THE FACE WITHOUT PAIN OR FEAR OR GUILT

The silence of her apartment and the motionless perfection of objects that had remained just as she had left them a month before, struck her with a sense of relief and desolation together, when she entered her living room. The silence gave her an illusion of privacy and ownership; the sight of the objects reminded her that they were preserving a moment she could not recapture, as she could not undo the events that had happened since.

There was still a remnant of daylight beyond the windows. She had left the office earlier than, she intended, unable to summon the effort for any task that could be postponed till morning. This was new to her —and it was new that she should now feel more at home in her apartment than in her office.

She took a shower, and stood for long, blank minutes, letting the water run over her body, but stepped out hastily when she realized that what she wanted to wash off was not the dust of the drive from the country, but the feel of the office.

She dressed, lighted a cigarette and walked into the living room, to stand at the window, looking at the city, as she had stood looking at the countryside at the start of this day.

She had said she would give her life for one more year on the railroad. She was back; but this was not the joy of working; it was only the clear, cold peace of a decision reached—and the stillness of unadmitted pain.

Clouds had wrapped the sky and had descended as fog to wrap the streets below, as if the sky were engulfing the city. She could see the whole of Manhattan Island, a long, triangular shape cutting into an invisible ocean. It looked like the prow of a sinking ship; a few tall buildings still rose above it, like funnels, but the rest was disappearing under gray-blue coils, going down slowly into vapor and space.

This was how they had gone—she thought—Atlantis, the city that sank into the ocean, and all the other kingdoms that vanished, leaving the same legend in all the languages of men, and the same longing.

She felt—-as she had felt it one spring night, slumped across her desk in the crumbling office of the John Galt Line, by a window facing a dark alley—the sense and vision of her own world, which she would never reach. , , . You—she thought—whoever you are, whom ,1 have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon, you whose presence I had always felt in the streets of the city and whose world I had wanted to build, it is my love for you that had kept me moving, my love and my hope to reach you and my wish to be worthy of you on the day when I would stand before you face to face. Now I know that I shall never find you—that it is not to be reached or lived—but what is left of my life is still yours, and I will go on in your name, even though it is a name I'll never learn, I will go on serving you, even though I'm never to win, I will go on, to be worthy of you on the day when I would have met you, even though I won't. . . . She had never accepted hopelessness, but she stood at the window and, addressed to the shape of a fogbound city, it was her self-dedication to unrequited love.

The doorbell rang.

She turned with indifferent astonishment to open, the door—but she knew that she should have expected him, when she saw that it was Francisco d'Anconia. She felt no shock and no rebellion, only the cheerless serenity of her assurance—and she raised her head to face him, with a slow, deliberate movement, as if telling him that she had chosen her stand and that she stood in the open.

His face was grave and calm; the look of happiness was gone, but the amusement of the playboy had not returned. He looked as if all masks were down, he looked direct, tightly disciplined, intent upon a purpose, he looked like a man able to know the earnestness of action, as she had once expected him to look—he had never seemed so attractive as he did in this moment—and she noted, in astonishment, her sudden feeling that he was not a man who had deserted her, but a man whom she had deserted.

"Dagny, are you able to talk about it now?"

"Yes—if you wish. Come in."

He glanced briefly at her living room, her home which he had never entered, then his eyes came back to her. He was watching her attentively. He seemed to know that the quiet simplicity of her manner was the worst of all signs for his purpose, that it was like a spread of ashes where no flicker of pain could be revived, that even pain would have been a form of fire.

"Sit down, Francisco."

She remained standing before him, as if consciously letting him see that she had nothing to hide, not even the weariness of her posture, the price she had paid for this day and her carelessness of price.

"I don't think I can stop you now," he said, "if you've made your choice. But if there's one chance left to stop you, it's a chance I have to take."

She shook her head slowly. "There isn't. And—what for, Francisco?

You've given up. What difference does it make to you whether I perish with the railroad or away from it?"

"I haven't given up the future,"

"What future?"

"The day when the looters will perish, but we won't."

"If Taggart Transcontinental is to perish with the looters, then so am I."

He did not take his eyes off her face and he did not answer.

She added dispassionately, "I thought I could live without it. I can't.

I'll never try it again. Francisco, do you remember?—we both believed, when we started, that the only sin on earth was to do things badly, I still believe it." The first note of life shuddered in her voice. "I can't stand by and watch what they did at that tunnel. I can't accept what they're all accepting—Francisco, it's the thing we thought so monstrous, you and I!—the belief that disasters are one's natural fate, to be borne, not fought. I can't accept submission. I can't accept helplessness. I can't accept renunciation. So long as there's a railroad left to run, I'll run it."

"In order to maintain the looters' world?"

"In order to maintain the last strip of mine."

"Dagny," he said slowly, "I know why one loves one's work. I know what it means to you, the job of running trains. But you would not run them if they were empty. Dagny, what is it you see when you think of a moving train?"

She glanced at the city. "The life of a man of ability who might have perished in that catastrophe, but will escape the next one, which I'll prevent—a man who has an intransigent mind and an unlimited ambition, and is in love with his own life . . . the kind of man who is what we were when we started, you and I. You gave him up. I can't."

He closed his eyes for an instant, and the tightening movement of his mouth was a smile, a smile substituting for a moan of understanding, amusement and pain. He asked, his voice gravely gentle, "Do you think that you can still serve him—that kind of man—by running the railroad?"

"Yes."

"All right, Dagny. I won't try to stop you. So long as you still think that, nothing can stop you, or should. You will stop on the day when you'll discover that your work has been placed in the service, not of that man's life, but of his destruction."

