Atlas Shrugged (56 page)

“All right, Hank,” she said, forcing her voice to sound calmly toneless.

“Will you?”

“When do you want to start?”

“Monday morning.”

“All right.”

She turned to step away. He seized her wrist, pulled her down, swung her body to lie stretched full-length on top of him, he held her still, uncomfortably, as she had fallen, his one hand in her hair, pressing her mouth to his, his other hand moving from the shoulder blades under her thin blouse to her waist, to her legs. She whispered, “And you say I don’t need you ... !”

She pulled herself away from him, and stood up, brushing her hair off her face. He lay still, looking up at her, his eyes narrowed, the bright flicker of some particular interest in his eyes, intent and faintly mocking. She glanced down: a strap of her slip had broken, the slip hung diagonally from her one shoulder to her side, and he was looking at her breast under the transparent film of the blouse. She raised her hand to adjust the strap. He slapped her hand down. She smiled, in understanding, in answering mockery. She walked slowly, deliberately across the room and leaned against a table, facing him, her hands holding the table’s edge, her shoulders thrown back. It was the contrast he liked—the severity of her clothes and the half-naked body, the railroad executive who was a woman he owned.

He sat up; he sat leaning comfortably across the couch, his legs crossed and stretched forward, his hands in his pockets, looking at her with the glance of a property appraisal.

“Did you say you wanted a transcontinental track of Rearden Metal, Mr. Vice-President?” he asked. “What if I don’t give it to you? I can choose my customers now and demand any price I please. If this were a year ago, I would have demanded that you sleep with me in exchange.”

“I wish you had.”

“Would you have done it?”

“Of course.”

“As a matter of business? As a sale?”

“If you were the buyer. You would have liked that, wouldn’t you?”

“Would you?”

“Yes ...” she whispered.

He approached her, he grasped her shoulders and pressed his mouth to her breast through the thin cloth.

Then, holding her, he looked at her silently for a long moment. “What did you do with that bracelet?” he asked.

They had never referred to it; she had to let a moment pass to regain the steadiness of her voice. “I have it,” she answered.

“I want you to wear it.”

“If anyone guesses, it will be worse for you than for me.”

“Wear it.”

She brought out the bracelet of Rearden Metal. She extended it to him without a word, looking straight at him, the green-blue chain glittering across her palm. Holding her glance, he clasped the bracelet on her wrist. In the moment when the clasp clicked shut under his fingers, she bent her head down to them and kissed his hand.

The earth went flowing under the hood of the car. Uncoiling from among the curves of Wisconsin’s hills, the highway was the only evidence of human labor, a precarious bridge stretched across a sea of brush, weeds and trees. The sea rolled softly, in sprays of yellow and orange, with a few red jets shooting up on the hillsides, with pools of remnant green in the hollows, under a pure blue sky. Among the colors of a picture post card, the car’s hood looked like the work of a jeweler, with the sun sparkling on its chromium steel, and its black enamel reflecting the sky.

Dagny leaned against the corner of the side window, her legs stretched forward; she liked the wide, comfortable space of the car’s seat and the warmth of the sun on her shoulders; she thought that the countryside was beautiful.

“What I’d like to see,” said Rearden, “is a billboard.”

She laughed: he had answered her silent thought. “Selling what and to whom? We haven’t seen a car or a house for an hour.”

“That’s what I don’t like about it.” He bent forward a little, his hands on the wheel; he was frowning. “Look at that road.”

The long strip of concrete was bleached to the powdery gray of bones left on a desert, as if sun and snows had eaten away the traces of tires, oil and carbon, the lustrous polish of motion. Green weeds rose from the angular cracks of the concrete. No one had used the road or repaired it for many years; but the cracks were few.

“It’s a good road,” said Rearden. “It was built to last. The man who built it must have had a good reason for expecting it to carry a heavy traffic in the years ahead.”

“Yes ...”

“I don’t like the looks of this.”

“I don’t either.” Then she smiled. “But think how often we’ve heard people complain that billboards ruin the appearance of the countryside. Well, there’s the unruined countryside for them to admire.” She added, “They’re the people I hate.”

She did not want to feel the uneasiness which she felt like a thin crack under her enjoyment of this day. She had felt that uneasiness at times, in the last three weeks, at the sight of the country streaming past the wedge of the car’s hood. She smiled: it was the hood that had been the immovable point in her field of vision, while the earth had gone by, it was the hood that had been the center, the focus, the security in a blurred, dissolving world ... the hood before her and Rearden’s hands on the wheel by her side ... she smiled, thinking that she was satisfied to let this be the shape of her world.

After the first week of their wandering, when they had driven at random, at the mercy of unknown crossroads, he had said to her one morning as they started out, “Dagny, does resting have to be purposeless?” She had laughed, answering, “No. What factory do you want to see?” He had smiled—at the guilt he did not have to assume, at the explanations he did not have to give—and he had answered, “It’s an abandoned ore mine around Saginaw Bay, that I’ve heard about. They say it’s exhausted.”

They had driven across Michigan to the ore mine. They had walked through the ledges of an empty pit, with the remnants of a crane like a skeleton bending above them against the sky, and someone’s rusted lunchbox clattering away from under their feet. She had felt a stab of uneasiness., sharper than sadness—but Rearden had said cheerfully, “Exhausted, hell! I’ll show them how many tons and dollars I can draw out of this place!” On their way back to the car, he had said, “If I could find the right man, I’d buy that mine for him tomorrow morning and set him up to work it.”

