Atlas Shrugged (137 page)

“Why, Midas met us at the landing field, drove me to my house and took Daniels with him. I was going to join them for breakfast, but I saw your plane spinning and plunging for that pasture. I was the closest one to the scene.”

“We got here as fast as we could,” said Mulligan. “I thought he deserved to get himself killed—whoever was in that plane. I never dreamed that it was one of the only two persons in the whole world whom I’d exempt.”

“Who is the other one?” she asked.

“Hank Rearden.”

She winced; it was like a sudden blow from another great distance. She wondered why it seemed to her that Galt was watching her face intently and that she saw an instant’s change in his, too brief to define.

They had come to the car. It was a Hammond convertible, its top down, one of the costliest models, some years old, but kept in the shining trim of efficient handling. Gait placed her cautiously in the back seat and held her in the circle of his arm. She felt a stabbing pain once in a while, but she had no attention to spare for it. She watched the distant houses of the town, as Mulligan pressed the starter and the car moved forward, as they went past the sign of the dollar and a golden ray hit her eyes, sweeping over her forehead.

“Who is the owner of this place?” she asked.

“I am,” said Mulligan.

“What is
he?”
She pointed to Galt.

Mulligan chuckled. “He just works here.”

“And you, Dr. Akston?” she asked.

He glanced at Galt. “I’m one of his two fathers, Miss Taggart. The one who didn’t betray him.”

“Oh!” she said, as another connection fell into place. “Your third pupil?”

“That’s right.”

“The second assistant bookkeeper!” she moaned suddenly, at one more memory.

“What’s that?”

“That’s what Dr. Stadler called him. That’s what Dr. Stadler told me he thought his third pupil had become.”

“He overestimated,” said Galt. “I’m much lower than that by the scale of his standards and of his world.”

The car had swerved into a lane rising toward a lonely house that stood on a ridge above the valley. She saw a man walking down a path, ahead of them, hastening in the direction of the town. He wore blue denim overalls and carried a lunchbox. There was something faintly familiar in the swift abruptness of his gait. As the car went past him, she caught a glimpse of his face—and she jerked backward, her voice rising to a scream from the pain of the movement and from the shock of the sight: “Oh, stop! Stop! Don’t let him go!” It was Ellis Wyatt.

The three men laughed, but Mulligan stopped the car. “Oh ...” she said weakly, in apology, realizing she had forgotten that this was the place from which Wyatt would not vanish.

Wyatt was running toward them: he had recognized her, too. When he seized the edge of the car, to brake his speed, she saw the face and the young, triumphant smile that she had seen but once before: on the platform of Wyatt Junction.

“Dagny! You, too, at last? One of us?”

“No,” said Gait. “Miss Taggart is a castaway.”

“Miss Taggart’s plane crashed. Didn’t you see it?”

“Crashed—
here?
”

“Yes.”

“I heard a plane, but I ...” His look of bewilderment changed to a smile, regretful, amused and friendly. “I see. Oh, hell, Dagny, it’s preposterous!”

She was staring at him helplessly, unable to reconnect the past to the present. And helplessly—as one would say to a dead friend, in a dream, the words one regrets having missed the chance to say in life—she said, with the memory of a telephone ringing, unanswered, almost two years ago, the words she had hoped to say if she ever caught sight of him again, “I ... I tried to reach you.”

He smiled gently. “We’ve been trying to reach you ever since, Dagny. ... I’ll see you tonight. Don’t worry, I won’t vanish—and I don’t think you will, either.”

He waved to the others and went off, swinging his lunchbox. She glanced up, as Mulligan started the car, and saw Galt’s eyes watching her attentively. Her face hardened, as if in open admission of pain and in defiance of the satisfaction it might give him. “All right,” she said. “I see what sort of show you want to put me through the shock of witnessing.”

But there was neither cruelty nor pity in his face, only the level look of justice. “Our first rule here, Miss Taggart,” he answered, “is that one must always see for oneself.”

The car stopped in front of the lonely house. It was built of rough granite blocks, with a sheet of glass for most of its front wall. “I’ll send the doctor over,” said Mulligan, driving off, while Galt carried her up the path.

