Atlas Shrugged (190 page)

They did not answer. They did not look at him. Their faces wore expressions of stubborn resentment, as if
his
were the plea of a liar.

Then Lawson said softly, half in reproach, half in scorn, “Well, after all, you businessmen have kept predicting disasters for years, you’ve cried catastrophe at every progressive measure and told us that we’ll perish—but we haven’t.” He started a smile, but drew back from the sudden intensity of Rearden’s eyes.

Rearden had felt another click in his mind, the sharper click of the second tumbril connecting the circuits of the lock. He leaned forward. “What are you counting on?” he asked; his tone had changed, it was low, it had the steady, pressing, droning sound of a drill.

“It’s only a matter of gaining time!” cried Mouch.

“There isn’t any time left to gain.”

“All we need is a chance!” cried Lawson.

“There are no chances left.”

“It’s only until we recover!” cried Holloway.

“There is no way to recover.”

“Only until our policies begin to work!” cried Dr. Ferris.

“There’s no way to make the irrational work.” There was no answer. “What can save you now?”

“Oh, you’ll do something!” cried James Taggart.

Then—even though it was only a sentence he had heard all his life—he felt a deafening crash within him, as of a steel door dropping open at the touch of the final tumbril, the one small number completing the sum and releasing the intricate lock, the answer uniting all the pieces, the questions and the unsolved wounds of his life.

In the moment of silence after the crash, it seemed to him that he heard Francisco’s voice, asking him quietly in the ballroom of this building, yet asking it also here and now: “Who is the guiltiest man in this room?” He heard his own answer of the past: “I suppose-James Taggart?” and Francisco’s voice saying without reproach: “No, Mr. Rearden, it’s not James Taggart,”—but here, in this room and this moment, his mind answered: “I am.”

He had cursed these looters for their stubborn blindness? It was he who had made it possible. From the first extortion he had accepted, from the first directive he had obeyed, he had given them cause to believe that reality was a thing to be cheated, that one could demand the irrational and someone somehow would provide it. If he had accepted the Equalization of Opportunity Bill, if he had accepted Directive 10-289, if he had accepted the law that those who could not equal his ability had the right to dispose of it, that those who had not earned were to profit, but he who had was to lose, that those who could not think were to command, but he who could was to obey them—then were they illogical in believing that they existed in an irrational universe? He had made it for them, he had provided it. Were they illogical in believing that theirs was only
to wish,
to wish with no concern for the possible—and that
his
was to fulfill their wishes, by means they did not have to know or name? They, the impotent mystics, struggling to escape the responsibility of reason, had known that he, the rationalist, had undertaken to serve their whims. They had known that he had given them a blank check on reality—his was not to ask
why?
—theirs was not to ask
how?
—let them demand that he give them a share of his wealth, then all that he owns, then more than he owns—impossible?—no,
he’ll do something!

He did not know that he had leaped to his feet, that he stood staring down at James Taggart, seeing in the unbridled shapelessness of Taggart’s features the answer to all the devastation he had witnessed through the years of his life.

“What’s the matter, Mr. Rearden? What have I said?” Taggart was asking with rising anxiety—but he was out of the reach of Taggart’s .voice.

He was seeing the progression of the years, the monstrous extortions, the impossible demands, the inexplicable victories of evil, the preposterous plans and unintelligible goals proclaimed in volumes of muddy philosophy, the desperate wonder of the victims who thought that some complex, malevolent wisdom was moving the powers destroying the world—and all of it had rested on one tenet behind the shifty eyes of the victors:
he’ll do something!
... We’ll get away with it—he’ll let us—
he’ll do something! ...

You businessmen kept predicting that we’d perish, but we haven’t. ... It was true, he thought. They had not been blind to reality, he had—blind to the reality he himself had created. No, they had not perished, but who had? Who had perished to pay for their manner of survival? Ellis Wyatt ... Ken Danagger ... Francisco d.‘Anconia.

