had come, as if knowing that this was the last event they would ever witness in their community and, perhaps, in their lives.

She walked hastily through the crowd, trying not to look at anyone. Some knew who she was, most of them did not. She saw an old woman with a ragged shawl on her shoulders and the graph of a lifetime’s struggle on the cracked skin of her face; the woman’s glance was a hopeless appeal for help. An unshaved young man with gold-rimmed glasses stood on a crate under an arc light, yelling to the faces shifting past him, “What do they mean, no business! Look at that train! It’s full of passengers! There’s plenty of business! It’s just that there’s no profits for them—that’s why they’re letting you perish, those greedy parasites!” A disheveled woman rushed up to Dagny, waving two tickets and screaming something about the wrong date. Dagny found herself pushing people out of the way, fighting to reach the end of the train—but an emaciated man, with the staring eyes of years of malicious futility, rushed at her, shouting, “It’s all right for you, you’ve got a good overcoat and a private car, but you won’t give us any trains, you and all the selfish—” He stopped abruptly, looking at someone behind her. She felt a hand grasping her elbow: it was Hank Rearden. He held her arm and led her toward her car; seeing the look on his face, she understood why people got out of their way. At the end of the platform, a pallid, plumpish man stood saying to a crying woman, “That’s how it’s always been in this world. There will be no chance for the poor, until the rich are destroyed.” High above the town, hanging in black space like an uncooled planet, the flame of Wyatt’s Torch was twisting in the wind.

Rearden went inside her car, but she remained on the steps of the vestibule, delaying the finality of turning away. She heard the “All aboard!” She looked at the people who remained on the platform as one looks at those who watch the departure of the last lifeboat.

The conductor stood below, at the foot of the steps, with his lantern in one hand and his watch in the other. He glanced at the watch, then glanced up at her face. She answered by the silent affirmation of closing her eyes and inclining her head. She saw his lantern circling through the air, as she turned away—and the first jolt of the wheels, on the rails of Rearden Metal, was made easier for her by the sight of Rearden, as she pulled the door open and went into her car.

When James Taggart telephoned Lillian Rearden from New York and said, “Why, no—no special reason, just wondered how you were and whether you ever came to the city—haven’t seen you for ages and just thought we might have lunch together next time you’re in New York”—she knew that he had some very special reason in mind.

When she answered lazily, “Oh, let me see—what day is this? April second?—let me look at my calendar—why, it just so happens that I have some shopping to do in New York tomorrow, so I’ll be delighted to let you save me my lunch money”—he knew that she had no shopping to do and that the luncheon would be the only purpose of her trip to the city.