Atlas Shrugged (110 page)

Rearden knew that of all possible speeches, this was the last Dr. Ferris would make if any doubt of his surrender remained in the man’s mind.

“Go on,” said Rearden evenly. “You haven’t finished.”

“You know—as you have demonstrated at your trial—how important it is, and why, that we obtain all that property with the voluntary consent of the victims.” Dr. Ferris opened his briefcase. “Here is the Gift Certificate, Mr. Rearden. We have filled it out and all you have to do is to sign your name at the bottom.”

The piece of paper, which he placed in front of Rearden, looked like a small college diploma, with the text printed in old-fashioned script and the particulars inserted by typewriter. The thing stated that he, Henry Rearden, hereby transferred to the nation all rights to the metal alloy now known as “Rearden Metal,” which would henceforth be manufactured by all who so desired, and which would bear the name of “Miracle Metal,” chosen by the representatives of the people. Glancing at the paper, Rearden wondered whether it was a deliberate mockery of decency, or so low an estimate of their victims’ intelligence, that had made the designers of this paper print the text across a faint drawing of the Statue of Liberty.

His eyes moved slowly to Dr. Ferris’ face. “You would not have come here,” he said, “unless you had some extraordinary kind of blackjack to use on me. What is it?”

“Of course,” said Dr. Ferris. “I would expect you to understand that. That is why no lengthy explanations are necessary.” He opened his briefcase. “Do you wish to see my blackjack? I have brought a few samples.”

In the manner of a cardsharp whisking out a long fan of cards with one snap of the hand, he spread before Rearden a line of glossy photographic prints. They were photostats of hotel and auto court registers, bearing in Rearden’s handwriting the names of Mr. and Mrs. J. Smith.

“You know, of course,” said Dr. Ferris softly, “but you might wish to see whether we know it, that Mrs. J. Smith is Miss Dagny Taggart.”

He found nothing to observe in Rearden’s face. Rearden had not moved to bend over the prints, but sat looking down at them with grave attentiveness, as if, from the perspective of distance, he were discovering something about them which he had not known.

“We have a great deal of additional evidence,” said Dr. Ferris, and tossed down on the desk a photostat of the jeweler’s bill for the ruby pendant. “You wouldn’t care to see the sworn statements of apartment-house doormen and night clerks—they contain nothing that would be new to you, except the number of witnesses who know where you spent your nights in New York for about the last two years. You mustn’t blame those people too much. It’s an interesting characteristic of epochs such as ours that people begin to be afraid of saying the things they want to say—and afraid, when questioned, to remain silent about things they’d prefer never to utter. That is to be expected. But you would be astonished if you knew who gave us the original tip.”

“I know it,” said Rearden; his voice conveyed no reaction. The trip to Florida was not inexplicable to him any longer.

“There is nothing in this blackjack of mine that can harm you personally,” said Dr. Ferris. “We knew that no form of personal injury would ever make you give in. Therefore, I am telling you frankly that this will not hurt you at all. It will only hurt Miss Taggart.”

Rearden was looking straight at him now, but Dr. Ferris wondered why it seemed to him that the calm, closed face was moving away into a greater and greater distance.

“If this affair of yours is spread from one end of the country to the other,” said Dr. Ferris, “by such experts in the art of smearing as Bertram Scudder, it will do no actual damage to your reputation. Beyond a few glances of curiosity and a few raised eyebrows in a few of the stuffier drawing rooms, you will get off quite easily. Affairs of this sort are expected of a man. In fact, it will enhance your reputation. It will give you an aura of romantic glamor among the women and, among the men, it will give you a certain kind of prestige, in the nature of envy for an unusual conquest. But what it will do to Miss Taggart—with her spotless name, her reputation for being above scandal, her peculiar position of a woman in a strictly masculine business—what it will do to her, what she will see in the eyes of everyone she meets, what she will hear from every man she deals with—I will leave that up to your own mind to imagine. And to consider.”

