Atlas Shrugged (194 page)

Mr. Thompson thudded down upon the central chair, in the manner of grabbing a vacant seat in a subway.

Chick Morrison’s assistants were herding the crowd toward the circle of light.

“A happy family,” Chick Morrison explained, “the country must see us as a big, united, happy—What’s the matter with that thing?” The radio music had gone off abruptly, choking on an odd little gasp of static, cut in the middle of a ringing phrase. It was 7:51. He shrugged and went on: “—happy family. Hurry up, boys. Take close-ups of Mr. Thompson, first.”

The hand of the clock went slicing off the minutes, while press photographers clicked their cameras at Mr. Thompson’s sourly impatient face.

“Mr. Thompson will sit between science and industry!” Chick Morrison announced. “Dr. Stadler, please—the chair on Mr. Thompson’s left. Miss Taggart—this way, please—on Mr. Thompson’s right.”

Dr. Stadler obeyed. She did not move.

“It’s not just for the press, it’s for the television audiences,” Chick Morrison explained to her, in the tone of an inducement.

She made a step forward. “I will not take part in this program,” she said evenly, addressing Mr. Thompson.

“You won’t?” he asked blankly, with the kind of look he would have worn if one of the flower vases had suddenly refused to perform its part.

“Dagny, for Christ’s sake!” cried James Taggart in panic.

“What’s the matter with her?” asked Mr. Thompson.

“But, Miss Taggart! Why?” cried Chick Morrison.

“You all know why,” she said to the faces around her. “You should have known better than to try that again.”

“Miss Taggart!” yelled Chick Morrison, as she turned to go. “It’s a national emer—”

Then a man came rushing toward Mr. Thompson, and she stopped, as did everyone else—and the look on the man’s face swept the crowd into an abruptly total silence. He was the station’s chief engineer, and it was odd to see a look of primitive terror struggling against his remnant of civilized control.

“Mr. Thompson,” he said, “we . . . we might have to delay the broadcast.”

“What?”
cried Mr. Thompson.

The hand of the dial stood at 7:58.

“We’re trying to fix it, Mr. Thompson, we’re trying to find out what it is ... but we might not be on time and—”

“What are you talking about? What happened?”

“We’re trying to locate the—”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know! But ... We .. we can’t get on the air, Mr. Thompson.”

There was a moment of silence, then Mr. Thompson asked, his voice unnaturally low, “Are you crazy?”

“I must be. I wish I were. I can’t make it out. The station is dead.”

“Mechanical trouble?” yelled Mr. Thompson, leaping to his feet. “Mechanical trouble, God damn you, at a time like this? If that’s how you run this station—”

The chief engineer shook his head slowly, in the manner of an adult who is reluctant to frighten a child. “It’s not this station, Mr. Thompson,” he said softly. “It’s every station in the country, as far as we’ve been able to check. And there is no mechanical trouble. Neither here nor elsewhere. The equipment is in order, in perfect order, and they all report the same, but ... but all radio stations went off the air at seven-fifty-one, and ... and nobody can discover why.”

“But—” cried Mr. Thompson, stopped, glanced about him and screamed, “Not tonight! You can’t let it happen tonight! You’ve got to get me on the air!”

“Mr. Thompson,” the man said slowly, “we’ve called the electronic laboratory of the State Science Institute. They ... they’ve never seen anything like it. They said it might be a natural phenomenon, some sort of cosmic disturbance of an unprecedented kind, only—”

“Well?”

“Only they don’t think it is. We don.‘t, either. They said it looks like radio waves, but of a frequency never produced before, never observed anywhere, never discovered by anybody.”

No one answered him. In a moment, he went on, his voice oddly solemn: “It looks like a wall of radio waves jamming the air, and we can’t get through it, we can’t touch it, we can’t break it.... What’s more, we can’t locate its source, not by any of our usual methods.... Those waves seem to come from a transmitter that ... that makes any known to us look like a child’s toy!”

“But that’s not possible!” The cry came from behind Mr. Thompson and they all whirled in its direction, startled by its note of peculiar terror; it came from Dr. Stadler. “There’s no such thing! There’s nobody on earth to make it!”

The chief engineer spread his hands out. “That’s it, Dr. Stadler,” he said wearily. “It can’t be possible. It shouldn’t be possible. But there it is.”

“Well, do something about it!” cried Mr. Thompson to the crowd at large.

No one answered or moved.

“I won’t permit this!” cried Mr. Thompson. “I won’t permit it! Tonight of all nights! I’ve got to make that speech! Do something! Solve it, whatever it is! I order you to solve it!”

The chief engineer was looking at him blankly.

