Home Random Page


CATEGORIES:

BiologyChemistryConstructionCultureEcologyEconomyElectronicsFinanceGeographyHistoryInformaticsLawMathematicsMechanicsMedicineOtherPedagogyPhilosophyPhysicsPolicyPsychologySociologySportTourism






THE MAN WHO BELONGED ON EARTH 3 page

But by the time he raised his head—and before he saw the look of admiration in her eyes, the open look he had begged for, the look of forgiveness—he destroyed his single moment's atonement by adding in a voice of drawing-room sarcasm, "Apparently, the young man had no desire to work for the good of society or the welfare of science. He told me that he would not take a government job. I presume he wanted the bigger salary he could hope to obtain from a private employer."

He turned away, not to see the look that was fading from her face, not to let himself know its meaning. "Yes," she said, her voice hard, "he is probably the kind of man I want."

"He's a young physicist from the Utah Institute of Technology," he said dryly. "His name is Quentin Daniels. A friend of mine sent him to me a few months ago. He came to see me, but he would not take the job I offered. I wanted him on my staff. He had the mind of a scientist. I don't know whether he can succeed with your motor, but at least he has the ability to attempt it. I believe you can still reach him at the Utah Institute of Technology. I don't know what he's doing there now—they closed the Institute a year ago."

"Thank you, Dr. Stadler. I shall get in touch with him."

"If . . . if you want me to, I'll be glad to help him with the theoretical part of it. I'm going to do some work myself, starting from the leads of that manuscript. I'd like to find the cardinal secret of energy that its author had found. It's his basic principle that we must discover. If we succeed, Mr. Daniels may finish the job, as far as your motor is concerned."

"I will appreciate any help you may care to give me, Dr. Stadler."

They walked silently -through the dead tunnels of the Terminal, down the ties of a rusted track under a string of blue lights, to the distant glow of the platforms.

At the mouth of the tunnel, they saw a man kneeling on the track, hammering at a switch with the unrhythmical exasperation of uncertainty. Another man stood watching him impatiently.

"Well, what's the matter with the damn thing?" asked the watcher.

"Don't know."

"You've been at it for an hour."

"Yeah."

"How long is it going to take?"

"Who is John Galt?"

Dr. Stadler winced. They had gone past the men, when he said, "I don't like that expression."

"I don't, either," she answered.

"Where did it come from?"

"Nobody knows."

They were silent, then he said, "I knew a John Galt once. Only he died long ago."

"Who was he?"

"I used to think that he was still alive. But now I'm certain that he must have died. He had such a mind that, had he lived, the whole world would have been talking of him by now."

"But the whole world is talking of him."

He stopped still. "Yes . . ." he said slowly, staring at a thought that had never struck him before, "yes . . . Why?" The word was heavy with the sound of terror.



"Who was he, Dr. Stadler?"

"Why are they talking of him?"

"Who was he?"

He shook his head with a shudder and said sharply, "It's just a coincidence. The name is not uncommon at all. It's a meaningless coincidence. It has no connection with the man I knew. That man is dead."

He did not permit himself to know the full meaning of the words he added: "He has to be dead."

 

The order that lay on his desk was marked "Confidential . . .

Emergency . . . Priority . . . Essential need certified by office of Top Co-ordinator . . . for the account of Project X"—and demanded that he sell ten thousand tons of Rearden Metal to the State Science Institute.

Rearden read it and glanced up at the superintendent of his mills who stood before him without moving. The superintendent had come in and put the order down on his desk without a word.

"I thought you'd want to see it," he said, in answer to Rearden's glance.

Rearden pressed a button, summoning Miss Ives. He handed the order to her and said, "Send this back to wherever it came from. Tell them that I will not sell any Rearden Metal to the State Science Institute."

Gwen Ives and the superintendent looked at him, at each other and back at him again; what he saw in their eyes was congratulation.

