Atlas Shrugged (7 page)

“Oh sure,” she said. “I’ll send you a detailed report, which Eddie will prepare and which you won’t read. Eddie will help you put it through the works. I’m going to Philadelphia tonight to see Rearden. He and I have a lot of work to do.” She added, “It’s as simple as that, Jim.”

She had turned to go, when he spoke again—and what he said seemed bewilderingly irrelevant. “That’s all right for you, because you’re lucky. Others can’t do it.”

“Do what?”

“Other people are human. They’re sensitive. They can’t devote their whole life to metals and engines. You’re lucky—you’ve never had any feelings. You’ve never felt anything at all.”

As she looked at him, her dark gray eyes went slowly from astonishment to stillness, then to a strange expression that resembled a look of weariness, except that it seemed to reflect much more than the endurance of this one moment.

“No, Jim,” she said quietly, “I guess I’ve never felt anything at all.”

Eddie Willers followed her to her office. Whenever she returned, he felt as if the world became clear, simple, easy to face—and he forgot his moments of shapeless apprehension. He was the only person who found it completely natural that she should be the Operating Vice-President of a great railroad, even though she was a woman. She had told him, when he was ten years old, that she would run the railroad some day. It did not astonish him now, just as it had not astonished him that day in a clearing of the woods.

When they entered her office, when he saw her sit down at the desk and glance at the memos he had left for her—he felt as he did in his car when the motor caught on and the wheels could move forward.

He was about to leave her office, when he remembered a matter he had not reported. “Owen Kellogg of the Terminal Division has asked me for an appointment to see you,” he said.

She looked up, astonished. “That’s funny. I was going to send for him. Have him come up. I want to see him.... Eddie,” she added suddenly, “before I start, tell them to get me Ayers of the Ayers Music Publishing Company on the phone.”

“The Music Publishing Company?” he repeated incredulously.

“Yes. There’s something I want to ask him.”

When the voice of Mr, Ayers, courteously eager, inquired of what service he could be to her, she asked, “Can you tell me whether Richard Halley has written a new piano concerto, the Fifth?”

“A
fifth
concerto, Miss Taggart? Why, no, of course he hasn’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure, Miss Taggart. He has not written anything for eight years.”

“Is he still alive?”

“Why, yes—that is, I can’t say for certain, he has dropped out of public life entirely—but I’m sure we would have heard of it if he had died.”

“If he wrote anything, would you know about it?”

“Of course. We would be the first to know. We publish all of his work. But he has stopped writing.”

“I see. Thank you.”

When Owen Kellogg entered her office, she looked at him with satisfaction. She was glad to see that she had been right in her vague recollection of his appearance—his face had the same quality as that of the young brakeman on the train, the face of the kind of man with whom she could deal.

“Sit down, Mr. Kellogg,” she said, but he remained standing in front of her desk.

“You had asked me once to let you know if I ever decided to change my employment, Miss Taggart,” he said. “So I came to tell you that I am quitting.”

She had expected anything but that; it took her a moment before she asked quietly, “Why?”

“For a personal reason.”

“Were you dissatisfied here?”

“No.”

“Have you received a better offer?”

“No.”

“What railroad are you going to?”

“I’m not going to any railroad, Miss Taggart.”

“Then what job are you taking?”

“I have not decided that yet.”

She studied him, feeling slightly uneasy. There was no hostility in his face; he looked straight at her, he answered simply, directly; he spoke like one who has nothing to hide, or to show; the face was polite and empty.

“Then why should you wish to quit?”

“It’s a personal matter.”

“Are you ill? Is it a question of your health?”

“No.”

“Are you leaving the city?”

“No.”

“Have you inherited money that permits you to retire?”

“No.”

“Do you intend to continue working for a living?”

“Yes.”

“But you do not wish to work for Taggart Transcontinental?”

“No.”

“In that case, something must have happened here to cause your decision. What?”

“Nothing, Miss Taggart.”

“I wish you’d tell me. I have a reason for wanting to know.”

“Would you take my word for it, Miss Taggart?”

“Yes.”

“No person, matter or event connected with my job here had any bearing upon my decision.”

“You have no specific complaint against Taggart Transcontinental?”

“None.”

“Then I think you might reconsider when you hear what I have to offer you.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Taggart. I can’t.”

“May I tell you what I have in mind?”

“Yes, if you wish.”

“Would you take my word for it that I decided to offer you the post I’m going to offer, before you asked to see me? I want you to know that.”

“I will always take your word, Miss Taggart.”

“It’s the post of Superintendent of the Ohio Division. It’s yours, if you want it.”

His face showed no reaction, as if the words had no more significance for him than for a savage who had never heard of railroads.

“I don’t want it, Miss Taggart,” he answered.

After a moment, she said, her voice tight, “Write your own ticket, Kellogg. Name your price. I want you to stay. I can match anything any other railroad offers you.”

“I am not going to work for any other railroad.”

“I thought you loved your work.”

This was the first sign of emotion in him, just a slight widening of his eyes and an oddly quiet emphasis in his voice when he answered, “I do.”

“Then tell me what it is that I should say in order to hold you!”

It had been involuntary and so obviously frank that he looked at her as if it had reached him.

“Perhaps I am being unfair by coming here to tell you that I’m quitting, Miss Taggart. I know that you asked me to tell you because you wanted to have a chance to make me a counter-offer. So if I came, it looks as if I’m open to a deal. But I’m not. I came only because I . . . I wanted to keep my word to you.”

That one break in his voice was like a sudden flash that told her how much her interest and her request had meant to him; and that his decision had not been an easy one to make.

“Kellogg, is there nothing I can offer you?” she asked.

“Nothing, Miss Taggart. Nothing on earth.”

He turned to go. For the first time in her life, she felt helpless and beaten.

