Atlas Shrugged (209 page)

The explosions of oil refineries, the crashes of defective airplanes, the break-outs of blast furnaces, the wrecks of colliding trains, and the rumors of drunken orgies in the offices of newly created executives, made the members of the Board fear the kind of men who did apply for the positions of responsibility.

“Don’t despair! Don’t give up!” said official broadcasts on December 15, and on every day thereafter. “We will reach an agreement with John Galt. We will get him to lead us. He will solve all our problems. He will make things work. Don’t give up! We will get John Galt!”

Rewards and honors were offered to applicants for managerial jobs -then to foremen—then to skilled mechanics—then to any man who would make an effort to deserve a promotion in rank: wage raises, bonuses, tax exemptions and a medal devised by Wesley Mouch, to be known as “The Order of Public Benefactors.” It brought no results. Ragged people listened to the offers of material comforts and turned away with lethargic indifference, as if they had lost the concept of “Value.”
These,
thought the public-pulse-takers with terror, were men who did not care to live—or men who did not care to live on present terms.

“Don’t despair! Don’t give up! John Galt will solve our problems!” said the radio voices of official broadcasts, traveling through the silence of falling snow into the silence of unheated homes.

“Don’t tell them that we haven’t got him!” cried Mr. Thompson to his assistants. “But for God’s sake tell them to find him!” Squads of Chick Morrison’s boys were assigned to the task of manufacturing rumors: half of them went spreading the story that John Galt was in Washington and in conference with government omcials—while the other half went spreading the story that the government would give five hundred thousand dollars as reward for information that would help to find John Galt.

“No, not a clue,” said Wesley Mouch to Mr. Thompson, summing up the reports of the special agents who had been sent to check on every man by the name of John Galt throughout the country. “They’re a shabby lot. There’s a John Gait who’s a professor of ornithology, eighty years old -there’s a retired greengrocer with a wife and nine children—there’s an unskilled railroad laborer who’s held the same job for twelve years-and other such trash.”

“Don’t despair! We will get John Galt!” said official broadcasts in the daytime—but at night, every hour on the hour, by a secret, official order, an appeal was sent from short-wave transmitters into the empty reaches of space: “Calling John Galt! ... Calling John Galt! ... Are you listening, John Gait? ... We wish to negotiate. We wish to confer with you. Give us word on where you can be reached.... Do you hear us, John Galt?” There was no answer.

The wads of worthless paper money were growing heavier in the pockets of the nation, but there was less and less for that money to buy. In September, a bushel of wheat had cost eleven dollars; it had cost thirty dollars in November; it had cost one hundred in December; it was now approaching the price of two hundred—while the printing presses of the government treasury were running a race with starvation, and losing.

When the workers of a factory beat up their foreman and wrecked the machinery in a fit of despair—no action could be taken against them. Arrests were futile, the jails were full, the arresting officers winked at their prisoners and let them escape on their way to prison—men were going through the motions prescribed for the moment, with no thought of the moment to follow. No action could be taken when mobs of starving people attacked warehouses on the outskirts of cities. No action could be taken when punitive squadrons joined the people they had been sent to punish.

“Are you listening, John Galt? ... We wish to negotiate. We might meet your terms.... Are you listening?”

There were whispered rumors of covered wagons traveling by night through abandoned trails, and of secret settlements armed to resist the attacks of those whom they called the “Indians”—the attacks of any looting savages, be they homeless mobs or government agents. Lights were seen, once in a while, on the distant horizon of a prairie, in the hills, on the ledges of mountains, where no buildings had been known to exist. But no soldiers could be persuaded to investigate the sources of those lights.

On the doors of abandoned houses, on the gates of crumbling factories, on the walls of government buildings, there appeared, once in a while, traced in chalk, in paint, in blood, the curving mark which was the sign of the dollar.

“Can you hear us, John Galt? . . . Send us word. Name your terms. We will meet any terms you set. Can you hear us?”

There was no answer.

