Atlas Shrugged (108 page)

“Precisely,” said Dr. Ferris. “It’s extremely important to get those patents turned over to us
voluntarily.
Even if we had a law permitting outright nationalization, it would be much better to get them as a gift. We want to leave to people the illusion that they’re still preserving their private property rights. And most of them will play along. They’ll sign the Gift Certificates. Just raise a lot of noise about its being a patriotic duty and that anyone who refuses is a prince of greed, and they’ll sign. But—” He stopped.

“I know,” said Mouch; he was growing visibly more nervous. “There will be, I think, a few old-fashioned bastards here and there who’ll refuse to sign—but they won’t be prominent enough to make a noise, nobody will hear about it, their own communities and friends will turn against them for their being selfish, so it won’t give us any trouble. We’ll just take the patents over, anyway—and those guys won’t have the nerve or the money to start a test case. But—” He stopped.

James Taggart leaned back in his chair, watching them; he was beginning to enjoy the conversation.

“Yes,” said Dr. Ferris, “I’m thinking of it, too. I’m thinking of a certain tycoon who is in a position to blast us to pieces. Whether we’ll recover the pieces or not, is hard to tell. God knows what is liable to happen at a hysterical time like the present and in a situation as delicate as this. Anything can throw everything off balance. Blow up the whole works. And if there’s anyone who wants to do it, he does. He does and can. He knows the real issue, he knows the things which must not be said—and he is not afraid to say them. He knows the one dangerous, fatally dangerous weapon. He is our deadliest adversary.”

“Who?” asked Lawson.

Dr. Ferris hesitated, shrugged and answered, “The guiltless man.”

Lawson stared blankly. “What do you mean and whom are you talking about?”

James Taggart smiled.

“I mean that there is no way to disarm any man,” said Dr. Ferris, “except through guilt. Through that which he himself has accepted as guilt. If a man has ever stolen a dime, you can impose on him the punishment intended for a bank robber and he will take it. He’ll bear any form of misery, he’ll feel that he deserves no better. If there’s not enough guilt in the world, we must create it. If we teach a man that it’s evil to look at spring flowers and he believes us and then does it —we’ll be able to do whatever we please with him. He won’t defend himself. He won’t feel he’s worth it. He won’t fight. But save us from the man who lives up to his own standards. Save us from the man of clean conscience. He’s the man who’ll beat us.”

“Are you talking about Henry Rearden?” asked Taggart, his voice peculiarly clear.

The one name they had not wanted to pronounce struck them into .an instant’s silence.

“What if I were?” asked Dr. Ferris cautiously.

“Oh, nothing,” said Taggart. “Only, if you were, I would tell you that I can deliver Henry Rearden. He’ll sign.”

By the rules of their unspoken language, they all knew—from the tone of his voice—that he was not bluffing.

“God, Jim! No!” gasped Wesley Mouch.

“Yes,” said Taggart. “I was stunned, too, when I learned—what I learned. I didn’t expect that. Anything but that.”

“I am glad to hear it,” said Mouch cautiously. “It’s a constructive piece of information. It might be very valuable indeed.”

“Valuable—yes,” said Taggart pleasantly. “When do you plan to put the directive into effect?”

“Oh, we have to move fast. We don’t want any news of it to leak out. I expect you all to keep this most strictly confidential. I’d say that we’ll be ready to spring it on them in a couple of weeks.”

“Don’t you think that it would be advisable—before all prices are frozen—to adjust the matter of the railroad rates? I was thinking of a raise. A small but most essentially needed raise.”

“We’ll discuss it, you and I,” said Mouch amiably. “It might be arranged.” He turned to the others; Boyle’s face was sagging. “There are many details still to be worked out, but I’m sure that our program won’t encounter any major difficulties.” He was assuming the tone and manner of a public address; he sounded brisk and almost cheerful. “Rough spots are to be expected. If one thing doesn’t work, we’ll try another. Trial-and-error is the only pragmatic rule of action. We’ll just keep on trying. If any hardships come up, remember that it’s only temporary. Only for the duration of the national emergency.”

