Atlas Shrugged (127 page)

He had to look up, to face her and, desperately, to lie for the first time in his life. “I’m ... I’m afraid of the trouble we’ll get into with the law,” he said.

“Forget it. Don’t you see that there isn’t any law left? Anything goes now, for whoever can get away with it—and, for the moment, it’s we who’re setting the terms.”

When she was ready, he carried her suitcase to a taxicab, then down the platform of the Taggart Terminal to her office car, the last at the end of the Comet. He stood on the platform, saw the train jerk forward and watched the red markers on the back of her car slipping slowly away from him into the long darkness of the exit tunnel. When they were gone, he felt what one feels at the loss of a dream one had not known till after it was lost.

There were few people on the platform around him and they seemed to move with self-conscious strain, as if a sense of disaster clung to the rails and to the girders above their heads. He thought indifferently that after a century of safety, men were once more regarding the departure of a train as an event involving a gamble with death.

He remembered that he had had no dinner, and he felt no desire to eat, but the underground cafeteria of the Taggart Terminal was more truly his home than the empty cube of space he now thought of as his apartment—so he walked to the cafeteria, because he had no other place to go.

The cafeteria was almost deserted—but the first thing he saw, as he entered, was a thin column of smoke rising from the cigarette of the worker, who sat alone at a table in a dark corner.

Not noticing what he put on his tray, Eddie carried it to the worker’s table, said, “Hello,” sat down and said nothing else. He looked at the silverware spread before him, wondered about its purpose, remembered the use of a fork and attempted to perform the motions of eating, but found that it was beyond his power. After a while, he looked up and saw that the worker’s eyes were studying him attentively.

“No,” said Eddie, “no, there’s nothing the matter with me.... Oh yes, a lot has happened, but what difference does it make now? ... Yes, she’s back.... What else do you want me to say about it? ... How did you know she’s back? Oh well, I suppose the whole company knew it within the first ten minutes.... No, I don’t know whether I’m glad that she’s back.... Sure, she’ll save the railroad-for another year or month.... What do you want me to say? ... No, she didn’t. She didn’t tell me what she’s counting on. She didn’t tell me what she thought or felt.... Well, how do you suppose she’d feel? It’s hell for her—all right, for me, too! Only my kind of hell is my own fault.... No. Nothing. I can’t talk about it—talk?—I mustn’t even think about it, I’ve got to stop it, stop thinking of her and—of her, I mean.”

He remained silent and he wondered why the worker’s eyes—the eyes that always seemed to see everything within him—made him feel uneasy tonight. He glanced down at the table, and he noticed the butts of many cigarettes among the remnants of food on the worker’s plate.