"Yes, Mr. Rearden," Gwen Ives said formally, taking the slip as if it were any other kind of business paper. She bowed and left the room. The superintendent followed.

Rearden smiled faintly, in greeting to what they felt. He felt nothing about that paper or its possible consequences.

By a sort of inner convulsion—which had been like tearing a plug out to cut off the current of his emotions—he had told himself six months ago: Act first, keep the mills going, feel later. It had made him able to watch dispassionately the working of the Fair Share Law.

Nobody had known how that law was to be observed. First, he had been told that he could not produce Rearden Metal in an amount greater than the tonnage of the best special alloy, other than steel, produced by Orren Boyle. But Orren Boyle's best special alloy was some cracking mixture that no one cared to buy. Then he had been told that he could produce Rearden Metal in the amount that Orren Boyle could have produced, if he could have produced it. Nobody had known how this was to be determined. Somebody in Washington had announced a figure, naming a number of tons per year, giving no reasons. Everybody had let it go at that.

He had not known how to give every consumer who demanded it an equal share of Rearden Metal. The waiting list of orders could not be filled in three years, even had he been permitted to work at full capacity. New orders were coming in daily. They were not orders any longer, in the old, honorable sense of trade; they were demands. The law provided that he could be sued by any consumer who failed to receive his fair share of Rearden Metal.

Nobody had known how to determine what constituted a fair share of what amount. Then a bright young boy just out of college had been sent to him from Washington, as Deputy Director of Distribution. After many telephone conferences with the capital, the boy announced that customers would get five hundred tons of the Metal each, in the order of the dates of their applications. Nobody had argued against his figure.

There was no way to form an argument; the figure could have been one pound or one million tons, with the same validity. The boy had established an office at the Rearden mills, where four girls took applications for shares of Rearden Metal. At the present rate of the mills' production, the applications extended well into the next century.

Five hundred tons of Rearden Metal could not provide three miles of rail for Taggart Transcontinental; it could not provide the bracing for one of Ken Danagger's coal mines. The largest industries, Rearden's best customers, were denied the use of his Metal. But golf clubs made of Rearden Metal were suddenly appearing on the market, as well as coffee pots, garden tools and bathroom faucets. Ken Danagger, who had seen the value of the Metal and had dared to order it against a fury of public opinion, was not permitted to obtain it; his order had been left unfilled, cut off without warning by the new laws. Mr. Mowen, who had betrayed Taggart Transcontinental in its most dangerous hour, was now making switches of Rearden Metal and selling them to the Atlantic Southern. Rearden looked on, his emotions plugged out.

He turned away, without a word, when anybody mentioned to him what everybody knew: the quick fortunes that were being made on Rearden Metal. "Well, no," people said in drawing rooms, "you mustn’t call it a black market, because it isn't, really. Nobody is selling the Metal illegally. They're just selling their right to it. Not selling really, just pooling their shares." He did not want to know the insect intricacy of the deals through which the "shares" were sold and pooled—nor how a manufacturer in Virginia had produced, in two months, five thousand tons of castings made of Rearden Metal—nor what man in Washington was that manufacturer's unlisted partner.

He knew that their profit on a ton of Rearden Metal was five times larger than his own. He said nothing. Everybody had a right to the Metal, except himself.

The young boy from Washington—whom the steel workers had nicknamed the Wet Nurse—hung around Rearden with a primitive, astonished curiosity which, incredibly, was a form of admiration. Rearden watched him with disgusted amusement. The boy had no inkling of any concept of morality; it had been bred out of him by his college; this had left him an odd frankness, naive and cynical at once, like the innocence of a savage.

"You despise me, Mr. Rearden," he had declared once, suddenly and without any resentment. "That's impractical."

"Why is it impractical?" Rearden had asked.