"Francisco!" It was a cry of astonishment and despair. "You do understand it, you know what I mean by that kind of man, you see him, too!"

"Oh yes," he said simply, casually, looking at some point in space within the room, almost as if he were seeing a real person. He added, "Why should you be astonished? You said that we were of his kind once, you and I. We still are. But one of us has betrayed him."

"Yes," she said sternly, "one of us has. We cannot serve him by renunciation."

"We cannot serve him by making terms with his destroyers."

"I'm not making terms with them. They need me. They know it.

It's my terms that I'll make them accept."

"By playing a game in which they gain benefits in exchange for harming you?"

"If I can keep Taggart Transcontinental in existence, it's the only benefit I want. What do I care if they make me pay ransoms? Let them have what they want. I'll have the railroad."

He smiled. "Do you think so? Do you think that their need of you is your protection? Do you think that you can give them what they want? No, you won't quit until you see, of your own sight and judgment, what it is that they really want. You know, Dagny, we were taught that some things belong to God and others to Caesar. Perhaps their God would permit it. But the man you say we're serving—he docs not permit it. He permits no divided allegiance, no war between your mind and your body, no gulf between your values and your actions, no tributes to Caesar. He permits no Caesars."

"For twelve years," she said softly, "I would have thought it inconceivable that there might come a day when I would have to beg your forgiveness on my knees. Now I think it's possible. If I come to see that you're right, I will. But not until then."

"You will. But not on your knees."

He was looking at her, as if he were seeing her body as she stood before him, even though his eyes were directed at her face, and his glance told her what form of atonement and surrender he was seeing in the future. She saw the effort he made to look away, his hope that she had not seen his glance or understood it, his silent struggle, betrayed by the tension of a few muscles under the skin of his face—the face she knew so well, "Until then, Dagny, remember that we're enemies. I didn't want to tell you this, but you're the first person who almost stepped into heaven and came back to earth. You've glimpsed too much, so you have to know this clearly. It's you that I'm fighting, not your brother James or Wesley Mouch. It's you that I have to defeat. I am out to end all the things that are most precious to you right now. While you'll struggle to save Taggart Transcontinental, I will be working to destroy it. Don't ever ask me for help or money. You know my reasons. Now you may hate me—as, from your stand, you should."

She raised her head a little, there was no perceptible change in her posture, it was no more than her awareness of her own body and of its meaning to him, but for the length of one sentence she stood as a woman, the suggestion of defiance coming only from the faintly stressed spacing of her words: "And what will it do to you?"

He looked at her, in full understanding, but neither admitting nor denying the confession she wanted to tear from him. "That is no one's concern but mine," he answered.

It was she who weakened, but realized, while saying it, that this was still more cruel: "I don't hate you. I've tried to, for years, but I never will, no matter what we do, either one of us."

"I know it," he said, his voice low, so that she did not hear the pain, but felt it within herself as if by direct reflection from him.

"Francisco!" she cried, in desperate defense of him against herself.

"How can you do what you're doing?"

"By the grace of my love"—for you, said his eyes—"for the man," said his voice, "who did not perish in your catastrophe and who will never perish,"

She stood silently still for a moment, as if in respectful acknowledgment.

"I wish I could spare you what you're going to go through," he said, the gentleness of his voice saying: It's not me that you should pity.

"But I can't. Every one of us has to travel that road by his own steps.

But it's the same road."

"Where does it lead?"

He smiled, as if softly closing a door on the questions that he would not answer. "To Atlantis," he said.

"What?" she asked, startled.

"Don't you remember?—the lost city that only the spirits of heroes can enter."

The connection that struck her suddenly had been struggling in her mind since morning, like a dim anxiety she had had no time to identify.

She had known it, but she had thought only of his own fate and his personal decision, she had thought of him as acting alone. Now she remembered a wider danger and sensed the vast, undefined shape of the enemy she was facing.

"You're one of them," she said slowly, "aren't you?"

"Of whom?"

"Was it you in Ken Danagger's office?"

He smiled. "No." But she noted that he did not ask what she meant.

"Is there—you would know it—is there actually a destroyer loose in the world?"

"Of course."

"Who is it?"

"You."

She shrugged; her face was growing hard. "The men who've quit, are they still alive or dead?"

"They're dead—as far as you're concerned. But there's to be a Second Renaissance in the world. I'll wait for it."

"No!" The sudden violence of her voice was in personal answer to him, to one of the two things he had wanted her to hear in his words.

"No, don't wait for me!"

"I'll always wait for you, no matter what we do, either one of us."

The sound they heard was the turning of a key in the lock of the entrance door. The door opened and Hank Rearden came in.

He stopped briefly on the threshold, then walked slowly into the living room, his hand slipping the key into his pocket.

She knew that he had seen Francisco's face before he had seen hers.

He glanced at her, but his eyes came back to Francisco, as if this were the only face he was now able to see.

It was at Francisco's face that she was afraid to look. The effort she made to pull her glance along the curve of a few steps felt as if she were pulling a weight beyond her power. Francisco had risen to his feet, as if in the unhurried, automatic manner of a d'Anconia trained to the code of courtesy. There was nothing that Rearden could see in his face. But what she saw in it was worse than she had feared.

"What are you doing here?" asked Rearden, in the tone one would use to address a menial caught in a drawing room.

"I see that I have no right to ask you the same question," said Francisco. She knew what effort was required to achieve the clear, toneless quality of his voice. His eyes kept returning to Rearden's right hand, as if he were still seeing the key between, his fingers.

"Then answer it," said Rearden.

"Hank, any questions you wish to ask should be asked of me," she said.