The next day, when they were driving west and south, toward the plains of Illinois, he had said suddenly, after a long silence, “No, I’ll have to wait till they junk the Bill. The man who could work that mine, wouldn’t need me to teach him. The man who’d need me, wouldn’t be worth a damn.”

They could speak of their work, as they always had, with full confidence in being understood. But they never spoke of each other. He acted as if their passionate intimacy were a nameless physical fact, not to be identified in the communication between two minds. Each night, it was as if she lay in the arms of a stranger who let her see every shudder of sensation that ran through his body, but would never permit her to know whether the shocks reached any answering tremor within him. She lay naked at his side, but on her wrist there was the bracelet of Rearden Metal.

She knew that he hated the ordeal of signing the “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” on the registers of squalid roadside hotels. There were evenings when she noticed the faint contraction of anger in the tightness of his mouth, as he signed the expected names of the expected fraud, anger at those who made fraud necessary. She noticed, indifferently, the air of knowing slyness in the manner of the hotel clerks, which seemed to suggest that guests and clerks alike were accomplices in a shameful guilt: the guilt of seeking pleasure. But she knew that it did not matter to him when they were alone, when he held her against him for a moment and she saw his eyes look alive and guiltless.

They drove through small towns, through obscure side roads, through the kind of places they had not seen for years. She felt uneasiness at the sight of the towns. Days passed before she realized what it was that she missed most: a glimpse of fresh paint. The houses stood like men in unpressed suits, who had lost the desire to stand straight: the cornices were like sagging shoulders, the crooked porch steps like torn hem lines, the broken windows like patches, mended with clapboard. The people in the streets stared at the new car, not as one stares at a rare sight, but as if the glittering black shape were an impossible vision from another world. There were few vehicles in the streets and too many of them were horse-drawn. She had forgotten the literal shape and usage of horsepower; she did not like to see its return.

She did not laugh, that day at the grade crossing, when Rearden chuckled, pointing, and she saw the train of a small local railroad come tottering from behind a hill, drawn by an ancient locomotive that coughed black smoke through a tall stack.

“Oh God, Hank, it’s not funny!”

“I know,” he said.

They were seventy miles and an hour away from it, when she said, “Hank, do you see the Taggart Comet being pulled across the continent by a coal-burner of that kind?”

“What’s the matter with you? Pull yourself together.”

“I’m sorry ... It’s just that I keep thinking it won’t be any use, all my new track and all your new furnaces, if we don’t find someone able to produce Diesel engines. If we don’t find him fast.”

“Ted Nielsen of Colorado is your man.”

“Yes, if he finds a way to open his new plant. He’s sunk more money than he should into the bonds of the John Galt Line.”

“That’s turned out to be a pretty profitable investment, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, but it’s held him up. Now he’s ready to go ahead, but he can’t find the tools. There are no machine tools to buy, not anywhere, not at any price. He’s getting nothing but promises and delays. He’s combing the country, looking for old junk to reclaim from closed factories. If he doesn’t start soon—”

“He will. Who’s going to stop him now?”

“Hank,” she said suddenly, “could we go to a place I’d like to see?”

“Sure. Anywhere. Which place?”

“It’s in Wisconsin. There used to be a great motor company there, in my father’s time. We had a branch line serving it, but we closed the line—about seven years ago—when they closed the factory. I think it’s one of those blighted areas now. Maybe there’s still some machinery left there that Ted Nielsen could use. It might have been overlooked—the place is forgotten and there’s no transportation to it at all.”

“I’ll find it. What was the name of the factory?”

“The Twentieth Century Motor Company.”

“Oh, of course! That was one of the best motor firms in my youth, perhaps the best. I seem to remember that there was something odd about the way it went out of business ... can’t recall what it was.”

It took them three days of inquiries, but they found the bleached, abandoned road—and now they were driving through the yellow leaves that glittered like a sea of gold coins, to the Twentieth Century Motor Company.

“Hank, what if anything happens to Ted Nielsen?” she asked suddenly, as they drove in silence.

“Why should anything happen to him?”

“I don’t know, but ... well, there was Dwight Sanders. He vanished. United Locomotives is done for now. And the other plants are in no condition to produce Diesels. I’ve stopped listening to promises. And ... and of what use is a railroad without motive power?”

“Of what use is anything, for that matter, without it?”

The leaves sparkled, swaying in the wind. They spread for miles, from grass to brush to trees, with the motion and all the colors of fire; they seemed to celebrate an accomplished purpose, burning in unchecked, untouched abundance.

Rearden smiled. “There’s something to be said for the wilderness. I’m beginning to like it. New country that nobody’s discovered.” She nodded gaily. “It’s good soil—look at the way things grow. I’d clear that brush and I’d build a—”

And then they stopped smiling. The corpse they saw in the weeds by the roadside was a rusty cylinder with bits of glass—the remnant of a gas-station pump.

It was the only thing left visible. The few charred posts, the slab of concrete and the sparkle of glass dust—which had been a gas station—were swallowed in the brush, not to be noticed except by a careful glance, not to be seen at all in another year.

They looked away. They drove on, not wanting to know what else lay hidden under the miles of weeds. They felt the same wonder like a weight in the silence between them: wonder as to how much the weeds had swallowed and how fast.

The road ended abruptly behind the turn of a hill. What remained was a few chunks of concrete sticking out of a long, pitted stretch of tar and mud. The concrete had been smashed by someone and carted away; even weeds could not grow in the strip of earth left behind. On the crest of a distant hill, a single telegraph pole stood slanted against the sky, like a cross over a vast grave.