He was reaching for his hat and coat, when he noticed that the men in the room were trying to stop him, that their faces had a look of panic and their voices were crying in bewilderment: “What’s the matter, Mr. Rearden? ... Why? ... But why? ... What have we said? ... You’re not going! ... You can’t go! ... It’s too early! ... Not yet! Oh, not yet!”

He felt as if he were seeing them from the rear window of a speeding express, as if they stood on the track behind him, waving their arms in futile gestures and screaming indistinguishable sounds, their figures growing smaller in the distance, their voices fading.

One of them tried to stop him as he turned to the door. He pushed him out of his way, not roughly, but with a simple, smooth sweep of his arm, as one brushes aside an obstructing curtain, then walked out.

Silence was his only sensation, as he sat at the wheel of his car, speeding back down the road to Philadelphia. It was the silence of immobility within him, as if, possessing knowledge, he could now afford to rest, with no further activity of soul. He felt nothing, neither anguish nor elation. It was as if, by an effort of years, he had climbed a mountain to gain a distant view and, having reached the top, had fallen to lie still, to rest before he looked, free to spare himself for the first time.

He was aware of the long, empty road streaming, then curving, then streaming straight before him, of the effortless pressure of his hands on the wheel and the screech of the tires on the curves. But he felt as if he were speeding down a skyway suspended and coiling in empty space.

The passers-by at the factories, the bridges, the power plants along his road saw a sight that had once been natural among them: a trim, expensively powerful car driven by a confident man, with the concept of success proclaimed more loudly than by any electric sign, proclaimed by the driver’s garments, by his expert steering, by his purposeful speed. They watched him go past and vanish into the haze equating earth with night.

He saw his mills rising in the darkness, as a black silhouette against a breathing glow. The glow was the color of burning gold, and “Rearden Steel” stood written across the sky in the cool, white fire of crystal.

He looked at the long silhouette, the curves of blast furnaces standing like triumphal arches, the smokestacks rising like a solemn colonnade along an avenue of honor in an imperial city, the bridges hanging like garlands, the cranes saluting like lances, the smoke waving slowly like flags. The sight broke the stillness within him and he smiled in greeting. It was a smile of happiness, of love, of dedication. He had never loved his mills as he did in that moment, for—seeing them by an act of his own vision, cleared of all but his own code of values, in a luminous reality that held no contradictions—he was seeing the reason of his love: the mills were an achievement of his mind, devoted to his enjoyment of existence, erected in a rational world to deal with rational men. If those men had vanished, if that world was gone, if his mills had ceased to serve his values—then the mills were only a pile of dead scrap, to be left to crumble, the sooner the better—to be left, not as an act of treason, but as an act of loyalty to their actual meaning.

The mills were still a mile ahead when a small spurt of flame caught his sudden attention. Among all the shades of fire in the vast spread of structures, he could tell the abnormal and the out-of-place: this one was too raw a shade of yellow and it was darting from a spot where no fire had reason to be, from a structure by the gate of the main entrance.

In the next instant, he heard the dry crack of a gunshot, then three answering cracks in swift succession, like an angry hand slapping a sudden assailant.

Then the black mass barring the road in the distance took shape, it was not mere darkness and it did not recede as he came closer—it was a mob squirming at the main gate, trying to storm the mills.

He had time to distinguish waving arms, some with clubs, some with crowbars, some with rifles—the yellow flames of burning wood gushing from the window of the gatekeeper’s office—the blue cracks of gun-fire darting out of the mob and the answers spitting from the roofs of the structures—he had time to see a human figure twisting backward and falling from the top of a car—then he sent his wheels into a shrieking curve, turning into the darkness of a side road.

He was going at the rate of sixty miles an hour down the ruts of an unpaved soil, toward the eastern gate of the mills—and the gate was in sight when the impact of tires on a gully threw the car off the road, to the edge of a ravine where an ancient slag heap lay at the bottom. With the weight of his chest and elbow on the wheel, pitted against two tons of speeding metal, the curve of his body forced the curve of the car to complete its screaming half-circle, sweeping it back onto the road and into the control of his hands. It had taken one instant, but in the next his foot went down on the brake, tearing the engine to a stop: for in the moment when his headlights had swept the ravine, he had glimpsed an oblong shape, darker than the gray of the weeds on the slope, and it had seemed to him that a brief white blur had been a human hand waving for help.