Rearden felt nothing but a great stillness and a great clarity. It was as if some voice were telling him sternly: This is the time—the scene is lighted—now look. And standing naked in the great light, he was looking quietly, solemnly, stripped of fear, of pain, of hope, with nothing left to him but the desire to know.

Dr. Ferris was astonished to hear him say slowly, in the dispassionate tone of an abstract statement that did not seem to be addressed to his listener, “But all your calculations rest on the fact that Miss Taggart is a virtuous woman, not the slut you’re going to call her.”

“Yes, of course,” said Dr. Ferris.

“And that this means much more to me than a casual affair.”

“Of course.”

“If she and I were the kind of scum you’re going to make us appear, your blackjack wouldn’t work.”

“No, it wouldn’t.”

“If our relationship were the depravity you’re going to proclaim it to be, you’d have no way to harm us.”

“No.”

“We’d be outside your power.”

“Actually—yes.”

It was not to Dr. Ferris that Rearden was speaking. He was seeing a long line of men stretched through the centuries from Plato onward, whose heir and final product was an incompetent little professor with the appearance of a gigolo and the soul of a thug.

“I offered you, once, a chance to join us,” said Dr. Ferris. “You refused. Now you can see the consequences. How a man of your intelligence thought that he could win by playing it straight, I can’t imagine.”

“But if I had joined you,” said Rearden with the same detachment, as if he were not speaking about himself, “what would I have found worth looting from Orren Boyle?”

“Oh hell, there’s always enough suckers to expropriate in the world!”

“Such as Miss Taggart? As Ken Danagger? As Ellis Wyatt? As I?”

“Such as any man who wants to be impractical.”

“You mean that it is not practical to live on earth, is it?”

He did not know whether Dr. Ferris answered him. He was not listening any longer. He was seeing the pendulous face of Orren Boyle with the small slits of pig’s eyes, the doughy face of Mr. Mowen with the eyes that scurried away from any speaker and any fact—he was seeing them go through the jerky motions of an ape performing a routine it had learned to copy by muscular habit, performing it in order to manufacture Rearden Metal, with no knowledge and no capacity to know what had taken place in the experimental laboratory of Rearden Steel through ten years of passionate devotion to an excruciating effort. It was proper that they should now call it “Miracle Metal”—a miracle was the only name
they
could give to those ten years and to that faculty from which Rearden Metal was born—a miracle was all that the Metal could be in their eyes, the product of an unknown, unknowable cause, an object in nature, not to be explained, but to be seized, like a stone or a weed, theirs for the seizing—“are we to let the many remain in want while the few withhold from us the better products and methods available?”

If I had not known that my life depends on my mind and my effort—he was saying soundlessly to the line of men stretched through the centuries—if I had not made it my highest moral purpose to exercise the best of my effort and the fullest capacity of my mind in order to support and expand my life, you would have found nothing to loot from me, nothing to support your own existence. It is not my sins that you’re using to injure me, but my virtues—my virtues by your own acknowledgment, since your own life depends on them, since you need them, since you do not seek to destroy my achievement but to .seize it.

He remembered the voice of the gigolo of science saying to him: “We’re after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick.” We were not after power—he said to the gigolo’s ancestors-in-spirit-and we did not live by means of that which we condemned. We regarded productive ability as virtue—and we let the degree of his virtue be the measure of a man’s reward. We drew no advantage from the things we regarded as evil—we did not require the existence of bank robbers in order to operate our banks, or of burglars in order to provide for our homes, or of murderers in order to protect our lives. But you need the products of a man’s ability—yet you proclaim that productive ability is a selfish evil and you turn the degree of a man’s productiveness into the measure of his loss. We lived by that which we held to be good and punished that which we held to be evil. You live by that which you denounce as evil and punish that which you know to be good.