Rearden did not seem to see or hear her. "Answer it," he repeated.

"There is only one answer which you would have the right to demand," said Francisco, "so I will answer you that that is not the reason of my presence here."

"There is only one reason for your presence in the house of any woman," said Rearden. "And I mean, any woman—as far as you're concerned. Do you think that I believe it now, that confession of yours or anything you ever said to me?"

"I have given you grounds not to trust me, but none to include Miss Taggart."

"Don't tell me that you have no chance here, never had and never will. I know it. But that I should find you here on the first—"

"Hank, if you wish to accuse me—" she began, but Rearden whirled to her.

"God, no, Dagny, I don't! But you shouldn't be seen speaking to him. You shouldn't deal with him in any way. You don't know him. I do." He turned to Francisco. "What are you after? Are you hoping to include her among your kind of conquests or—"

"No!" It was an involuntary cry and it sounded futile, with its passionate sincerity offered—to be rejected—as its only proof.

"No? Then are you here on a matter of business? Are you setting a trap, as you -did for me? What sort of double-cross are you preparing for her?"

"My purpose . . . was not . . . a matter of business."

"Then what was it?"

"If you still care to believe me, I can tell you only that it involved no . . . betrayal of any kind."

"Do you think that you may still discuss betrayal, in my presence?”

"I will answer you some day. I cannot answer you now."

"You don't like to be reminded of it, do you? You've stayed away from me since, haven't you? You didn't expect to see me here? You didn't want to face me?" But he knew that Francisco was facing him as no one else did these days—he saw the eyes held straight to meet his, the features composed, without emotion, without defense or appeal, set to endure whatever was coming—he saw the open, unprotected look of courage—this was the face of the man he had loved, the man who had set him free of guilt—and he found himself fighting against the knowledge that this face still held him, above all else, above his month of impatience for the sight of Dagny. "Why don't you defend yourself, if you have nothing to hide? Why are you here? Why were you stunned to see me enter?"

"Hank, stop it!" Dagny's voice was a cry, and she drew back, knowing that violence was the most dangerous element to introduce into this moment.

Both men turned to her. "Please let me be the one to answer," Francisco said quietly.

"I told you that I hoped I'd never see him again," said Rearden.

"I'm sorry if it has to be here. It doesn't concern you, but there's something he must be paid for."

"If that is . . . your purpose," Francisco said with effort, "haven't you . . . achieved it already?"

"What's the matter?" Rearden's face was frozen, his lips barely moving, but his voice had the sound of a chuckle. "Is this your way of asking for mercy?"

The instant of silence was Francisco's strain to a greater effort.

"Yes . . . if you wish," he answered.

"Did you grant it when you held my future in your hands?"

"You are justified in anything you wish to think of me. But since it doesn't concern Miss Taggart . . . would you now permit me to leave?"

"No! Do you want to evade it, like all those other cowards? Do you want to escape?"

"I will come anywhere you require any time you wish. But I would rather it were not in Miss Taggart's presence."

"Why not? I want it to be in her presence, since this is the one place you had no right to come. I have nothing left to protect from you, you've taken more than the looters can ever take, you've destroyed everything you've touched, but here is one thing you're not -going to touch." He knew that the rigid absence of emotion in Francisco's face was the strongest evidence of emotion, the evidence of some abnormal effort at control—he knew that this was torture and that he, Rearden, was driven blindly by a feeling which resembled a torturer's enjoyment, except that he was now unable to tell whether he was torturing Francisco or himself. "You're worse than the looters, because you betray with full understanding of that which you're betraying. I don't know what form of corruption is your motive—but I want you to learn that there are things beyond your reach, beyond your aspiration or your malice."

"You have nothing . . . to fear from me . . . now."

"I want you to learn that you are not to think of her, not to look at her, not to approach her. Of all men, it's you who're not to appear in her presence." He knew that he was driven by a desperate anger at his own feeling for this man, that the feeling still lived, that it was this feeling which he had to outrage and destroy. "Whatever your motive, it's from any contact with you that she has to be protected."

"IE I gave you my word—" He stopped.

Rearden chuckled. "I know what they mean, your words, your convictions, your friendship and your oath by the only woman you ever—"

He stopped. They all knew what this meant, in the same instant that Rearden knew it.

He made a step toward Francisco; he asked, pointing at Dagny, his voice low and strangely unlike his own voice, as if it neither came from nor were addressed to a living person, "Is this the woman you love?"

Francisco closed his eyes.

"Don't ask him that!" The cry was Dagny's.

"Is this the woman you love?"

Francisco answered, looking at her, "Yes."

Rearden's hand rose, swept down and slapped Francisco's face.

The scream came from Dagny. When she could see again—after an instant that felt as if the blow had struck her own cheek—Francisco's hands were the first thing she saw. The heir of the d'Anconias stood thrown back against a table, clasping the edge behind him, not to support himself, but to stop his own hands. She saw the rigid stillness of his body,, a body that was pulled too straight but seemed broken, with the slight, unnatural angles of his waistline and shoulders, with his arms held stiff but slanted back—he stood as if the effort not to move were turning the force of his violence against himself, as if the motion he resisted were running through his muscles as a tearing pain. She saw his convulsed fingers struggling to grow fast to the table's edge, she wondered which would break first, the wood of the table or the bones of the man, and she knew that Rearden's life hung in the balance.