The boy had looked puzzled and had found no answer. He never had an answer to any "why?" He spoke in flat assertions. He would say about people, "He's old-fashioned," "He's unreconstructed," "He's unadjusted," without hesitation or explanation; he would also say, while being a graduate in metallurgy, "Iron smelting, I think, seems to require a high temperature." He uttered nothing but uncertain opinions about physical nature—and nothing but categorical imperatives about men.

"Mr. Rearden," he had said once, "if you feel you'd like to hand out more of the Metal to friends of yours—I mean, in bigger hauls—it could be arranged, you know. Why don't we apply for a special permission on the ground of essential need? I've got a few friends in Washington. Your friends are pretty important people, big businessmen, so it wouldn't be difficult to get away with the essential need dodge. Of course, there would be a few expenses. For things in Washington, You know how it is, things always occasion expenses."

"What things?"

"You understand what I mean."

"No," Rearden had said, "I don't. Why don't you explain it to me?"

The boy had looked at him uncertainly, weighed it in his mind, then come out with: "It's bad psychology."

"What is?"

"You know, Mr. Rearden, it's not necessary to use such words as that."

"As what?"

"Words are relative. They're only symbols. If we don't use ugly symbols, we won't have any ugliness. Why do you want me to say things one way, when I've already said them another?"

"Which way do I want you to say them?"

"Why do you want me to?"

"For the same reason that you don't."

The boy had remained silent for a moment, then had said, "You know, Mr. Rearden, there are no absolute standards. We can't go by rigid principles, we've got to be flexible, we've got to adjust to the reality of the day and act on the expediency of the moment."

"Run along, punk. Go and try to pour a ton of steel without rigid principles, on the expediency of the moment."

A strange sense, which was almost a sense of style, made Rearden feel contempt for the boy, but no resentment. The boy seemed to fit the spirit of the events around them. It was as if they were being carried back across a long span of centuries to the age where the boy had belonged, but he, Rearden, had not. Instead of building new furnaces, thought Rearden, he was now running a losing race to keep the old ones going; instead of starting new ventures, new research, new experiments in the use of Rearden Metal, he was spending the whole of his energy on a quest for sources of iron ore: like the men at the dawn of the Iron Age—he thought—but with less hope.

He tried to avoid these thoughts. He had to stand on guard against his own feeling—as if some part of him had become a stranger that had to be kept numb, and his will had to be its constant, watchful anesthetic. That part was an unknown of which he knew only that he must never see its root and never give it voice. He had lived through one dangerous moment which he could not allow to return.

It was the moment when—alone in his office, on a winter evening, held paralyzed by a newspaper spread on his desk with a long column of directives on the front page—he had heard on the radio the news of Ellis Wyatt's flaming oil fields. Then, his first reaction—before any thought of the future, any sense of disaster, any shock, terror or protest —had been to burst out laughing. He had laughed in triumph, in deliverance, in a spurting, living exultation—and the words which he had not pronounced, but felt, were: God bless you, Ellis, whatever you're doing!

When he had grasped the implications of his laughter, he had known that he was now condemned to constant vigilance against himself. Like the survivor of a heart attack, he knew that he had had a warning and that he carried within him a danger that could strike him at any moment.

He had held it off, since then. He had kept an even, cautious, severely controlled pace in his inner steps. But it had come close to him for a moment, once again. When he had looked at the order of the State Science Institute on his desk, it had seemed to him that the glow moving over the paper did not come from the furnaces outside, but from the flames of a burning oil field.

"Mr. Rearden," said the Wet Nurse, when he heard about the rejected order, "you shouldn't have done that."

"Why not?"

"There's going to be trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

"It's a government order. You can't reject a government order."

"Why can't I?"

"It's an Essential Need project, and secret, too. It's very important."

"What kind of a project is it?"

"I don't know. It's secret."

"Then how do you know it's important?"

"It said so."

"Who said so?"

"You can't doubt such a thing as that, Mr. Rearden!"

"Why can't 1?"

"But you can't."

"If I can't, then that would make it an absolute and you said there aren't any absolutes."

"That's different."

"How is it different?"

