Atlas Shrugged (176 page)

She knew that there was money to be had out of the railroad business and she knew who was now obtaining it. Cuffy Meigs was selling trains as he was selling the last of the railroad’s supplies, whenever he could rig a setup which would not let it be discovered or proved—selling rail to roads in Guatemala or to trolley companies in Canada, selling wire to manufacturers of juke boxes, selling crossties for fuel in resort hotels.

Did it matter—she thought, looking at the map—which part of the corpse had been consumed by which type of maggot, by those who gorged themselves or by those who gave the food to other maggots? So long as living flesh was prey to be devoured, did it matter whose stomachs it had gone to fill? There was no way to tell which devastation had been accomplished by the humanitarians and which by undisguised gangsters. There was no way to tell which acts of plunder had been prompted by the charity-lust of the Lawsons and which by the gluttony of Cuffy Meigs—no way to tell which communities had been immolated to feed another community one week closer to starvation and which to provide yachts for the pull-peddlers. Did it matter? Both were alike in fact as they were alike in spirit, both were in need and need was regarded as sole title to property, both were acting in strictest accordance with the same code of morality. Both held the immolation of men as proper and both were achieving it. There wasn’t even any way to tell who were the cannibals and who the victims—the communities that accepted as their rightful due the confiscated clothing or fuel of a town to the east of them, found, next week, their granaries confiscated to feed a town to the west—men had achieved the ideal of the centuries, they were practicing it in unobstructed perfection, they were serving need as their highest ruler, need as first claim upon them, need as their standard of value, as the coin of their realm, as more sacred than right and life. Men had been pushed into a pit where, shouting that man is his brother’s keeper, each was devouring his neighbor and was being devoured by his neighbor’s brother, each was proclaiming the righteousness of the unearned and wondering who was stripping the skin off his back, each was devouring himself, while screaming in terror that some unknowable evil was destroying the earth.

“What complaint do they now have to make?” she heard Hugh Akston’s voice in her mind. “That the universe is irrational? Is it?”

She sat looking at the map, her glance dispassionately solemn, as if no emotion save respect were permissible when observing the awesome power of logic. She was seeing—in the chaos of a perishing continent -the precise, mathematical execution of all the ideas men had held. They had not wanted to know that
this
was what they wanted, they had not wanted to see that they had the power to wish, but not the power to fake—and they had achieved their wish to the letter, to the last bloodstained comma of it.

.What were they thinking now, the champions of need and the lech ers of pity?—she wondered. What were they counting on? Those who had once simpered: “I don’t want to destroy the rich, I only want to seize a little of their surplus to help the poor, just a
little,
they’ll never miss it!”—then, later, had snapped: “The tycoons can stand being squeezed, they’ve amassed enough to last them for three generations”—then, later, had yelled: “Why should the people suffer while businessmen have reserves to last a year?”—
now
were screaming: “Why should we starve while some people have reserves to last a week?” What were they counting on?—she wondered.

“You must do something!” cried James Taggart.

She whirled to face him.
“I?”

“It’s
your
job, it’s your province, it’s your duty!”

“What is?”

“To act. To do.”

“To do—what?”

“How should I know? It’s
your
special talent. You’re the doer.”

She glanced at him: the statement was so oddly perceptive and so incongruously irrelevant. She rose to her feet.

“Is this all, Jim?”

“No! No! I want a discussion!”

“Go ahead.”

“But you haven’t said anything!”

“You haven.‘t, either.”

“But ... What I mean is, there are practical problems to solve, which ... For instance, what was that matter of our last allocation of new rail vanishing from the storehouse in Pittsburgh?”

“Cuffy Meigs stole it and sold it.”

“Can you prove it?” he snapped defensively.

“Have your friends left any means, methods, rules or agencies of proof?”

