THE CONCERTO OF DELIVERANCE 12 page

"You're not agreeing with her, are you?" asked Wesley Mouch.

"Who's said anything about agreeing?" said Mr. Thompson, his tone surprisingly placid. "Don't be premature. Just don't you be premature, any of you. There's no harm in listening to any argument, is there?"

"That kind of argument?" asked Wesley Mouch, his finger stabbing again and again in Dagny's direction.

"Any kind," said Mr. Thompson placidly. "We mustn’t be intolerant,"

"But it's treason, ruin, disloyalty, selfishness and big-business propaganda!"

"Oh, I don't know," said Mr. Thompson. "We've got to keep an open mind. We've got to give consideration to every one's viewpoint.

She might have something there. He knows what to do. We've got to be flexible."

"Do you mean that you're willing to quit?" gasped Mouch.

"Now don't jump to conclusions," snapped Mr. Thompson angrily.

"If there's one thing I can't stand, it's people who jump to conclusions. And another thing is ivory-tower intellectuals who stick to some pet theory and haven't any sense of practical reality. At a time like this, we've got to be flexible above all."

He saw a look of bewilderment on all the faces around him, on Dagny's and on the others, though not for the same reasons. He smiled, rose to his feet and turned to Dagny.

"Thank you, Miss Taggart," he said. "Thank you for speaking your mind. That's what I want you to know—that you can trust me and speak to me with full frankness. We're not your enemies, Miss Taggart.

Don't pay any attention to the boys—they're upset, but they'll come down to earth. We're not your enemies, nor the country's. Sure, we've made mistakes, we're only human, but we're trying to do our best for the people—that is, I mean, for everybody—in these difficult times.

We can't make snap judgments and reach momentous decisions on the spur of the moment, can we? We've got to consider it, and mull it over, and weigh it carefully. I just want you to remember that we're not anybody's enemies—you realize that, don't you?"

"I've said everything I had to say," she answered, turning away from him, with no clue to the meaning of his words and no strength to attempt to find it.

She turned to Eddie Willers, who had watched the men around them with a look of so great an indignation that he seemed paralyzed —as if his brain were crying, "It's evil!" and could not move to any further thought. She jerked her head, indicating the door; he followed her obediently.

Dr. Robert Stadler waited until the door had closed after them, then whirled on Mr. Thompson. "You bloody fool! Do you know what you're playing with? Don't you understand that it's life or death? That it's you or him?"

The thin tremor that ran along Mr. Thompson's lips was a smile of contempt. "It's a funny way for a professor to behave. I didn't think professors ever went to pieces."

"Don't you understand? Don't you see that it's one or the other?"

"And what is it that you want me to do?"

"You must kill him."

It was the fact that Dr. Stadler had not cried it, but had said it in a flat, cold, suddenly and fully conscious voice, that brought a chill moment of silence as the whole room's answer.

"You must find him," said Dr. Stadler, his voice cracking and rising once more. "You must leave no stone unturned till you find him and destroy him! If he lives, he'll destroy all of us! If he lives, we can't!"

"How am I to find him?" asked Mr. Thompson, speaking slowly and carefully.

"I . . . I can tell you. I can give you a lead. Watch that Taggart woman. Set your men to watch every move she makes. She'll lead you to him, sooner or later."

"How do you know that?"

"Isn't it obvious? Isn't it sheer chance that she hasn't deserted you long ago? Don't you have the wits to see that she's one of his kind?"

He did not state what kind.

"Yeah," said Mr. Thompson thoughtfully, "yeah, that's true." He jerked his head up with a smile of satisfaction. "The professor's got something there. Put a tail on Miss Taggart," he ordered, snapping his fingers at Mouch. "Have her tailed day and night. We've got to find him."

"Yes, sir," said Mouch blankly.

"And when you find him," Dr. Stadler asked tensely, "you'll kill him?"

"Kill him, you damn fool? We need him!" cried Mr. Thompson.

