Atlas Shrugged (157 page)

Then, turning his head a little, his voice as clear, but his eyes breaking the circuit, he asked, “What time do you wish to leave tomorrow?”

“Oh ... ! As early as it will be convenient for you.”

“Then have breakfast ready at seven and we’ll take off at eight.”

“I will.”

He reached into his pocket and extended to her a small, shining disk which she could not distinguish at first. He dropped it on the palm of her hand: it was a five-dollar gold piece.

“The last of your wages for the month,” he said.

Her fingers snapped closed over the coin too tightly, but she answered calmly and tonelessly, “Thank you.”

“Good night, Miss Taggart.”

“Good night.”

She did not sleep in the hours that were still left to her. She sat on the floor of her room, her face pressed to the bed, feeling nothing but the sense of his presence beyond the wall. At times, she felt as if he were before her, as if she were sitting at his feet. She spent her last night with him in this manner.

She left the valley as she had come, carrying away nothing that belonged to it. She left the few possessions she had acquired—her peasant skirt, a blouse, an apron, a few pieces of underwear—folded neatly in a drawer of the chest in her room. She looked at them for a moment, before she closed the drawer, thinking that if she came back, she would, perhaps, still find them there. She took nothing with her but the five-dollar gold piece and the band of tape still wound about her ribs.

The sun touched the peaks of the mountains, drawing a shining circle as a frontier of the valley—when she climbed aboard the plane. She leaned back in the seat beside him and looked at Galt’s face bent over her, as it had been bent when she had opened her eyes on the first morning. Then she closed her eyes and felt his hands tying the blindfold across her face.

She heard the blast of the motor, not as sound, but as the shudder of an explosion inside her body; only it felt like a distant shudder, as if the person feeling it would have been hurt if she were not so far away.

She did not know when the wheels left the ground or when the plane crossed the circle of the peaks. She lay still, with the pounding beat of the motor as her only perception of space, as if she were carried inside a current of sound that rocked once in a while. The sound came from his engine, from the control of his hands on the wheel; she held onto that; the rest was to be endured, not resisted.

She lay still, her legs stretched forward, her hands on the arms of the seat, with no sense of motion, not even her own, to give her a sense of time, with no space, no sight, no future, with the night of closed eyelids under the pressure of the cloth—and with the knowledge of his presence beside her as her single, unchanging reality.

They did not speak. Once, she said suddenly, “Mr. Galt.”

“Yes?”

“No. Nothing. I just wanted to know whether you were still there.”

“I will always be there.”

She did not know for how many miles the memory of the sound of words seemed like a small landmark rolling away into the distance, then vanishing. Then there was nothing but the stillness of an indivisible present.

She did not know whether a day had passed or an hour, when she felt the downward, plunging motion which meant that they were about to land or to crash; the two possibilities seemed equal to her mind.

She felt the jolt of the wheels against the ground as an oddly delayed sensation: as if some fraction of time had gone to make her believe it.

She felt the running streak of jerky motion, then the jar of the stop and of silence, then the touch of his hands on her hair, removing the blindfold.

She saw a glaring sunlight, a stretch of scorched weeds going off into the sky, with no mountains to stop it, a deserted highway and the hazy outline of a town about a mile away. She glanced at her watch: forty-seven minutes ago, she had still been in the valley.

“You’ll find a Taggart station there,” he said, pointing at the town, “and you’ll be able to take a train.”

She nodded, as if she understood.

He did not follow her as she descended to the ground. He leaned across the wheel toward the open door of the plane, and they looked at each other. She stood, her face raised to him, a faint wind stirring her hair, the straight line of her shoulders sculptured by the trim suit of a business executive amidst the flat immensity of an empty prairie.

The movement of his hand pointed east, toward some invisible cities. “Don’t look for me out there,” he said. “You will not find me—until you want me for what I am. And when you’ll want me, I’ll be the easiest man to find.”

She heard the sound of the door falling closed upon him; it seemed louder than the blast of the propeller that followed. She watched the run of the plane’s wheels and the trail of weeds left flattened behind them. Then she saw a strip of sky between wheels and weeds.

She looked around her. A reddish haze of heat hung over the shapes of the town in the distance, and the shapes seemed to sag under a rusty tinge; above their roofs, she saw the remnant of a crumbled smokestack. She saw a dry, yellow scrap rustling faintly in the weeds beside her: it was a piece of newspaper. She looked at these objects blankly, unable to make them real.

She raised her eyes to the plane. She watched the spread of its wings grow smaller in the sky, draining away in its wake the sound of its motor. It kept rising, wings first, like a long silver cross; then the curve of its motion went following the sky, dropping slowly closer to the earth; then it seemed not to move any longer, but only to shrink. She watched it like a star in the process of extinction, while it shrank from cross to dot to a burning spark which she was no longer certain of seeing. When she saw that the spread of the sky was strewn with such sparks all over, she knew that the plane was gone.

CHAPTER III

ANTI-GREED

“What am I doing here?” asked Dr. Robert Stadler. “Why was I asked to come here? I demand an explanation. I’m not accustomed to being dragged halfway across a continent without rhyme, reason or notice.”

Dr. Floyd Ferris smiled. “Which makes me appreciate it all the more that you
did
come, Dr. Stadler.” It was impossible to tell whether his voice had a tone of gratitude—or of gloating.

The sun was beating down upon them and Dr. Stadler felt a streak of perspiration oozing along his temple. He could not hold an angrily, embarrassingly private discussion in the middle of a crowd streaming to fill the benches of the grandstand around them—the discussion which he had tried and failed to obtain for the last three days. It occurred to him that that was precisely the reason why his meeting with Dr. Ferris had been delayed to this moment; but he brushed the thought aside, just as he brushed some insect buzzing to reach his wet temple.

