Atlas Shrugged (41 page)

He added, in explanation, “He wasn’t prepared to proceed at once, either. It’s eight thousand tons of Rearden Metal. Structural metal. For coal mines.”

They glanced at each other and smiled. They needed no further comment.

He glanced down, as she handed the telegrams back to him. The skin of her hand looked transparent in the light, on the edge of his desk, a young girl’s hand with long, thin fingers, relaxed for a moment, defenseless.

“The Stockton Foundry in Colorado,” she said, “is going to finish that order for me—the one that the Amalgamated Switch and Signal Company ran out on. They’re going to get in touch with you about the Metal.”

“They have already. What have you done about the construction crews?”

“Nealy’s engineers are staying on, the best ones, those I need. And most of the foremen, too. It won’t be too hard to keep them going. Nealy wasn’t of much use, anyway.”

“What about labor?”

“More applicants than I can hire. I don’t think the union is going to interfere. Most of the applicants are giving phony names. They’re union members. They need the work desperately. I’ll have a few guards on the Line, but I don’t expect any trouble.”

“What about your brother Jim’s Board of Directors?”

“They’re all scrambling to get statements into the newspapers to the effect that they have no connection whatever with the John Galt Line and how reprehensible an undertaking they think it is. They agreed to everything I asked.”

The line of her shoulders looked taut, yet thrown back easily, as if poised for flight. Tension seemed natural to her, not a sign of anxiety, but a sign of enjoyment; the tension of her whole body, under the gray suit, half-visible in the darkness.

“Eddie Willers has taken over the office of Operating Vice-President,” she said. “If you need anything, get in touch with him. I’m leaving for Colorado tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes. We have to make up time. We’ve lost a week.”

“Flying your own plane?”

“Yes. I’ll be back in about ten days. I intend to be in New York once or twice a month.”

“Where will you live out there?”

“On the site. In my own railway car—that is, Eddie’s car, which I’m borrowing.”

“Will you be safe?”

“Safe from what?” Then she laughed, startled. “Why, Hank, it’s the first time you’ve ever thought that I wasn’t a man. Of course I’ll be safe.”

He was not looking at her; he was looking at a sheet of figures on his desk. “I’ve had my engineers prepare a breakdown of the cost of the bridge,” he said, “and an approximate schedule of the construction time required. That is what I wanted to discuss with you.” He extended the papers. She settled back to read them.

A wedge of light fell across her face. He saw the firm, sensual mouth in sharp outline. Then she leaned back a little, and he saw only a suggestion of its shape and the dark lines of her lowered lashes.

Haven’t I?—he thought. Haven’t I thought of it since the first time I saw you? Haven’t I thought of nothing else for two years? ... He sat motionless, looking at her. He heard the words he had never allowed himself to form, the words he had felt, known, yet had not faced, had hoped to destroy by never letting them be said within his own mind. Now it was as sudden and shocking as if he were saying it to her.... Since the first time I saw you . . . Nothing but your body, that mouth of yours, and the way your eyes would look at me, if ... Through every sentence I ever said to you, through every conference you thought so safe, through the importance of all the issues we discussed . . . You trusted me, didn’t you? To recognize your greatness? To think of you as you deserved—as if you were a man? ... Don’t you suppose I know how much I’ve betrayed? The only bright encounter of my life—the only person I respected—the best businessman I know—my ally—my partner in a desperate battle . . . The lowest of all desires—as my answer to the highest I’ve met . . . Do you know what I am? I thought of it, because it should have been unthinkable. For that degrading need, which should never touch you, I have never wanted anyone but you . . . I hadn’t known what it was like, to want it, until I saw you for the first time. I had thought: Not I, I couldn’t be broken by it ... Since then . . . for two years ... with not a moment’s respite . . . Do you know what it’s like, to want it? Would you wish to hear what I thought when I looked at you ... when I lay awake at night . . . when I heard your voice over a telephone wire . . . when I worked, but could not drive it away? ... To bring you down to things you can’t conceive—and to know that it’s I who have done it. To reduce you to a body, to teach you an animal’s pleasure, to see you need it, to see you asking me for it, to see your wonderful spirit dependent upon the obscenity of your need. To watch you as you are, as you face the world with your clean, proud strength—then to see you, in my bed, submitting to any infamous whim I may devise, to any act which I’ll perform for the sole purpose of watching your dishonor and to which you’ll submit for the sake of an unspeakable sensation . . . I want you—and may I be damned for it! . . .

She was reading the papers, leaning back in the darkness—he saw the reflection of the fire touching her hair, moving to her shoulder, down her arm, to the naked skin of her wrist.

... Do you know what I’m thinking now, in this moment? ... Your gray suit and your open collar . . . you look so young, so austere, so sure of yourself . . . What would you be like if I knocked your head back, if I threw you down in that formal suit of yours, if I raised your skirt—

She glanced up at him. He looked down at the papers on his desk. In a moment, he said, “The actual cost of the bridge is less than our original estimate. You will note that the strength of the bridge allows for the eventual addition of a second track, which, I think, that section of the country will justify in a very few years. If you spread the cost over a period of—”

He spoke, and she looked at his face in the lamplight, against the black emptiness of the office. The lamp was outside her field of vision, and she felt as if it were his face that illuminated the papers on the desk. His face, she thought, and the cold, radiant clarity of his voice, of his mind, of his drive to a single purpose. The face was like his words—as if the line of a single theme ran from the steady glance of the eyes, through the gaunt muscles of the cheeks, to the faintly scornful, downward curve of the mouth—the line of a ruthless asceticism.

