Atlas Shrugged (139 page)

“Good day, Miss Taggart!” he said happily. “I’m glad to see that you weren’t hurt badly.”

She inclined her head in silent greeting—it was like a greeting to the loss and the pain of the past, to a desolate evening and the desperate face of Eddie Willers telling her the news of this man’s disappearance—hurt badly? she thought—I was, but not in the plane crash—on that evening, in an empty office.... Aloud, she asked, “What are you doing here? What was it that you betrayed me for, at the worst time possible?”

He smiled, pointing at the stone structure and down at the rocky drop where the tube of a water main went vanishing into the underbrush. “I’m the utilities man,” he said. “I take care of the water lines, the power lines and the telephone service.”

.“Alone?”

“Used to. But we’ve grown so much in the past year that I’ve had to hire three men to help me.”

“What men? From where?”

“Well, one of them is a professor of economics who couldn’t get a job outside, because he taught that you can’t consume more than you have produced—one is a professor of history who couldn’t get a job because he taught that the inhabitants of slums were not the men who made this country—and one is a professor of psychology who couldn’t get a job because he taught that men are capable of thinking.”

“They work for you as plumbers and linesmen?”

“You’d be surprised how good they are at it.”

“And to whom have they abandoned our colleges?”

“To those who’re wanted there.” He chuckled. “How long ago was it that I betrayed you, Miss Taggart? Not quite three years ago, wasn’t it? It’s the John Galt Line that I refused to build for you. Where is your Line now? But
my
lines have grown, in that time, from the couple of miles that Mulligan had built when I took over, to hundreds of miles of pipe and wire, all within the space of this valley.”

He saw the swift, involuntary look of eagerness on her face, the look of a competent person’s appreciation; he smiled, glanced at her companion and said softly, “You know, Miss Taggart, when it comes to the John Galt Line—maybe it’s I who’ve followed it and you who’re betraying it.”

She glanced at Galt. He was watching her face, but she could read nothing in his.

As they drove on along the edge of the lake, she asked, “You’ve mapped this route deliberately, haven’t you? You’re showing me all the men whom”—she stopped, feeling inexplicably reluctant to say it, and said, instead—“whom I have lost?”

“I’m showing you all the men whom I have taken away from you,” he answered firmly.

This was the root, she thought, of the guiltlessness of his face: he had guessed and named the words she had wanted to spare him, he had rejected a good will that was not based on his values—and in proud certainty of being right, he had made a boast of that which she had intended as an accusation.

Ahead of them, she saw a wooden pier projecting into the water of the lake. A young woman lay stretched on the sun-flooded planks, watching a battery of fishing rods. She glanced up at the sound of the car, then leaped to her feet in a single swift movement, a shade too swift, and ran to the road. She wore slacks, rolled above the knees of her bare legs, she had dark, disheveled hair and large eyes. Galt waved to her.

“Hello, John! When did you get in?” she called.

“This morning,” he answered, smiling and driving on.

Dagny jerked her head to look back and saw the glance with which the young woman stood looking after Galt. And even though hopelessness, serenely accepted, was part of the worship in that glance, she experienced a feeling she had never known before: a stab of jealousy.

“Who is that?” she asked.

“Our best fishwife. She provides the fish for Hammond’s grocery market.”

“What else is she?”

“You’ve noticed that there’s a .‘what else’ for every one of us here? She’s a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn’t be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.”

The car turned into a narrow path, climbing steeply into a wilderness of brush and pine trees. She knew what to expect when she saw a handmade sign nailed to a tree, with an arrow pointing the way: The Buena Esperanza Pass.

It was not a pass, it was a wall of laminated rock with a complex chain of pipes, pumps and valves climbing like a vine up its narrow ledges, but it bore, on its crest, a huge wooden sign—and the proud violence of the letters announcing their message to an impassable tangle of ferns and pine branches, was more characteristic, more familiar than the words: Wyatt Oil.