“Say,” asked Kinnan, “how is the emergency to end if everything is to stand still?”

“Don’t be theoretical,” said Mouch impatiently. “We’ve got to deal with the situation of the moment. Don’t bother about minor details, so long as the broad outlines of our policy are clear. We’ll have the power. We’ll be able to solve any problem and answer any question.”

Fred Kinnan chuckled. “Who is John Galt?”

“Don’t say that!” cried Taggart.

“I have a question to ask about Point Seven,” said Kinnan. “It says that all wages, prices, salaries, dividends, profits and so forth will be frozen on the date of the directive. Taxes, too?”

“Oh no!” cried Mouch. “How can we tell what funds we’ll need in the future?” Kinnan seemed to be smiling. “Well?” snapped Mouch. “What about it?”

“Nothing,” said Kinnan. “I just asked.”

Mouch leaned back in his chair. “I must say to all of you that I appreciate your coming here and giving us the benefit of your opinions. It has been very helpful.” He leaned forward to look at his desk calendar and sat over it for a moment, toying with his pencil. Then the pencil came down, struck a date and drew a circle around it. “Directive 10-289 will go into effect on the morning of May first.”

All nodded approval. None looked at his neighbor.

James Taggart rose, walked to the window and pulled the blind down over the white obelisk.

In the first moment of awakening, Dagny was astonished to find herself looking at the spires of unfamiliar buildings against a glowing, pale blue sky. Then she saw the twisted seam of the thin stocking on her own leg, she felt a wrench of discomfort in the muscles of her waistline, and she realized that she was lying on the couch in her office, with the clock on her desk saying 6:15 and the first rays of the sun giving silver edges to the silhouettes of the skyscrapers beyond the window. The last thing she remembered was that she had dropped down on the couch, intending to rest for ten minutes, when the window was black and the clock stood at 3:30.

She twisted herself to her feet, feeling an enormous exhaustion. The lighted lamp on the desk looked futile in the glow of the morning, over the piles of paper which were her cheerless, unfinished task. She tried not to think of the work for a few minutes longer, while she dragged herself past the desk to her washroom and let handfuls of cold .water run over her face.

The exhaustion was gone by the time she stepped back into the office. No matter what night preceded it, she had never known a morning when she did not feel the rise of a quiet excitement that became a tightening energy in her body and a hunger for action in her mind—because this was the beginning of day and it was a day of
her
life. She looked down at the city. The streets were still empty, it made them look wider, and in the luminous cleanliness of the spring air they seemed to be waiting for the promise of all the greatness that would take form in the activity about to pour through them. The calendar in the distance said: May 1.

She sat down at her desk, smiling in defiance at the distastefulness of her job. She hated the reports that she had to finish reading, but it was her job, it was her railroad, it was morning. She lighted a cigarette, thinking that she would finish this task before breakfast; she turned off the lamp and pulled the papers forward.

There were reports from the general managers of the four Regions of the Taggart system, their pages a typewritten cry of despair over the breakdowns of equipment. There was a report about a wreck on the main line near Winston, Colorado. There was the new budget of the Operating Department, the revised budget based on the raise in rates which Jim had obtained last week. She tried to choke the exasperation of hopelessness as she went slowly over the budget’s figures: all those calculations had been made on the assumption that the volume of freight would remain unchanged and that the raise would bring them added revenue by the end of the year; she knew that the freight tonnage would go on shrinking, that the raise would make little difference, that by the end of this year their losses would be greater than .ever.

When she looked up from the pages, she saw with a small jolt of astonishment that the clock said 9:25. She had been dimly aware of the usual sound of movement and voices in the anteroom of her office, as her staff had arrived to begin their day; she wondered why nobody had entered her office and why her telephone had remained silent; as a daily rule, there should have been a rush of business by this hour. She glanced at her calendar; there was a note that the McNeil Car Foundry of Chicago was to phone her at nine A.M. in regard to the new freight cars which Taggart Transcontinental had been expecting for six months.