When her eyes moved up to Francisco's face, she saw no sign of struggle, only the skin of his temples pulled tight and the planes of his cheeks drawn inward, seeming faintly more hollow than usual. It made his face look naked, pure and young. She felt terror because she was seeing in his eyes the tears which were not there. His eyes were brilliant and dry. He was looking at Rearden, but it was not Rearden that he was seeing. He looked as if he were facing another presence in the room and as if his glance were saying: If this is what you demand of me, then even this is yours, yours to accept and mine to endure, there is no more than this in me to offer you, but let me be proud to know that I can offer so much. She saw—with a single artery beating under the skin of his throat, with a froth of pink in the corner of his mouth—the look of an enraptured dedication which was almost a smile, and she knew that she was witnessing Francisco d'Anconia's greatest achievement.

When she felt herself shaking and heard her own voice, it seemed to meet the last echo of her scream in the air of the room—and she realized how brief a moment had passed between. Her voice had the savage sound of rising to deliver a blow and it was crying to Rearden: "—to protect me from him? Long before you ever—"

"Don't!" Francisco's head jerked to her, the brief snap of his voice held all of his unreleased violence, and she knew it was an order that had to be obeyed.

Motionless but for the slow curve of his head, Francisco turned to Rearden. She saw his hands leave the edge of the table and hang relaxed by his sides. It was Rearden that he was now seeing, and there was nothing in Francisco's face except the exhaustion of effort, but Rearden knew suddenly how much this man had loved him.

"Within the extent of your knowledge," Francisco said quietly, "you are right."

Neither expecting nor permitting an answer, he turned to leave. He bowed to Dagny, inclining his head in a manner that appeared as a simple gesture of leave-taking to Rearden, as a gesture of acceptance to her. Then he left.

Rearden stood looking after him, knowing—without context and with absolute certainty—that he would give his life for the power not to have committed the action he had committed.

When he turned to Dagny, his face looked drained, open and faintly attentive, as if he were not questioning her about the words she had cut off, but were waiting for them to come.

A shudder of pity ran through her body and ended in the movement of shaking her head: she did not know for which of the two men the pity was intended, but it made her unable to speak and she shook her head over and over again, as if trying desperately to negate some vast, impersonal suffering that had made them all its victims.

"If there's something that must be said, say it." His voice was toneless.

The sound she made was half-chuckle, half-moan—it was not a desire for vengeance, but a desperate sense of justice that drove the cutting bitterness of her voice, as she cried, consciously throwing the words at his face, "You wanted to know the name of that other man?

The man. I slept with? The man who had me first? It was Francisco d'Anconia!"

She saw the force of the blow by seeing his face swept blank. She knew that if justice was her purpose, she had achieved it—because this slap was worse than the one he had dealt.

She felt suddenly calm, knowing that her words had had to be said for the sake of all three of them. The despair of a helpless victim left her, she was not a victim any longer, she was one of the contestants, willing to bear the responsibility of action. She stood facing him, waiting for any answer he would choose to give her, feeling almost as if it were her turn to be subjected to violence.

She did not know what form of torture he was enduring, or what he saw being wrecked within him and kept himself the only one to see.

There was no sign of pain to give her any warning; he looked as if he were just a man who stood still in the middle of a room, making his consciousness absorb a fact that it refused to absorb. Then she noticed that he did not change his posture, that even his hands hung by his sides with the fingers half-bent as they had been for a long time, it seemed to her that she could feel the heavy numbness of the blood stopping in his fingers—and this was the only clue to his suffering she was able to find, but it told her that that which he felt left him no power to feel anything else, not even the existence of his own body.

She waited, her pity vanishing and becoming respect.

Then she saw his eyes move slowly from her face down the length of her body, and she knew the sort of torture he was now choosing to experience, because it was a glance of a nature he could not hide from her. She knew that he was seeing her as she had been at seventeen, he was seeing her with the rival he hated, he was seeing them together as they would be now, a sight he could neither endure nor resist. She saw the protection of control dropping from his face, but he did not care whether he let her see his face alive and naked, because there now was nothing to read in it except an unrevealing violence, some part of which resembled hatred.

He seized her shoulders, and she felt prepared to accept that he would now kill her or beat her into unconsciousness, and in the moment when she felt certain that he had thought of it, she felt her body thrown against him and his mouth falling on hers, more brutally than the act of a beating would have permitted.

She found herself, in terror, twisting her body to resist, and, in exultation, twisting her arms around him, holding him, letting her lips bring blood to his, knowing that she had never wanted him as she did in this moment.

When he threw her down on the couch, she knew, to the rhythm of the beat of his body, that it was the act of his victory over his rival and of his surrender to him, the act of ownership brought to unendurable violence by the thought of the man whom it was defying, the act of transforming his hatred for the pleasure that man had known into the intensity of his own pleasure, his conquest of that man by means of her body—she felt Francisco's presence through Rearden's mind, she felt as if she were surrendering to both men, to that which she had worshipped in both of them, that which they held in common, that essence of character which had made of her love for each an act of loyalty to both. She knew also that this was his rebellion against the world around them, against its worship of degradation, against the long torment of his wasted days and lightless struggle—this was what he wished to assert and, alone with her in the half-darkness high in space above a city of ruins, to hold as the last of his property.

Afterwards, they lay still, his face on her shoulder. The reflection of a distant electric sign kept beating in faint flashes on the ceiling above her head.

He reached for her hand and slipped her fingers under his face to let his mouth rest against her palm for a moment, so gently that she felt his motive more than his touch.

After a while, she got up, she reached for a cigarette, lighted it, then held it out to him with a slight, questioning lift of her hand; he nodded, still sitting half-stretched on the couch; she placed the cigarette between his lips and lighted another for herself. She felt a great sense of peace between them, and the intimacy of the unimportant gestures underscored the importance of the things they were not saying to each other. Everything was said, she thought—but knew that it waited to be acknowledged.