“Then don’t talk about it, don’t be theoretical, we’ve got to deal with facts! We’ve got to deal with facts as they are today ... I mean, we’ve got to be realistic and devise some practical means to protect our supplies under existing conditions, not under unprovable assumptions, which—”

She chuckled.
There
was the form of the formless, she thought,
there
was the method of his consciousness: he wanted her to protect him from Cuffy Meigs without acknowledging Meigs’ existence, to fight it without admitting its reality, to defeat it without disturbing its game.

“What do you find so damn funny?” he snapped angrily.

“You know it.”

“I don’t know what’s the matter with you! I don’t know what’s happened to you ... in the last two months ... ever since you came back.... You’ve never been so unco-operative!”

“Why, Jim, I haven’t argued with you in the last two months.”

“That’s what I mean!” He caught himself hastily, but not fast enough to miss her smile. “I mean, I wanted to have a conference, I wanted to know your view of the situation—”

“You know it.”

“But you haven’t said a word!”

“I said everything I had to say, three years ago. I told you where your course would take you. It has.”

“Now there you go again! What’s the use of theorizing? We’re here, we’re not back three years ago. We’ve got to deal with the present, not the past. Maybe things would have been different, if we had followed your opinion, maybe, but the fact is that we
didn.‘t-and
we’ve got to deal with facts. We’ve got to take reality as it is now, today!”

“Well, take it.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Take your reality. I’ll merely take your orders.”

“That’s unfair! I’m asking for your opinion—”

“You’re asking for reassurance, Jim. You’re not going to get it.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m not going to help you pretend—by arguing with you—that the reality you’re talking about is not what it is, that there’s still a way to make it work and to save your neck. There isn’t.”

“Well ...” There was no explosion, no anger—only the feebly uncertain voice of a man on the verge of abdication. “Well ... what would you want me to do?”

“Give up.” He looked at her blankly. “Give up—all of you, you and your Washington friends and your looting planners and the whole of your cannibal philosophy. Give up and get out of the way and let those of us who can, start from scratch out of the ruins.”

“No!” The explosion came, oddly, now; it was the scream of a man who would die rather than betray his idea, and it came from a man who had spent his life evading the existence of ideas, acting with the expediency of a criminal. She wondered whether she had ever understood the essence of criminals. She wondered about the nature of the loyalty to the idea of denying ideas.

“No!” he cried, his voice lower, hoarser and more normal, sinking from the tone of a zealot to the tone of an overbearing executive. “That’s impossible! That’s out of the question!”

“Who said so?”

“Never mind! It’s so! Why do you always think of the impractical? Why don’t you accept reality as it is and do something about it? You’re the realist, you’re the doer, the mover, the producer, the Nat Taggart, you’re the person who’s able to achieve any goal she chooses! You could save us now, you could find a way to make things work—if you
wanted
to!”

She burst out laughing.

There, she thought, was the ultimate goal of all that loose academic prattle which businessmen had ignored for years, the goal of all the slipshod definitions, the sloppy generalities, the soupy abstractions, all claiming that obedience to objective reality is the same as obedience to the State, that there is no difference between a law of nature and a bureaucrat’s directive, that a hungry man is not free, that man must be released from the tyranny of food, shelter and clothing—all of it, for years, that the day might come when Nat Taggart, the realist, would be asked to consider the will of Cuffy Meigs as a fact of nature, irrevocable and absolute like steel, rails and gravitation, to accept the Meigs-made world as an objective, unchangeable reality—then to continue producing abundance in that world.
There
was the goal of all those con men of library and classroom, who sold their revelations as reason, their “instincts” as science, their cravings as knowledge, the goal of all the savages of the non-objective, the non-absolute, the relative, the tentative, the probable—the savages who, seeing a farmer gather a harvest, can consider it only as a mystic phenomenon unbound by the law of causality and created by the farmer’s omnipotent whim, who then proceed to seize the farmer, to chain him, to deprive him of tools, of seeds, of water, of soil, to push him out on a barren rock and to command:
“Now
grow a harvest and feed us!”

No—she thought, expecting Jim to ask it—it would be useless to try to explain what she was laughing at, he would not be able to understand it.

