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THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE 8 page

He died five years ago, of a heart ailment from which he had suffered for some time."

Dagny asked hopelessly, "Did you know the nature of his experiments?"

"No. I know very little about engineering."

"Did you know any of his professional friends or co-workers, who might have been acquainted with his research?"

"No. When he was at Twentieth Century Motors, he worked such long hours that we had very little time for ourselves and we spent it together. We had no social life at all. He never brought his associates to the house."

"When he was at Twentieth Century, did he ever mention to you a motor he had designed, an entirely new type of motor that could have changed the course of all industry?"

"A motor? Yes. Yes, he spoke of it several times. He said it was an invention of incalculable importance. But it was not he who had designed it. It was the invention of a young assistant of his."

She saw the expression on Dagny's face, and added slowly, quizzically, without reproach, merely in sad amusement, "I see."

"Oh, I'm sorry!" said Dagny, realizing that her emotion had shot to her face and become a smile as obvious as a cry of relief.

"It's quite all right. I understand. It's the inventor of that motor that you're interested in. I don't know whether he is still alive, but at least I have no reason to think that he isn't."

"I'd give half my life to know that he is—and to find him. It's as important as that, Mrs. Hastings. Who is he?"

"I don't know. I don't know his name or anything about him. I never knew any of the men on my husband's staff. He told me only that he had a young engineer who, some day, would up-turn the world.

My husband did not care for anything in people except ability. I think this was the only man he ever loved. He didn't say so, but I could tell it, just by the way he spoke of this young assistant. I remember—the day he told me that the motor was completed—how his voice sounded when he said, 'And he's only twenty-six!' This was about a month before the death of Jed Starnes. He never mentioned the motor or the young engineer, after that."

"You don't know what became of the young engineer?"

"No."

"You can't suggest any way to find him?"

"No."

"You have no clue, no lead to help me learn his name?"

"None. Tell me, was that motor extremely valuable?"

"More valuable than any estimate I could give you."

"It's strange, because, you see, I thought of it once, some years after we'd left Wisconsin, and I asked my husband what had become of that invention he'd said was so great, what would be done with it.

He looked at me very oddly and answered, 'Nothing.' "

"Why?"

"He wouldn't tell me."

"Can you remember anyone at all who worked at Twentieth Century? Anyone who knew that young engineer? Any friend of his?"



"No, I . . . Wait! Wait, I think I can give you a lead. I can tell you where to find one friend of his. I don't even know that friend's name, either, but I know his address. It's an odd story. I'd better explain how it happened. One evening—about two years after we'd come here—my husband was going out and I needed our car that night, so he asked me to pick him up after dinner at the restaurant of the railroad station. He did not tell me with whom he was having dinner. When I drove up to the station, I saw him standing outside the restaurant with two men. One of them was young and tall. The other was elderly; he looked very distinguished. I would still recognize those men anywhere; they had the kind of faces one doesn't forget. My husband saw me and left them. They walked away toward the station platform; there was a train coming. My husband pointed after the young man and said, 'Did you see him? That's the boy I told you about.1 'The one who's the great maker of motors?' The one who was.' "

"And he told you nothing else?"

"Nothing else. This was nine years ago. Last spring, I went to visit my brother who lives in Cheyenne. One afternoon, he took the family out for a long drive. We went up into pretty wild country, high in the Rockies, and we stopped at a roadside diner. There was a distinguished, gray-haired man behind the counter. I kept staring at him while he fixed our sandwiches and coffee, because I knew that I had seen his face before, but could not remember where. We drove on, we were miles away from the diner, when I remembered. You'd better go there.

It's on Route 86, in the mountains, west of Cheyenne, near a small industrial settlement by the Lennox Copper Foundry. It seems strange, but I'm certain of it: the cook in that diner is the man I saw at the railroad station with my husband's young idol."

The diner stood on the summit of a long, hard climb. Its glass walls spread a coat of polish over the view of rocks and pines descending in broken ledges to the sunset. It was dark below, but an even, glowing light still remained in the diner, as in a small pool left behind by a receding tide.

Dagny sat at the end of the counter, eating a hamburger sandwich.

It was the best-cooked food she had ever tasted, the product of simple ingredients and of an unusual skill. Two workers were finishing their dinner; she was waiting for them to depart.