She saw his eyes move to the entrance door once in a while and remain on it for long moments, as if he were still seeing the man who had left.

He said quietly, "He could have beaten me by letting me have the truth, any time he wished. Why didn't he?"

She shrugged, spreading her hands in a gesture of helpless sadness, because they both knew the answer. She asked, "He did mean a great deal to you, didn't he?"

"He does."

The two dots of fire at the tips of their cigarettes had moved slowly to the tips of their fingers, with the small glow of an occasional flare and the soft crumbling of ashes as sole movement in the silence, when the doorbell rang. They knew that it was not the man they wished but could not hope to see return, and she frowned with sudden anger as she went to open the door. It took her a moment to remember that the innocuously courteous figure she saw bowing to her with a standard smile of welcome was the assistant manager of the apartment house.

"Good evening, Miss Taggart. We're so glad to see you back. I just came on duty and heard that you had returned and wanted to greet you in person."

"Thank you." She stood at the door, not moving to admit him.

"I have a letter that came for you about a week ago, Miss Taggart," he said, reaching into his pocket. "It looked as if it might be important, but being marked 'personal,' it was obviously not intended to be sent to your office and, besides, they did not know your address, either—so not knowing where to forward it, I kept it in our safe and I thought I'd deliver it to you in person."

The envelope he handed to her was marked: Registered—Air Mail —Special Delivery—Personal. The return address said: Quentin Daniels, Utah Institute of Technology;. Afton, Utah.

"Oh . . . Thank you."

The assistant manager noted that her voice went dropping toward a whisper, the polite disguise for a gasp, he noted that she stood looking down at the sender's name much longer than was necessary, so he repeated his good wishes and departed.

She was tearing the envelope open as she walked toward Rearden, and she stopped in the middle of the room to read the letter. It was typewritten on thin paper—he could see the black rectangles of the paragraphs through the transparent sheets—and he could see her face as she read them.

He expected it, by the time he saw her come to the end: she leaped to the telephone, he heard the violent whirl of the dial and her voice saying with trembling urgency, "Long-distance, please . . . Operator, get me the Utah Institute of Technology at Afton, Utah!"

He asked, approaching, "What is it?"

She extended the letter, not looking at him, her eyes fixed on the telephone, as if she could force it to answer.

The letter said: Dear Miss Taggart: I have fought it out for three weeks, I did not want to do it, I know how this will hit you and I know every argument you could offer me, because I have used them all against myself—but this is to tell you that I am quitting.

I cannot work under the terms of Directive 10-289—though not for the reason its perpetrators intended. I know that their abolition of all scientific research does not mean a damn to you or me, and that you would want me to continue. But I have to quit, because I do not wish to succeed any longer.

I do not wish to work in a world that regards me as a slave. I do not wish to be of any value to people. If I succeeded in rebuilding the motor, I would not let you place it in their service. I would not take it upon my conscience that anything produced by my mind should be used to bring them comfort.

I know that if we succeed, they will be only too eager to expropriate the motor. And for the sake of that prospect, we have to accept the position of criminals, you and I, and live under the threat of being arrested at any moment at their whim. And this is the thing that I cannot take, even were I able to take all the rest: that in order to give them an inestimable benefit, we should be made martyrs to the men who, but for us, could not have conceived of it. I might have forgiven the rest, but when I think of this, I say: May they be damned, I will see them all die of starvation, myself included, rather than forgive them for this or permit it!

To tell you the full truth, I want to succeed, to solve the secret of the motor, as much as ever. So I shall continue to work on it for my own sole pleasure and for as long as I last. But if I solve it, it will remain my private secret. I will not release it for any commercial use. Therefore, I cannot take your money any longer.

Commercialism is supposed to be despicable, so all those people should truly approve of my decision, and I—I'm tired of helping those who despise me.

I don't know how long I will last or what I will do in the future.

For the moment, I intend to remain in my job at this Institute.

But if any of its trustees or receivers should remind me that I am now legally forbidden to cease being a janitor, I will 'quit.

You had given me my greatest chance and if I am now giving you a painful blow, perhaps T should ask you to forgive me, I think that you love your work as much as I loved mine, so you will know that my decision was not easy to make, but that I had to make it.

It is a strange feeling—writing this letter. I do not intend to die, but I am giving up the world and this feels like the letter of a suicide. So I want to say that of all the people I have known, you are the only person I regret leaving behind.

Sincerely yours, Quentin Daniels When he looked up from the letter, he heard her saying, as he had heard her through the words of the typewritten lines, her voice rising closer to despair each time: "Keep ringing, Operator! . . . Please keep ringing!"

"What can you tell him?" he asked. "There are no arguments to offer."

"I won't have a chance to tell him! He's gone by now. It was a week ago. I'm sure he's gone. They've got him."

"Who got him?"

"Yes, Operator, I'll hold the line, keep trying!"

"What would you tell him if he answered?"

"I'd beg him to go on taking my money, with no strings attached, no conditions, just so he'll have the means to continue! I'll promise him that if we're still in a looters' world when and if he succeeds, I won't ask him to give me the motor or even to tell me its secret. But if, by that time, we're free—" She stopped.

"If we're free . . ."

"All I want from him now is that he doesn't give up and vanish, like . . . like all those others. I don't want to let them get him. If it's not too late—oh God, I don't want them to get him! . . . Yes, Operator, keep ringing!"

"What good will it do us, even if he continues to work?"