“Your house?” she asked.

“Mine,” he answered, kicking the door open.

He carried her across the threshold into the glistening space of his living room, where shafts of sunlight hit walls of polished pine. She saw a few pieces of furniture made by hand, a ceiling of bare rafters, an archway open upon a small kitchen with rough shelves, a bare wooden table and the astonishing sight of chromium glittering on an electric stove; the place had the primitive simplicity of a frontiersman’s cabin, reduced to essential necessities, but reduced with a super-modern skill.

He carried her across the sunrays into a small guest room and placed her down on a bed. She noticed a window open upon a long slant of rocky steps and pines going off into the sky. She noticed small streaks that looked like inscriptions cut into the wood of the walls, a few scattered lines that seemed made by different handwritings; she could not distinguish the words. She noticed another door, left half-open; it led to his bedroom.

“A.m I a guest here or a prisoner?” she asked.

“The choice will be yours, Miss Taggart.”

“I can make no choice when I’m dealing with a stranger.”

“But you’re not. Didn’t you name a railroad line after me?”

“Oh! ... Yes . . .” It was the small jolt of another connection falling into place. “Yes, I—” She was looking at the tall figure with the sun-streaked hair, with the suppressed smile in the mercilessly perceptive eyes—she was seeing the struggle to build her Line and the summer day of the first train’s run—she was thinking that if a human figure could be fashioned as an emblem of that Line,
this
was the figure. “Yes . . . I did . . .” Then, remembering the rest, she added, “But I named it after an enemy.”

He smiled. “That’s the contradiction you had to resolve sooner or later, Miss Taggart.”

“It was you... wasn’t it? ... who destroyed my Line....”

“Why, no. It was the contradiction.”

She closed her eyes; in a moment, she asked, “All those stories I heard about you—which of them were true?”

“All of them.”

“Was it you who spread them?”

“No. What for? I never had any wish to be talked about.”

“But you do know that you’ve become a legend?”

.“Yes.”

“The young inventor of the Twentieth Century Motor Company is the one real version of the legend, isn’t it?”

“The one that’s concretely real—yes.”

She could not say it indifferently; there was still a breathless tone and the drop of her voice toward a whisper, when she asked, “The motor... the motor I found... it was you who made it?”

“Yes.”

She could not prevent the jolt of eagerness that threw her head up. “The secret of transforming energy—” she began, and stopped.

“I could tell it to you in fifteen minutes,” he said, in answer to the desperate plea she had not uttered, “but there’s no power on earth that can force me to tell it. If you understand this, you’ll understand everything that’s baffling you.”

“That night... twelve years ago . . . a spring night when you walked out of a meeting of six thousand murderers—that story is true, isn’t it?”

.“Yes.”

“You told them that you would stop the motor of the world.”

“I have.”

“What have you done?”

.“I’ve done
nothing,
Miss Taggart. And that’s the whole of my secret.”

She looked at him silently for a long moment. He stood waiting, as if he could read her thoughts. “The destroyer—” she said in a tone of wonder and helplessness.

“—the most evil creature that’s ever existed,” he said in the tone of a quotation, and she recognized her own words, “the man who’s draining the brains of the world.”

“How thoroughly have you been watching me,” she asked, “and for how long?”

It was only an instant’s pause, his eyes did not move, but it seemed to her that his glance was stressed, as if in special awareness of seeing her, and she caught the sound of some particular intensity in his voice as he answered quietly, “For years.”

She closed her eyes, relaxing and giving up. She felt an odd, light-hearted indifference, as if she suddenly wanted nothing but the comfort of surrendering to helplessness.

The doctor who arrived was a gray-haired man with a mild, thoughtful face and a firmly, unobtrusively confident manner.

“Miss Taggart, may I present Dr. Hendricks?” said Galt.

“Not Dr. Thomas Hendricks?” she gasped, with the involuntary rudeness of a child; the name belonged to a great surgeon, who had retired and vanished six years ago.

“Yes, of course,” said Galt.