The shaft of red smoke that shot to the sky on the night of January 22 and stood abnormally still for a while, like a solemn memorial obelisk, then wavered and swept back and forth across the sky, like a searchlight sending some undecipherable message, then went out as abruptly as it had come, marked the end of Rearden Steel-but the inhabitants of the area did not know it. They learned it only on subsequent nights, when they—who had cursed the mills for the smoke, the fumes, the soot and the noise—looked out and, instead of the glow pulsating with life on their familiar horizon, they saw a black void.

The mills had been nationalized, as the property of a deserter. The first bearer of the title of “People’s Manager,” appointed to run the mills, had been a man of the Orren Boyle faction, a pudgy hanger-on of the metallurgical industry, who had wanted nothing but to follow his employees while going through the motions of leading. But at the end of a month, after too many clashes with the workers, too many occasions when his only answer had been that he couldn’t help it, too many undelivered orders, too many telephonic pressures from his buddies, he had begged to be transferred to some other position. The Orren Boyle faction had been falling apart, since Mr. Boyle had been confined to a rest home, where his doctor had forbidden him any contact with business and had put him to the job of weaving baskets, as a means of occupational therapy. The second “People’s Manager” sent to Rearden Steel had belonged to the faction of Cuffy Meigs. He had worn leather leggings and perfumed hair lotions, he had come to work with a gun on his hip, he had kept snapping that discipline was his primary goal and that by God he’d get it or else. The only discernible rule of the discipline had been his order forbidding all questions. After weeks of frantic activity on the part of insurance companies, of firemen, of ambulances and of first-aid units, attending to a series of inexplicable accidents—the “People’s Manager” had vanished one morning, having sold and shipped to sundry racketeers of Europe and Latin America most of the cranes, the automatic conveyors, the supplies of refractory brick, the emergency power generator, and the carpet from what had once been Rearden’s office.

No one had been able to untangle the issues in the violent chaos of the next few days—the issues had never been named, the sides had remained unacknowledged, but everyone had known that the bloody encounters between the older workers and the newer had not been driven to such ferocious intensity by the trivial causes that kept setting them off—neither guards nor policemen nor state troopers had been able to keep order for the length of a day—nor could any faction muster a candidate willing to accept the post of “People’s Manager.” On January 22, the operations of Rearden Steel had been ordered temporarily suspended.

The shaft of red smoke, that night, had been caused by a sixty-year-old worker, who had set fire to one of the structures and had been caught in the act, laughing dazedly and staring at the flames. “To avenge Hank Rearden!” he had cried defiantly, tears running down his furnace-tanned face.

Don’t let it hurt you like this—thought Dagny, slumped across her desk, over the page of the newspaper where a single brief paragraph announced the “temporary” end of Rearden Steel—don’t let it hurt you so much.... She kept seeing the face of Hank Rearden, as he had stood at the window of his office, watching a crane move against the sky with a load of green-blue rail.... Don’t let it hurt him like this -was the plea in her mind, addressed to no one—don’t let him hear of it, don’t let him know.... Then she saw another face, a face with unflinching green eyes, saying to her, in a voice made implacable by the quality of respect for facts: “You’ll have to hear about it. ... You’ll hear about every wreck. You’ll hear about every discontinued train.... Nobody stays in this valley by faking reality in any manner whatever....” Then she sat still, with no sight and no sound in her mind, with nothing but that enormous presence which was pain -until she heard the familiar cry that had become a drug killing all sensations except the capacity to act: “Miss Taggart, we don’t know what to do!”—and she shot to her feet to answer.

“The People’s State of Guatemala,” said the newspapers on January 26, “declines the request of the United States for the loan of a thousand tons of steel.”

On the night of February 3, a young pilot was flying his usual route, a weekly flight from Dallas to New York City. When he reached the empty darkness beyond Philadelphia—in the place where the flames of Rearden Steel had for years been his favorite landmark, his greeting in the loneliness of night, the beacon of a living earth—he saw a snow-covered spread, dead-white and phosphorescent in the starlight, a spread of peaks and craters that looked like the surface of the moon. He quit his job, next morning.