She studied the man behind the counter. He was slender and tall; he had an air of distinction that belonged in an ancient castle or in the inner office of a bank; but his peculiar quality came from the fact that he made the distinction seem appropriate here, behind the counter of a diner. He wore a cook's white jacket as if it were a full-dress suit. There was an expert competence in his manner of working; his movements were easy, intelligently economical. He had a lean face and gray hair that blended in tone with the cold blue of his eyes; somewhere beyond his look of courteous sternness, there was a note of humor, so faint that it vanished if one tried to discern it.

The two workers finished, paid and departed, each leaving a dime for a tip. She watched the man as he removed their dishes, put the dimes into the pocket of his white jacket, wiped the counter, working with swift precision. Then he turned and looked at her. It was an impersonal glance, not intended to invite conversation; but she felt certain that he had long since noted her New York suit, her high-heeled pumps, her air of being a woman who did not waste her time; his cold, observant eyes seemed to tell her that he knew she did not belong here and that he was waiting to discover her purpose.

"How is business?" she asked.

"Pretty bad. They're going to close the Lennox Foundry next week, so I'll have to close soon, too, and move on." His voice was clear, impersonally cordial.

"Where to?"

"1 haven't decided."

"What sort of thing do you have in mind?"

"I don't know. I'm thinking of opening a garage, if I can find the right spot in some town."

"Oh no! You're too good at your job to change it. You shouldn't want to be anything but a cook."

A strange, fine smile moved the curve of his mouth. "No?" he asked courteously.

"No! How would you like a job in New York?" He looked at her, astonished. "I'm serious. I can give you a job on a big railroad, in charge of the dining-car department."

"May I ask why you should want to?"

She raised the hamburger sandwich in its white paper napkin.

"There's one of the reasons."

"Thank you. What are the others?"

"T don't suppose you've lived in a big city, or you'd know how miserably difficult it is to find any competent men for any job whatever."

"I know a little about that."

"Well? How about it, then? Would you like a job in New York at ten thousand dollars a year?"

"No."

She had been carried away by the joy of discovering and rewarding ability. She looked at him silently, shocked. "I don't think you understood me," she said.

"I did."

"You're refusing an opportunity of this kind?"

"Yes."

"But why?"

"That is a personal matter."

"Why should you work like this, when you can have a better job?"

"I am not looking for a better job."

"You don't want a chance to rise and make money?"

"No. Why do you insist?"

"Because I hate to see ability being wasted!"

He said slowly, intently, "So do I."

Something in the way he said it made her feel the bond of some profound emotion which they held in common; it broke the discipline that forbade her ever to call for help. "I'm so sick of them!" Her voice startled hen it was an involuntary cry. "I'm so hungry for any sight of anyone who's able to do whatever it is he's doing!"

She pressed the back of her hand to her eyes, trying to dam the outbreak of a despair she had not permitted herself to acknowledge; she had not known the extent of it, nor how little of her endurance the quest had left her.

"I'm sorry," he said, his voice low. It sounded, not as an apology, but as a statement of compassion.

She glanced up at him. He smiled, and she knew that the smile was intended to break the bond which he, too, had felt: the smile had a trace of courteous mockery. He said, "But I don't believe that you came all the way from New York just to hunt for railroad cooks in the Rockies."

"No. I came for something else." She leaned forward, both forearms braced firmly against the counter, feeling calm and in tight control again, sensing a dangerous adversary. "Did you know, about ten years ago, a young engineer who worked for the Twentieth Century Motor Company?"

She counted the seconds of a pause; she could not define the nature of the way he looked at her, except that it was the look of some special attentiveness.

"Yes, I did," he answered.

"Could you give me his name and address?"

"What for?"

"It's crucially important that I find him."

"That man? Of what importance is he?"

"He is the most important man in the world."

"Really? Why?"

"Did you know anything about his work?"

"Yes."

"Did you know that he hit upon an idea of the most tremendous consequence?"

He let a moment pass. "May I ask who you are?”

"Dagny Taggart. I'm the Vice-Pres—"

"Yes, Miss Taggart. I know who you are."

He said it with impersonal deference. But he looked as if he had found the answer to some special question in his mind and was not astonished any longer.

"Then you know that my interest is not idle," she said. "I'm in a position to give him the chance he needs and I'm prepared to pay anything he asks."

"May I ask what has aroused your interest in him?"

"His motor."

"How did you happen to know about his motor?"

"I found a broken remnant of it in the ruins of the Twentieth Century factory. Not enough to reconstruct it or to learn how it worked, But enough to know that it did work and that it's an invention which can save my railroad, the country and the economy of the whole world.

