THE EXPLOITERS AND THE EXPLOITED 3 page

"What did they say?"

"Dagny, they didn't say it! . . . They haven't really said it, yet it's there—and it isn't. That's what's monstrous about it."

His effort was focused on keeping his voice quiet; he could not control his words. The words were forced out of him by the unbelieving. bewildered indignation of a child screaming in denial at his first encounter with evil.

"What did they say, Eddie?"

"They . . . You'd have to read it." He pointed to the newspaper he had left on her desk. "They haven't said that Rearden Metal is bad.

They haven't said that it's unsafe. What they've done is . . ." His hands spread and dropped in a gesture of futility.

She saw at a glance what they had done. She saw the sentences: "It may be possible that after a period of heavy usage, a sudden fissure may appear, though the length of this period cannot be predicted. . . . The possibility of a molecular reaction, at present unknown, cannot be entirely discounted. . . . Although the tensile strength of the metal is obviously demonstrable, certain questions in regard to its behavior under unusual stress are not to be ruled out.

. . . Although there is no evidence to support the contention that the use of the metal should be prohibited, a further study of its properties would be of value."

"We can't fight it. It can't be answered," Eddie was saying slowly.

"We can't demand a retraction. We can't show them our tests or prove anything. They've said nothing. They haven't said a thing that could be refuted and embarrass them professionally. It's the job of a coward.

You'd expect it from some con-man or blackmailer. But, Dagny! It's the State Science Institute!"

She nodded silently. She stood, her eyes fixed on some point beyond the window. At the end of a dark street, the bulbs of an electric sign kept going on and off, as if winking at her maliciously.

Eddie gathered his strength and said in the tone of a military report, "Taggart stock has crashed. Ben Nealy quit. The National Brotherhood of Road and Track Workers has forbidden its members to work on the Rio Norte Line. Jim has left town."

She took her hat and coat off, walked across the room and slowly, very deliberately sat down at her desk.

She noticed a large brown envelope lying before her; it bore the letterhead of Rearden Steel.

"That came by special messenger, right after you left," said Eddie.

She put her hand on the envelope, but did not open it. She knew what it was: the drawings of the bridge.

After a while, she asked, "Who issued that statement?"

Eddie glanced at her and smiled briefly, bitterly, shaking his head.

"No," he said. "I thought of that, too. I called the Institute long distance and asked them. No, it was issued by the office of Dr. Floyd Ferris, their co-ordinator."

She said nothing.

"But still! Dr. Stadler is the head of that Institute. He is the Institute. He must have known about it. He permitted it. If it's done, it's done in his name . . . Dr. Robert Stadler . . . Do you remember . . . when we were in college . . . how we used to talk about the great names in the world . . . the men of pure intellect . . . and we always chose his name as one of them, and—" He stopped. "I'm sorry, Dagny. I know it's no use saying anything. Only—"

She sat, her hand pressed to the brown envelope.

"Dagny," he asked, his voice low, "what is happening to people?

Why did that statement succeed? It's such an obvious smear-job, so obvious and so rotten. You'd think a decent person would throw it in the gutter. How could"—his voice was breaking in gentle, desperate, rebellious anger—"how could they accept it? Didn't they read it?

Didn't they see? Don't they think? Dagny! What is it in people that lets them do this—and how can we live with it?"

"Quiet, Eddie," she said, "quiet. Don't be afraid."

The building of the State Science Institute stood over a river of New Hampshire, on a lonely hillside, halfway between the river and the sky. From a distance, it looked like a solitary monument in a virgin forest. The trees were carefully planted, the roads were laid out as a park, the roof tops of a small town could be seen in a valley some miles away. But nothing had been allowed to come too close and detract from the building's austerity.

The white marble of the walls gave it a classical grandeur; the composition of its rectangular masses gave it the cleanliness and beauty of a modern plant. It was an inspired structure. From across the river, people looked at it with reverence and thought of it as a monument to a living man whose character had the nobility of the building's lines.

Over the entrance, a dedication was cut into the marble: "To the fearless mind. To the inviolate truth." In a quiet aisle, in a bare corridor, a small brass plate, such as dozens of other name plates on other doors, said: Dr. Robert Stadler.

At the age of twenty-seven, Dr. Robert Stadler had written a treatise on cosmic rays, which demolished most of the theories held by the scientists who preceded him. Those who followed, found his achievement somewhere at the base of any line of inquiry they undertook.

