THE SIGN OF THE DOLLAR 6 page

"Yes . . . I did . . . " Then, remembering the rest, she added, "But I named it after an enemy."

He smiled. "That's the contradiction you had to resolve sooner or later, Miss Taggart."

"It was you . . . wasn't it? . . . who destroyed my Line. . . ."

"Why, no. It was the contradiction."

She closed her eyes; in a moment, she asked, "All those stories I heard about you—which of them were true?"

"All of them."

"Was it you who spread them?"

"No. What for? I never had any wish to be talked about."

"But you do know that you've become a legend?"

"Yes."

"The young inventor of the Twentieth Century Motor Company is the one real version of the legend, isn't it?"

"The one that's concretely real—yes."

She could not say it indifferently; there was still a breathless tone and the drop of her voice toward a whisper, when she asked, "The motor . . . the motor I found . . . it was you who made it?"

"Yes."

She could not prevent the jolt of eagerness that threw her head up.

"The secret of transforming energy—" she began, and stopped, "I could tell it to you in fifteen minutes," he said, in answer to the desperate plea she had not uttered, "but there's no power on earth that can force me to tell it. If you understand this, you'll understand everything that's baffling you."

"That night . . . twelve years ago . . . a spring night when you walked out of a meeting of six thousand murderers—that story is true, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"You told them that you would stop the motor of the world."

"I have."

"What have you done?"

"I've done nothing, Miss Taggart. And that's the whole of my secret."

She looked at him silently for a long moment. He stood waiting, as if he could read her thoughts. "The destroyer—" she said in a tone of wonder and helplessness.

"—the most evil creature that's ever existed," he said in the tone of a quotation, and she recognized her own words, "the man who's draining the brains of the world."

"How thoroughly have you been watching me," she asked, "and for how long?"

It was only an instant's pause, his eyes did not move, but it seemed to her that his glance was stressed, as if in special awareness of seeing her, and she caught the sound of some particular intensity in his voice as he answered quietly, "For years."

She closed her eyes, relaxing and giving up. She felt an odd, lighthearted indifference, as if she suddenly wanted nothing but the comfort of surrendering to helplessness.

The doctor who arrived was a gray-haired man with a mild, thoughtful face and a firmly, unobtrusively confident manner.

"Miss Taggart, may I present Dr. Hendricks?" said Galt.

"Not Dr, Thomas Hendricks?" she gasped, with the involuntary rudeness of a child; the name belonged to a great surgeon, who had retired and vanished six years ago.

"Yes, of course," said Galt.

Dr. Hendricks smiled at her, in answer. "Midas told me that Miss Taggart has to be treated for shock," he said, "not for the one sustained, but for the ones to come."

"I'll leave you to do it," said Galt, "while I go to the market to get supplies for breakfast."

She watched the rapid efficiency of Dr. Hendricks' work, as he examined her injuries. He had brought an object she had never seen before: a portable X-ray machine. She learned that she had torn the cartilage of two ribs, that she had sprained an ankle, ripped patches of skin off one knee and one elbow, and acquired a few bruises spread in purple blotches over her body. By the time Dr. Hendricks' swift, competent hands had wound the bandages and the tight lacings of tape, she felt as if her body were an engine checked by an expert mechanic, and no further care was necessary, "I would advise you to remain in bed, Miss Taggart."

"Oh no! If I'm careful and move slowly, I'll be all right."

"You ought to rest."

"Do you think I can?"

He smiled. "I guess not."

She was dressed by the time Galt came back. Dr. Hendricks gave him an account of her condition, adding, "I'll be back to check up, tomorrow."

"Thanks," said Galt. "Send the bill to me."

"Certainly not!" she said indignantly. "I will pay it myself."

The two men glanced at each other, in amusement, as at the boast of a beggar.

"We'll discuss that later," said Galt.