Don't ask me to tell you now what trail I've followed, trying to trace that motor and to find its inventor. That's not of any importance, even my life and work are not of any importance to me right now, nothing is of any importance, except that I must find him. Don't ask me how I happened to come to you. You're the end of the trail. Tell me his name."

He had listened without moving, looking straight at her; the attentiveness of his eyes seemed to take hold of every word and store it carefully away, giving her no clue to his purpose. He did not move for a long time. Then he said, "Give it up, Miss Taggart. You won't find him."

"What is his name?"

"I can tell you nothing about him."

"Is he still alive?"

"I can tell you nothing."

"What is your name?"

"Hugh Akston."

Through the blank seconds of recapturing her mind, she kept telling herself: You're hysterical . . . don't be preposterous . . . it's just a coincidence of names—while she knew, in certainty and numb, inexplicable terror, that this was the Hugh Akston.

"Hugh Akston?" she stammered. "The philosopher? . . . The last of the advocates of reason?"

"Why, yes," he answered pleasantly. "Or the first of their return."

He did not seem startled by her shock, but he seemed to find it unnecessary. His manner was simple, almost friendly, as if he felt no need to hide his identity and no resentment at its being discovered.

"I didn't think that any young person would recognize my name or attach any significance to it, nowadays," he said.

"But . . . but what are you doing here?" Her arm swept at the room. "This doesn't make sense!"

"Are you sure?"

"What is it? A stunt? An experiment? A secret mission? Are you studying something for some special purpose?"

"No, Miss Taggart. I'm earning my living." The words and the voice had the genuine simplicity of truth, "Dr. Akston, I . . . it's inconceivable, it's . . . You're . . . you're a philosopher . . . the greatest philosopher living . . . an immortal name . . . why would you do this?"

"Because I am a philosopher, Miss Taggart."

She knew with certainty—even though she felt as if her capacity for certainty and for understanding were gone—that she would obtain no help from him, that questions were useless, that he would give her no explanation, neither of the inventor's fate nor of his own.

"Give it up, Miss Taggart," he said quietly, as if giving proof that he could guess her thoughts, as she had known he would. "It is a hopeless quest, the more hopeless because you have no inkling of what an impossible task you have chosen to undertake. I would like to spare you the strain of trying to devise some argument, trick or plea that would make me give you the information you are seeking. Take my word for it: it can't be done. You said I'm the end of your trail. It's a blind alley, Miss Taggart, Do not attempt to waste your money and effort on other, more conventional methods of inquiry: do not hire detectives. They will learn nothing. You may choose to ignore my warning, but I think that you are a person of high intelligence, able to know that I know what I am saying. Give it up. The secret you are trying to solve involves something greater—much greater—than the invention of a motor run by atmospheric electricity. There is only one helpful suggestion that I can give you: By the essence and nature of existence, contradictions cannot exist. If you find it inconceivable that an invention of genius should be abandoned among ruins, and that a philosopher should wish to work as a cook in a diner—check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."

She started: she remembered that she had heard this before and that it was Francisco who had said it. And then she remembered that this man had been one of Francisco's teachers.

"As you wish, Dr. Akston," she said. "I won't attempt to question you about it. But would you permit me to ask you a question on an entirely different subject?"

"Certainly."

"Dr. Robert Stadler once told me that when you were at the Patrick Henry University, you had three students who were your favorites and his, three brilliant minds from whom you expected a great future. One of them was Francisco d'Anconia."

"Yes. Another was Ragnar Danneskjold."

"Incidentally—this is not my question—who was the third?"

"His name would mean nothing to you. He is not famous."

"Dr. Stadler said that you and he were rivals over these three students, because you both regarded them as your sons."

"Rivals? He lost them."

"Tell me, are you proud of the way these three have turned out?"

He looked off, into the distance, at the dying fire of the sunset on the farthest rocks; his face had the look of a father who watches his sons bleeding on a battlefield. He answered: "More proud than I had ever hoped to be,"

It was almost dark. He turned sharply, took a package of cigarettes from his pocket, pulled out one cigarette, but stopped, remembering her presence, as if he had forgotten it for a moment, and extended the package to her. She took a cigarette and he struck the brief flare of a match, then shook it out, leaving only two small points of fire in the darkness of a glass room and of miles of mountains beyond it.

