Atlas Shrugged (207 page)

“Pipe down,” said Mr. Thompson uncertainly, drawing a little away from him.

“We don’t have to believe it!” Taggart’s voice had the flat, insistent sound of an effort to maintain a trance. “Nobody’s ever said it before! It’s just one man! We don’t have to believe it!”

“Take it easy,” said Mr. Thompson.

“Why is he so sure he’s right? Who is he to go against the whole world, against everything ever said for centuries and centuries? Who is he to know? Nobody can be sure! Nobody can know what’s right! There isn’t any right!”

“Shut up!” yelled Mr. Thompson. “What are you trying to—”

The blast that stopped him was a military march leaping suddenly forth from the radio receiver—the military march interrupted three hours ago, played by the familiar screeches of a studio record. It took them a few stunned seconds to grasp it, while the cheerful, thumping chords went goose-stepping through the silence, sounding grotesquely irrelevant, like the mirth of a half-wit. The station’s program director was blindly obeying the absolute that no radio time was ever to be left blank.

“Tell them to cut it off!” screamed Wesley Mouch, leaping to his feet. “It will make the public think that we authorized that speech!”

“You damn fool!” cried Mr. Thompson. “Would you rather have the public think that we didn’t?”

Mouch stopped short and his eyes shot to Mr. Thompson with the appreciative glance of an amateur at a master.

“Broadcasts as usual!” ordered Mr. Thompson. “Tell them to go on with whatever programs they’d scheduled for this hour! No special announcements, no explanations! Tell them to go on as if nothing had happened!”

Half a dozen of Chick Morrison’s morale conditioners went scurrying off toward telephones.

“Muzzle the commentators! Don’t allow them to comment! Send word to every station in the country! Let the public wonder! Don’t let them think that we’re worried! Don’t let them think that it’s important!”

“No!” screamed Eugene Lawson. “No, no, no! We can’t give people the impression that we’re endorsing that speech! It’s horrible, horrible, horrible!” Lawson was not in tears, but his voice had the undignified sound of an adult sobbing with helpless rage.

“Who’s said anything about endorsing it?” snapped Mr. Thompson.

“It’s horrible! It’s immoral! It’s selfish, heartless, ruthless! It’s the most vicious speech ever made! It ... it will make people demand to be happy!”

“It’s only a speech,” said Mr. Thompson, not too firmly.

“It seems to me,” said Chick Morrison, his voice tentatively helpful, “.‘that people of nobler spiritual nature, you know what I mean, people of ... of ... well, of mystical insight”—he paused, as if waiting to be slapped, but no one moved, so he repeated firmly—“yes, of mystical insight, won’t go for that speech. Logic isn’t everything, after all.”

“The workingmen won’t go for it,” said Tinky Holloway, a bit more helpfully. “He didn’t sound like a friend of labor.”

“The women of the country won’t go for it,” declared Ma Chalmers. “It is, I believe, an established fact that women don’t go for that stuff about the mind. Women have finer feelings. You can count on the women.”

“You can count on the scientists,” said Dr. Simon Pritchett. They were all pressing forward, suddenly eager to speak, as if they had found a subject they could handle with assurance. “Scientists know better than to believe in reason. He’s no friend of the scientists.”

“He’s no friend of anybody,” said Wesley Mouch, recapturing a shade of confidence at the sudden realization, “except maybe of big business.”

“No!” cried Mr. Mowen in terror. “No! Don’t accuse us! Don’t say it! I won’t have you say it!”

“What?”

“That . . . that . . . that anybody is a friend of business!”

“Don’t let’s make a fuss about that speech,” said Dr. Floyd Ferris. “It was too intellectual. Much too intellectual for the common man. It will have no effect. People are too dumb to understand it.”

“Yeah,” said Mouch hopefully, “that’s so.”

“In the first place,” said Dr. Ferris, encouraged, “people can’t think. In the second place, they don’t want to.”

“In the third place,” said Fred Kinnan, “they don’t want to starve. And what do you propose to do about that?”

It was as if he had pronounced the question which all of the preceding utterances had been intended to stave off. No one answered him, but heads drew faintly deeper into shoulders, and figures drew faintly closer to one another, like a small cluster under the weight of the studio’s empty space. The military march boomed through the silence with the inflexible gaiety of a grinning skull.