"It's the government."

"You mean, there aren't any absolutes except the government?"

"I mean, if they say it's important, then it is."

"Why?"

"I don't want you to get in trouble, Mr. Rearden, and you're going to, sure as hell. You ask too many why's. Now why do you do that?"

Rearden glanced at him and chuckled. The boy noticed his own words and grinned sheepishly, but he looked unhappy.

The man who came to see Rearden a week later was youngish and slenderish, but neither as young nor as slender as he tried to make himself appear. He wore civilian clothes and the leather leggings of a traffic cop. Rearden could not quite get it clear whether he came from the State Science Institute or from Washington.

"I understand that you refused to sell metal to the State Science Institute, Mr. Rearden," he said in a soft, confidential tone of voice.

"That's right," said Rearden.

"But wouldn't that constitute a willful disobedience of the law?"

"It's for you to interpret."

"May I ask your reason?"

"My reason is of no interest to you."

"Oh, but of course it is! We are not your enemies, Mr. Rearden. We want to be fair to you. You mustn't be afraid of the fact that you are a big industrialist. We won't hold it against you. We actually want to be as fair to you as to the lowest day laborer. We would like to know your reason."

"Print my refusal in the newspapers, and any reader will tell you my reason. It appeared in all the newspapers a little over a year ago."

"Oh, no, no, no! Why talk of newspapers? Can't we settle this as a friendly, private matter?"

"That's up to you."

"We don't want this in the newspapers."

"No?"

"No. We wouldn't want to hurt you."

Rearden glanced at him and asked, "Why does the State Science Institute need ten thousand tons of metal? What is Project X?"

"Oh, that? It's a very important project of scientific research, an undertaking of great social value that may prove of inestimable public benefit, but, unfortunately, the regulations of top policy do not permit me to tell you its nature in fuller detail."

"You know," said Rearden, "I could tell you—as my reason—that I do not wish to sell my Metal to those whose purpose is kept secret from me. I created that Metal. It is my moral responsibility to know for what purpose I permit it to be used."

"Oh, but you don't have to worry about that, Mr. Rearden! We relieve you of the responsibility."

"Suppose I don't wish to be relieved of it?"

"But . . . but that is an old-fashioned and . . . and purely theoretical attitude."

"I said I could name it as my reason. But I won't—because, in this case, I have another, inclusive reason. I would not sell any Rearden Metal to the State Science Institute for any purpose whatever, good or bad, secret or open."

"But why?"

"Listen," said Rearden slowly, "there might be some sort of justification for the savage societies in which a man had to expect that enemies could murder him at any moment and had to defend himself as best he could. But there can be no justification for a society in which a man is expected to manufacture the weapons for his own murderers."

"I don't think it's advisable to use such words, Mr. Rearden. I don't think it's practical to think in such terms. After all, the government cannot—in the pursuit of wide, national policies—take cognizance of your personal grudge against some one particular institution."

"Then don't take cognizance of it."

"What do you mean?"

"Don't come asking my reason."

"But, Mr. Rearden, we cannot let a refusal to obey the law pass unnoticed. What do you expect us to do?"

"Whatever you wish."

"But this is totally unprecedented. Nobody has ever refused to sell an essential commodity to the government. As a matter of fact, the law does not permit you to refuse to sell your Metal to any consumer, let alone the government."

"Well, why don't you arrest me, then?"

"Mr. Rearden, this is an amicable discussion. Why speak of such things as arrests?"

"Isn't that your ultimate argument against me?"

"Why bring it up?"

"Isn't it implied in every sentence of this discussion?"

"Why name it?"

"Why not?" There was no answer. "Arc you trying to hide from me the fact that if it weren't for that trump card of yours, I wouldn't have allowed you to enter this office?"

"But I'm not speaking of arrests."

"I am.11

"I don't understand you, Mr. Rearden."

"I am not helping you to pretend that this is any sort of amicable discussion. It isn't. Now do what you please about it."