She rose, paid her bill, and said, "Thank you, Dr. Akston. I will not molest you with tricks or pleas. I will not hire detectives. But I think I should tell you that I will not give up, I must find the inventor of that motor. I will find him."

"Not until the day when he chooses to find you—as he will."

When she walked to her car, he switched on the lights in the diner, she saw the mailbox by the side of the road and noted the incredible fact that the name "Hugh Akston" stood written openly across it.

She had driven far down the winding road, and the lights of the diner were long since out of sight, when she noticed that she was enjoying the taste of the cigarette he had given her: it was different from any she had ever smoked before. She held the small remnant to the light of the dashboard, looking for the name of the brand. There was no name, only a trademark. Stamped in gold on the thin, white paper there stood the sign of the dollar.

She examined it curiously: she had never heard of that brand before.

Then she remembered the old man at the cigar stand of the Taggart Terminal, and smiled, thinking that this was a specimen for his collection. She stamped out the fire and dropped the butt into her handbag.

Train Number 57 was lined along the track, ready to leave for Wyatt Junction, when she reached Cheyenne, left her car at the garage where she had rented it, and walked out on the platform of the Taggart station. She had half an hour to wait for the eastbound main liner to New York. She walked to the end of the platform and leaned wearily against a lamppost; she did not want to be seen and recognized by the station employees, she did not want to talk to anyone, she needed rest. A few people stood in clusters on the half-deserted platform; animated conversations seemed to be going on, and newspapers were more prominently in evidence than usual.

She looked at the lighted windows of Train Number 57—for a moment's relief in the sight of a victorious achievement. Train Number 57 was about to start down the track of the John Galt Line, through the towns, through the curves of the mountains, past the green signals where people had stood cheering and the valleys where rockets had risen to the summer sky. Twisted remnants of leaves now hung on the branches beyond the train's roof line, and the passengers wore furs and mufflers, as they climbed aboard. They moved with the casual manner of a daily event, with the security of expecting a performance long since taken for granted. . . . We've done it—she thought—this much, at least, is done.

It was the chance conversation of two men somewhere behind her that came beating suddenly against her closed attention.

"But laws shouldn't be passed that way, so quickly."

"They're not laws, they're directives."

"Then it's illegal."

"It's not illegal, because the Legislature passed a law last month giving him the power to issue directives."

"I don't think directives should be sprung on people that way, out of the blue, like a punch in the nose."

"Well, there's no time to palaver when it's a national emergency."

"But I don't think it's right and it doesn't jibe. How is Rearden going to do it, when it says here—"

"Why should you worry about Rearden? He's rich enough. He can find a way to do anything."

Then she leaped to the first newsstand in sight and seized a copy of the evening paper.

It was on the front page. Wesley Mouch, Top Co-ordinator of the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources, "in a surprise move," said the paper, "and in the name of the national emergency," had issued a set of directives, which were strung in a column down the page: The railroads of the country were ordered to reduce the maximum speed of all trains to sixty miles per hour—to reduce the maximum length of all trains to sixty cars—and to run the same number of trains in every state of a zone composed of five neighboring states, the country being divided into such zones for the purpose.

The steel mills of the country were ordered to limit the maximum production of any metal alloy to an amount equal to the production of other metal alloys by other mills placed in the same classification of plant capacity—and to supply a fair share of any metal alloy to all consumers who might desire to obtain it.

All the manufacturing establishments of the country, of any size and nature, were forbidden to move from their present locations, except when granted a special permission to do so by the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources.

To compensate the railroads of the country for the extra costs involved and "to cushion the process of readjustment," a moratorium on payments of interest and principal on all railroad bonds—secured and unsecured, convertible and non-convertible—was declared for a period of five years.

To provide the funds for the personnel to enforce these directives, a special tax was imposed on the state of Colorado, "as the state best able to assist the needier states to bear the brunt of the national emergency," such tax to consist of five per cent of the gross sales of Colorado's industrial concerns.

The cry she uttered was one she had never permitted herself before, because she made it her pride always to answer it herself—but she saw a man standing a few steps away, she did not see that he was a ragged bum, and she uttered the cry because it was the plea of reason and he was a human figure: "What are we going to do?"

The bum grinned mirthlessly and shrugged: "Who is John Galt?"