Mouch waited, but no one ventured the question that was on everyone's mind, so he made the effort to utter stiffly, "I don't understand you, Mr. Thompson."

"Oh, you theoretical intellectuals!" said Mr. Thompson with exasperation. "What are you all gaping at? It's simple. Whoever he is, he's a man of action. Besides, he's got a pressure group: he's cornered all the men of brains. He knows what to do. We'll find him and he'll tell us. He'll tell us what to do. He'll make things work. He'll pull us out of the hole."

"Us, Mr. Thompson?"

"Sure. Never mind your theories. We'll make a deal with him."

"With him?"

"Sure. Oh, we'll have to compromise, we'll have to make a few concessions to big business, and the welfare boys won't like it, but what the hell!—do you know any other way out?"

"But his ideas—"

"Who cares about ideas?"

"Mr. Thompson," said Mouch, choking, "I . . . I'm afraid he's a man who's not open to a deal."

"There's no such thing," said Mr. Thompson.

A cold wind rattled the broken signs over the windows of abandoned shops, in the street outside the radio station. The city seemed abnormally quiet. The distant rumble of the traffic sounded lower than usual and made the wind sound louder. Empty sidewalks stretched off into the darkness; a few lone figures stood in whispering clusters under the rare lights.

Eddie Willers did not speak until they were many blocks away from the station. He stopped abruptly, when they reached a deserted square where the public loud-speakers, which no one had thought of turning off, were now broadcasting a domestic comedy—the shrill voices of a husband and wife quarreling over Junior's dates—to an empty stretch of pavement enclosed by unlighted house fronts. Beyond the square, a few dots of light, scattered Vertically above the twenty fifth-floor limit of the city, suggested a distant, rising form, which was the Taggart Building.

Eddie' stopped and pointed at the building, his finger shaking.

"Dagny!" he cried, then lowered his voice involuntarily. "Dagny," he whispered, "I know him. He . . . he works there . . . there . . ."

He kept pointing at the building with incredulous helplessness. "He works for Taggart Transcontinental . . ."

"I know," she answered; her voice was a lifeless monotone.

"As a track laborer . . . as the lowest of track laborers . . ."

"I know."

"I've talked to him . . . I've been talking to him for years . . . in the Terminal cafeteria. . . . He used to ask questions . . . all sorts of questions about the railroad, and I—God, Dagny! was I protecting the railroad or was I helping to destroy it?"

"Both. Neither. It doesn't matter now."

"I could have staked my life that he loved the railroad!"

"He does."

"But he's destroyed it."

"Yes."

She tightened the collar of her coat and walked on, against a gust of wind.

"I used to talk to him," he said, after a while. "His face . . . Dagny, it didn't look like any of the others, it . . . it showed that he understood so much. . . . I was glad, whenever I saw him there, in the cafeteria . . . I just talked . . . I don't think I knew that he was asking questions . . . but he was . . . so many questions about the railroad and . . . and about you."

"Did he ever ask you what I look like, when I'm asleep?"

"Yes . . . Yes, he did . . . I'd found you once, asleep in the office, and when I mentioned it, he—" He stopped, as a sudden connection crashed into place in his mind.

She turned to him, in the ray of a street lamp, raising and holding her face in full light for a silent, deliberate moment, as if in answer and confirmation of his thought.

He closed his eyes. "Oh God, Dagny!" he whispered.

They walked on in silence.

"He's gone by now, isn't he?" he asked. "From the Taggart Terminal, I mean."

"Eddie," she said, her voice suddenly grim, "if you value his life, don't ever ask that question. You don't want them to find him, do you?

Don't give them any leads. Don't ever breathe a word to anyone about having known him. Don't try to find out whether he's still working in the Terminal."

"You don't mean that he's still there?"

"I don't know. I know only that he might be."

"Now?"

"Yes."

"Still?"

"Yes. Keep quiet about it, if you don't want to destroy him."

