Atlas Shrugged (133 page)

When the green light of a signal appeared by the track, it gave them a point to reach and pass, but—incongruous in the midst of the floating dissolution—it brought them no sense of relief. It seemed to come from a long since extinguished world, like those stars whose light remains after they are gone. The green circle glowed in space, announcing a clear track, inviting motion where there was nothing to move. Who was that philosopher, she thought, who preached that motion exists without any moving entities? This was
his
world, too.

She found herself pushing forward with increasing effort, as if against some resistance that was, not pressure, but suction. Glancing at Kellogg, she saw that he, too, was walking like a man braced against a storm. She felt as if the two of them were the sole survivors of ... of reality, she thought—two lonely figures fighting, not through a storm, but worse: through non-existence.

It was Kellogg who glanced back, after a while, and she followed his glance: there was no headlight behind them.

They did not stop. Looking straight ahead, he reached absently into his pocket; she felt certain that the movement was involuntary; he produced a package of cigarettes and extended it to her.

She was about to take a cigarette—then, suddenly, she seized his wrist and tore the package out of his hand. It was a plain white package that bore, as single imprint, the sign of the dollar.

“Give me the flashlight!” she ordered, stopping.

He stopped obediently and sent the beam of the flashlight at the package in her hands. She caught a glimpse of his face: he looked a little astonished and very amused.

There was no printing on the package, no trade name, no address, only the dollar sign stamped in gold. The cigarettes bore the same sign.

“Where did you get this?” she asked.

He was smiling. “If you know enough to ask that, Miss Taggart, you should know that I won’t answer.”

“I know that this stands for something.”

“The dollar sign? For a great deal. It stands on the vest of every fat, piglike figure in every cartoon, for the purpose of denoting a crook, a grafter, a scoundrel—as the one sure-fire brand of evil. It stands—as the money of a free country—for achievement, for success, for ability, for man’s creative power—and, precisely for these reasons, it is used as a brand of infamy. It stands stamped on the forehead of a man like Hank Rearden, as a mark of damnation. Incidentally, do you know where that sign comes from? It stands for the initials of the United States.”

He snapped the flashlight off, but he did not move to go; she could distinguish the hint of his bitter smile.

“Do you know that the United States is the only country in history that has ever used its own monogram as a symbol of depravity? Ask yourself why. Ask yourself how long a country that did that could hope to exist, and whose moral standards have destroyed it. It was the only country in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only country whose money was the symbol of man’s right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself. If this is evil, by the present standards of the world, if this is the reason for damning us, then we —we, the dollar chasers and makers—accept it and choose to be damned by that world. We choose to wear the sign of the dollar on our foreheads, proudly, as our badge of nobility—the badge we are willing to live for and, if need be, to die.”

He extended his hand for the package. She held it as if her fingers would not let it go, but gave up and placed it on his palm. With deliberate slowness, as if to underscore the meaning of his gesture, he offered her a cigarette. She took it and placed it between her lips. He took one for himself, struck a match, lighted both, and they walked on.

They walked, over rotting logs that sank without resistance into the shifting ground, through a vast, uncongealed globe of moonlight and coiling mist—with two spots of living fire in their hands and the glow of two small circles to light their faces.

“Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips ...” she remembered the old man saying to her, the old man who had said that these cigarettes were not made anywhere on earth. “When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind—and it’s proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.”

“I wish you’d tell me who makes them,” she said, in the tone of a hopeless plea.

He chuckled good-naturedly. “I can tell you this much: they’re made by a friend of mine, for sale, but—not being a common carrier —he sells them only to his friends.”

“Sell me that package, will you?”

“I don’t think you’ll be able to afford it, Miss Taggart, but—all right, if you wish.”

“How much is it?”

“Five cents.”

“Five cents?” she repeated, bewildered.

“Five cents—” he said, and added, “in gold.”

She stopped, staring at him. “In gold?”

“Yes, Miss Taggart.”

“Well, what’s your rate of exchange? How much is it in our normal money?”

“There is no rate of exchange, Miss Taggart. No amount of physical—or spiritual—currency, whose sole standard of value is the decree of Mr. Wesley Mouch, will buy these cigarettes.”

“I see.”

He reached into his pocket, took out the package and handed it to her. “I’ll give them to you, Miss Taggart,” he said, “because you’ve earned them many times over—and because you need them for the same purpose we do.”

“What purpose?”

“To remind us—in moments of discouragement, in the loneliness of exile—of our true homeland, which has always been yours, too, Miss Taggart.”

“Thank you,” she said. She put the cigarettes in her pocket; he saw that her hand was trembling.

When they reached the fourth of the five mileposts, they had been silent for a long time, with no strength left for anything but the effort of moving their feet. Far ahead, they saw a dot of light, too low on the horizon and too harshly clear to be a star. They kept watching it, as they walked, and said nothing until they became certain that it was a powerful electric beacon blazing in the midst of the empty prairie.

“What is that?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It looks like—”

“No,” she broke in hastily, “it couldn’t be. Not around here.”

She did not want to hear him name the hope which she had felt for many minutes past. She could not permit herself to think of it or to know that the thought was hope.

They found the telephone box at the fifth milepost. The beacon hung like a violent spot of cold fire, less than half a mile farther south.

The telephone was working. She heard the buzz of the wire, like the breath of a living creature, when she lifted the receiver. Then a drawling voice answered, “Jessup, at Bradshaw.” The voice sounded sleepy.

“This is Dagny Taggart, speaking from—”

“Who?”

“Dagny Taggart, of Taggart Transcontinental, speaking—”

“Oh ... Oh yes ... I see ... Yes?”

