Atlas Shrugged (33 page)

The rails rose through the rocks to the oil derricks and the oil derricks rose to the sky. Dagny stood on the bridge, looking up at the crest of the hill where the sun hit a spot of metal on the top of the highest rigging. It looked like a white torch lighted over the snow on the ridges of Wyatt Oil.

By spring, she thought, the track would meet the line growing toward it from Cheyenne. She let her eyes follow the green-blue rails that started from the derricks, came down, went across the bridge and past her. She turned her head to follow them through the miles of clear air, as they went on in great curves hung on the sides of the mountains, far to the end of the new track, where a locomotive crane, like an arm of naked bones and nerves, moved tensely against the sky.

A tractor went past her, loaded with green-blue bolts. The sound of drills came as a steady shudder from far below, where men swung on metal cables, cutting the straight stone drop of the canyon wall to reinforce the abutments of the bridge. Down the track, she could see men working, their arms stiff with the tension of their muscles as they gripped the handles of electric tie tampers.

“Muscles, Miss Taggart,” Ben Nealy, the contractor, had said to her, “muscles—that’s all it takes to build anything in the world.”

No contractor equal to McNamara seemed to exist anywhere. She had taken the best she could find. No engineer on the Taggart staff could be trusted to supervise the job; all of them were skeptical about the new metal. “Frankly, Miss Taggart,” her chief engineer had said, “since it is an experiment that nobody has ever attempted before, I do not think it’s fair that it should be my responsibility.” “It’s mine,” she had answered. He was a man in his forties, who still preserved the breezy manner of the college from which he had graduated. Once, Taggart Transcontinental had had a chief engineer, a silent, gray-haired, self-educated man, who could not be matched on any railroad. He had resigned, five years ago.

She glanced down over the bridge. She was standing on a slender beam of steel above a gorge that had cracked the mountains to a depth of fifteen hundred feet. Far at the bottom, she could distinguish the dim outlines of a dry river bed, of piled boulders, of trees contorted by centuries. She wondered whether boulders, tree trunks and muscles could ever bridge that canyon. She wondered why she found herself thinking suddenly that cave-dwellers had lived naked on the bottom of that canyon for ages.

She looked up at the Wyatt oil fields. The track broke into sidings among the wells. She saw the small disks of switches dotted against the snow. They were metal switches, of the kind that were scattered in thousands, unnoticed, throughout the country—but these were sparkling in the sun and the sparks were greenish-blue. What they meant to her was hour upon hour of speaking quietly, evenly, patiently, trying to hit the centerless target that was the person of Mr. Mowen, president of the Amalgamated Switch and Signal Company, Inc., of Connecticut. “But, Miss Taggart, my dear Miss Taggart! My company has served your company for generations, why, your grandfather was the first customer of my grandfather, so you cannot doubt our eagerness to do anything you ask, but—did you say switches made of Rearden Metal?”

“Yes.”

“But, Miss Taggart! Consider what it would mean, having to work with that metal. Do you know that the stuff won’t melt under less than four thousand degrees? ... Great? Well, maybe that’s great for motor manufacturers, but what I’m thinking of is that it means a new type of furnace, a new process entirely, men to be trained, schedules upset, work rules shot, everything balled up and then God only knows whether it will come out right or not! ... How do you know, Miss Taggart? How can you know, when it’s never been done before? ... Well, I can’t say that that metal is good and I can’t say that it isn’t. ... Well, no, I can’t tell whether it’s a product of genius, as you say, or just another fraud as a great many people are saying, Miss Taggart, a great many.... Well, no, I can’t say that it does matter one way or the other, because who am I to take a chance on a job of this kind?”

She had doubled the price of her order. Rearden had sent two metallurgists to train Mowen’s men, to teach, to show, to explain every step of the process, and had paid the salaries of Mowen’s men while they were being trained.