"That's all I'll beg him to do—just to continue. Maybe we'll never get a chance to use the motor in the future. But I want to know that somewhere in the world there's still a great brain at work on a great attempt—and that we still have a chance at a future. , , . If that motor is abandoned again, then there's nothing but Starnesville ahead of us."

"Yes. I know."

She held the receiver pressed to her ear, her arm stiff with the effort not to tremble. She waited, and he heard, in the silence, the futile clicking of the unanswered call.

"He's gone," she said. 'They got him. A week is much longer than they need. I don't know how they learn when the time is right, but this"

—she pointed at the letter—"this was their time and they wouldn't have missed it."

"Who?"

"The destroyer's agents,"

"Are you beginning to think that they really exist?"

"Yes."

"Are you serious?"

"I am. I've met one of them."

"Who?"

"I'll tell you later. I don't know who their leader is, but I'm going to find out, one of these days. I'm going to find out. I'll be damned if I let them—"

She broke off on a gasp; he saw the change in her face the moment before he heard the click of a distant receiver being lifted and the sound of a man's voice saying, across the wire, "Hello?"

"Daniels! Is that you? You're alive? You're still there?"

"Why, yes. Is this you, Miss Taggart? What's the matter?"

"I . . . I thought you were gone."

"Oh, I'm sorry, I just heard the phone ringing, I was out in the back lot, gathering carrots."

""Carrots?" She was laughing with hysterical relief.

"I have my own vegetable patch out there. Used to be the Institute's parking lot. Are you calling from New York, Miss Taggart?"

"Yes. I just received your letter. Just now. I . . . I had been away."

"Oh." There was a pause, then he said quietly, "There's really nothing more to be said about it, Miss Taggart."

"Tell me, are you going away?"

"No."

"You're not planning to go?"

"No. Where?"

"Do you intend to remain at the Institute?"

"Yes."

"For how long? Indefinitely?"

"Yes—as far as I know."

"Has anyone approached you?"

"About what?"

"About leaving."

"No. Who?"

"Listen, Daniels, I won't try to discuss your letter over the phone.

But I must speak to you. I'm coming to see you. I'll get there as fast as I can."

"I don't want you to do that, Miss Taggart. I don't want you to go to such an effort, when it's useless."

"Give me a chance, won't you? You don't have to promise to change your mind, you don't have to commit yourself to anything—only to give me a hearing. If I want to come, it's my risk, I'm taking it. There are things I want to say to you, I'm asking you only-for the chance to say them."

"You know that I will always give you that chance, Miss Taggart."

"I'm leaving for Utah at once. Tonight. But there's one thing I want you to promise me. Will you promise to wait for me? Will you promise to be there when I arrive?"

"Why . . . of course, Miss Taggart. Unless I die or something happens outside my power—but I don't expect it to happen."

"Unless you die, will you wait for me no matter what happens?"

"Of course."

"Do you give me your word that you'll wait?"

"Yes, Miss Taggart."

"Thank you. Good night."

"Good night, Miss Taggart."

She pressed the receiver down and picked it up again in the same sweep of her hand and rapidly dialed a number.

"Eddie? . . . Have them hold the Comet for me. . . . Yes, tonight's Comet. Give orders to have my car attached, then come here, to my place, at once," She glanced at her watch. "It's eight-twelve. I have an hour to make it. I don't think I'll hold them up too long. I'll talk to you while I pack."

She hung up and turned to Rearden.

"Tonight?" he said.

"I have to."

"I guess so. Don't you have to go to Colorado, anyway?"

"Yes. I intended to leave tomorrow night. But I think Eddie can manage to take care of my office, and I'd better start now. It takes three days"—she remembered—"it will now take five days to reach Utah.

I have to go by train, there are people I have to see on the line—this can't be delayed, either."

"How long will you stay in Colorado?"

"Hard to tell."

"Wire me when you get there, will you? If it looks as if it's going to be long, I'll join you there."

This was the only expression he could give to the words he had desperately wished to say to her, had waited for, had come here to say, and now wished to pronounce more than ever, but knew that it must not be said tonight.

She knew, by a faint, solemn stress in the tone of his voice, that this was his acceptance of her confession, his surrender, his forgiveness. She asked, "Can you leave the mills?"

"It will take me a few days to arrange, but I can."

He knew what her words were admitting, acknowledging and forgiving him, when she said, "Hank, why don't you meet me in Colorado in a week? If you fly your plane, we'll both get there at the same time. And then we'll come back together."

"All right . . . dearest."

She dictated a list of instructions, while pacing her bedroom, gathering her clothes, hastily packing a suitcase. Rearden had left; Eddie Willers sat at her dressing table, making notes. He seemed to work in his usual manner of unquestioning efficiency, as if he were not aware of the perfume bottles and powder boxes, as if the dressing table were a desk and the room were only an office.

"I'll phone you from Chicago, Omaha, Flagstaff and Afton," she said, tossing underwear into the suitcase. "If you need me in between, call any operator along the line, with orders to flag the train."

"The Comet?" he asked mildly.

"Hell, yes!—the Comet.”

"Okay."

"Don't hesitate to call, if you have to."

"Okay. But I don't think I'll have to."

"We'll manage. We'll work by long-distance phone, just as we did when we—" She stopped.

"—when we were building the John Galt Line?" he asked quietly.

They glanced at each other, but said nothing else.

"What's the latest report on the construction crews?" she asked.

"Everything's under way. I got word, just after you left the office, that the grading gangs have started—out of Laurel, Kansas, and out of Jasper, Oklahoma. The rail is on its way to them from Silver Springs.

It will be all right. The hardest thing to find was—M

"The men?"