Dr. Hendricks left, and she tried to stand up, limping, catching at the furniture for support. Galt lifted her in his arms, carried her to the kitchen alcove and placed her on a chair by the table set for two.

She noticed that she was hungry, at the sight of the coffee pot boiling on the stove, the two glasses of orange juice, the heavy white pottery dishes sparkling in the sun on the polished table top.

"When did you sleep or eat last?" he asked.

"I don't know . . . I had dinner on the train, with—" She shook her head in helplessly bitter amusement: with the tramp, she thought, with a desperate voice pleading for escape from an avenger who would not pursue or be found—the avenger who sat facing her across the table, drinking a glass of orange juice. "I don't know . . . it seems centuries and continents away."

"How did you happen to be following me?"

"I landed at the Alton airport just as you were taking off. The man there told me that Quentin Daniels had gone with you."

"I remember your plane circling to land. But that was the one and only time when I didn't think of you. I thought you were coming by train."

She asked, looking straight at him, "How do you want me to understand that?"

"What?"

"The one and only time when you didn't think of me."

He held her glance; she saw the faint movement she had noted as typical of him: the movement of his proudly intractable mouth curving into the hint of a smile. "In any way you wish," he answered.

She let a moment pass to underscore her choice by the severity of her face, then asked coldly, in the tone of an enemy's accusation, "You knew that I was coming for Quentin Daniels?"

"Yes."

"You got him first and fast, in order not to let me reach him? In order to beat me—knowing fully what sort of beating that would mean for me?"

"Sure."

It was she who looked away and remained silent. He rose to cook the rest of their breakfast. She watched him as he stood at the stove, toasting bread, frying eggs and bacon. There was an easy, relaxed skill about the way he worked, but it was a skill that belonged to another profession; his hands moved with the rapid precision of an engineer pulling the levers of a control board. She remembered suddenly where she had seen as expert and preposterous a performance.

"Is that what you learned from Dr. Akston?" she asked, pointing at the stove.

"That, among other things."

"Did he teach you to spend your time—your time!—" she could not keep the shudder of indignation out of her voice—"on this sort of work?"

"I've spent time on work of much lesser importance."

When he put her plate before her, she asked, "Where did you get that food? Do they have a grocery store here?"

"The best one in the world. It's run by Lawrence Hammond."

"What?"

"Lawrence Hammond, of Hammond Cars. The bacon is from the farm of Dwight Sanders—of Sanders Aircraft. The eggs and the butter from Judge Narragansett—of the Superior Court of the State of Illinois."

She looked at her plate, bitterly, almost as if she were afraid to touch it. "It's the most expensive breakfast I'll ever eat, considering the value of the cook's time and of all those others."

"Yes—from one aspect. But from another, it's the cheapest breakfast you'll ever eat—because no part of it has gone to feed the looters who'll make you pay for it through year after year and leave you to starve in the end."

After a long silence, she asked simply, almost wistfully, "What is it that you're all doing here?"

"Living."

She had never heard that word sound so real, "What is your job?" she asked. "Midas Mulligan said that you work here."

"I'm the handy man, I guess."

"The what?"

"I'm on call whenever anything goes wrong with any of the installations—with the power system, for instance."

She looked at him—and suddenly she tore forward, staring at the electric stove, but fell back on her chair, stopped by pain.

He chuckled. "Yes, that's true—but take it easy or Dr. Hendricks will order you back to bed."

"The power system . . ." she said, choking, "the power system here . . . it's run by means of your motor?"

"Yes."

"It's built? It's working? It's functioning?"

"It has cooked your breakfast."

"I want to see it!"

"Don't bother crippling yourself to look at that stove. It's just a plain electric stove like any other, only about a hundred times cheaper to run.

And that's all you'll have a chance to see, Miss Taggart."

"You promised to show me this valley."

"I'll show it to you. But not the power generator."

"Will you take me to see the place now, as soon as we finish?"

"If you wish—and if you're able to move."

"I am."