“Are you in trouble, too?” asked Eddie. “Oh, just that you’ve sat here for a long time tonight, haven’t you? ... For me? Why should you have wanted to wait for me? ... You know, I never thought you cared whether you saw me or not, me or anybody, you seemed so complete in yourself, and that’s why I liked to talk to you, because I felt that you always understood, but nothing could hurt you—you looked as if nothing had ever hurt you—and it made me feel free, as if ... as if there were no pain in the world.... Do you know what’s strange about your face? You look as if you’ve never known pain or fear or guilt.... I’m sorry I’m so late tonight. I had to see her off—she has just left, on the Comet.... Yes, tonight, just now. ... Yes, she’s gone.... Yes, it was a sudden decision—within the past hour. She intended to leave tomorrow night, but something unexpected happened and she had to go at once.... Yes, she’s going to Colorado—afterwards.... To Utah—first.... Because she got a letter from Quentin Daniels that he’s quitting—and the one thing she won’t give up, couldn’t stand to give up, is the motor. You remember, the motor I told you about, the remnant that she found.... Daniels? He’s a physicist who’s been working for the past year, at the Utah Institute of Technology, trying to solve the secret of the motor and to rebuild it.... Why do you look at me like that? ... No, I haven’t told you about him before, because it was a secret. It was a private, secret project of her own—and of what interest would it have been to you, anyway? ... I guess I can talk about it now, because he’s quit.... Yes, he told her his reasons. He said that he won’t give anything produced by his mind to a world that regards him as a slave. He said that he won’t be made a martyr to people in exchange for giving them an inestimable benefit.... What—what are you laughing at? ... Stop it, will you? Why do you laugh like that? ... The whole secret? What do you mean, the whole secret? He hasn’t found the whole secret of the motor, if that’s what you meant, but he seemed to be doing well, he had a good chance. Now it’s lost. She’s rushing to him, she wants to plead, to hold him, to make him go on—but I think it’s useless. Once they stop, they don’t come back again. Not one of them has.... No, I don’t care, not any more, we’ve taken so many losses that I’m getting used to it.... Oh no! It’s not Daniels that I can’t take, it.‘s—no, drop it. Don’t question me about it. The whole world is going to pieces, she’s still fighting to save it, and I—I sit here damning her for something I had no right to know.... No! She’s done nothing to be damned, nothing—and, besides, it doesn’t concern the railroad.... Don’t pay any attention to me, it’s not true, it’s not her that I’m damning, it’s myself.... Listen, I’ve always known that you loved Taggart Transcontinental as I loved it, that it meant something special to you, something personal, and that was why you liked to hear me talk about it. But this—the thing I learned today—this has nothing to do with the railroad. It would be of no importance to you. Forget it.... It’s something that I didn’t know about her, that’s all. ... I grew up with her. I thought I knew her. I didn’t.... I don’t know what it was that I expected. I suppose I just thought that she had no private life of any kind. To me, she was not a person and not ... not a woman. She was the railroad. And I didn’t think that anyone would ever have the audacity to look at her in any other way. ... Well, it serves me right. Forget it.... Forget it, I said! Why do you question me like this? It’s only her private life. What can it matter to you? ... Drop it, for God’s sake! Don’t you see that I can’t talk about it? ... Nothing happened, nothing’s wrong with me, I just —oh, why am I lying? I can’t lie to you, you always seem to see everything, it’s worse than trying to lie to myself! ... I
have
lied to myself. I didn’t know what I felt for her. The railroad? I’m a rotten hypocrite. If the railroad was all she meant to me, it wouldn’t have hit me like this. I wouldn’t have felt that I wanted to kill him! ... What’s the matter with you tonight? Why do you look at me like that? ... Oh, what’s the matter with all of us? Why is there nothing but misery left for anyone? Why do we suffer so much? We weren’t meant to. I always thought that we were to be happy, all of us, as our natural fate. What are we doing? What have we lost? A year ago, I wouldn’t have damned her for finding something she wanted. But I know that they’re doomed, both of them, and so am I, and so is everybody, and she was all I had left.... It was so great, to be alive, it was such a wonderful chance, I didn’t know that I loved it and that that was our love, hers and mine and yours—but the world is perishing and we cannot stop it. Why are we destroying ourselves? Who will tell us the truth? Who will save us? Oh, who is John Galt?! ... No, it’s no use. It doesn’t matter now. Why should I feel anything? We won’t last much longer. Why should I care what she does? Why should I care that she’s sleeping with Hank Rearden? ... Oh God!—what’s the matter with you? Don’t go! Where are you going?”

CHAPTER X

THE SIGN OF THE DOLLAR

She sat at the window of the train, her head thrown back, not moving, wishing she would never have to move again.

The telegraph poles went racing past the window, but the train seemed lost in a void, between a brown stretch of prairie and a solid spread of rusty, graying clouds. The twilight was draining the sky without the wound of a sunset; it looked more like the fading of an anemic body in the process of exhausting its last drops of blood and light. The train was going west, as if it, too, were pulled to follow the sinking rays and quietly to vanish from the earth. She sat still, feeling no desire to resist it.

She wished she would not hear the sound of the wheels. They knocked in an even rhythm, every fourth knock accented—and it seemed to her that through the rapid, running clatter of some futile stampede to escape, the beat of the accented knocks was like the steps of an enemy moving toward some inexorable purpose.

She had never experienced it before, this sense of apprehension at the sight of a prairie, this feeling that the rail was only a fragile thread stretched across an enormous emptiness, like a worn nerve ready to break. She had never expected that she, who had felt as if she were the motive power aboard a train, would now sit wishing, like a child or a savage, that this train would move, that it would not stop, that it would get her there on time—wishing it, not like an act of will, but like a plea to a dark unknown.