"Yes. The men to put in charge. We had trouble out West, over the Elgin to Midland stretch. All the men we were counting on are gone. I couldn't find anyone able to assume responsibility, neither on our line nor elsewhere. I even tried to get Dan Conway, but—"

"Dan Conway?" she asked, stopping.

"Yes. I did. I tried. Do you remember how he used to have rail laid at the rate of five miles a day, right in that part of the country? Oh, I know he'd have reason to hate our guts, but what does it matter now?

I found him—he's living on a ranch out in Arizona. I phoned him myself and I begged him to save us. Just to take charge, for one night, of building five and a half miles of track. Five and a half miles, Dagny, that we're stuck with—and he's the greatest railroad builder living! I told him that I was asking him to do it as a gesture of charity to us, if he would. You know, I think he understood me. He wasn't angry. He sounded sad. But he wouldn't do it. He said one must not try to bring people back out of the grave. . . . He wished me luck. I think he meant it. . . . You know, I don't think he's one of those that the destroyer knocked out. I think he just broke by himself."

"Yes. I know he did."

Eddie saw the expression on her face and pulled himself up hastily.

"Oh, we finally found a man to put in charge at Elgin," he said, forcing his voice to sound confident. "Don't worry, the track will be built long before you get there."

She glanced at him with the faint suggestion of a smile, thinking of how often she had said these words to him and of the desperate bravery with which he was now trying to tell her: Don't worry. He caught her glance, he understood, and the answering hint of his smile had a touch of embarrassed apology.

He turned back to his note pad, feeling anger at himself, sensing that he had broken his own unstated commandment: Don't make it harder for her. He should not have told her about Dan Conway, he thought; he should not have said anything to remind them both of the despair they would feel, if they felt. He wondered what was the matter with him: he thought it inexcusable that he should find his discipline slipping just because this was a room, not an office.

She went on speaking—and he listened, looking down at his pad, making a brief notation once in a while. He did not permit himself to look at her again.

She threw the door of her closet open, jerked a suit off a hanger and folded it rapidly, while her voice went on with unhurried precision.

He did not look up, he was aware of her only by means of sound: the sound of the swift movements and of the measured voice. He knew what was wrong with him, he thought; he did not want her to leave, he did not want to lose her again, after so brief a moment of reunion. But to indulge any personal loneliness, at a time when he knew how desperately the railroad needed her in Colorado, was an act of disloyalty he had never committed before—and he felt a vague, desolate sense of guilt.

('Send out orders that the Comet is to stop at every division point," she said, "and that all division superintendents are to prepare for me a report on—"

He glanced up—then his glance stopped and he did not hear the rest of the words. He saw a man's dressing gown hanging on the back of the open closet door, a dark blue gown with the white initials HR on its breast pocket.

He remembered where he had seen that gown before, he remembered the man facing him across a breakfast table in the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, he remembered that man coming, unannounced, to her office late on a Thanksgiving night—and the realization that he should have known it, came to him as two subterranean jolts of a single earthquake: it came with a feeling that screamed "No!" so savagely that the scream, not the sight, brought down every girder within him. It was not the shock of the discovery, but the more terrible shock of what it made him discover about himself.

He hung on to a single thought; that he must not let her see what he had noticed or what it had done to him. He felt a sensation of embarrassment magnified to the point of physical torture; it was the dread of violating her privacy twice: by learning her secret and by revealing his own. He bent lower over the note pad and concentrated on an immediate purpose: to stop his pencil from shaking.

". . . fifty miles of mountain trackage to build, and we can count on nothing but whatever material we own."

"I beg your pardon," he said, his voice barely audible, "I didn't hear what you said.”

"I said I want a report from all superintendents on every foot of rail and every piece of equipment available on their divisions."

"Okay."

"I will confer with each one of them in turn. Have them meet me in my car aboard the Comet."

"Okay."

"Send word out—unofficially—that the engineers are to make up time for the stops by going seventy, eighty, a hundred miles an hour, anything they wish as and when they need to, and that I will . . .

Eddie?"

"Yes. Okay."

"Eddie, what's the matter?"

He had to look up, to face her and, desperately, to lie for the first time in his life. "I'm . . . I'm afraid of the trouble we'll get into with the law," he said.

"Forget it. Don't you see that there isn't any law left? Anything goes now, for whoever can get away with it—and, for the moment, it's we who're setting the terms."

When she was ready, he carried her suitcase to a taxicab, then down the platform of the Taggart Terminal to her office car, the last at the end of the Comet. He stood on the platform, saw the train jerk forward and watched the red markers on the back of her car slipping slowly away from him into the long darkness of the exit tunnel. When they were gone, he felt what one feels at the loss of a dream one had not known till after it was lost.

There were few people on the platform around him and they seemed to move with self-conscious strain, as if a sense of disaster clung to the rails and to the girders above their heads. He thought indifferently that after a century of safety, men were once more regarding the departure of a train as an event involving a gamble with death.

He remembered that he had had no dinner, and he felt no desire to eat, but the underground cafeteria of the Taggart Terminal was more truly his home than the empty cube of space he now thought of as his apartment—so he walked to the cafeteria, because he had no other place to go.

The cafeteria was almost deserted—but the first thing he saw, as he entered, was a thin column of smoke rising from the cigarette of the worker, who sat alone at a table in a dark corner.

Not noticing what he put on his tray, Eddie carried it to the worker's table, said, "Hello," sat down and said nothing else. He looked at the silverware spread before him, wondered about its purpose, remembered the use of a fork and attempted to perform the motions of eating, but found that it was beyond his power. After a while, he looked up and saw that the worker's eyes were studying him attentively.