It was oil that ran in a glittering curve from the mouth of a pipe into a tank at the foot of the wall, as the only confession of the tremendous secret struggle inside the stone, as the unobtrusive purpose of all the intricate machinery—but the machinery did not resemble the installations of an oil derrick, and she knew that she was looking at the unborn secret of the Buena Esperanza Pass, she knew that this was oil drawn out of shale by some method men had considered impossible.

Ellis Wyatt stood on a ridge, watching the glass dial of a gauge imbedded in the rock. He saw the car stopping below, and called, “Hi, Dagny! Be with you in a minute!”

There were two other men working with him: a big, muscular roughneck, at a pump halfway up the wall, and a young boy, by the tank on the ground. The young boy had blond hair and a face with an unusual purity of form. She felt certain that she knew this face, but she could not recall where she had seen it. The boy caught her puzzled glance, grinned and, as if to help her, whistled softly, almost inaudibly the first notes of Halley’s Fifth Concerto. It was the young brakeman of the Comet.

She laughed. “It was the Fifth Concerto by Richard Halley, wasn’t .it?”

“Sure,” he answered. “But do you think I’d tell that to a scab?”

“A what?”

“What am I paying you for?” asked Ellis Wyatt, approaching; the boy chuckled, darting back to seize the lever he had abandoned for a moment. “It’s Miss Taggart who couldn’t fire you, if you loafed on the job. I can.”

“That’s one of the reasons why I quit the railroad, Miss Taggart,” said the boy.

“Did you know that I stole him from you?” said Wyatt. “He used to be your best brakeman and now he’s my best grease-monkey, but neither one of us is going to hold him permanently.”

.“Who is?”

“Richard Halley. Music. He’s Halley’s best pupil.”

She smiled. “I know, this is a place where one employs nothing but aristocrats for the lousiest kinds of jobs.”

“They’re all aristocrats, that’s true,” said Wyatt, “because they know that there’s no such thing as a lousy job—only lousy men who don’t care to do it.”

The roughneck was watching them from above, listening with curiosity. She glanced up at him, he looked like a truck driver, so she asked, “What were
you
outside? A professor of comparative philology, I suppose?”

“No, ma.‘am,” he answered. “I was a truck driver.” He added, “But that’s not what I wanted to remain.”

Ellis Wyatt was looking at the place around them with a kind of youthful pride eager for acknowledgment: it was the pride of a host at a formal reception in a drawing room, and the eagerness of an artist at the opening of his show in a gallery. She smiled and asked, pointing at the machinery, “Shale oil?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s the process which you were working to develop while you were on earth?” She said it involuntarily and she gasped a little at her own words.

He laughed. “While I was in hell—yes. I’m on earth now.”

“How much do you produce?”

“Two hundred barrels a day.”

A note of sadness came back into her voice: “It’s the process by which you once intended to fill five tank-trains a day.”

“Dagny,” he said earnestly, pointing at his tank, “one gallon of it is worth more than a trainful back there in hell—because this is
mine,
all of it, every single drop of it, to be spent on nothing but myself.” He raised his smudged hand, displaying the greasy stains as a treasure, and a black drop on the tip of his finger flashed like a gem in the sun. “Mine,” he said. “Have you let them beat you into forgetting what that word means, what it feels like? You should give yourself a chance to relearn it.”

“You’re hidden in a hole in the wilderness,” she said bleakly, “and you’re producing two hundred barrels of oil, when you could have flooded the world with it.”

“What for? To feed the looters?”

“No! To earn the fortune you deserve.”

“But I’m richer now than I was in the world. What’s wealth but the means of expanding one’s life? There’s two ways one can do it: either by producing more or by producing it faster. And that’s what I’m doing: I’m manufacturing time.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m producing everything I need, I’m working to improve my methods, and every hour I save is an hour added to my life. It used to take me five hours to fill that tank. It now takes three. The two I saved are mine—as pricelessly mine as if I moved my grave two further hours away for every five I’ve got. It’s two hours released from one task, to be invested in another—two more hours in which to work, to grow, to move forward. That’s the savings account I’m hoarding. Is there any sort of safety vault that could protect this account in the outside world?”