“Why was I unable to get in touch with you?” he asked. The fraudulent weapon of sarcasm now seemed to sound less effective than ever, but it was Dr. Stadler’s only weapon: “Why did you find it necessary to send me messages on official stationery worded in a style proper, I’m sure, for Army”—orders, he was about to say, but didn.‘t—“communications, but certainly not for scientific correspondence?”

“It is a
government
matter,” said Dr. Ferris gently.

“Do you realize that I was much too busy and that this meant an interruption of my work?”

“Oh yes,” said Dr. Ferris noncommittally.

“Do you realize that I could have refused to come?”

“But you didn.‘t,” said Dr. Ferris softly.

“Why was I given no explanation? Why didn’t you come for me in person, instead of sending those incredible young hooligans with their mysterious gibberish that sounded half-science, half-pulp-magazine?”

“I was too busy,” said Dr. Ferris blandly.

“Then would you mind telling me what you’re doing in the middle of a plain in Iowa—and what I’m doing here, for that matter?” He waved contemptuously at the dusty horizon of an empty prairie and at the three wooden grandstands. The stands were newly erected, and the wood, too, seemed to perspire; he could see drops of resin sparkling in the sun.

“We are about to witness an historical event, Dr. Stadler. An occasion which will become a milestone on the road of science, civilization, social welfare and political adaptability.” Dr. Ferris’ voice had the tone of a public relations man’s memorized handout. “The turning point of a new era.”

“What event? What new era?”

“As you will observe, only the most distinguished citizens, the cream of our intellectual elite, have been chosen for the special privilege of witnessing this occasion. We could not omit your name, could we?—and we feel certain, of course, that we can count on your loyalty and co-operation.”

He could not catch Dr. Ferris’ eyes. The grandstands were rapidly filling with people, and Dr. Ferris kept interrupting himself constantly to wave to nondescript newcomers, whom Dr. Stadler had never seen before, but who were personages, as he could tell by the particular shade of gaily informal deference in Ferris’ waving. They all seemed to know Dr. Ferris and to seek him out, as if he were the master of ceremonies —or the star—of the occasion.

“If you would kindly be specific for a moment,” said Dr. Stadler, “and tell me what—”

“Hi, Spud!” called Dr. Ferris, waving to a portly, white-haired man who filled the full-dress uniform of a general.

Dr. Stadler raised his voice: “I said, if you would kindly concentrate long enough to explain to me what in hell is going on—”

“But it’s very simple. It’s the final triumph of ... You’ll have to excuse me a minute, Dr. Stadler,” said Dr. Ferris hastily, tearing forward, like an overtrained lackey at the sound of a bell, in the direction of what looked like a group of aging rowdies; he turned back long enough to add two words which he seemed reverently to consider as a full explanation:
“The press!”

Dr. Stadler sat down on the wooden bench, feeling unaccountably reluctant to brush against anything around him. The three grandstands were spaced at intervals in a semi-curve, like the tiers of a small, private circus, with room for some three hundred people; they seemed built for the viewing of some spectacle—but they faced the emptiness of a flat prairie stretching off to the horizon, with nothing in sight but the dark blotch of a farmhouse miles away.

There were radio microphones in front of one stand, which seemed reserved for the press. There was a contraption resembling a portable switchboard in front of the stand reserved for officials; a few levers of polished metal sparkled in the sun on the face of the switchboard. In an improvised parking lot behind the stands, the glitter of luxurious new cars seemed a brightly reassuring sight. But it was the building that stood on a knoll some thousand feet away that gave Dr. Stadler a vague sense of uneasiness. It was a small, squat structure of unknown purpose, with massive stone walls, no windows except a few slits protected by stout iron bars, and a large dome, grotesquely too heavy for the rest, that seemed to press the structure down into the soil. A few outlets protruded from the base of the dome, in loose, irregular shapes, resembling badly poured clay funnels; they did not seem to belong to an industrial age or to any known usage. The building had an air of silent malevolence, like a puffed, venomous mushroom; it was obviously modern, but its sloppy, rounded, ineptly unspecific lines made it look like a primitive structure unearthed in the heart of the jungle, devoted to some secret rites of savagery.

Dr. Stadler sighed with irritation; he was tired of secrets. “Confidential” and “Top Confidential” had been the words stamped on the invitation which had demanded that he travel to Iowa on a two-day notice and for an unspecified purpose. Two young men, who called themselves physicists, had appeared at the Institute to escort him; his calls to Ferris’ office in Washington had remained unanswered. The young men had talked—through an exhausting trip by government plane, then a clammy ride in a government car—about science, emergencies, social equilibriums and the need of secrecy, till he knew less than he had known at the start; he noticed only that two words kept recurring in their jabber, which had also appeared in the text of the invitation, two words that had an ominous sound when involving an unknown issue: the demands for his “loyalty” and “co-operation.”

The young men had deposited him on a bench in the front row of the grandstand and had vanished, like the folding gear of a mechanism, leaving him to the sudden presence of Dr. Ferris in person. Now, watching the scene around him, watching Dr. Ferris’ vague, excited, loosely casual gestures in the midst of a group of newsmen, he had an impression of bewildering confusion, of senseless, chaotic inefficiency—and of a smooth machine working to produce the exact degree of that impression needed at the exact moment.

He felt a single, sudden flash of panic, in which, as in a flash of lightning, he permitted himself to know that he felt a desperate desire to escape. But he slammed his mind shut against it. He knew that the darkest secret of the occasion—more crucial, more untouchable, more deadly than whatever was hidden in the mushroom building—was that which had made him agree to come.