There was a strange look on the man's face: bewilderment, as if he had no conception of the issue confronting him, and fear, as if he had always had full knowledge of it and had lived in dread of exposure.

Rearden felt a strange excitement; he felt as if he were about to grasp something he had never understood, as if he were on the trail of some discovery still too distant to know, except that it had the most immense importance he had ever glimpsed.

"Mr. Rearden" said the man, "the government needs your Metal.

You have to sell it to us, because surely you realize that the government's plans cannot be held up by the matter of your consent."

"A sale," said Rearden slowly, "requires the seller's consent." He got up and walked to the window. "I'll tell you what you can do.”

He pointed to the siding where ingots of Rearden Metal were being loaded onto freight cars. "There's Rearden Metal. Drive down there with your trucks—like any other looter, but without his risk, because I won't shoot you, as you know I can't—take as much of the Metal as you wish and go. Don't try to send me payment. I won't accept it.

Don't print out a check to me. It won't be cashed. If you want that Metal, you have the guns to seize it. Go ahead."

"Good God, Mr. Rearden, what would the public think!"

It was an instinctive, involuntary cry. The muscles of Rearden's face moved briefly in a soundless laughter. Both of them had understood the implications of that cry. Rearden said evenly, in the grave, unstrained tone of finality, "You need my help to make it look like a sale—like a safe, just, moral transaction. I will not help you."

The man did not argue. He rose to leave. He said only, "You will regret the stand you've taken, Mr. Rearden."

"I don't think so," said Rearden.

He knew that the incident was not ended. He knew also that the secrecy of Project X was not the main reason why these people feared to make the issue public. He knew that he felt an odd, joyous, lighthearted self-confidence. He knew that these were the right steps down the trail he had glimpsed.

Dagny lay stretched in an armchair of her living room, her eyes closed. This day had been hard, but she knew that she would see Hank Rearden tonight. The thought of it was like a lever lifting the weight of hours of senseless ugliness away from her.

She lay still, content to rest with the single purpose of waiting quietly for the sound of the key in the lock. He had not telephoned her, but she had heard that he was in New York today for a conference with producers of copper, and he never left the city till next morning, nor spent a night in New York that was not hers. She liked to wait for him. She needed a span of time as a bridge between her days and his nights.

The hours ahead, like all her nights with him, would be added, she thought, to that savings account of one's life where moments of time are stored in the pride of having been lived. The only pride of her workday was not that it had been lived, but that it had been survived.

It was wrong, she thought, it was viciously wrong that one should ever be forced to say that about any hour of one's life. But she could not think of it now. She was thinking of him, of the struggle she had watched through the months behind them, his struggle for deliverance; she had known that she could help him win, but must help him in every way except in words.

She thought of the evening last winter when he came in, took a small package from his pocket and held it out to her, saying, "I want you to have it." She opened it and stared in incredulous bewilderment at a pendant made of a single pear-shaped ruby that spurted a violent fire on the white satin of the jeweler's box. It was a famous stone, which only a dozen men in the world could properly afford to purchase; he was not one of them.

"Hank . . . why?"

"No special reason. I just wanted to see you wear it."

"Oh, no, not a thing of this kind! Why waste it? I go so rarely to occasions where one has to dress. When would I ever wear it?"

He looked at her, his glance moving slowly from her legs to her face. "I'll show you," he said.

He led her to the bedroom, he took off her clothes, without a word, in the manner of an owner undressing a person whose consent is not required. He clasped the pendant on her shoulders. She stood naked, the stone between her breasts, like a sparkling drop of blood.

"Do you think a man should give jewelry to his mistress for any purpose but his own pleasure?" he asked. "This is the way I want you to wear it. Only for me. I like to look at it. It's beautiful,"

She laughed; it was a soft, low, breathless sound. She could not speak or move, only nod silently in acceptance and obedience; she nodded several times, her hair swaying with the wide, circular movement of her head, then hanging still as she kept her head bowed to him.