She flicked the switch of the interoffice communicator to call her secretary. The girl’s voice answered with a startled little gasp: “Miss Taggart! Are you here, in your office?”

“I slept here last night, again. Didn’t intend to, but did. Was there a call for me from the McNeil Car Foundry?”

“No, Miss Taggart.”

“Put them through to me immediately, when they call.”

“Yes, Miss Taggart.”

Switching the communicator off, she wondered whether she imagined it or whether there had been something strange in the girl’s voice: it had sounded unnaturally tense.

She felt the faint light-headedness of hunger and thought that she should go down to get a cup of coffee, but there was still the report of the chief engineer to finish, so she lighted one more cigarette.

The chief engineer was out on the road, supervising the reconstruction of the main track with the Rearden Metal rail taken from the corpse of the John Galt Line; she had chosen the sections most urgently in need of repair. Opening his report, she read—with a shock of incredulous anger—that he had stopped work in the mountain section of Winston, Colorado. He recommended a change of plans: he suggested that the rail intended for Winston be used, instead, to repair the track of their Washington-to-Miami branch. He gave his reasons: a derailment had occurred on that branch last week, and Mr. Tinky Holloway of Washington, traveling with a party of friends, had been delayed for three hours; it had been reported to the chief engineer that Mr. Holloway had expressed extreme displeasure. Although, from a purely technological viewpoint—said the chief engineer’s report—the rail of the Miami branch was in better condition than that of the Winston section, one had to remember, from a sociological viewpoint, that the Miami branch carried a much more important class of passenger traffic; therefore, the chief engineer suggested that Winston could be kept waiting a little longer, and recommended the sacrifice of an obscure section of mountain trackage for the sake of a branch where “Taggart Transcontinental could not afford to create an unfavorable impression.”

She read, slashing furious pencil marks on the margins of the pages, thinking that her first duty of the day, ahead of any other, was to stop this particular piece of insanity.

The telephone rang.

“Yes?” she asked, snatching the receiver. “McNeil Car Foundry?”

“No,” said the voice of her secretary. “Señor Francisco d.‘Anconia.”

She looked at the phone’s mouthpiece for the instant of a brief shock. “All right. Put him on.”

The next voice she heard was Francisco’s. “I see that you’re in your office just the same,” he said; his voice was mocking, harsh and tense.

“Where did you expect me to be?”

“How do you like the new suspension?”

“What suspension?”

“The moratorium on brains.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Haven’t you seen today’s newspapers?”

“No.”

There was a pause; then his voice came slowly, changed and grave: “Better take a look at them, Dagny.”

“All right.”

“I’ll call you later.”

She hung up and pressed the switch of the communicator on her desk. “Get me a newspaper,” she said to her secretary.

“Yes, Miss Taggart,” the secretary’s voice answered grimly.

It was Eddie Willers who came in and put the newspaper down on her desk. The meaning of the look on his face was the same as the tone she had caught in Francisco’s voice: the advance notice of some inconceivable disaster.

“None of us wanted to be first to tell you,” he said very quietly and walked out.

When she rose from her desk, a few moments later, she felt that she had full control of her body and that she was not aware of her body’s existence. She felt lifted to her feet and it seemed to her that she stood straight, not touching the ground. There was an abnormal clarity about every object in the room, yet she was seeing nothing around her, but she knew that she would be able to see the thread of a cobweb if her purpose required it, just as she would be able to walk with a somnambulist’s assurance along the edge of a roof. She could not know that she was looking at the room with the eyes of a person who had lost the capacity and the concept of doubt, and what remained to her was the simplicity of a single perception and of a single goal. She did not know that the thing which seemed so violent, yet felt like such a still, unfamiliar calm within her, was the power of full certainty—and that the anger shaking her body, the anger which made her ready, with the same passionate indifference, either to kill or to die, was her love of rectitude, the only love to which all the years of her life had been given.