“I’ll fire the lot of you for this! I’ll fire every electronic engineer in the country! I’ll put the whole profession on trial for sabotage, desertion and treason! Do you hear me? Now do something, God damn you! Do something!”

The chief engineer was looking at him impassively, as if words were not conveying anything any longer.

“Isn’t there anybody around to obey an order?” cried Mr. Thompson. “Isn’t there a brain left in this country?”

The hand of the clock reached the dot of 8:00.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said a voice that came from the radio receiver—a man’s clear, calm, implacable voice, the kind of voice that had not been heard on the airwaves for years—“Mr. Thompson will not speak to you tonight. His time is up. I have taken it over. You were to hear a report on the world crisis. That is what you are going to hear.”

Three gasps of recognition greeted the voice, but nobody had the power to notice them among the sounds of the crowd, which were beyond the stage of cries. One was a gasp of triumph, another—of terror, the third—of bewilderment. Three persons had recognized the speaker: Dagny, Dr. Stadler, Eddie Willers. Nobody glanced at Eddie Willers; but Dagny and Dr. Stadler glanced at each other. She saw that his face was distorted by as evil a terror as one could ever bear to see; he saw that she knew and that the way she looked at him was as if the speaker had slapped his face.

“For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing—you who dread knowledge—I am the man who will now tell you.”

The chief engineer was the only one able to move; he ran to a television set and struggled frantically with its dials. But the screen remained empty; the speaker had not chosen to be seen. Only his voice filled the airways of the country—of the world, thought the chief engineer—sounding as if he were speaking here, in this room, not to a group, but to one man; it was not the tone of addressing a meeting, but the tone of addressing a mind.

“You have heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis. You have said it yourself, half in fear, half in hope that the words had no meaning. You have cried that man’s sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster. In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.

“You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, you have wished it, and I -I am the man who has granted you your wish.

“Your ideal had an implacable enemy, which your code of morality was designed to destroy. I have withdrawn that enemy. I have taken it out of your way and out of your reach. I have removed the source of all those evils you were sacrificing one by one. I have ended your battle. I have stopped your motor. I have deprived your world of man’s mind.

“Men do not live by the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those who do. The mind is impotent, you say? I have withdrawn those whose mind isn’t. There are values higher than the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those for whom there aren’t.

“While you were dragging to your sacrificial altars the men of justice, of independence, of reason, of wealth, of self-esteem—I beat you to it, I reached them first. I told them the nature of the game you were playing and the nature of that moral code of yours, which they had been too innocently generous to grasp. I showed them the way to live by another morality-mine. It is mine that they chose to follow.

“All the men who have vanished, the men you hated, yet dreaded to lose, it is I who have taken them away from you. Do not attempt to find us. We do not choose to be found. Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don’t. Do not beg us to return. We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.

“We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one’s happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.

“There is a difference between our strike and all those you’ve practiced for centuries: our strike consists, not of making demands, but of granting them. We are evil, according to your morality. We have chosen not to harm you any longer. We are useless, according to your economics. We have chosen not to exploit you any longer. We are dangerous and to be shackled, according to your politics. We have chosen not to endanger you, nor to wear the shackles any longer. We are only an illusion, according to your philosophy. We have chosen not to blind you any longer and have left you free to face reality—the reality you wanted, the world as you see it now, a world without mind.

“We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it. We have no demands to present to you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us.
We do not need you.

“Are you now crying: No, this was not what you wanted? A mindless world of ruins was not your goal? You did not want us to leave you? You moral cannibals, I know that you’ve always known what it was that you wanted. But your game is up, because now we know it, .too.

“Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. Your victims took the blame and struggled on, with your curses as reward for their martyrdom—while you went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good?—by what standard?

“You wanted to know John Galt’s identity. I am the man who has asked that question.

“Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you
are
bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that’s through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to
return
to morality—you who have never known any—but to
discover
it.

“You have heard no concepts of morality but the mystical or the social. You have been taught that morality is a code of behavior imposed on you by whim, the whim of a supernatural power or the whim of society, to serve God’s purpose or your neighbor’s welfare, to please an authority beyond the grave or else next door—but not to serve
your
life or pleasure. Your pleasure, you have been taught, is to be found in immorality, your interests would best be served by evil, and any moral code must be designed not
for
you, but
against
you, not to further your life, but to drain it.

“For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors—between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.

“Both sides agreed that morality demands the surrender of your self-interest and of your mind, that the moral and the practical are opposites, that morality is not the province of reason, but the province of faith and force. Both sides agreed that no rational morality is possible, that there is no right or wrong in reason—that in reason there’s no reason to be moral.

“Whatever else they fought about, it was against man’s mind that all your moralists have stood united. It was man’s mind that all their schemes and systems were intended to despoil and destroy. Now choose to perish or to learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life.