“—speaking from your track phone Number 83. The Comet is stalled seven miles north of here. It’s been abandoned. The crew has deserted.”

There was a pause. “Well, what do you want me to do about it?”

She had to pause in turn, in order to believe it. “Are you the night dispatcher?”

“Yeah.”

“Then send another crew out to us at once.”

“A full passenger train crew?”

“Of course.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

There was a pause. “The rules don’t say anything about that.”

“Get me the chief dispatcher,” she said, choking.

“He’s away on his vacation.”

“Get the division superintendent.”

“He’s gone down to Laurel for a couple of days.”

“Get me somebody who’s in charge.”

.“I’m in charge.”

“Listen,” she said slowly, fighting for patience, “do you understand that there’s a train, a passenger limited, abandoned in the middle of the prairie?”

“Yeah, but how am I to know what I’m supposed to do about it? The rules don’t provide for it. Now if you had an accident, we’d send out the wrecker, but if there was no accident ... you don’t need the wrecker, do you?”

“No. We don’t need the wrecker. We need men. Do you understand ? Living men to run an engine.”

“The rules don’t say anything about a train without men. Or about men without a train. There’s no rule for calling out a full crew in the middle of the night and sending them to hunt for a train somewhere. I’ve never heard of it before.”

“You’re hearing it now. Don’t you know what you have to do?”

“Who am I to know?”

“Do you know that your job is to keep trains moving?”

“My job is to obey the rules. If I send out a crew when I’m not supposed to, God only knows what’s going to happen! What with the Unification Board and all the regulations they’ve got nowadays, who am I to take it upon myself?”

“And what’s going to happen if you leave a train stalled on the line?”

“That’s not my fault. I had nothing to do with it. They can’t blame me. I couldn’t help it.”

“You’re to help it now.”

“Nobody told me to.”

“I’m
telling you to!”

“How do I know whether you’re supposed to tell me or not? We’re not supposed to furnish any Taggart crews. You people were to run with your own crews. That’s what we were told.”

“But this is an emergency!”

“Nobody told me anything about an emergency.”

She had to take a few seconds to control herself. She saw Kellogg watching her with a bitter smile of amusement.

“Listen,” she said into the phone, “do you know that the Comet was due at Bradshaw over three hours ago?”

“Oh, sure. But nobody’s going to make any trouble about that. No train’s ever on schedule these days.”

“Then do you intend to leave us blocking your track forever?”

“We’ve got nothing due till Number 4, the northbound passenger out of Laurel, at eight thirty-seven A.M. You can wait till then. The day-trick dispatcher will be on then. You can speak to him.”

“You blasted idiot! This is
the Comet!”

“What’s that to me? This isn’t Taggart Transcontinental. You people expect a lot for your money. You’ve been nothing but a headache to us, with all the extra work at no extra pay for the little fellows.” His voice was slipping into whining insolence. “You can’t talk to me that way. The time’s past when you could talk to people that way.”

She had never believed that there were men with whom a certain method, which she had never used, would work; such men were not hired by Taggart Transcontinental and she had never been forced to deal with them before.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked, in the cold, overbearing tone of a personal threat.

It worked. “I ... I guess so,” he answered.

“Then let me tell you that if you don’t send a crew to me at once, you’ll be out of a job within one hour after I reach Bradshaw, which I’ll reach sooner or later. You’d better make it sooner.”

“Yes, ma.‘am,” he said.

“Call out a full passenger train crew and give them orders to run us to Laurel, where we have our own men.”

“Yes, ma.‘am.” He added, “Will you tell headquarters that it was you who told me to do it?”

“I will.”

“And that it’s you who’re responsible for it?”

“I am.”

There was a pause, then he asked helplessly, “Now how am I going to call the men? Most of them haven’t got any phones.”

“Do you have a call boy?”

“Yes, but he won’t get here till morning.”

“Is there anybody in the yards right now?”

“There’s the wiper in the roundhouse.”

“Send
him
out to call the men.”

“Yes, ma.‘am. Hold the line.”

She leaned against the side of the phone box, to wait. Kellogg was smiling.

“And you propose to run a railroad—a transcontinental railroad—with
that?”
he asked.

She shrugged.

She could not keep her eyes off the beacon. It seemed so close, so easily within her reach. She felt as if the unconfessed thought were struggling furiously against her, splattering bits of the struggle all over her mind: A man able to harness an untapped source of energy, a man working on a motor to make all other motors useless ... she could be talking to him, to his kind of brain, in a few hours ... in just a few hours.... What if there was no need to hurry to him? It was what she wanted to do. It was all she wanted.... Her work? What was her work: to move on to the fullest, most exacting use of her mind—or to spend the rest of her life doing his thinking for a man unfit to be a night dispatcher? Why had she chosen to work? Was it in order to remain where she had started—night operator of Rockdale Station—no, lower than that—she had been better than that dispatcher, even at Rockdale—was this to be the final sum: an end lower than her beginning? ... There was no reason to hurry?
She
was the reason.... They needed the trains, but they did not need the motor?
She
needed the motor.... Her duty? To whom?

The dispatcher was gone for a long time; when he came back, his voice sounded sulky: “Well, the wiper says he can get the men all right, but it’s no use, because how am I going to send them out to you? We have no engine.”

“No engine?”

“No. The superintendent took one to run down to Laurel, and the other’s in the shops, been there for weeks, and the switch engine jumped a rail this morning, they’ll be working on her till tomorrow afternoon.”

“What about the wrecker’s engine that you were offering to send us?”

“Oh, she’s up north. They had a wreck there yesterday. She hasn’t come back yet.”

“Have you a Diesel car?”

“Never had any such thing. Not around here.”

“Have you a track motor car?”