At the age of thirty, he was recognized as the greatest physicist of his time. At thirty-two, he became head of the Department of Physics of the Patrick Henry University, in the days when the great University still deserved its glory. It was of Dr. Robert Stadler that a writer had said: "Perhaps, among the phenomena of the universe which he is studying, none is so miraculous as the brain of Dr. Robert Stadler himself." It was Dr. Robert Stadler who had once corrected a student: "Free scientific inquiry? The first adjective is redundant."

At the age of forty, Dr. Robert Stadler addressed the nation, endorsing the establishment of a State Science Institute. "Set science free of the rule of the dollar," he pleaded. The issue had hung in the balance; an obscure group of scientists had quietly forced a bill through its long way to the floor of the Legislature; there had been some public hesitation about the bill, some doubt, an uneasiness no one could define. The name of Dr. Robert Stadler acted upon the country like the cosmic rays he studied: it pierced any barrier. The nation built the white marble edifice as a personal present to one of its greatest men.

Dr. Stadler's office at the Institute was a small room that looked like the office of the bookkeeper of an unsuccessful firm. There was n cheap desk of ugly yellow oak, a filing cabinet, two chairs, and a blackboard chalked with mathematical formulas. Sitting on one of the chairs against a blank wall, Dagny thought that the office had an air of ostentation and elegance, together: ostentation, because it seemed intended to suggest that the owner was great enough to permit himself such a setting; elegance, because he truly needed nothing else.

She had met Dr. Stadler on a few occasions, at banquets given by leading businessmen or great engineering societies, in honor of some solemn cause or another. She had attended the occasions as reluctantly as he did, and had found that he liked to talk to her. "Miss Taggart," he had said to her once, "I never expect to encounter intelligence.

That I should find it here is such an astonishing relief!" She had come to his office, remembering that sentence. She sat, watching him in the manner of a scientist: assuming nothing, discarding emotion, seeking only to observe and to understand.

"Miss Taggart," he said gaily, "I'm curious about you, I'm curious whenever anything upsets a precedent. As a rule, visitors are a painful duty to me. I'm frankly astonished that I should feel such a simple pleasure in seeing you here. Do you know what it's like to feel suddenly that one can talk without the strain of trying to force some sort of understanding out of a vacuum?"

He sat on the edge of his desk, his manner gaily informal. He was not tall, and his slenderness gave him an air of youthful energy, almost of boyish zest. His thin face was ageless; it was a homely face, but the great forehead and the large gray eyes held such an arresting intelligence that one could notice nothing else. There were wrinkles of humor in the corners of the eyes, and faint lines of bitterness in the corners of the mouth. He did not look like a man in his early fifties; the slightly graying hair was his only sign of age.

"Tell me more about yourself," he said. "I always meant to ask you what you're doing in such an unlikely career as heavy industry and how you can stand those people."

"I cannot take too much of your time, Dr. Stadler." She spoke with polite, impersonal precision. "And the matter I came to discuss is extremely important."

He laughed. "There's a sign of the businessman—wanting to come to the point at once. Well, by all means. But don't worry about my time—it's yours. Now, what was it you said you wanted to discuss?

Oh yes. Rearden Metal. Not exactly one of the subjects on which I'm best informed, but if there's anything I can do for you—" His hand moved in a gesture of invitation.

"Do you know the statement issued by this Institute in regard to Rearden Metal?"

He frowned slightly. "Yes, I've heard about it."

"Have you read it?"

"No."

"It was intended to prevent the use of Rearden Metal."

"Yes, yes, I gathered that much.”

"Could you tell me why?"

He spread his hands; they were attractive hands—long and bony, beautiful in their suggestion of nervous energy and strength. "I really wouldn't know. That is the province of Dr. Ferris. I'm sure he had his reasons. Would you like to speak to Dr. Ferris?"

"No. Are you familiar with the metallurgical nature of Rearden Metal, Dr. Stadler?"

"Why, yes, a little. But tell me, why are you concerned about it?"

A flicker of astonishment rose and died in her eyes; she answered without change in the impersonal tone of her voice, "I am building a branch line with rails of Rearden Metal, which—"

"Oh, but of course! I did hear something about it. You must forgive me, I don't read the newspapers as regularly as I should. It's your railroad that's building that new branch, isn't it?"

"The existence of my railroad depends upon the completion of that branch—and, I think," eventually, the existence of this country will depend on it as well."

The wrinkles of amusement deepened about his eyes. "Can you make such a statement with positive assurance, Miss Taggart? I couldn't."

"In this case?"

"In any case. Nobody can tell what the course of a country's future may be. It is not a matter of calculable trends, but a chaos subject to the rule of the moment, in which anything is possible."

"Do you think that production is necessary to the existence of a country, Dr. Stadler?"