It was not Taggart Transcontinental that stood as the focus of terror in her mind, it was not the thought of Hank Rearden tied to a rack pulled in opposite directions—it was Ellis Wyatt. Wiping out the rest, filling her consciousness, leaving no room for words, no time for wonder, as a glaring answer to the questions she had not begun to ask, stood two pictures: Ellis Wyatt's implacable figure in front of her desk, saying, "It is now in your power to destroy me; I may have to go; but if I go, I'll make sure that I take all the rest of you along with me"—and the circling violence of Ellis Wyatt's body when he flung a glass to shatter against the wall.

The only consciousness the pictures left her was the feeling of the approach of some unthinkable disaster, and the feeling that she had to outrun it. She had to reach Ellis Wyatt and stop him. She did not know what it was that she had to prevent. She knew only that she had to stop him.

And because, were she lying crushed under the ruins of a building, were she torn by the bomb of an air raid, so long as she was still in existence she would know that action is man's foremost obligation, regardless of anything he feels—she was able to run down the platform and to see the face of the stationmaster when she found him—she was able to order: "Hold Number 57 for me!"—then to run to the privacy of a telephone booth in the darkness beyond the end of the platform, and to give the long-distance operator the number of Ellis Wyatt's house.

She stood, propped up by the walls of the booth, her eyes closed, and listened to the dead whirl of metal which was the sound of a bell ringing somewhere. It brought no answer. The bell kept coming in sudden spasms, like a drill going through her ear, through her body.

She clutched the receiver as if, unheeded, it were still a form of contact.

She wished the bell were louder. She forgot that the sound she heard was not the one ringing in his house. She did not know that she was screaming, "Ellis, don't! Don't! Don't I"—until she heard the cold, reproving voice of the operator say, "Your party does not answer."

She sat at the window of a coach of Train Number 57, and listened to the clicking of the wheels on the rails of Rearden Metal, She sat, unresisting, swaying with the motion of the train. The black luster of the window hid the countryside she did not want to see. It was her second run on the John Galt Line, and she tried not to think of the first.

The bondholders, she thought, the bondholders of the John Galt Line—it was to her honor that they had entrusted their money, the saving and achievement of years, it was on her ability that they had staked it, it was on her work that they had relied and on their own—and she had been made to betray them into a looters' trap: there would be no trains and no life-blood of freight, the John Galt Line had been only a drainpipe that had permitted Jim Taggart to make a deal and to drain their wealth, unearned, into his pocket, in exchange for letting others drain his railroad—the bonds of the John Galt Line, which, this morning, had been the proud guardians of their owners' security and future, had become in the space of an hour, scraps of paper that no one would buy, with no value, no future, no power, save the power to close the doors and stop the wheels of the last hope of the country—and Taggart Transcontinental was not a living plant, fed by blood it had worked to produce, but a cannibal of the moment, devouring the unborn children of greatness.

The tax on Colorado, she thought, the tax collected from Ellis Wyatt to pay for the livelihood of those whose job was to tie him and make him unable to live, those who would stand on guard to see that he got no trains, no tank cars, no pipeline of Rearden Metal—Ellis Wyatt, stripped of the right of serf-defense, left without voice, without weapons, and worse: made to be the tool of his own destruction, the supporter of his own destroyers, the provider of their food and of their weapons—Ellis Wyatt being choked, with his own bright energy turned against him as the noose—Ellis Wyatt, who had wanted to tap an unlimited source of shale oil and who spoke of a Second Renaissance. . . .

She sat bent over, her head on her arms, slumped at the, ledge of the window—while the great curves of the green-blue rail, the mountains, the valleys, the new towns of Colorado went by in the darkness, unseen.

The sudden jolt of brakes on wheels threw her upright. It was an unscheduled stop, and the platform of the small station was crowded with people, all looking off in the same direction. The passengers around her were pressing to the windows, staring. She leaped to her feet, she ran down the aisle, down the steps, into the cold wind sweeping the platform.

In the instant before she saw it and her scream cut the voices of the crowd, she knew that she had known that which she was to see. In a break between mountains, lighting the sky, throwing a glow that swayed on the roofs and walls of the station, the hill of Wyatt Oil was a solid sheet of flame.

Later, when they told her that Ellis Wyatt had vanished, leaving nothing behind but a board he had nailed to a post at the foot of the hill, when she looked at his handwriting on the board, she felt as if she had almost known that these would be the words: "I am leaving it as I found it. Take over. It's yours."

 

 

PART II

EITHER-OR

 

CHAPTER I


Date: 2015-12-17; view: 514


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