She looked at the spikes in the rail at her feet. They meant the night when she had heard that Summit Casting of Illinois, the only company willing to make spikes of Rearden Metal, had gone bankrupt, with half of her order undelivered. She had flown to Chicago, that night, she had got three lawyers, a judge and a state legislator out of bed, she had bribed two of them and threatened the others, she had obtained a paper that was an emergency permit of a legality no one would ever be able to untangle, she had had the padlocked doors of the Summit Casting plant unlocked and a random, half-dressed crew working at the smelters before the windows had turned gray with daylight. The crews had remained at work, under a Taggart engineer and a Rearden metallurgist. The rebuilding of the Rio Norte Line was not held up.

She listened to the sound of the drills. The work had been held up once, when the drilling for the bridge abutments was stopped. “I couldn’t help it, Miss Taggart,” Ben Nealy had said, offended. “You know how fast drill heads wear out. I had them on order, but Incorporated Tool ran into a little trouble, they couldn’t help it either, Associated Steel was delayed in delivering the steel to them, so there’s nothing we can do but wait. It’s no use getting upset, Miss Taggart. I’m doing my best.”

“I’ve hired you to do a job, not to do your best—whatever that is.”

“That’s a funny thing to say. That’s an unpopular attitude, Miss Taggart, mighty unpopular.”

“Forget Incorporated Tool. Forget the steel. Order the drill heads made of Rearden Metal.”

“Not me. I’ve had enough trouble with the damn stuff in that rail of yours. I’m not going to mess up my own equipment.”

“A drill head of Rearden Metal will outlast three of steel.”

“Maybe.”

“I said order them made.”

“Who’s going to pay for it?”

“I am.”

“Who’s going to find somebody to make them?”

She had telephoned Rearden. He had found an abandoned tool plant, long since out of business. Within an hour, he had purchased it from the relatives of its last owner. Within a day, the plant had been reopened. Within a week, drill heads of Rearden Metal had been delivered to the bridge in Colorado.

She looked at the bridge. It represented a problem badly solved, but she had had to accept it. The bridge, twelve hundred feet of steel across the black gap, was built in the days of Nat Taggart’s son. It was long past the stage of safety; it had been patched with stringers of steel, then of iron, then of wood; it was barely worth the patching. She had thought of a new bridge of Rearden Metal. She had asked her chief engineer to submit a design and an estimate of the cost. The design he had submitted was the scheme of a steel bridge badly scaled down to the greater strength of the new metal; the cost made the project impossible to consider.

“I beg your pardon, Miss Taggart,” he had said, offended. “I don’t know what you mean when you say that I haven’t made use of the metal. This design is an adaptation of the best bridges on record. What else did you expect?”

“A new method of construction.”

“What do you mean, a new method?”

“I mean that when men got structural steel, they did not use it to build steel copies of wooden bridges.” She had added wearily, “Get me an estimate on what we’ll need to make our old bridge last for another five years.”

“Yes, Miss Taggart,” he had said cheerfully. “If we reinforce it with steel—”

“We’ll reinforce it with Rearden Metal.”

“Yes, Miss Taggart,” he had said coldly.

She looked at the snow-covered mountains. Her job had seemed hard at times, in New York. She had stopped for blank moments in the middle of her office, paralyzed by despair at the rigidity of time which she could not stretch any further—on a day when urgent appointments had succeeded one another, when she had discussed worn Diesels, rotting freight cars, failing signal systems, falling revenues, while thinking of the latest emergency on the Rio Norte construction; when she had talked, with the vision of two streaks of green-blue metal cutting across her mind; when she had interrupted the discussions, realizing suddenly why a certain news item had disturbed her, and seized the telephone receiver to call long-distance, to call her contractor, to say, “Where do you get the food from, for your men? ... I thought so. Well, Barton and Jones of Denver went bankrupt yesterday. Better find another supplier at once, if you don’t want to have a famine on your hands.” She had been building the line from her desk in New York. It had seemed hard. But now she was looking at the track. It was growing. It would be done on time.

She heard sharp, hurried footsteps, and turned. A man was coming up the track. He was tall and young, his head of black hair was hatless in the cold wind, he wore a workman’s leather jacket, but he did not look like a workman, there was too imperious an assurance in the way he walked. She could not recognize the face until he came closer. It was Ellis Wyatt. She had not seen him since that one interview in her office.