"Why, yes, yes, of course."

"The building of our branch line has been stopped by the statement of this Institute."

He did not smile and he did not answer.

"Does that statement represent your conclusion about the nature of Rearden Metal?" she asked.

"I have said that I have not read it." There was an edge of sharpness in his voice.

She opened her bag, took out a newspaper clipping and extended it to him. "Would you read it and tell me whether this is a language which science may properly speak?"

He glanced through the clipping, smiled contemptuously and tossed it aside with a gesture of distaste. "Disgusting, isn't it?" he said. "But what can you do when you deal with people?"

She looked at him, not understanding. "You do not approve of that statement?"

He shrugged. "My approval or disapproval would be irrelevant."

"Have you formed a conclusion of your own about Rearden Metal?"

"Well, metallurgy is not exactly—what shall we say?—my specialty."

"Have you examined any data on Rearden Metal?"

"Miss Taggart, I don't see the point of your questions." His voice sounded faintly impatient.

"I would like to know your personal verdict on Rearden Metal,"

"For what purpose?"

"So that I may give it to the press."

He got up. "That is quite impossible."

She said, her voice strained with the effort of trying to force understanding, "I will submit to you all the information necessary to form a conclusive judgment."

"I cannot issue any public statements about it."

"Why not?"

"The situation is much too complex to explain in a casual discussion."

"But if you should find that Rearden Metal is, in fact, an extremely valuable product which—"

"That is beside the point."

"The value of Rearden Metal is beside the point?"

"There are other issues involved, besides questions of fact."

She asked, not quite believing that she had heard him right, "What other issues is science concerned with, besides questions of fact?"

The bitter lines of his mouth sharpened into the suggestion of a smile. "Miss Taggart, you do not understand the problems of scientists."

She said slowly, as if she were seeing it suddenly in time with her words, "I believe that you do know what Rearden Metal really is."

He shrugged. "Yes. I know. From such information as I've seen, it appears to be a remarkable thing. Quite a brilliant achievement—as far as technology is concerned." He was pacing impatiently across the office. "In fact, I should like, some day, to order a special laboratory motor that would stand just such high temperatures as Rearden Metal can take. It would be very valuable in connection with certain phenomena I should like to observe. I have found that when particles are accelerated to a speed approaching the speed of light, they—"

"Dr. Stadler," she asked slowly, "you know the truth, yet you will not state it publicly?"

"Miss Taggart, you are using an abstract term, when we are dealing with a matter of practical reality."

"We are dealing with a matter of science."

"Science? Aren't you confusing the standards involved? It is only in the realm of pure science that truth is an absolute criterion. When we deal with applied science, with technology—we deal with people.

And when we deal with people, considerations other than truth enter the question."

"What considerations?"

"I am not a technologist, Miss Taggart. I have no talent or taste for dealing with people. I cannot become involved in so-called practical matters."

"That statement was issued in your name."

"I had nothing to do with it!"

"The name of this Institute is your responsibility."

"That's a perfectly unwarranted assumption."

"People think that the honor of your name is the guarantee behind any action of this Institute."

"I can't help what people think—if they think at all!"

"They accepted your statement. It was a lie."

"How can one deal in truth when one deals with the public?"

"I don't understand you," she said very quietly.

"Questions of truth do not enter into social issues. No principles have ever had any effect on society."

"What, then, directs men's actions?"

He shrugged. "The expediency of the moment,"

"Dr. Stadler," she said, "I think I must tell you the meaning and the consequences of the fact that the construction of my branch line is being stopped. I am stopped, in the name of public safety, because I am using the best rail ever produced. In six months, if I do not complete that line, the best industrial section of the country will be left without transportation. It will be destroyed, because it was the best and there were men who thought it expedient to seize a share of its wealth."

"Well, that may be vicious, unjust, calamitous—but such is life in society. Somebody is always sacrificed, as a rule unjustly; there is no other way to live among men. What can any one person do?"

"You can state the truth about Rearden Metal."

He did not answer.

"I could beg you to do it in order to save me. I could beg you to do it in order to avert a national disaster. But I won't. These may not be valid reasons. There is only one reason; you must say it, because it is true."

"I was not consulted about that statement!" The cry broke out involuntarily. "I wouldn't have allowed it! I don't like it any better than you do! But I can't issue a public denial!"

"You were not consulted? Then shouldn't you want to find out the reasons behind that statement?"

"I can't destroy the Institute now!"

"Shouldn't you want to find out the reasons?"

"I know the reasons! They won't tell me, but I know. And I can't say that I blame them, either."

"Would you tell me?"

"I'll tell you, if you wish. It's the truth that you want, isn't it?