"I think he's gone. He won't be back. I haven't seen him since . . . since . . ."

"Since when?" she asked sharply.

"The end of May. The night when you left for Utah, remember?" He paused, as the memory of that night's encounter and the full understanding of its meaning struck him together. He said with effort, "1 saw him that night. Not since . . . I've waited for him, in the cafeteria . . . He never came back."

"I don't think he'll let you see him now, he'll keep out of your way.

Bat don't look for him. Don't inquire."

"It's funny. I don't even know what name he used. It was Johnny something or—"

"It was John Galt," she said, with a faint, mirthless chuckle. "Don't look at the Terminal payroll. The name is still there."

"Just like that? All these years?"

"For twelve years. Just like that."

"And it's still there now?"

"Yes."

After a moment, he said, "It proves nothing, I know. The personnel office hasn't taken a single name off the payroll list since Directive 10-289. If a man quits, they give his name and job to a starving friend of their own, rather than report it to the Unification Board."

"Don't question the personnel office or anyone. Don't call attention to his name. If you or I make any inquiries about him, somebody might begin to wonder. Don't look for him. Don't make any move in his direction. And if you ever catch sight of him by chance, act as if you didn't know him."

He nodded. After a while, he said, his voice tense and low, "I wouldn't turn him over to them, not even to save the railroad."

"Eddie—"

"Yes?"

"If you ever catch sight of him, tell me."

He nodded.

Two blocks later, he asked quietly, "You're going to quit, one of these days, and vanish, aren't you?"

"Why do you say that?" It was almost a cry.

"Aren't you?"

She did not answer at once; when she did, the sound of despair was present in her voice only in the form of too tight a monotone: "Eddie, if I quit, what would happen to the Taggart trains?"

"There would be no Taggart trains within a week. Maybe less."

"There will be no looters' government within ten days. Then men like Cuffy Meigs will devour the last of our rails and engines. Should I lose the battle by failing to wait one more moment? How can I let it go—Taggart Transcontinental, Eddie—go forever, when one last effort can still keep it in existence? If I've stood things this long, I can stand them a little longer. Just a little longer. I'm not helping the looters.

Nothing can help them now."

"What are they going to do?"

"I don't know. What can they do? They're finished."

"I suppose so."

"Didn't you see them? They're miserable, panic-stricken rats, running for their lives."

"Does it mean anything to them?"

"What?"

"Their lives."

"They're still struggling, aren't they? But they're through and they know it."

"Have they ever acted on what they know?"

"They'll have to. They'll give up. It won't be long. And we'll be here to save whatever's left."

"Mr. Thompson wishes it to be known," said official broadcasts on the morning of November 23, "that there is no cause for alarm. He urges the public not to draw any hasty conclusions. We must preserve our discipline, our morale, our unity and our sense of broad-minded tolerance. The unconventional speech, which some of you might have heard on the radio last night, was a thought-provoking contribution to our pool of ideas on world problems. We must consider it soberly, avoiding the extremes of total condemnation or of reckless agreement.

We must regard it as one viewpoint out of many in our democratic forum of public opinion, which, as last night has proved, is open to all. The truth, says Mr. Thompson, has many facets. We must remain impartial."

"They're silent," wrote Chick Morrison, as a summary of its content, across the report from one of the field agents he had sent out on a mission entitled Public Pulse Taking. "They're silent," he wrote across the next report, then across another and another. "Silence," he wrote, with a frown of uneasiness, summing up his report to Mr. Thompson.

"People seem to be silent."

The flames that went up to the sky of a winter night and devoured a home in Wyoming were not seen by the people of Kansas, who watched a trembling red glow on the prairie horizon, made by the flames that went up to devour a farm, and the glow was not reflected by the windows of a street in Pennsylvania, where the twisting red tongues were reflections of the flames that went up to devour a factory. Nobody mentioned, next morning, that those flames had not been set off. by chance and that the owners of the three places had vanished. Neighbors observed it without comment—and without astonishment. A few homes were found abandoned in random corners across the nation, some left locked, shuttered and empty, others open and gutted of all movable goods—but people watched it in silence and, through the snowdrifts of untended streets in the haze of pre-morning darkness, went on trudging to their jobs, a little slower than usual.