“Turn it off!” yelled Mr. Thompson, waving at the radio. “Turn that damn thing off!”

Someone obeyed him. But the sudden silence was worse.

“Well?” said Mr. Thompson at last, raising his eyes reluctantly to Fred Kinnan. “What do you think we ought to do?”

“Who, me?” chuckled Kinnan. “I don’t run this show.”

Mr. Thompson slammed his fist down on his knee. “Say something —” he ordered, but seeing Kinnan turn away, added, “somebody!” There were no volunteers. “What are we to do?” he yelled, knowing that the man who answered would, thereafter, be the man in power. “What are we to do? Can’t somebody tell us what to do?”

“I can!”

It was a woman’s voice, but it had the quality of the voice they had heard on the radio. They whirled to Dagny before she had time to step forward from the darkness beyond the group. As she stepped forward, her face frightened them—because it was devoid of fear.

“I can,” she said, addressing Mr. Thompson. “You’re to give up.”

“Give up?” he repeated blankly.

“You’re through. Don’t you see that you’re through? What else do you need, after what you’ve heard? Give up and get out of the way. Leave men free to exist.” He was looking at her, neither objecting nor moving. “You’re still alive, you’re using a human language, you’re asking for answers, you’re counting on reason—you’re still counting on reason, God damn you! You’re able to understand. It isn’t possible that you haven’t understood. There’s nothing you can now pretend to hope, to want or gain or grab or reach. There’s nothing but destruction ahead, the world’s and your own. Give up and get out.”

They were listening intently, but as if they did not hear her words, as if they were clinging blindly to a quality she was alone among them to possess: the quality of being alive. There was a sound of exultant laughter under the angry violence of her voice, her face was lifted, her eyes seemed to be greeting some spectacle at an incalculable distance, so that the glowing patch on her forehead did not look like the reflection of a studio spotlight, but of a sunrise.

“You wish to live, don’t you? Get out of the way, if you want a chance. Let those who can, take over.
He
knows what to do. You don’t.
He
is able to create the means of human survival. You aren’t.”

“Don’t listen to her!”

It was so savage a cry of hatred that they drew away from Dr. Robert Stadler, as if he had given voice to the unconfessed within them. His face looked as they feared theirs would look in the privacy of darkness.

“Don’t listen to her!” he cried, his eyes avoiding hers, while hers paused on him for a brief, level glance that began as a shock of astonishment and ended as an obituary. “It’s your life or his!”

“Keep quiet, Professor,” said Mr. Thompson, brushing him off with the jerk of one hand. Mr. Thompson’s eyes were watching Dagny, as if some thought were struggling to take shape inside his skull.

“You know the truth, all of you,” she said, “and so do I, and so does every man who’s heard John Galt! What else are you waiting for? For proof? He’s given it to you. For facts? They’re all around you. How many corpses do you intend to pile up before you renounce it—your guns, your power, your controls and the whole of your miserable altruistic creed? Give it up, if you want to live. Give it up, if there’s anything left in your mind that’s still able to want human beings to remain alive on this earth!”

“But it’s treason!” cried Eugene Lawson. “She’s talking pure treason!”

“Now, now,” said Mr. Thompson. “You don’t have to go to extremes. ”

“Huh?” asked Tinky Holloway.

“But . . . but surely it’s outrageous?” asked Chick Morrison.

“You’re not agreeing with her, are you?” asked Wesley Mouch.

“Who’s said anything about agreeing?” said Mr. Thompson, his tone surprisingly placid. “Don’t be premature. Just don’t you be premature, any of you. There’s no harm in listening to any argument, is there?”

“That kind of argument?” asked Wesley Mouch, his finger stabbing again and again in Dagny’s direction.

“Any kind,” said Mr. Thompson placidly. “We musn’t be intolerant.”

“But it’s treason, ruin, disloyalty, selfishness and big-business propaganda!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mr. Thompson. “We’ve got to keep an open mind. We’ve got to give consideration to every one’s viewpoint. She might have something there.
He knows what to do.
We’ve got to be flexible.”

“Do you mean that you’re willing to quit?” gasped Mouch.