Dr. Hendricks smiled at her, in answer. “Midas told me that Miss Taggart has to be treated for shock,” he said, “not for the one sustained, but for the ones to come.”

“I’ll leave you to do it,” said Galt, “while I go to the market to get supplies for breakfast.”

She watched the rapid efficiency of Dr. Hendricks’ work, as he examined her injuries. He had brought an object she had never seen before: a portable X-ray machine. She learned that she had torn the cartilage of two ribs, that she had sprained an ankle, ripped patches of skin off one knee and one elbow, and acquired a few bruises spread in purple blotches over her body. By the time Dr. Hendricks’ swift, competent hands had wound the bandages and the tight lacings of tape, she felt as if her body were an engine checked by an expert mechanic, and no further care was necessary.

“I would advise you to remain in bed, Miss Taggart.”

“Oh no! If I’m careful and move slowly, I’ll be all right.”

“You ought to rest.”

“Do you think I can?”

He smiled. “I guess not.”

She was dressed by the time Galt came back. Dr. Hendricks gave him an account of her condition, adding, “I’ll be back to check up, tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” said Galt. “Send the bill to me.”

“Certainly not!” she said indignantly. “I will pay it myself.”

The two men glanced at each other, in amusement, as at the boast of a beggar.

“We’ll discuss that later,” said Galt.

Dr. Hendricks left, and she tried to stand up, limping, catching at the furniture for support. Galt lifted her in his arms, carried her to the kitchen alcove and placed her on a chair by the table set for two.

She noticed that she was hungry, at the sight of the coffee pot boiling on the stove, the two glasses of orange juice, the heavy white pottery dishes sparkling in the sun on the polished table top.

“When did you sleep or eat last?” he asked.

“I don’t know... I had dinner on the train, with—” She shook her head in helplessly bitter amusement: with the tramp, she thought, with a desperate voice pleading for escape from an avenger who would not pursue or be found—the avenger who sat facing her across the table, drinking a glass of orange juice. “I don’t know ... it seems centuries and continents away.”

“How did you happen to be following me?”

“I landed at the Afton airport just as you were taking off. The man there told me that Quentin Daniels had gone with you.”

“I remember your plane circling to land. But that was the one and only time when I didn’t think of you. I thought you were coming by .train.”

She asked, looking straight at him, “How do you want me to understand that?”

“What?”

“The one and only time when you didn’t think of me.”

He held her glance; she saw the faint movement she had noted as typical of him: the movement of his proudly intractable mouth curving into the hint of a smile. “In any way you wish,” he answered.

She let a moment pass to underscore her choice by the severity of her face, then asked coldly, in the tone of an enemy’s accusation, “You knew that I was coming for Quentin Daniels?”

“Yes.”

“You got him first and fast, in order not to let me reach him? In order to beat me—knowing fully what sort of beating that would mean for me?”

“Sure.”

It was she who looked away and remained silent. He rose to cook the rest of their breakfast. She watched him as he stood at the stove, toasting bread, frying eggs and bacon. There was an easy, relaxed skill about the way he worked, but it was a skill that belonged to another profession; his hands moved with the rapid precision of an engineer pulling the levers of a control board. She remembered suddenly where she had seen as expert and preposterous a performance.

“Is that what you learned from Dr. Akston?” she asked, pointing at .the stove.

“That, among other things.”

“Did he teach you to spend your time—
your
time!—” she could not keep the shudder of indignation out of her voice—“on this sort of work?”

“I’ve spent time on work of much lesser importance.”

When he put her plate before her, she asked, “Where did you get that food? Do they have a grocery store here?”

“The best one in the world. It’s run by Lawrence Hammond.”

“Lawrence Hammond, of Hammond Cars. The bacon is from the farm of Dwight Sanders—of Sanders Aircraft. The eggs and the butter from Judge Narragansett—of the Superior Court of the State of Illinois.”

She looked at her plate, bitterly, almost as if she were afraid to touch it. “It’s the most expensive breakfast I’ll ever eat, considering the value of the cook’s time and of all those others.”