Then, on November 27, a speaker at a political meeting in Cleveland was beaten up and had to escape by scurrying down dark alleys.

His silent audience had come to sudden life when he had shouted that the cause of all their troubles was their selfish concern with their own troubles.

On the morning of November 29, the workers of a shoe factory in Massachusetts were astonished, on entering their workshop, to find that the foreman was late. But they went to their usual posts and went on with their habitual routine, pulling levers, pressing buttons, feeding leather into automatic cutters, piling boxes on a moving belt, wondering, as the hours went by, why they did not catch sight of the foreman, or the superintendent, or the general manager, or the company president.

It was noon before they discovered that the front offices of the plant were empty.

"You goddamn cannibals!" screamed a woman in the midst of a crowded movie theater, breaking into sudden, hysterical sobs—and the audience showed no sign of astonishment, as if she were screaming for them all, "There is no cause for alarm," said official broadcasts on December 5. "Mr. Thompson wishes it to be known that he is willing to negotiate with John Galt for the purpose of devising ways and means to achieve a speedy solution of our problems. Mr. Thompson urges the people to be patient. We must not worry, we must not doubt, we must not lose heart,"

The attendants of a hospital in Illinois showed no astonishment when a man was brought in, beaten up by his elder brother, who had supported him all his life: the younger man had screamed at the elder, accusing him of selfishness and greed—just as the attendants of a hospital in New York City showed no astonishment at the case of a woman who came in with a fractured jaw: she had been slapped in the face by a total stranger, who had heard her ordering her five-year old son to give his best toy to the children of neighbors.

Chick Morrison attempted a whistle-stop tour to buttress the country's morale by speeches on self-sacrifice for the general welfare. He was stoned at the first of his stops and had to return to Washington.

Nobody had ever granted them the title of "the better men" or, granting it, had paused to grasp that title's meaning, but everybody knew, each in his own community, neighborhood, office or shop and hi his own unidentified terms, who would be the men that would now fail to appear at their posts on some coming morning and would silently vanish in search of unknown frontiers—the men whose faces were tighter than the faces around them, whose eyes were more direct, whose energy was more conscientiously enduring—the men who were now slipping away, one by one, from every corner of the country—of the country which was now like the descendant of what had once been regal glory, prostrated by the scourge of hemophilia, losing the best of its blood from a wound not to be healed.

"But we're willing to negotiate!" yelled Mr. Thompson to his assistants, ordering the special announcement to be repeated by all radio stations three times a day. "We're willing to negotiate! He'll hear it! He'll answer!"

Special listeners were ordered to keep watch, day and night, at radio receivers tuned to every known frequency of sound, waiting for an answer from an unknown transmitter. There was no answer.

Empty, hopeless, unfocused faces were becoming more apparent in the streets of the cities, but no one could read their meaning. As some men were escaping with their bodies into the underground of uninhabited regions, so others could only save their souls and were escaping into the underground of their minds—and no power on earth could tell whether their blankly indifferent eyes were shutters protecting hidden treasures at the bottom of shafts no longer to be mined, or were merely gaping holes of the parasite's emptiness never to be filled.

"I don't know what to do," said the assistant superintendent of an oil refinery, refusing to accept the job of the superintendent who had vanished—and the agents of the Unification Board were unable to tell whether he lied or not. It was only an edge of precision in the tone of his voice, an absence of apology or shame, that made them wonder whether he was a rebel or a fool. It was dangerous to force the job on either.