He got up, went to the telephone and dialed a number. "Hello, Midas? . . . Yes. . . . He did? Yes, she's all right. . . . Will you rent me your car for the day? . . . Thanks. At the usual rate—twenty-five cents, . . . . Can you send it over? . . . Do you happen to have some sort of cane? She'll need it. . . . Tonight? Yes, I think so.

We will. Thanks."

He hung up. She was staring at him incredulously.

"Did I understand you to say that Mr. Mulligan—who's worth about two hundred million dollars, I believe—is going to charge you twenty-five cents for the use of his car?"

"That's right."

"Good heavens, couldn't he give it to you as a courtesy?"

He sat looking at her for a moment, studying her face, as if deliberately letting her see the amusement in his. "Miss Taggart," he said, "we have no laws in this valley, no rules, no formal organization of any kind. We come here because we want to rest. But we have certain customs, which we all observe, because they pertain to the things we need to rest from. So I'll warn you now that there is one word which is forbidden in this valley: the word 'give,' "

"I'm sorry," she said. "You're right."

He refilled her cup of coffee and extended a package of cigarettes.

She smiled, as she took a cigarette: it bore the sign of the dollar.

"If you're not too tired by evening," he said, "Mulligan has invited us for dinner. He'll have some guests there whom, I think, you'll want to meet."

"Oh, of course! I won't be too tired. I don't think I’ll ever feel tired again."

They were finishing breakfast when she saw Mulligan's car stopping in front of the house. The driver leaped out, raced up the path and rushed into the room, not pausing to ring or knock. It took her a moment to realize that the eager, breathless, disheveled young man was Quentin Daniels.

"Miss Taggart," he gasped, "I'm sorry!" The desperate guilt in his voice clashed with the joyous excitement in his face, "I've never broken my word before! There's no excuse for it, I can't ask you to forgive me, and I know that you won't believe it, but the truth is that I—I forgot!"

She glanced at Galt, "I believe you."

"I forgot that I promised to wait, I forgot everything—until a few minutes ago, when Mr. Mulligan told me that you'd crashed here in a plane, and then I knew it was my fault, and if anything had happened to you—oh God, are you all right?"

"Yes. Don't worry. Sit down."

"I don't know how one can forget one's word of honor. I don't know what happened to me."

"I do."

"Miss Taggart, I had been working on it for months, on that one particular hypothesis, and the more I worked, the more hopeless it seemed to become. I'd been in my laboratory for the last two days, trying to solve a mathematical equation that looked impossible. I felt I'd die at that blackboard, but wouldn't give up. It was late at night when he came in. I don't think I even noticed him, not really. He said he wanted to speak to me and I asked him to wait and went right on.

I think I forgot his presence. I don't know how long he stood there, watching me, but what I remember is that suddenly his hand reached over, swept all my figures off the blackboard and wrote one brief equation. And then I noticed him! Then I screamed—because it wasn't the full answer to the motor, but it was the way to it, a way I hadn't seen, hadn't suspected, but I knew where it led! I remember I cried, 'How could you know it?'—and he answered, pointing at a photograph of your motor, 'I'm the man who made it in the first place.' And that's the last I remember, Miss Taggart—I mean, the last I remember of my own existence, because after that we talked about static electricity and the conversion of energy and the motor."

"We talked physics all the way down here," said Galt.

"Oh, I remember when you asked me whether I'd go with you," said Daniels, "whether I'd be willing to go and never come back and give up everything . . . Everything? Give up a dead Institute that's crumbling back into the jungle, give up my future as a janitor-slave-by-law, give up Wesley Mouch and Directive 10-289 and sub-animal creatures who crawl on their bellies, grunting that there is no mind! . . . Miss Taggart"—he laughed exultantly—"he was asking me whether I'd give that up to go with him! He had to ask it twice, I couldn't believe it at first, I couldn't believe that any human being would need to be asked or would think of it as a choice. To go? I would have leaped off a skyscraper just to follow him—and to hear his formula before we hit the pavement!"