She thought of what a difference one month had made. She had seen it in the faces of the men at the stations. The track workers, the switchmen, the yardmen, who had always greeted her, anywhere along the line, their cheerful grins boasting that they knew who she was—had now looked at her stonily, turning away, their faces wary and closed. She had wanted to cry to them in apology, “It’s not I who’ve done it to you!”—then had remembered that she had accepted it and that they now had the right to hate her, that she was both a slave and a driver of slaves, and so was every human being in the country, and hatred was the only thing that men could now feel for one another.

She had found reassurance, for two days, in the sight of the cities moving past her window—the factories, the bridges, the electric signs, the billboards pressing down upon the roofs of homes—the crowded, grimy, active, living conflux of the industrial East.

But the cities had been left behind. The train was now diving into the prairies of Nebraska, the rattle of its couplers sounding as if it were shivering with cold. She saw lonely shapes that had been farmhouses in the vacant stretches that had been fields. But the great burst of energy, in the East, generations ago, had splattered bright trickles to run through the emptiness; some were gone, but some still lived. She was startled when the lights of a small town swept across her car and, vanishing, left it darker than it had been before. She would not move to turn on the light. She sat still, watching the rare towns. Whenever an electric beam went flashing briefly at her face, it was like a moment’s greeting.

She saw them as they went by, written on the walls of modest structures, over sooted roofs, down slender smokestacks, on the curves of tanks: Reynolds Harvesters—Macey Cement—Quinlan & Jones Pressed Alfalfa—Home of the Crawford Mattress—Benjamin Wylie Grain and Feed—words raised like flags to the empty darkness of the sky, the motionless forms of movement, of effort, of courage, of hope, the monuments to how much had been achieved on the edge of nature’s void by men who had once been free to achieve—she saw the homes built in scattered privacy, the small shops, the wide streets with electric lighting, like a few luminous strokes criss-crossed on the black sheet of the wastelands—she saw the ghosts between, the remnants of towns, the skeletons of factories with crumbling smokestacks, the corpses of shops with broken panes, the slanting poles with shreds of wire—she saw a sudden blaze, the rare sight of a gas station, a glittering white island of glass and metal under the huge black weight of space and sky -she saw an ice-cream cone made of radiant tubing, hanging above the corner of a street, and a battered car being parked below, with a young boy at the wheel and a girl stepping out, her white dress blowing in the summer wind—she shuddered for the two of them, thinking: I can’t look at you, I who know what it has taken to give you your youth, to give you this evening, this car and the ice-cream cone you’re going to buy for a quarter—she saw, on the edge beyond a town, a building glowing with tiers of pale blue light, the industrial light she loved, with the silhouettes of machines in its windows and a billboard in the darkness above its roof—and suddenly her head fell on her arm, and she sat shaking, crying soundlessly to the night, to herself, to whatever was human in any living being: Don’t let it go! ... Don’t let it go! ...

She jumped to her feet and snapped on the light. She stood still, fighting to regain control, knowing that such moments were her greatest danger. The lights of the town were past, her window was now an empty rectangle, and she heard, in the silence, the progression of the fourth knocks, the steps of the enemy moving on, not to be hastened or stopped.

In desperate need of the sight of some living activity, she decided she would not order dinner in her car, but would go to the diner. As if stressing and mocking her loneliness, a voice came back to her mind: “But you would not run trains if they were empty.” Forget it!—she told herself angrily, walking hastily to the door of her car.

She was astonished, approaching her vestibule, to hear the sound of voices close by. As she pulled the door open, she heard a shout: “Get off, God damn you!”

An aging tramp had taken refuge in the corner of her vestibule. He sat on the floor, his posture suggesting that he had no strength left to stand up or to care about being caught. He was looking at the conductor, his eyes observant, fully conscious, but devoid of any reaction. The train was slowing down for a bad stretch of track, the conductor had opened the door to a cold gust of wind, and was waving at the speeding black void, ordering, “Get going! Get off as you got on or I’ll kick you off head first!”