But he did not ask it. Instead, she saw him slumping and heard him say—terrifyingly, because his words were so irrelevant, if he did not understand, and so monstrous, if he did, “Dagny, I’m your brother ...”

She drew herself up, her muscles growing rigid, as if she were about to face a killer’s gun.

“Dagny”—his voice was the soft, nasal, monotonous whine of a beggar—“I want to be president of a railroad. I want it. Why can’t I have my wish as you always have yours? Why shouldn’t I be given the fulfillment of my desires as you always fulfill any desire of your own? Why should you be happy while I suffer? Oh yes, the world is yours, you’re the one who has the brains to run it. Then why do you permit suffering in your world? You proclaim the pursuit of happiness, but you doom me to frustration. Don’t I have the right to demand any form of happiness I choose? Isn’t that a debt which you owe me? Am I not your brother?”

His glance was like a prowler’s flashlight searching her face for a shred of pity. It found nothing but a look of revulsion.

“It’s
your
sin if I suffer! It’s your moral failurel I’m your brother, therefore I’m your responsibility, but you’ve failed to supply my wants, therefore you’re guilty! All of mankind’s moral leaders have said so for centuries—who are you to say otherwise? You’re so proud of yourself, you think that you’re pure and good—but you can’t be good, so long as I’m wretched. My misery is the measure of your sin. My contentment is the measure of your virtue. I want this kind of world, today’s world, it gives me my share of authority, it allows me to feel important—make it work for me!—do something!—how do I know what?-it’s
your
problem and
your
duty! You have the privilege of strength, but I—I have the
right
of weakness! That’s a moral absolute! Don’t you know it? Don’t you? Don’t you?”

His glance was now like the hands of a man hanging over an abyss, groping frantically for the slightest fissure of doubt, but slipping on the clean, polished rock of her face.

“You bastard,” she said evenly, without emotion, since the words were not addressed to anything human.

It seemed to her that she saw him fall into the abyss—even though there was nothing to see in his face except the look of a con man whose trick has not worked.

There was no reason to feel more revulsion than usual, she thought; he had merely uttered the things which were preached, heard and accepted everywhere; but this creed was usually expounded in the third person, and Jim had had the open effrontery to expound it in the first. She wondered whether people accepted the doctrine of sacrifice provided its recipients did not identify the nature of their own claims and actions.

She turned to leave.

“No! No! Wait!” he cried, leaping to his feet, with a glance at his wrist watch. “It’s time now! There’s a particular news broadcast that I want you to hear!”

She stopped, held by curiosity.

He pressed the switch of the radio, watching her face openly, intently, almost insolently. His eyes had a look of fear and of oddly lecherous anticipation.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” the voice of the radio speaker leaped forth abruptly; it had a tone of panic. “News of a shocking development has just reached us from Santiago, Chile!”

She saw the jerk of Taggart’s head and a sudden anxiety in his bewildered frown, as if something about the words and voice were not what he had expected.

“A special session of the legislature of the People’s State of Chile had been called for ten o‘clock this morning, to pass an act of utmost importance to the people of Chile, Argentina and other South American People’s States. In line with the enlightened policy of Señor Ramirez, the new Head of the Chilean State—who came to power on the moral slogan that man is his brother’s keeper—the legislature was to nationalize the Chilean properties of d’.Anconia Copper, thus opening the way .for the People’s State of Argentina to nationalize the rest of the d‘An conia properties the world over. This, however, was known only to a very few of the top-level leaders of both nations. The measure had been kept secret in order to avoid debate and reactionary opposition. The seizure of the multi-billion dollar d’.Anconia Copper was to come as a munificent surprise to the country.

“On the stroke of ten, in the exact moment when the chairman’s gavel struck the rostrum, opening the session—almost as if the gavel’s blow had set it off—the sound of a tremendous explosion rocked the hall, shattering the glass of its windows. It came from the harbor, a few streets away—and when the legislators rushed to the windows, they saw a long column of flame where once there had risen the familiar silhouettes of the ore docks of d.‘Anconia Copper. The ore docks had been blown to bits.