"I don't blame you," she said; she looked at him with a tinge of wistfulness that was almost envy. "Besides, you've fulfilled your contract. You've led me to the secret of the motor."

"I'm going to be a janitor here, too," said Daniels, grinning happily.

"Mr. Mulligan said he'd give me the job of janitor—at the power plant.

And when I learn, I'll rise to electrician. Isn't he great—Midas Mulligan? That's what I want to be when I reach his age. I want to make money. I want to make millions. I want to make as much as he did!"

"Daniels!" She laughed, remembering the quiet self-control, the strict precision, the stern logic of the young scientist she had known. "What's the matter with you? Where are you? Do you know what you're saying?"

"I'm here, Miss Taggart—and there's no limit to what's possible here!

I'm going to be the greatest electrician in the world and the richest! I'm going to—"

"You're going to go back to Mulligan's house," said Galt, "and sleep for twenty-four hours—or I won't let you near the power plant."

"Yes, sir," said Daniels meekly.

The sun had trickled down the peaks and drawn a circle of shining granite and glittering snow to enclose the valley—when they stepped out of the house. She felt suddenly as if nothing existed beyond that circle, and she wondered at the joyous, proud comfort to be found in a sense of the finite, in the knowledge that the field of one's concern lay within the realm of one's sight. She wanted to stretch out her arms over the roofs of the town below, feeling that her fingertips would touch the peaks across. But she could not raise her arms; leaning on a cane with one hand and on Galt's arm with the other, moving her feet by a slow, conscientious effort, she walked down to the car like a child learning to walk for the first time.

She sat by Galt's side as he drove, skirting the town, to Midas Mulligan's house. It stood on a ridge, the largest house of the valley, the only one built two stories high, an odd combination of fortress and pleasure resort, with stout granite walls and broad, open terraces. He stopped to let Daniels off, then drove on up a winding road rising slowly into the mountains.

It was the thought of Mulligan's wealth, the luxurious car and the sight of Galt's hands on the wheel that made her wonder for the first time whether Galt, too, was wealthy. She glanced at his clothes: the gray slacks and white shirt seemed of a quality intended for long wear; the leather of the narrow belt about his waistline was cracked; the watch on his wrist was a precision instrument, but made of plain stainless steel. The sole suggestion of luxury was the color of his hair—the strands stirring in the wind like liquid gold and copper.

Abruptly, behind a turn of the road, she saw the green acres of pastures stretching to a distant farmhouse. There were herds of sheep, some horses, the fenced squares of pigpens under the sprawling shapes of wooden barns and, farther away, a metal hangar of a type that did not belong on a farm, A man in a bright cowboy shirt was hurrying toward them. Galt stopped the car and waved to him, but said nothing in answer to her questioning glance. He let her discover for herself, when the man came closer, that it was Dwight Sanders, "Hello, Miss Taggart," he said, smiling.

She looked silently at his rolled shirt sleeves, at his heavy boots, at the herds of cattle. "So that's all that's left of Sanders Aircraft," she said.

"Why, no. There's that excellent monoplane, my best model, which you flattened up in the foothills."

"Oh, you know about that? Yes, it was one of yours. It was a wonderful ship. But I'm afraid I've damaged it pretty badly."

"You ought to have it fixed."

"I think I've ripped the bottom. Nobody can fix it."

"I can."

These were the words and the tone of confidence that she had not heard for years, this was the manner she had given up expecting—but the start of her smile ended in a bitter chuckle. "How?" she asked. "On a hog farm?"

"Why, no. At Sanders Aircraft."

"Where is it?"

"Where did you think it was? In that building in New Jersey, which Tinky Holloway's cousin bought from my bankrupt successors by means of a government loan and a tax suspension? In that building where he produced six planes that never left the ground and eight that did, but crashed with forty passengers each?"