The day began with the news of a disaster: a freight train of the Atlantic Southern had crashed head-on into a passenger train, in New Mexico, on a sharp curve in the mountains, scattering freight cars all over the slopes. The cars carried five thousand tons of copper, bound from a mine in Arizona to the Rearden mills.

Rearden telephoned the general manager of the Atlantic Southern, but the answer he received was: “Oh God, Mr. Rearden, how can we tell? How can anybody tell how long it will take to clear that wreck? One of the worst we’ve ever had . . . I don’t know, Mr. Rearden. There are no other lines anywhere in that section. The track is torn for twelve hundred feet. There’s been a rockslide. Our wrecking train can’t get through. I don’t know how we’ll ever get those freight cars back on rails, or when. Can’t expect it sooner than two weeks . . .
Three days?
Impossible, Mr. Rearden! ... But we can’t help it! ... But surely you can tell your customers that it’s an act of God! What if you do hold them up? Nobody can blame you in a case of this kind!”

In the next two hours, with the assistance of his secretary, two young engineers from his shipping department, a road map, and the long-distance telephone, Rearden arranged for a fleet of trucks to proceed to the scene of the wreck, and for a chain of hopper cars to meet them at the nearest station of the Atlantic Southern. The hopper cars had been borrowed from Taggart Transcontinental. The trucks had been recruited from all over New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado. Rearden’s engineers had hunted by telephone for private truck owners and had offered payments that cut all arguments short.

It was the third of three shipments of copper that Rearden had expected ; two orders had not been delivered: one company had gone out of business, the other was still pleading delays that it could not help.

He had attended to the matter without breaking his chain of appointments, without raising his voice, without sign of strain, uncertainty or apprehension; he had acted with the swift precision of a military commander under sudden fire—and Gwen Ives, his secretary, had acted as his calmest lieutenant. She was a girl in her late twenties, whose quietly harmonious, impenetrable face had a quality matching the best-designed office equipment; she was one of his most ruthlessly competent employees; her manner of performing her duties suggested the kind of rational cleanliness that would consider any element of emotion, while at work, as an unpardonable immorality.

When the emergency was over, her sole comment was, “Mr. Rearden, I think we should ask all our suppliers to ship via Taggart Transcontinental.” “I’m thinking that, too,” he answered; then added, “Wire Fleming in Colorado. Tell him I’m taking an option on that copper mine property.”

He was back at his desk, speaking to his superintendent on one phone and to his purchasing manager on another, checking every date and ton of ore on hand—he could not leave to chance or to another person the possibility of a single hour’s delay in the flow of a furnace: it was the last of the rail for the John Gait Line that was being poured—when the buzzer rang and Miss Ives’ voice announced that his mother was outside, demanding to see him.

He had asked his family never to come to the mills without appointment. He had been glad that they hated the place and seldom appeared in his office. What he now felt was a violent impulse to order his mother off the premises. Instead, with a greater effort than the problem of the train wreck had required of him, he said quietly, “All right. Ask her to come in.”

His mother came in with an air of belligerent defensiveness. She looked at his office as if she knew what it meant to him and as if she were declaring her resentment against anything being of greater importance to him than her own person. She took a long time settling down in an armchair, arranging and rearranging her bag, her gloves, the folds of her dress, while droning, “It’s a fine thing when a mother has to wait in an anteroom and ask permission of a stenographer before she’s allowed to see her own son who—”

“Mother, is it anything important? I am very rushed today.”

“You’re not the only one who’s got problems. Of course, it’s important. Do you think I’d go to the trouble of driving way out here, if it wasn’t important?”

“What is it?”

“It’s about Philip.”

“Yes?”

“Philip is unhappy.”

“Well?”

“He feels it’s not right that he should have to depend on your charity and live on handouts and never be able to count on a single dollar of his own.”

“Well!” he said with a startled smile. “I’ve been waiting for him to realize that.”

“It isn’t right for a sensitive man to be in such a position.”

“It certainly isn’t.”

“I’m glad you agree with me. So what you have to do is give him a job.”

“A ... what?”

“You must give him a job, here, at the mills—but a nice, clean job, of course, with a desk and an office and a decent salary, where he wouldn’t have to be among your day laborers and your smelly furnaces.”

He knew that he was hearing it; he could not make himself believe it. “Mother, you’re not serious.”

“I certainly am. I happen to know that that’s what he wants, only he’s too proud to ask you for it. But if you offer it to him and make it look like it’s you who’re asking him a favor—why, I know he’d be happy to take it. That’s why I had to come here to talk to you—so he wouldn’t guess that I put you up to it.”

It was not in the nature of his consciousness to understand the nature of the things he was hearing. A single thought cut through his mind like a spotlight, making him unable to conceive how any eyes could miss it. The thought broke out of him as a cry of bewilderment: “But he knows nothing about the steel business!”

“What has that got to do with it? He needs a job.”

“But he couldn’t do the work.”

“He needs to gain self-confidence and to feel important.”

“But he wouldn’t be any good whatever.”

“He needs to feel that he’s wanted.”

“Here? What could I want him for?”

“You hire plenty of strangers.”

“I hire men who produce. What has he got to offer?”

“He’s your brother, isn’t he?”

“What has that got to do with it?”

She stared incredulously, in turn, silenced by shock. For a moment, they sat looking at each other, as if across an interplanetary distance.

“He’s your brother,” she said, her voice like a phonograph record repeating a magic formula she could not permit herself to doubt. “He needs a position in the world. He needs a salary, so that he’d feel that he’s got money coming to him as his due, not as alms.”