Atlas Shrugged (83 page)

“You
are
making the same mistake as that woman, Mr. Rearden, though in a nobler form.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean much more than just your judgment of me. That woman and all those like her keep evading the thoughts which they know to be good. You keep pushing out of your mind the thoughts which you believe to be evil. They do it, because they want to avoid effort. You do it, because you won’t permit yourself to consider anything that would spare you. They indulge their emotions at any cost. You sacrifice your emotions as the first cost of any problem. They are willing to bear nothing. You are willing to bear anything. They keep evading responsibility. You keep assuming it. But don’t you see that the essential error is the same? Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think. Don’t ignore your own desires, Mr. Rearden. Don’t sacrifice them. Examine their cause. There is a limit to how much you should have to bear.”

“How did you know this about me?”

“I made the same mistake, once. But not for long.”

“I wish—” Rearden began and stopped abruptly.

Francisco smiled. “Afraid to wish, Mr. Rearden?”

“I wish I could permit myself to like you as much as I do.”

“I’d give—” Francisco stopped; inexplicably, Rearden saw the look of an emotion which he could not define, yet felt certain to be pain; he saw Francisco’s first moment of hesitation. “Mr. Rearden, do you own any d.‘Anconia Copper stock?”

Rearden looked at him, bewildered. “No.”

“Some day, you’ll know what treason I’m committing right now, but . . . Don’t ever buy any d‘Anconia Copper stock. Don’t ever deal with d’.Anconia Copper in any way.”

“Why?”

“When you’ll learn the full reason, you’ll know whether there’s ever been anything—or anyone—that meant a damn to me, and . . . and how much he did mean.”

Rearden frowned: he had remembered something. “I wouldn’t deal with your company. Didn’t you call them the men of the double standard? Aren’t you one of the looters who is growing rich right now by means of directives?”

Inexplicably, the words did not hit Francisco as an insult, but cleared his face back into his look of assurance. “Did you think that it was I who wheedled those directives out of the robber-planners?”

“If not, then who did it?”

“My hitchhikers.”

“Without your consent?”

“Without my knowledge.”

“I’d hate to admit how much I want to believe you—but there’s no way for you to prove it now.”

“No? I’ll prove it to you within the next fifteen minutes.”

“How? The fact remains that you’ve profited the most from those directives.”

“That’s true. I’ve profited more than Mr. Mouch and his gang could ever imagine. After my years of work, they gave me just the chance I needed.”

“Are you boasting?”

“You bet I am!” Rearden saw incredulously that Francisco’s eyes had a hard, bright look, the look, not of a party hound, but of a man of action. “Mr. Rearden, do you know where most of those new aristocrats keep their hidden money? Do you know where most of the fair-share vultures have invested their profits from Rearden Metal?”

“No, but—”

“In d‘Anconia Copper stock. Safely out of the way and out of the country. D’.Anconia Copper—an old, invulnerable company, so rich that it would last for three more generations of looting. A company managed by a decadent playboy who doesn’t give a damn, who’ll let them use his property in any way they please and just continue to make money for them—automatically, as did his ancestors. Wasn’t that a perfect setup for the looters, Mr. Rearden? Only—what one single point did they miss?”

Rearden was staring at him. “What are you driving at?”

Francisco laughed suddenly. “It’s too bad about those profiteers on Rearden Metal. You wouldn’t want them to lose the money you made for them, would you, Mr. Rearden? But accidents do happen in the world—you know what they say, man is only a helpless plaything at the .mercy of nature’s disasters. For instance, there was a fire at the d‘An conia ore docks in Valparaiso tomorrow morning, a fire that razed them to the ground along with half of the port structures. What time is it, Mr. Rearden? Oh, did I mix my tenses? Tomorrow afternoon, there will be a rock slide in the d’.Anconia mines at Oráno—no lives lost, no casualties, except the mines themselves. It will be found that the mines are done for, because they had been worked in the wrong places for months—what can you expect from a playboy’s management? The great deposits of copper will be buried under tons of mountain where a Sebastián d‘Anconia would not be able to reclaim them in less than three years, and a People’s State will never reclaim them at all. When the stockholders begin to look into things, they will find that the mines at Campos, at San Félix, at Las Heras have been worked in exactly the same manner and have been running at a loss for over a year, only the playboy juggled the books and kept it out of the newspapers. Shall I tell you what they will discover about the management of the d’.Anconia foundries? Or of the d‘Anconia ore fleet? But all these discoveries won’t do the stockholders any good anyway, because the stock of d’.Anconia Copper will have crashed tomorrow morning, crashed like an electric bulb against concrete, crashed like an express elevator, spattering pieces of hitchhikers all over the gutters!”