He approached, stopped, looked at her and smiled.

“Hello, Dagny,” he said.

In a single shock of emotion, she knew everything the two words were intended to tell her. It was forgiveness, understanding, acknowledgment. It was a salute.

She laughed, like a child, in happiness that things should be as right as that.

“Hello,” she said, extending her hand.

His hand held hers an instant longer than a greeting required. It was their signature under a score settled and understood.

“Tell Nealy to put up new snow fences for a mile and a half on Granada Pass,” he said. “The old ones are rotted. They won’t stand through another storm. Send him a rotary plow. What he’s got is a piece of junk that wouldn’t sweep a back yard. The big snows are coming any day now.”

She considered him for a moment. “How often have you been doing this?” she asked.

“What?”

“Coming to watch the work.”

“Every now and then. When I have the time. Why?”

“Were you here the night when they had the rock slide?”

“Yes.”

“I was surprised how quickly and well they cleared the track, when I got the reports about it. It made me think that Nealy was a better man than I had thought.”

“He isn’t.”

“Was it you who organized the system of moving his day’s supplies down to the line?”

“Sure. His men used to spend half their time hunting for things. Tell him to watch his water tanks. They’ll freeze on him one of these nights. See if you can get him a new ditcher. I don’t like the looks of the one he’s got. Check on his wiring system.”

She looked at him for a moment. “Thanks, Ellis,” she said.

He smiled and walked on. She watched him as he walked across the bridge, as he started up the long rise toward his derricks.

“He thinks he owns the place, doesn’t he?”

She turned, startled. Ben Nealy had approached her; his thumb was pointing at Ellis Wyatt.

“What place?”

“The railroad, Miss Taggart. Your railroad. Or the whole world maybe. That’s what he thinks.”

Ben Nealy was a bulky man with a soft, sullen face. His eyes were stubborn and blank. In the bluish light of the snow, his skin had the tinge of butter.

“What does he keep hanging around here for?” he said. “As if nobody knew their business but him. The snooty show-off. Who does he think he is?”

“God damn you,” said Dagny evenly, not raising her voice.

Nealy could never know what had made her say it. But some part of him, in some way of his own, knew it: the shocking thing to her was that he was not shocked. He said nothing.

“Let’s go to your quarters,” she said wearily, pointing to an old railway coach on a spur in the distance. “Have somebody there to take notes.”

“Now about those crossties, Miss Taggart,” he said hastily as they started. “Mr. Coleman of your office okayed them. He didn’t say anything about too much bark. I don’t see why you think they‘re—”

“I said you’re going to replace them.”

When she came out of the coach, exhausted by two hours of effort to be patient, to instruct, to explain—she saw an automobile parked on the torn dirt road below, a black two-seater, sparkling and new. A new car was an astonishing sight anywhere; one did not see them often.

She glanced around and gasped at the sight of the tall figure standing at the foot of the bridge. It was Hank Rearden; she had not expected to find him in Colorado. He seemed absorbed in calculations, pencil and notebook in hand. His clothes attracted attention, like his car and for the same reason; he wore a simple trenchcoat and a hat with a slanting brim, but they were of such good quality, so flagrantly expensive that they appeared ostentatious among the seedy garments of the crowds everywhere, the more ostentatious because worn so naturally.

She noticed suddenly that she was running toward him; she had lost all trace of exhaustion. Then she remembered that she had not seen him since the party. She stopped.

He saw her, he waved to her in a gesture of pleased, astonished greeting, and he walked forward to meet her. He was smiling.

“Hello,” he said. “Your first trip to the job?”

“My fifth, in three months.”

“I didn’t know you were here. Nobody told me.”

“I thought you’d break down some day.”

“Break down?”

“Enough to come and see this. There’s your Metal. How do you like it?”

He glanced around. “If you ever decide to quit the railroad business, let me know.”

“You’d give me a job?”

“Any time.”

She looked at him for a moment. “You’re only half-kidding, Hank. I think you’d like it—having me ask you for a job. Having me for an employee instead of a customer. Giving me orders to obey.”