"Where is it, then?"

"Wherever I am."

He pointed across the road. Glancing down through the tops of the pine trees, she saw the concrete rectangle of an airfield on the bottom of the valley.

"We have a few planes here and it's my job to take care of them," he said. "I'm the hog farmer and the airfield attendant. I'm doing quite well at producing ham and bacon, without the men from whom I used to buy it. But those men cannot produce airplanes without me—and, without me, they cannot even produce their ham and bacon,"

"But you—you have not been designing airplanes, either."

"No, I haven't. And I haven't been manufacturing the Diesel engines I once promised you. Since the time I saw you last, I have designed and manufactured just one new tractor. I mean, one—I tooled it by hand—no mass production was necessary. But that tractor has cut an eight-hour workday down to four hours on"—the straight line of his arm, extended to point across the valley, moved like a royal scepter; her eyes followed it and she saw the terraced green of hanging gardens on a distant mountainside—"the chicken and dairy farm of Judge Narragansett"—his arm moved slowly to a long, flat stretch of greenish gold at the foot of a canyon, then to a band of violent green—"in the wheat fields and tobacco patch of Midas Mulligan"—his arm rose to a granite flank striped by glistening tiers of leaves—"in the orchards of Richard Halley."

Her eyes went slowly over the curve his arm had traveled, over and over again, long after the arm had dropped; but she said only, "I see."

"Now do you believe that I can fix your plane?" he asked.

"Yes. But have you seen it?"

"Sure. Midas called two doctors immediately—Hendricks for you, and me for your plane. It can be fixed. But it will be an expensive job."

"How much?"

"Two hundred dollars."

"Two hundred dollars?" she repeated incredulously; the price seemed much too low.

"In gold, Miss Taggart."

"Oh . . . ! Well, where can I buy the gold?"

"You can't," said Galt.

She jerked her head to face him defiantly. "No?"

"No. Not where you come from. Your laws forbid it."

"Yours don't?"

"No."

"Then sell it to me. Choose your own rate of exchange. Name any sum you want—in my money."

"What money? You're penniless, Miss Taggart."

"What?" It was a word that a Taggart heiress could not ever expect to hear.

"You're penniless in this valley. You own millions of dollars in Taggart Transcontinental stock—but it will not buy one pound of bacon from the Sanders hog farm."

"1 see."

Galt smiled and turned to Sanders. "Go ahead and fix that plane.

Miss Taggart will pay for it eventually."

He pressed the starter and drove on, while she sat stiffly straight, asking no questions.

A stretch of violent turquoise blue split the cliffs ahead, ending the road; it took her a second to realize that it was a lake. The motionless water seemed to condense the blue of the sky and the green of the pine-covered mountains into so brilliantly pure a color that it made the sky look a dimmed pale gray. A streak of boiling foam came from among the pines and went crashing down the rocky steps to vanish in the placid water. A small granite structure stood by the stream.

Galt stopped the car just as a husky man in overalls stepped out to the threshold of the open doorway. It was Dick McNamara, who had once been her best contractor.

"Good day, Miss Taggart!" he said happily. "I'm glad to see that you weren't hurt badly.”

She inclined her head in silent greeting—it was like a greeting to the loss and the pain of the past, to a desolate evening and the desperate face of Eddie Willers telling her the news of this man's disappearance—hurt badly? she thought—I was, but not in the plane crash—on that evening, in an empty office. . . . Aloud, she asked, "What are you doing here? What was it that you betrayed me for, at the worst time possible?"

He smiled, pointing at the stone structure and down at the rocky drop where the tube of a water main went vanishing into the underbrush. "I'm the utilities man," he said. "I take care of the water lines, the power lines and the telephone service."

"Alone?"

"Used to. But we've grown so much in the past year that I've had to hire three men to help me."

"What men? From where?"