“But what space do you have for moving forward? Where’s your market?”

He chuckled. “Market? I now work for use, not for profit—
my
use, not the looters’ profit. Only those who add to my life, not those who devour it, are my market. Only those who produce, not those who consume, can ever be anybody’s market. I deal with the life-givers, not with the cannibals. If my oil takes less effort to produce, I ask less of the men to whom I trade it for the things I need. I add an extra span of time to their lives with every gallon of my oil that they burn. And since they’re men like me, they keep inventing faster ways to make the things they make—so every one of them grants me an added minute, hour or day with the bread I buy from them, with the clothes, the lumber, the metal”—he glanced at Galt—“an added year with every month of electricity I purchase. That’s our market and that’s how it works for us—but that was not the way it worked in the outer world. Down what drain were they poured out there, our days, our lives and our energy? Into what bottomless, futureless sewer of the unpaid-for? Here, we trade achievements, not failures—values, not needs. We’re free of one another, yet we all grow together. Wealth, Dagny? What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can’t stand still. It must grow or perish. Look—” He pointed at a plant fighting upward from under the weight of a rock—a long, gnarled stem, contorted by an unnatural struggle, with drooping, yellow remnants of unformed leaves and a single green shoot thrust upward to the sun with the desperation of a last, spent, inadequate effort. “That’s what they’re doing to us back there in hell. Do you see me submitting to it?”

“No,” she whispered.

“Do you see
him
submitting?” He pointed at Galt.

“God, no!”

“Then don’t be astonished by anything you see in this valley.”

She remained silent when they drove on. Galt said nothing.

On a distant mountainside, in the dense green of a forest, she saw a pine tree slanting down suddenly, tracing a curve, like the hand of a clock, then crashing abruptly out of sight. She knew that it was a man-made motion.

“Who’s the lumberjack around here?” she asked.

“Ted Nielsen.”

The road was relaxing into wider curves and gentler grades, among the softer shapes of hillsides. She saw a rust-brown slope patched by two squares of unmatching green: the dark, dusty green of potato plants, and the pale, greenish-silver of cabbages. A man in a red shirt was riding a small tractor, cutting weeds.

“Who’s the cabbage tycoon?” she asked.

“Roger Marsh.”

She closed her eyes. She thought of the weeds that were climbing up the steps of a closed factory, over its lustrous tile front, a few hundred miles away, beyond the mountains.

The road was descending to the bottom of the valley. She saw the roofs of the town straight below, and the small, shining spot of the dollar sign in the distance at the other end. Galt stopped the car in front of the first structure on a ledge above the roofs, a brick building with a faint tinge of red trembling over its smokestack. It almost shocked her to see so logical a sign as “Stockton Foundry” above its door.

When she walked, leaning on her cane, out of the sunlight into the dank gloom of the building, the shock she felt was part sense of anachronism, part homesickness. This was the industrial East which, in the last few hours, had seemed to be centuries behind her. This was the old, the familiar, the loved sight of reddish billows rising to steel rafters, of sparks shooting in sunbursts from invisible sources, of sudden flames streaking through a black fog, of sand molds glowing with white metal. The fog hid the walls of the structure, dissolving its size—and for a moment, this was the great, dead foundry at Stockton, Colorado, it was Nielsen Motors... it was Rearden Steel.

“Hi, Dagny!”

The smiling face that approached her out of the fog was Andrew Stockton.‘s, and she saw a grimy hand extended to her with a gesture of confident pride, as if it held all of her moment’s vision on its palm.

She clasped the hand. “Hello,” she said softly, not knowing whether she was greeting the past or the future. Then she shook her head and added, “How come you’re not planting potatoes or making shoes around here? You’ve actually remained in your own profession.”

“Oh, Calvin Atwood of the Atwood Light and Power Company of New York City is making the shoes. Besides, my profession is one of the oldest and most immediately needed anywhere. Still, I had to fight for it. I had to ruin a competitor, first.”