“Why?” she asked, not addressing him.

He stopped. He shrugged and smiled—he was alive for a moment and it was the strangest smile she had ever seen: it held secret amusement, and heartbreak, and an infinite bitterness. He answered:

“Who is John Galt?”

CHAPTER II

THE CHAIN

It began with a few lights. As a train of the Taggart line rolled toward Philadelphia, a few brilliant, scattered lights appeared in the darkness; they seemed purposeless in the empty plain, yet too powerful to have no purpose. The passengers watched them idly, without interest.

The black shape of a structure came next, barely visible against the sky, then a big building, close to the tracks; the building was dark, and the reflections of the train lights streaked across the solid glass of its walls.

An oncoming freight train hid the view, filling the windows with a rushing smear of noise. In a sudden break above the flat cars, the passengers saw distant structures under a faint, reddish glow in the sky; the glow moved in irregular spasms, as if the structures were breathing.

When the freight train vanished, they saw angular buildings wrapped in coils of steam. The rays of a few strong lights cut straight sheafs through the coils. The steam was red as the sky.

The thing that came next did not look like a building, but like a shell of checkered glass enclosing girders, cranes and trusses in a solid, blinding, orange spread of flame.

The passengers could not grasp the complexity of what seemed to be a city stretched for miles, active without sign of human presence. They saw towers that looked like contorted skyscrapers, bridges hanging in mid-air, and sudden wounds spurting fire from out of solid walls. They saw a line of glowing cylinders moving through the night; the cylinders were red-hot metal.

An office building appeared, close to the tracks. The big neon sign on its roof lighted the interiors of the coaches as they went by. It said: REARDEN STEEL.

A passenger, who was a professor of economics, remarked to his companion : “Of what importance is an individual in the titanic collective achievements of our industrial age?” Another, who was a journalist, made a note for future use in his column: “Hank Rearden is the kind of man who sticks his name on everything he touches. You may, from this, form your own opinion about the character of Hank Rearden.”

The train was speeding on into the darkness when a red gasp shot to the sky from behind a long structure. The passengers paid no attention; one more heat of steel being poured was not an event they had been taught to notice.

It was the first heat for the first order of Rearden Metal.

To the men at the tap-hole of the furnace inside the mills, the first break of the liquid metal into the open came as a shocking sensation of morning. The narrow streak pouring through space had the pure white color of sunlight. Black coils of steam were boiling upward, streaked with violent red. Fountains of sparks shot in beating spasms, as from broken arteries. The air seemed torn to rags, reflecting a raging flame that was not there, red blotches whirling and running through space, as if not to be contained within a man-made structure, as if about to consume the columns, the girders, the bridges of cranes overhead. But the liquid metal had no aspect of violence. It was a long white curve with the texture of satin and the friendly radiance of a smile. It flowed obediently through a spout of clay, with two brittle borders to restrain it, it fell through twenty feet of space, down into a ladle that held two hundred tons. A flow of stars hung above the stream, leaping out of its placid smoothness, looking delicate as lace and innocent as children’s sparklers. Only at a closer glance could one notice that the white satin was boiling. Splashes flew out at times and fell to the ground below: they were metal and, cooling while hitting the soil, they burst into flame.

Two hundred tons of a metal which was to be harder than steel, running liquid at a temperature of four thousand degrees, had the power to annihilate every wall of the structure and every one of the men who worked by the stream. But every inch of its course, every pound of its pressure and the content of every molecule within it, were controlled and made by a conscious intention that had worked upon it for ten years.

Swinging through the darkness of the shed, the red glare kept slashing the face of a man who stood in a distant corner; he stood leaning against a column, watching. The glare cut a moment’s wedge across his eyes, which had the color and quality of pale blue ice—then across the black web of the metal column and the ash-blond strands of his hair—then across the belt of his trenchcoat and the pockets where he held his hands. His body was tall and gaunt; he had always been too tall for those around him. His face was cut by prominent cheekbones and by a few sharp lines; they were not the lines of age, he had always had them: this had made him look old at twenty, and young now, at forty-five. Ever since he could remember, he had been told that his face was ugly, because it was unyielding, and cruel, because it was expressionless. It remained expressionless now, as he looked at the metal. He was Hank Rearden.

The metal came rising to the top of the ladle and went running over with arrogant prodigality. Then the blinding white trickles turned to glowing brown, and in one more instant they were black icicles of metal, starting to crumble off. The slag was crusting in thick, brown ridges that looked like the crust of the earth. As the crust grew thicker, a few craters broke open, with the white liquid still boiling within.

A man came riding through the air, in the cab of a crane overhead. He pulled a lever by the casual movement of one hand: steel hooks came down on a chain, seized the handles of the ladle, lifted it smoothly like a bucket of milk—and two hundred tons of metal went sailing through space toward a row of molds waiting to be filled.

Hank Rearden leaned back, closing his eyes. He felt the column trembling with the rumble of the crane. The job was done, he thought.

A worker saw him and grinned in understanding, like a fellow accomplice in a great celebration, who knew why that tall, blond figure had had to be present here tonight. Rearden smiled in answer: it was the only salute he had received. Then he started back for his office, once again a figure with an expressionless face.

It was late when Hank Rearden left his office that night to walk from his mills to his house. It was a walk of some miles through empty country, but he had felt like doing it, without conscious reason.

He walked, keeping one hand in his pocket, his fingers closed about a bracelet. It was made of Rearden Metal, in the shape of a chain. His fingers moved, feeling its texture once in a while. It had taken ten years to make that bracelet. Ten years, he thought, is a long time.

The road was dark, edged with trees. Looking up, he could see a few leaves against the stars; the leaves were twisted and dry, ready to fall. There were distant lights in the windows of houses scattered through the countryside; but the lights made the road seem lonelier.