Through the frozen nights, over dying cities, knocking in vain at un-answering windows, beating on unechoing walls, rising above the roofs of lightless buildings and the skeletal girders of ruins, the plea went on crying through space, crying to the stationary motion of the stars, to the heatless fire of their twinkling: “Can you hear us, John Galt? Can you hear us?”

“Miss Taggart, we don’t know what to do,” said Mr. Thompson; he had summoned her to a personal conference on one of his scurrying trips to New York. “We’re ready to give in, to meet his terms, to let him take over—but where is he?”

“For the third time,” she said, her face and voice shut tight against any fissure of emotion, “I do not know where he is. What made you think I did?”

“Well, I didn’t know, I had to try ... I thought, just in case . . . I thought, maybe if you had a way to reach him—”

“I haven’t.”

“You see, we can’t announce, not even by short-wave radio, that we’re willing to surrender altogether. People might hear it. But if you had some way to reach him, to let him know that we’re ready to give in, to scrap our policies, to do anything he tells us to—”

“I said I haven’t.”

“If he’d only agree to a conference, just a conference, it wouldn’t commit him to anything, would it? We’re willing to turn the whole economy over to him—if he’d only tell us when, where, how. If he’d give us some word or sign . . . if he’d answer us . . . Why doesn’t he answer?”

“You’ve heard his speech.”

“But what are we to do? We can’t just quit and leave the country without any government at all. I shudder to think what would happen. With the kind of social elements now on the loose—why, Miss Taggart, it’s all I can do to keep them in line or we’d have plunder and bloody murder in broad daylight. I don’t know what’s got into people, but they just don’t seem to be civilized any more. We can’t quit at a time like this. We can neither quit nor run things any longer. What are we to do, Miss Taggart?”

“Start decontrolling.”

“Huh?”

“Start lifting taxes and removing controls.”

“Oh, no, no, no! That’s out of the question!”

“Out of whose question?”

“I mean, not at this time, Miss Taggart, not at this time. The country isn’t ready for it. Personally, I’d agree with you, I’m a freedom-loving man, Miss Taggart, I’m not after power—but this is an emergency. People aren’t ready for freedom. We’ve got to keep a strong hand. We can’t adopt an idealistic theory, which—”

“Then don’t ask me what to do,” she said, and rose to her feet.

“But, Miss Taggart—”

“I didn’t come here to argue.”

She was at the door when he sighed and said, “I hope he’s still alive.” She stopped. “I hope they haven’t done anything rash.”

A moment passed before she was able to ask, “Who?” and to make it a word, not a scream.

He shrugged, spreading his arms and letting them drop helplessly. “I can’t hold my own boys in line any longer. I can’t tell what they might attempt to do. There’s one clique—the Ferris-Lawson-Meigs faction—that’s been after me for over a year to adopt stronger measures. A tougher policy, they mean. Frankly, what they mean is: to resort to terror. Introduce the death penalty for civilian crimes, for critics, dissenters and the like. Their argument is that since people won’t co-operate, won’t act for the public interest voluntarily, we’ve got to force them to. Nothing will make our system work, they say, but terror. And they may be right, from the look of things nowadays. But Wesley won’t go for strong-arm methods; Wesley is a peaceful man, a liberal, and so am I. We’re trying to keep the Ferris boys in check, but . . . You see, they’re set against any surrender to John Galt. They don’t want us to deal with him. They don’t want us to find him. I wouldn’t put anything past them. If they found him first, they.‘d—there’s no telling what they might do.... That’s what worries me. Why doesn’t he answer? Why hasn’t he answered us at all? What if they’ve found him and killed him? I wouldn’t know.... So I hoped that perhaps you had some way . . . some means of knowing that he’s still alive . . .” His voice trailed off into a question mark.

The whole of her resistance against a rush of liquefying terror went into the effort to keep her voice as stiff as her knees, long enough to say, “I do not know,” and her knees stiff enough to carry her out of the room.