"Give us men!" The plea began to hammer progressively louder upon the desk of the Unification Board, from all parts of a country ravaged by unemployment, and neither the pleaders nor the Board dared to add the dangerous words which the cry was implying: "Give us men of ability!" There were waiting lines years' long for the jobs of janitors, greasers, porters and bus boys; there was no one to apply for the jobs of executives, managers, superintendents, engineers.

The explosions of oil refineries, the crashes of defective airplanes, the break-outs of blast furnaces, the wrecks of colliding trains, and the rumors of drunken orgies in the offices of newly created executives, made the members of the Board fear the kind of men who did apply for the positions of responsibility.

"Don't despair! Don't give up!" said official broadcasts on December 15, and on every day thereafter, "We will reach an agreement with John Galt. We will get him to lead us. He will solve all our problems.

He will make things work. Don't give up! We will get John Galt!"

Rewards and honors were offered to applicants for managerial jobs —then to foremen—then to skilled mechanics—then to any man who would make an effort to deserve a promotion in rank: wage raises, bonuses, tax exemptions and a medal devised by Wesley Mouch, to be known as "The Order of Public Benefactors." It brought no results. Ragged people listened to the offers of material comforts and turned away with lethargic indifference, as if they had lost the concept of "Value." These, thought the public-pulse-takers with terror, were men who did not care to live—or men who did not care to live on present terms.

"Don't despair! Don't give up! John Galt will solve our problems!" said the radio voices of official broadcasts, traveling through the silence of falling snow into the silence of unheated homes.

"Don't tell them that we haven't got him!" cried Mr. Thompson to his assistants, "But for God's sake tell them to find him!" Squads of Chick Morrison's boys were assigned to the task of manufacturing rumors: half of them went spreading the story that John Galt was in Washington and in conference with government officials—while the other half went spreading the story that the government would give five hundred thousand dollars as reward for information that would help to find John Galt.

"No, not a clue," said Wesley Mouch to Mr. Thompson, summing up the reports of the special agents who had been sent to check on every man by the name of John Galt throughout the country. "They're a shabby lot. There's a John Galt who's a professor of ornithology, eighty years old —there's a retired greengrocer with a wife and nine children—there's an unskilled railroad laborer who's held the same job for twelve years—and other such trash."

"Don't despair! We will get John Galt!" said official broadcasts in the daytime—but at night, every hour on the hour, by a secret, official order, an appeal was sent from short-wave transmitters into the empty reaches of space: "Calling John Galt! . . . Calling John Galt! . . .

Are you listening, John Galt? . . . We wish to negotiate. We wish to confer with you. Give us word on where you can be reached. . . .

Do you hear us, John Galt?" There was no answer.

The wads of worthless paper money were growing heavier in the pockets of the nation, but there was less and less for that money to buy. In September, a bushel of wheat had cost eleven dollars; it had cost thirty dollars in November; it had cost one hundred in December; it was now approaching the price of two hundred—while the printing presses of the government treasury were running a race with starvation, and losing.

When the workers of a factory beat up their foreman and wrecked the machinery in a fit of despair— no action could be taken against them. Arrests were futile, the jails were full, the arresting officers winked at their prisoners and let them escape on then- way to prison—men were going through the motions prescribed for the moment, with no thought of the moment to follow. No action could be taken when mobs of starving people attacked warehouses on the outskirts of cities.

No action could be taken when punitive squadrons joined the people they had been sent to punish.

"Are you listening, John Galt? . . . We wish to negotiate. We might meet your terms. . . . Are you listening?"

There were whispered rumors of covered wagons traveling by night through abandoned trails, and of secret settlements armed to resist the attacks of those whom they called the "Indians"—the attacks of any looting savages, be they homeless mobs or government agents. Lights were seen, once in a while, on the distant horizon of a prairie, in the hills, on the ledges of mountains, where no buildings had been known to exist. But no soldiers could be persuaded to investigate the sources of those lights.

On the doors of abandoned houses, on the gates of crumbling factories, on the walls of government buildings, there appeared, once in a while, traced in chalk, in paint, in blood, the curving mark which was the sign of the dollar.