The triumphant rise of Francisco’s voice merged with a matching sound: Rearden burst out laughing.

Rearden did not know how long that moment lasted or what he had felt, it had been like a blow hurling him into another kind of consciousness, then a second blow returning him to his own—all that was left, as at the awakening from a narcotic, was the feeling that he had known some immense kind of freedom, never to be matched in reality. This was like the Wyatt fire again, he thought, this was his secret danger.

He found himself backing away from Francisco d.‘Anconia. Francisco stood watching him intently, and looked as if he had been watching him all through that unknown length of time.

“There are no evil thoughts, Mr. Rearden,” Francisco said softly, “except one: the refusal to think.”

“No,” said Rearden; it was almost a whisper, he had to keep his voice down, he was afraid that he would hear himself scream it, “no ... if this is the key to you, no, don’t expect me to cheer you . . . you didn’t have the strength to fight them . . . you chose the easiest, most vicious way . . . deliberate destruction ... the destruction of an achievement you hadn’t produced and couldn’t match....”

“That’s not what you’ll read in the newspapers tomorrow. There won’t be any evidence of deliberate destruction. Everything happened .in the normal, explicable, justifiable course of plain incompetence. In competence isn’t supposed to be punished nowadays, is it? The boys in Buenos Aires and the boys in Santiago will probably want to hand me a subsidy, by way of consolation and reward. There’s still a great part of the d.‘Anconia Copper Company left, though a great part of it is gone for good. Nobody will say that I’ve done it intentionally. You may think what you wish.”

“I think you’re the guiltiest man in this room,” said Rearden quietly, wearily; even the fire of his anger was gone; he felt nothing but the emptiness left by the death of a great hope. “I think you’re worse than anything I had supposed....”

Francisco looked at him with a strange half-smile of serenity, the serenity of a victory over pain, and did not answer.

It was their silence that let them hear the voices of the two men who stood a few steps away, and they turned to look at the speakers.

The stocky, elderly man was obviously a businessman of the conscientious, unspectacular kind. His formal dress suit was of good quality, but of a cut fashionable twenty years before, with the faintest tinge of green at the seams; he had had few occasions to wear it. His shirt studs were ostentatiously too large, but it was the pathetic ostentation of an heirloom, intricate pieces of old-fashioned workmanship, that had probably come to him through four generations, like his business. His face had the expression which, these days, was the mark of an honest man: an expression of bewilderment. He was looking at his companion, trying hard—conscientiously, helplessly, hopelessly—to understand.

His companion was younger and shorter, a small man with lumpy flesh, with a chest thrust forward and the thin points of a mustache thrust up. He was saying, in a tone of patronizing boredom, “Well, I don’t know. All of you are crying about rising costs, it seems to be the stock complaint nowadays, it’s the usual whine of people whose profits are squeezed a little. I don’t know, we’ll have to see, we’ll have to decide whether we’ll permit you to make any profits or not.”

Rearden glanced at Francisco—and saw a face that went beyond his conception of what the purity of a single purpose could do to a human countenance: it was the most merciless face one could ever be permitted to see. He had thought of himself as ruthless, but he knew that he could not match this level, naked, implacable look, dead to all feeling but justice. Whatever the rest of him—thought Rearden—the man who could experience this was a giant.

It was only a moment. Francisco turned to him, his face normal, and said very quietly, “I’ve changed my mind, Mr. Rearden. I’m glad that you came to this party. I want you to see this.”