"No," said Eddie, "no, there's nothing the matter with me. . . .

Oh yes, a lot has happened, but what difference does it make now?

. . . Yes, she's back. . . . What else do you want me to say about it? . . . How did you know she's back? Oh well, I suppose the whole company knew it within the first ten minutes. . . . No, I don't know whether I'm glad that she's back. . . . Sure, she'll save the railroad—for another year or month. . . . What do you want me to say? . . .

No, she didn't. She didn't tell me what she's counting on. She didn't tell me what she thought or felt. . . . Well, how do you suppose she'd feel? It's hell for her—all right, for me, too! Only my kind of hell is my own fault. . . . No. Nothing. I can't talk about it—talk?—I mustn't even think about it, I've got to stop it, stop thinking of her and—of her, I mean."

He remained silent and he wondered why the worker's eyes—the eyes that always seemed to see everything within him—made him feel uneasy tonight. He glanced down at the table, and he noticed the butts of many cigarettes among the remnants of food on the worker's plate.

"Are you in trouble, too?" asked Eddie. "Oh, just that you've sat here for a long time tonight, haven't you? . . . For me? Why should you have wanted to wait for me? . . . You know, I never thought you cared whether you saw me or not, me or anybody, you seemed so complete in yourself, and that's why I liked to talk to you, because I felt that you always understood, but nothing could hurt you—you looked as if nothing had ever hurt you—and it made me feel free, as if . . . as if there were no pain in the world. . . . Do you know what's strange about your face? You look as if you've never known pain or fear or guilt. . . . I'm sorry I'm so late tonight. I had to see her off—she has just left, on the Comet. . . . Yes, tonight, just now.

. . . Yes, she's gone. . . . Yes, it was a sudden decision—within the past hour. She intended to leave tomorrow night, but something unexpected happened and she had to go at once. . . . Yes, she's going to Colorado—afterwards. . . . To Utah—first. . . . Because she got a letter from Quentin Daniels that he's quitting—and the one thing she won't give up, couldn't stand to give up, is the motor. You remember, the motor I told you about, the remnant that she found. . . . Daniels?

He's a physicist who's been working for the past year, at the Utah Institute of Technology, trying to solve the secret of the motor and to rebuild it. . . . Why do you look at me like that? . . . No, I haven't told you about him before, because it was a secret. It was a private, secret project of her own—and of what interest would it have been to you, anyway? . . . I guess I can talk about it now, because he's quit. . . . Yes, he told her his reasons. He said that he won't give anything produced by his mind to a world that regards him as a slave.

He said that he won't be made a martyr to people in exchange for giving them an inestimable benefit. . . . What—what are you laughing at? . . . Stop it, will you? Why do you laugh like that? . . . The whole secret? What do you mean, the whole secret? He hasn't found the whole secret of the motor, if that's what you meant, but he seemed to be doing well, he had a good chance. Now it's lost. She's rushing to him, she wants to plead, to hold him, to make him go on—but I think it's useless. Once they stop, they don't come back again. Not one of them has. . . . No, I don't care, not any more, we've taken so many losses that I'm getting used to it. . . . Oh no! It's not Daniels that I can't take, it's—no, drop it. Don't question me about it. The whole world is going to pieces, she's still fighting to save it, and I—I sit here damning her for something I had no right to know. . . . No! She's done nothing to be damned, nothing—and, besides, it doesn't concern the railroad. . . . Don't pay any attention to me, it's not true, it's not her that I'm damning, it's myself. . . . Listen, I've always known that you loved Taggart Transcontinental as I loved it, that it meant something special to you, something personal, and that was why you liked to hear me talk about it. But this—the thing I learned today—this has nothing to do with the railroad. It would be of no importance to you.

Forget it. . . . It's something that I didn't know about her, that's all.

. . . I grew up with her. I thought I knew her. I didn't. . . . I don't know what it was that I expected. I suppose I just thought that she had no private life of any kind. To me, she was not a person and not . . . not a woman. She was the railroad. And I didn't think that anyone would ever have the audacity to look at her in any other way.

. . . Well, it serves me right. Forget it. . . . Forget it, I said! Why do you question me like this? It's only her private life. What can it matter to you? . . . Drop it, for God's sake! Don't you see that I can't talk about it? . . . Nothing happened, nothing's wrong with me, I just —oh, why am I lying? I can't lie to you, you always seem to see everything, it's worse than trying to lie to myself! . . . I have lied to myself. I didn't know what I felt for her. The railroad? I'm a rotten hypocrite. If the railroad was all she meant to me, it wouldn't have hit me like this. I wouldn't have felt that I wanted to kill him! . . .

What's the matter with you tonight? Why do you look at me like that?

. . . Oh, what's the matter with all of us? Why is there nothing but misery left for anyone? Why do we suffer so much? We weren't meant to. I always thought that we were to be happy, all of us, as our natural fate. What are we doing? What have we lost? A year ago, I wouldn't have damned her for finding something she wanted. But I know that they're doomed, both of them, and so am I, and so is everybody, and she was all I had left. . . . It was so great, to be alive, it was such a wonderful chance, I didn't know that I loved it and that that was our love, hers and mine and yours—but the world is perishing and we cannot stop it. Why are we destroying ourselves? Who will tell us the truth? Who will save us? Oh, who is John Galt?! . . . No, it's no use.

It doesn't matter now. Why should I feel anything? We won't last much longer. Why should I care what she does? Why should I care that she's sleeping with Hank Rearden? . . . Oh God!—what's the matter with you? Don't go! Where are you going?"

CHAPTER X

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 633