He remembered the formula of the punishment that Lillian had sought to impose on him, the formula he had considered too monstrous to believe—and he saw it now in its full application, as a system of thought, as a way of life and on a world scale. There it was: the punishment that required the victim’s own virtue as the fuel to make it work—his invention of Rearden Metal being used as the cause of his expropriation—Dagny’s honor and the depth of their feeling for each other being used as a tool of blackmail, a blackmail from which the depraved would be immune—and, in the People’s States of Europe, millions of men being held in bondage by means of their desire to live, by means of their energy drained in forced labor, by means of their ability to feed their masters, by means of the hostage system, of their love for their children or wives or friends—by means of love, ability and pleasure as the fodder for threats and the bait for extortion, with love tied to fear, ability to punishment, ambition to confiscation, with blackmail as law, with escape from pain, not quest for pleasure, as the only incentive to effort and the only reward of achievement—men held enslaved by means of whatever living power they possessed and of whatever joy they found in life. Such was the code that the world had accepted and such was the key to the code: that it hooked man’s love of existence to a circuit of torture, so that only the man who had nothing to offer would have nothing to fear, so that the virtues which made life possible and the values which gave it meaning became the agents of its destruction, so that one’s best became the tool of one’s agony, and man’s life on earth became impractical.

“Yours was the code of life,” said the voice of a man whom he could not forget. “What, then, is theirs?”

Why had the world accepted it?—he thought. How had the victims come to sanction a code that pronounced them guilty of the fact of existing? ... And then the violence of an inner blow became the total stillness of his body as he sat looking at a sudden vision: Hadn’t he done it also? Hadn’t he given his sanction to the code of self-damnation ? Dagny—he thought—and the depth of their feeling for each other ... the blackmail from which the depraved would be immune ... hadn’t he, too, once called it depravity? Hadn’t he been first to throw at her all the insults which the human scum was now threatening to throw at her in public? Hadn’t he accepted as guilt the highest happiness he had ever found?

“You who won’t allow one per cent of impurity into an alloy of metal,” the unforgotten voice was saying to him, “what have you allowed into your moral code?”

“Well, Mr. Rearden?” said the voice of Dr. Ferris. “Do you understand me now? Do we get the Metal or do we make a public show-place out of Miss Taggart’s bedroom?”

He was not seeing Dr. Ferris. He was seeing—in the violent clarity that was like a spotlight tearing every riddle open to him—the day he met Dagny for the first time.

It was a few months after she had become Vice-President of Taggart Transcontinental. He had been hearing skeptically, for some time, the rumors that the railroad was run by Jim Taggart’s sister. That summer, when he grew exasperated at Taggart’s delays and contradictions over an order of rail for a new cutoff, an order which Taggart kept placing, altering and withdrawing, somebody told him that if he wished to get any sense or action out of Taggart Transcontinental, he’d better speak to Jim’s sister. He telephoned her office to make an appointment and insisted on having it that same afternoon. Her secretary told him that Miss Taggart would be at the construction site of the new cutoff, that afternoon, at Milford Station between New York and Philadelphia, but would be glad to see him there if he wished. He went to the appointment resentfully; he did not like such businesswomen as he had met, and he felt that railroads were no business for a woman to play with; he expected a spoiled heiress who used her name and sex as substitute for ability, some eyebrow-plucked, overgroomed female, like the lady executives of department stores.

He got off the last car of a long train, far beyond the platform of Milford Station. There was a clutter of sidings, freight cars, cranes and steam shovels around him, descending from the main track down the slope of a ravine where men were grading the roadbed of the new cutoff. He started walking between the sidings toward the station building. Then he stopped.

He saw a girl standing on top of a pile of machinery on a flatcar. She was looking off at the ravine, her head lifted, strands of disordered hair stirring in the wind. Her plain gray suit was like a thin coating of metal over a slender body against the spread of sun-flooded space and sky. Her posture had the lightness and unself-conscious precision of an arrogantly pure self-confidence. She was watching the work, her glance intent and purposeful, the glance of competence enjoying its own function. She looked as if this were her place, her moment and her world, she looked as if enjoyment were her natural state, her face was the living form of an active, living intelligence, a young girl’s face with a woman’s mouth, she seemed unaware of her body except as of a taut instrument ready to serve her purpose in any manner she wished.