Throwing off his overcoat, he went hurrying down the side of the ravine, lumps of earth giving way under his feet, he went catching at the dried coils of brush, half-running, half-sliding toward the long black form which he could now distinguish to be a human body. A scum of cotton was swimming against the moon, he could see the white of a hand and the shape of an arm lying stretched in the weeds, but the body lay still, with no sign of motion.

“Mr. Rearden ...”

It was a whisper struggling to be a cry, it was the terrible sound of eagerness fighting against a voice that could be nothing but a moan of pain.

He did not know which came first, it felt like a single shock: his thought that the voice was familiar, a ray of moonlight breaking through the cotton, the movement of falling down on his knees by the white oval of a face, and the recognition. It was the Wet Nurse.

He felt the boy’s hand clutching his with the abnormal strength of agony, while he was noticing the tortured lines of the face, the drained lips, the glazing eyes and the thin, dark trickle from a small, black hole in too wrong, too close a spot on the left side of the boy’s chest.

“Mr. Rearden ... I wanted to stop them ... I wanted to save you ...”

“What happened to you, kid?”

“They shot me, so I wouldn’t talk ... I wanted to prevent”—his hand fumbled toward the red glare in the sky—“what they’re doing ... I was too late, but I’ve tried to ... I’ve tried ... And ... and I’m still able ... to talk ... Listen, they—”

“You need help. Let’s get you to a hospital and—”

“No! Wait! I ... I don’t think I have much time left to me and ... and I’ve got to tell you ... Listen, that riot ... it’s staged ... on orders from Washington ... It’s not workers ... not
your
workers ... it’s those new boys of theirs and ... and a lot of goons hired on the outside ... Don’t believe a word they’ll tell you about it ... It’s a frame-up ... it’s
their
rotten kind of frame-up ...”

There was a desperate intensity in the boy’s face, the intensity of a crusader’s battle, his voice seemed to gain a sound of life from some fuel burning in broken spurts within him—and Rearden knew that the greatest assistance he could now render was to listen.

“They ... they’ve got a Steel Unification Plan ready ... and they need an excuse for it ... because they know that the country won’t take it ... and you won’t stand for it ... They’re afraid this one’s going to be too much for everybody ... it’s just a plan to skin you alive, that’s all ... So they want to make it look like you’re starving your workers ... and the workers are running amuck and you’re unable to control them ... and the government’s got to step in for your own protection and for public safety ... That’s going to be their pitch, Mr. Rearden ...”

Rearden was noticing the torn flesh of the boy’s hands, the drying mud of blood and dust on his palms and his clothing, gray patches of dust on knees and stomach, scrambled with the needles of burs. In the intermittent fits of moonlight, he could see the trail of flattened weeds and glistening smears going off into the darkness below. He dreaded to think how far the boy had crawled and for how long.

“They didn’t want you to be here tonight, Mr. Rearden ... They didn’t want you to see their .‘People’s rebellion’ ... Afterwards ... you know how they screw up the evidence ... there won’t be a straight story to get anywhere ... and they hope to fool the country ... and you ... that they’re acting to protect you from violence ... Don’t let them get away with it, Mr. Rearden! ... Tell the country ... tell the people ... tell the newspapers ... Tell them that I told you ... it’s under oath ... I swear it ... that makes it legal, doesn’t it? ... doesn’t it? ... that gives you a chance?”

Rearden pressed the boy’s hand in his. “Thank you, kid.”

“I ... I’m sorry I’m late, Mr. Rearden, but ... but they didn’t let me in on it till the last minute ... till just before it started ... They called me in on a ... a strategy conference ... there was a man there by the name of Peters ... from the Unification Board ... he’s a stooge of Tinky Holloway ... who’s a stooge of Orren Boyle ... What they wanted from me was ... they wanted me to sign a lot of passes ... to let some of the goons in ... so they’d start trouble from the inside and the outside together ... to make it look like they really were your workers ... I refused to sign the passes.”