"Well, one of them is a professor of economics who couldn't get a job outside, because he taught that you can't consume more than you have produced—one is a professor of history who couldn't get a job because he taught that the inhabitants of slums were not the men who made this country—and one is a professor of psychology who couldn't get a job because he taught that men are capable of thinking."

"They work for you as plumbers and linesmen?"

"You'd be surprised how good they are at it."

"And to whom have they abandoned our colleges?"

"To those who're wanted there." He chuckled, "How long ago was it that I betrayed you, Miss Taggart? Not quite three years ago, wasn't it? it's the John Galt Line that I refused to build for you. Where is your Line now? But my lines have grown, in that time, from the couple of miles that Mulligan had built when I took over, to hundreds of miles of pipe and wire, all within the space of this valley."

He saw the swift, involuntary look of eagerness on her face, the look of a competent person's appreciation; he smiled, glanced at her companion and said softly, "You know, Miss Taggart, when it comes to the John Galt Line—maybe it's I who've followed it and you who're betraying it."

She glanced at Galt. He was watching her face, but she could read nothing in his.

As they drove on along the edge of the lake, she asked, "You've mapped this route deliberately, haven't you? You're showing me all the men whom"—she stopped, feeling inexplicably reluctant to say it, and said, instead—"whom I have lost?"

"I'm showing you all the men whom I have taken away from you," he answered firmly.

This was the root, she thought, of the guiltlessness of his face: he had guessed and named the words she had wanted to spare him, he had rejected a good will that was not based on his values—and in proud certainty of being right, he had made a boast of that which she had intended as an accusation.

Ahead of them, she saw a wooden pier projecting into the water of the lake. A young woman lay stretched on the sun-flooded planks, watching a battery of fishing rods. She glanced up at the sound of the car, then leaped to her feet in a single swift movement, a shade too swift, and ran to the road. She wore slacks, rolled above the knees of her bare legs, she had dark, disheveled hair and large eyes. Galt waved to her.

"Hello, John! When did you get in?" she called.

"This morning," he answered, smiling and driving on.

Dagny jerked her head to look back and saw the glance with which the young woman stood looking after Galt. And even though hopelessness, serenely accepted, was part of the worship in that glance, she experienced a feeling she had never known before: a stab of jealousy.

"Who is that?" she asked.

"Our best fishwife. She provides the fish for Hammond's grocery market."

"What else is she?"

"You've noticed that there's a 'what else' for every one of us here?

She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside.

She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind."

The car turned into a narrow path, climbing steeply into a wilderness of brush and pine trees. She knew what to expect when she saw a handmade sign nailed to a tree, with an arrow pointing the way: The Buena Esperanza Pass.

It was not a pass, it was a wall of laminated rock with a complex chain of pipes, pumps and valves climbing like a vine up its narrow ledges, but it bore, on its crest, a huge wooden sign—and the proud violence of the letters announcing their message to an impassable tangle of ferns and pine branches, was more characteristic, more familiar than the words: Wyatt Oil.

It was oil that ran in a glittering curve from the mouth of a pipe into a tank at the foot of the wall, as the only confession of the tremendous secret struggle inside the stone, as the unobtrusive purpose of all the intricate machinery—but the machinery did not resemble the installations of an oil derrick, and she knew that she was looking at the unborn secret of the Buena Esperanza Pass, she knew that this was oil drawn out of shale by some method men had considered impossible.

Ellis Wyatt stood on a ridge, watching the glass dial of a gauge imbedded in the rock. He saw the car stopping below, and called, "Hi, Dagny! Be with you in a minute!"

There were two other men working with him: a big, muscular roughneck, at a pump halfway up the wall, and a young boy, by the tank on the ground. The young boy had blond hair and a face with an unusual purity of form. She felt certain that she knew this face, but she could not recall where she had seen it. The boy caught her puzzled glance, grinned and, as if to help her, whistled softly, almost inaudibly the first notes of Halley's Fifth Concerto. It was the young brakeman of the Comet.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 629