Dr. Ferris cannot help it, if the morons who vote the funds for this Institute insist on what they call results. They are incapable of conceiving of such a thing as abstract science. They can judge it only in terms of the latest gadget it has produced for them. I do not know how Dr. Ferris has managed to keep this Institute in existence, I can only marvel at his practical ability. I don't believe he ever was a first-rate scientist—but what a priceless valet of science! I know that he has been facing a grave problem lately. He's kept me out of it, he spares me all that, but I do hear rumors. People have been criticizing the Institute, because, they say, we have not produced enough. The public has been demanding economy. In times like these, when their fat little comforts are threatened, you may be sure that science is the first thing men will sacrifice. This is the only establishment left. There are practically no private research foundations any longer. Look at the greedy ruffians who run our industries. You cannot expect them to support science."

"Who is supporting you now?" she asked, her voice low.

He shrugged. "Society."

She said, with effort, "You were going to tell me the reasons behind that statement."

"I wouldn't think you'd find them hard to deduce. If you consider that for thirteen years this Institute has had a department of metallurgical research, which has cost over twenty million dollars and has produced nothing but a new silver polish and a new anti-corrosive preparation, which, I believe, is not so good as the old ones—you can imagine what the public reaction will be if some private individual comes out with a product that revolutionizes the entire science of metallurgy and proves to be sensationally successful!"

Her head dropped. She said nothing.

"I don't blame our metallurgical department!" he said angrily. "I know that results of this kind are not a matter of any predictable time.

But the public won't understand it. What, then, should we sacrifice? An excellent piece of smelting—or the last center of science left on earth, and the whole future of human knowledge? That is the alternative."

She sat, her head down. After a while, she said, "AH right, Dr. Stadler. I won't argue."

He saw her groping for her bag, as if she were trying to remember the automatic motions necessary to get up.

"Miss Taggart," he said quietly. It was almost a plea. She looked up.

Her face was composed and empty.

He came closer; he leaned with one hand against the wall above her head, almost as if he wished to hold her in the circle of his arm.

"Miss Taggart," he said, a tone of gentle, bitter persuasiveness in his voice, "I am older than you. Believe me, there is no other way to live on earth, Men are not open to truth or reason. They cannot be reached by a rational argument. The mind is powerless against them. Yet we have to deal with them. If we want to accomplish anything, we have to deceive them into letting us accomplish it. Or force them. They understand nothing else. We cannot expect their support for any endeavor of the intellect, for any goal of the spirit. They are nothing but vicious animals. They are greedy, self-indulgent, predatory dollar-chasers who—"

"I am one of the dollar-chasers, Dr. Stadler," she said, her voice low.

"You are an unusual, brilliant child who has not seen enough of life to grasp the full measure of human stupidity. I've fought it all my life.

I'm very tired. . . ." The sincerity of his voice was genuine. He walked slowly away from her. "There was a time when I looked at the tragic mess they've made of this earth, and I wanted to cry out, to beg them to listen—I could teach them to live so much better than they did—but there was nobody to hear me, they had nothing to hear me with. . . .

Intelligence? It is such a rare, precarious spark that flashes for a moment somewhere among men, and vanishes. One cannot tell its nature, or its future . . . or its death. . . ."

She made a movement to rise.

"Don't go, Miss Taggart. I'd like you to understand."

She raised her face to him, in obedient indifference. Her face was not pale, but its planes stood out with strangely naked precision, as if its skin had lost the shadings of color.

"You're young," he said. "At your age, I had the same faith in the unlimited power of reason. The same brilliant vision of man as a rational being. I have seen so much, since. I have been disillusioned so often. . . . I'd like to tell you just one story."

He stood at the window of his office. It had grown dark outside. The darkness seemed to rise from the black cut of the river, far below. A few lights trembled in the water, from among the hills of the other shore. The sky was still the intense blue of evening. A lonely star, low over the earth, seemed unnaturally large and made the sky look darker.

"When I was at the Patrick Henry University," he said, "I had three pupils. I have had many bright students in the past, but these three were- the kind of reward a teacher prays for. If ever you could wish to receive the gift of the human mind at its best, young and delivered into your hands for guidance, they were this gift. Theirs was the kind of intelligence one expects to see, in the future, changing the course of the world. They came from very different backgrounds, but they were inseparable friends. They made a strange choice of studies. They majored in two subjects—mine and Hugh Akston's. Physics and philosophy. It is not a combination of interests one encounters nowadays. Hugh Akston was a distinguished man, a great mind . . . unlike the incredible creature whom that University has now put in his place. . . . Akston and I were a little jealous of each other over these three students. It was a kind of contest between us, a friendly contest, because we understood each other, I heard Akston saying one day that he regarded them as his sons. I resented it a little . . . because I thought of them as mine. . . ."