“Now don’t jump to conclusions,” snapped Mr. Thompson angrily. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s people who jump to conclusions. And another thing is ivory-tower intellectuals who stick to some pet theory and haven’t any sense of practical reality. At a time like this, we’ve got to be flexible above all.”

He saw a look of bewilderment on all the faces around him, on Dagny’s and on the others, though not for the same reasons. He smiled, rose to his feet and turned to Dagny.

“Thank you, Miss Taggart,” he said. “Thank you for speaking your mind. That’s what I want you to know—that you can trust me and speak to me with full frankness. We’re not your enemies, Miss Taggart. Don’t pay any attention to the boys—they’re upset, but they’ll come down to earth. We’re not your enemies, nor the country’s. Sure, we’ve made mistakes, we’re only human, but we’re trying to do our best for the people—that is, I mean, for everybody—in these difficult times. We can’t make snap judgments and reach momentous decisions on the spur of the moment, can we? We’ve got to consider it, and mull it over, and weigh it carefully. I just want you to remember that we’re not
anybody’s
enemies—you realize that, don’t you?”

“I’ve said everything I had to say,” she answered, turning away from him, with no clue to the meaning of his words and no strength to attempt to find it.

She turned to Eddie Willers, who had watched the men around them with a look of so great an indignation that he seemed paralyzed -as if his brain were crying, “It’s evil!” and could not move to any further thought. She jerked her head, indicating the door; he followed her obediently.

Dr. Robert Stadler waited until the door had closed after them, then whirled on Mr. Thompson. “You bloody fool! Do you know what you’re playing with? Don’t you understand that it’s life or death? That it’s you or him?”

The thin tremor that ran along Mr. Thompson’s lips was a smile of contempt. “It’s a funny way for a professor to behave. I didn’t think professors ever went to pieces.”

“Don’t you understand? Don’t you see that it’s one or the other?”

“And what is it that you want me to do?”

“You must kill him.”

It was the fact that Dr. Stadler had not cried it, but had said it in a flat, cold, suddenly and fully conscious voice, that brought a chill moment of silence as the whole room’s answer.

“You must find him,” said Dr. Stadler, his voice cracking and rising once more. “You must leave no stone unturned till you find him and destroy him! If he lives, he’ll destroy all of us! If he lives, we can.‘t!”

“How am I to find him?” asked Mr. Thompson, speaking slowly and carefully.

“I ... I can tell you. I can give you a lead. Watch that Taggart woman. Set your men to watch every move she makes. She’ll lead you to him, sooner or later.”

“How do you know that?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Isn’t it sheer chance that she hasn’t deserted you long ago? Don’t you have the wits to see that she’s one of
his
kind?” He did not state what kind.

“Yeah,” said Mr. Thompson thoughtfully, “yeah, that’s true.” He jerked his head up with a smile of satisfaction. “The professor’s got something there. Put a tail on Miss Taggart,” he ordered, snapping his fingers at Mouch. “Have her tailed day and night. We’ve got to find him.”

“Yes, sir,” said Mouch blankly.

“And when you find him,” Dr. Stadler asked tensely, “you’ll kill him?”

“Kill him, you damn fool? We
need
him!” cried Mr. Thompson.

Mouch waited, but no one ventured the question that was on everyone’s mind, so he made the effort to utter stiffly, “I don’t understand you, Mr. Thompson.”

“Oh, you theoretical intellectuals!” said Mr. Thompson with exasperation. “What are you all gaping at? It’s simple. Whoever he is, he’s a man of action. Besides, he’s got a pressure group: he’s cornered all the men of brains. He knows what to do. We’ll find him and he’ll tell us. He’ll tell us what to do. He’ll make things work. He’ll pull us out of the hole.”

“Us,
Mr. Thompson?”

“Sure. Never mind your theories. We’ll make a deal with him.”

.“With
him?”

“Sure. Oh, we’ll have to compromise, we’ll have to make a few concessions to big business, and the welfare boys won’t like it, but what the hell!—do you know any other way out?”

“But his ideas—”

“Who cares about ideas?”

“Mr. Thompson,” said Mouch, choking, “I ... I’m afraid he’s a man who’s not open to a deal.”

“There’s no such thing,” said Mr. Thompson.