Then, raising his voice, Francisco said suddenly, in the gay, loose, piercing tone of a man of complete irresponsibility, “You won’t grant me that loan, Mr. Rearden? It puts me on a terrible spot. I must get the money—I must raise it tonight—I must raise it before the Stock Exchange opens in the morning, because otherwise—”

He did not have to continue, because the little man with the mustache was clutching at his arm.

Rearden had never believed that a human body could change dimensions within one’s sight, but he saw the man shrinking in weight, in posture, in form, as if the air were let out of his lumps, and what had been an arrogant ruler was suddenly a piece of scrap that could not be a threat to anyone.

“Is . . . is there something wrong, Señor d.‘Anconia? I mean, on . . . on the Stock Exchange?”

Francisco jerked his finger to his lips, with a frightened glance. “Keep quiet,” he whispered. “For God’s sake, keep quiet!”

The man was shaking. “Something’s ... wrong?”

“You don’t happen to own any d.‘Anconia Copper stock, do you?” The man nodded, unable to speak. “Oh my, that’s too bad! Well, listen, I’ll tell you, if you give me your word of honor that you won’t repeat it to anyone. You don’t want to start a panic.”

“Word of honor . . .” gasped the man.

“What you’d better do is run to your stockbroker and sell as fast as you can—because things haven’t been going too well for d.‘Anconia Copper, I’m trying to raise some money, but if I don’t succeed, you’ll be lucky if you’ll have ten cents on your dollar tomorrow morning—oh my! I forgot that you can’t reach your stockbroker before tomorrow morning—well, it’s too bad, but—”

The man was running across the room, pushing people out of his way, like a torpedo shot into the crowd.

“Watch,” said Francisco austerely, turning to Rearden.

The man was lost in the crowd, they could not see him, they could not tell to whom he was selling his secret or whether he had enough of his cunning left to make it a trade with those who held favors—but they saw the wake of his passage spreading through the room, the sudden cuts splitting the crowd, like the first few cracks, then like the accelerating branching that runs through a wall about to crumble, the streaks of emptiness slashed, not by a human touch, but by the impersonal breath of terror.

There were the voices abruptly choked off, the pools of silence, then sounds of a different nature: the rising, hysterical inflections of uselessly repeated questions, the unnatural whispers, a woman’s scream, the few spaced, forced giggles of those still trying to pretend that nothing was happening.

There were spots of immobility in the motion of the crowd, like spreading blotches of paralysis; there was a sudden stillness, as if a motor had been cut off; then came the frantic, jerking, purposeless, rudderless movement of objects bumping down a hill by the blind mercy of gravitation and of every rock they hit on the way. People were running out, running to telephones, running to one another, clutching or pushing the bodies around them at random. These men, the most powerful men in the country, those who held, unanswerable to any power, the power over every man’s food and every man’s enjoyment of his span of years on earth—these men had become a pile of rubble, clattering in the wind of panic, the rubble left of a structure when its key pillar has been cut.

James Taggart, his face indecent in its exposure of emotions which centuries had taught men to keep hidden, rushed up to Francisco and screamed, “Is it true?”

“Why, James,” said Francisco, smiling, “what’s the matter? Why do you seem to be upset? Money is the root of all evil—so I just got tired of being evil.”

Taggart ran toward the main exit, yelling something to Orren Boyle on the way. Boyle nodded and kept on nodding, with the eagerness and humility of an inefficient servant, then darted off in another direction. Cherryl, her wedding veil coiling like a crystal cloud upon the air, as she ran after him, caught Taggart at the door. “Jim, what’s the matter?” He pushed her aside and she fell against the stomach of Paul Larkin, as Taggart rushed out.

Three persons stood immovably still, like three pillars spaced through the room, the lines of their sight cutting across the spread of the wreckage: Dagny, looking at Francisco—Francisco and Rearden, looking at each other.

CHAPTER III

WHITE BLACKMAIL

“What time is it?”

It’s running out, thought Rearden—but he answered, “I don’t know. Not yet midnight,” and remembering his wrist watch, added, “Twenty of.”

“I’m going to take a train home,” said Lillian.