He turned and looked at her. The bitter lines of age were visible now, cutting across his cheeks. He said, "When I endorsed the establishment of this Institute, one of these three damned me. I have not seen him since. It used to disturb me, in the first few years. I wondered, once in a while, whether he had been right. . . . It has ceased to disturb me, long ago."

He smiled. There was nothing but bitterness now, in his smile and his face.

"These three men, these three who held all the hope which the gift of intelligence ever proffered, these three from whom we expected such a magnificent future—one of them was Francisco d'Anconia, who became a depraved playboy. Another was Ragnar Danneskjold, who became a plain bandit. So much for the promise of the human mind."

"Who was the third one?" she asked, He shrugged. "The third one did not achieve even that sort of notorious distinction. He vanished without a trace—into the great unknown of mediocrity. He is probably a second assistant bookkeeper somewhere."

"It's a lie! I didn't run away!" cried James Taggart. "I came here because I happened to be sick. Ask Dr. Wilson. It's a form of flu.

He'll prove it. And how did you know that I was here?"

Dagny stood in the middle of the room; there were melting snowflakes on her coat collar, on the brim of her hat. She glanced around, feeling an emotion that would have been sadness, had she had time to acknowledge it.

It was a room in the house of the old Taggart estate on the Hudson.

Jim had inherited the place, but he seldom came here. In their childhood, this had been their father's study. Now it had the desolate air of a room which is used, yet uninhabited. There were slipcovers on all but two chairs, a cold fireplace and the dismal warmth of an electric heater with a cord twisting across the floor, a desk, its glass surface empty.

Jim lay on the couch, with a towel wrapped for a scarf around his neck. She saw a stale, filled ashtray on a chair beside him, a bottle of whisky, a wilted paper cup, and two-day-old newspapers scattered about the floor. A portrait of their grandfather hung over the fireplace, full figure, with a railroad bridge in the fading background.

"I have no time for arguments, Jim."

"It was your idea! I hope you'll admit to the Board that it was your idea. That's what your goddamn Rearden Metal has done to us! If we had waited for Orren Boyle . . ." His unshaved face was pulled by a twisted scramble of emotions: panic, hatred, a touch of triumph, the relief of screaming at a victim—and the faint, cautious, begging look that sees a hope of help.

He had stopped tentatively, but she did not answer. She stood watching him, her hands in the pockets of her coat.

"There's nothing we can do now!" he moaned. "I tried to call Washington, to get them to seize the Phoenix-Durango and turn it over to us, on the ground of emergency, but they won't even discuss it! Too many people objecting, they say, afraid of some fool precedent or another! . . . I got the National Alliance of Railroads to suspend the deadline and permit Dan Conway to operate his road for another year —that would have given us time—but he's refused to do it! I tried to get Ellis Wyatt and his bunch of friends in Colorado to demand that Washington order Conway to continue operations—but all of them, Wyatt and all the rest of those bastards, refused! It's their skin, worse than ours, they're sure to go down the drain—but they've refused!"

She smiled briefly, but made no comment.

"Now there's nothing left for us to do! We're caught. We can't give up that branch and we can't complete it. We can't stop or go on. We have no money. Nobody will touch us with a ten-foot pole! What have we got left without the Rio Norte Line? But we can't finish it. We'd be boycotted. We'd be blacklisted. That union of track workers would sue us. They would, there's a law about it. We can't complete that Line! Christ! What are we going to do?"

She waited. "Through, Jim?" she asked coldly. "If you are, I’ll tell you what we're going to do."

He kept silent, looking up at her from under his heavy eyelids.

"This is not a proposal, Jim. It's an ultimatum. Just listen and accept. I am going to complete the construction of the Rio Norte Line.

I personally, not Taggart Transcontinental. I will take a leave of absence from the job of Vice-President. I will form a company in my own name. Your Board will turn the Rio None Line over to me. I will act as my own contractor. I will get my own financing. I will take full charge and sole responsibility. I will complete the Line on time. After you have seen how the Rearden Metal rails can take it, I will transfer the Line back to Taggart Transcontinental and I'll return to my job. That is all,"

He was looking at her silently, dangling a bedroom slipper on the tip of his foot. She had never supposed that hope could look ugly in a man's face, but it did: it was mixed with cunning. She turned her eyes away from him, wondering how it was possible that a man's first thought in such a moment could be a search for something to put over on her.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 648