"Can you hear us, John Galt? . . . Send us word. Name your terms.

We will meet any terms you set. Can you hear us?"

There was no answer.

The shaft of red smoke that shot to the sky on the night of January 22 and stood abnormally still for a while, like a solemn memorial obelisk, then wavered and swept back and forth across the sky, like a searchlight sending some undecipherable message, then went out as abruptly as it had come, marked the end of Rearden Steel—but the inhabitants of the area did not know it. They learned it only on subsequent nights, when they—who had cursed the mills for the smoke, the fumes, the soot and the noise—looked out and, instead of the glow pulsating with life on their familiar horizon, they saw a black void.

The mills had been nationalized, as the property of a deserter.

The first bearer of the title of "People's Manager," appointed to run the mills, had been a man of the Orren Boyle faction, a pudgy hanger-on of the metallurgical industry, who had wanted nothing but to follow his employees while going through the motions of leading. But at the end of a month, after too many clashes with the workers, too many occasions when his only answer had been that he couldn't help it, too many undelivered orders, too many telephonic pressures from his buddies, he had begged to be transferred to some other position. The Orren Boyle faction had been falling apart, since Mr. Boyle had been confined to a rest home, where his doctor had forbidden him any contact with business and had put him to the job of weaving baskets, as a means of occupational therapy. The second "People's Manager" sent to Rearden Steel had belonged to the faction of Cuffy Meigs. He had worn leather leggings and perfumed hair lotions, he had come to work with a gun on his hip, he had kept snapping that discipline was his primary goal and that by God he'd get it or else. The only discernible rule of the discipline had been his order forbidding all questions.

After weeks of frantic activity on the part of insurance companies, of firemen, of ambulances and of first-aid units, attending to a series of inexplicable accidents—the "People's Manager" had vanished one morning, having sold and shipped to sundry racketeers of Europe and Latin America most of the cranes, the automatic conveyors, the supplies of refractory brick, the emergency power generator, and the carpet from what had once been Rearden's office.

No one had been able to untangle the issues in the violent chaos of the next few days—the issues had never been named, the sides had remained unacknowledged, but everyone had known that the bloody encounters between the older workers and the newer had not been driven to such ferocious intensity by the trivial causes that kept setting them off—neither guards nor policemen nor state troopers had been able to keep order for the length of a day—nor could any faction muster a candidate willing to accept the post of "People's Manager."

On January 22, the operations of Rearden Steel had been ordered temporarily suspended.

The shaft of red smoke, that night, had been caused by a sixty-year old worker, who had set fire to one of the structures and had been caught in the act, laughing dazedly and staring at the flames. "To avenge Hank Rearden!" he had cried defiantly, tears running down his furnace-tanned face.

Don't let it hurt you like this—thought Dagny, slumped across her desk, over the page of the newspaper where a single brief paragraph announced the "temporary" end of Rearden Steel—don't let it hurt you so much. . . . She kept seeing the face of Hank Rearden, as he had stood at the window of his office, watching a crane move against the sky with a load of green-blue rail. . . . Don't let it hurt him like this —was the plea in her mind, addressed to no one—don't let him hear of it, don't let him know. . . . Then she saw another face, a face with unflinching green eyes, saying to her, in a voice made implacable by the quality of respect for facts: "You'll have to hear about it.

. . . You'll hear about every wreck. You'll hear about every discontinued train. . . . Nobody stays in this valley by faking reality in any manner whatever. . . ." Then she sat still, with no sight and no sound in her mind, with nothing but that enormous presence which was pain —until she heard the familiar cry that had become a drug killing all sensations except the capacity to act: "Miss Taggart, we don't know what to do!"—and she shot to her feet to answer.

"The People's State of Guatemala," said the newspapers on January 26, "declines the request of the United States for the loan of a thousand tons of steel."

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 485