She dropped down on the bed. She lay stretched lazily, her head thrown back, her arms at her sides, palms pressed to the rough texture of the bedspread, one leg bent, the long line of the other extended across the dark blue linen of the spread, the stone glowing like a wound in the semi-darkness, throwing a star of rays against her skin.

Her eyes were half-closed in the mocking, conscious triumph of being admired, but her mouth was half-open in helpless, begging expectation. He stood across the room, looking at her, at her flat stomach drawn in, as her breath was drawn, at the sensitive body of a sensitive consciousness. He said, his voice low, intent and oddly quiet: "Dagny, if some artist painted you as you are now, men would come to look at the painting to experience a moment that nothing could give them in their own lives. They would call it great art. They would not know the nature of what they felt, but the painting would show them everything—even that you're not some classical Venus, but the Vice-President of a railroad, because that's part of it—even what I am, because that's part of it, too. Dagny, they'd feel it and go away and sleep with the first barmaid in sight—and they'd never try to reach what they had felt. I wouldn't want to seek it from a painting.

I'd want it real. I'd take no pride in any hopeless longing. I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it.

Do you understand?"

"Oh yes, Hank, 7 understand!" she said. Do you, my darling?—do you understand it fully?—she thought, but did not say it aloud.

On the evening of a blizzard, she came home to find an enormous spread of tropical flowers standing in her living room against the dark glass of windows battered by snowflakes. They were stems of Hawaiian Torch Ginger, three feet tall; their large heads were cones of petals that had the sensual texture of soft leather and the color of blood. "I saw them in a florist's window," he told her when he came, that night.

"I liked seeing them through a blizzard. But there's nothing as wasted as an object in a public window."

She began to find flowers in her apartment at unpredictable times, flowers sent without a card, but with the signature of the sender in their fantastic shapes, in the violent colors, in the extravagant cost. He brought her a gold necklace made of small hinged squares that formed a spread of solid gold to cover her neck and shoulders, like the collar of a knight's armor—"Wear it with a black dress," he ordered. He brought her a set of glasses that were tall, slender blocks of square-cut crystal, made by a famous jeweler. She watched the way he held one of the glasses when she served him a drink—as if the touch of the texture under his fingers, the taste of the drink and the sight of her face were the single form of an indivisible moment of enjoyment. "I used to see things I liked," he said, "but I never bought them. There didn't seem to be much meaning in it. There is, now."

He telephoned her at the office, one winter morning, and said, not in the tone of an invitation, but in the tone of an executive's order, "We're going to have dinner together tonight, T want you to dress. Do you have any sort of blue evening gown? Wear it."

The dress she wore was a slender tunic of dusty blue that gave her a look of unprotected simplicity, the look of a statue in the blue shadows of a garden under the summer sun. What he brought and put over her shoulders was a cape of blue fox that swallowed her from the curve of her chin to the tips of her sandals. "Hank, that's preposterous"—she laughed—"it's not my kind of thing!" "No?" he asked, drawing her to a mirror.

The huge blanket of fur made her look like a child bundled for a snowstorm; the luxurious texture transformed the innocence of the awkward bundle into the elegance of a perversely intentional contrast: into a look of stressed sensuality. The fur was a soft brown, dimmed by an aura of blue that could not be seen, only felt like an enveloping mist, like a suggestion of color grasped not by one's eyes but by one's hands, as if one felt, without contact, the sensation of sinking one's palms into the fur's softness. The cape left nothing to be seen of her, except the brown of her hair, the blue-gray of her eyes, the shape of her mouth.


Date: 2015-12-17; view: 561


<== previous page | next page ==>
THE MAN WHO BELONGED ON EARTH 2 page | THE MAN WHO BELONGED ON EARTH 4 page
doclecture.net - lectures - 2014-2024 year. Copyright infringement or personal data (0.017 sec.)