THE CONCERTO OF DELIVERANCE 17 page

He did not know why he had been listening to the broadcast; he did not know what made him tremble now. He chuckled abruptly—it sounded like a malevolent growl—either at the radio, or at those in the city, or at the sky.

He was watching the rare posts of highway numbers. He did not need to consult a map: for four days, that map had been printed on his brain, like a net of lines traced in acid. They could not take it away from him, he thought; they could not stop him. He felt as if he were being pursued; but there was nothing for miles behind him, except the two red lights on the rear of his car—like two small signals of danger, fleeing through the darkness of the Iowa plains.

The motive directing his hands and feet was four days behind him. It was the face of the man on the window sill, and the faces he had confronted when he had escaped from that room. He had cried to them that he could not deal with Galt and neither could they, that Galt would destroy them all, unless they destroyed him first. "Don't get smart, Professor," Mr. Thompson had answered coldly. "You've done an awful lot of yelling about hating his guts, but when it comes to action, you haven't helped us at all. I don't know which side you're on. If he doesn't give in to us peaceably, we might have to resort to pressure—such as hostages whom he wouldn't want to see hurt—and you're first on the list, Professor." "I?" he had screamed, shaking with terror and with bitterly desperate laughter. "I? But he damns me more than anyone on earth!" "How do I know?" Mr. Thompson had answered. "I hear that you used to be his teacher. Arid, don't forget, you're the only one he asked for."

His mind liquid with terror, he had felt as if he were about to be crushed between two walls advancing upon him: he had no chance, if Galt refused to surrender—and less chance, if Galt joined these men.

It was then that a distant shape had come swimming forward in his mind: the image of a mushroom-domed structure in the middle of an Iowa plain.

All images had begun to fuse in his mind thereafter. Project X—he had thought, not knowing whether it was the vision of that structure or of a feudal castle commanding the countryside, that gave him the sense of an age and a world to which he belonged. . . . I'm Robert Stadler —he had thought—it's my property, it came from my discoveries, they said it was I who invented it. . . . I'll show them!—he had thought, not knowing whether he meant the man on the window sill or the others or the whole of mankind. . . . His thoughts had become like chips floating in a liquid, without connections: To seize control . . .

I'll show them! . . . To seize control, to rule . . . There is no other way to live on earth. . . .

These had been the only words that named the plan in his mind. He had felt that the rest was clear to him—clear in the form of a savage emotion crying defiantly that he did not have to make it clear. He would seize control of Project X and he would rule a part of the country as his private feudal domain. The means? His emotion had answered: Somehow. The motive? His mind had repeated insistently that his motive was terror of Mr. Thompson's gang, that he was not safe among them any longer, that his plan was a practical necessity. In the depth of his liquid brain, his emotion had held another kind of terror, drowned along with the connections between his broken chips of words.

These chips had been the only compass directing his course through four days and nights—while he drove down deserted highways, across a country collapsing into chaos, while he developed a monomaniac's cunning for obtaining illegal purchases of gas, while he snatched random hours of restless sleep, in obscure motels, under assumed names. . . .

I'm Robert Stadler—he had thought, his mind repeating it as a formula of omnipotence. . . . To seize control—he had thought, speeding against the futile traffic lights of half-abandoned towns—speeding on the vibrating steel of the Taggart Bridge across the Mississippi—speeding past the occasional ruins of farms in the empty stretches of Iowa. . . . I'll show them—he had thought—let them pursue, they won't stop me this time. . . . He had thought it, even though no one had pursued him—as no one was pursuing him now, but the taillights of his own car and the motive drowned in his mind.

He looked at his silent radio and chuckled; the chuckle had the emotional quality of a fist being shaken at space. It's I who am practical—he thought—I have no choice . . . I have no other way . . . I'll show all those insolent gangsters, who forget that I am Robert Stadler . . . They will all collapse, but I won't! . . . I'll survive! . . . I'll win! . . . I'll show them!

The words were like chunks of solid ground in his mind, in the midst of a fiercely silent swamp; the connections lay submerged at the bottom.

If connected, his words would have formed the sentence: I'll show him that there is no other way to live on earth! . . .

The scattered lights in the distance ahead were the barracks erected on the site of Project X, now known as Harmony City. He observed, as he came closer, that something out of the ordinary was going on at Project X, The barbed-wire fence was broken, and no sentinels met him at the gate. But some sort of abnormal activity was churning in the patches of darkness and in the glare of some wavering spotlights: there were armored trucks and running figures and shouted orders and the gleam of bayonets. No one stopped his car. At the corner of a shanty, he saw the motionless body of a soldier sprawled on the ground.

Drunk—he thought, preferring to think it, wondering why he felt unsure of it.

The mushroom structure crouched on a knoll before him; there were lights in the narrow slits of its windows—and the shapeless funnels protruded from under its dome, aimed at the darkness of the country. A soldier barred his way, when he alighted from his car at the entrance.

The soldier was properly armed, but hatless, and his uniform seemed too sloppy. "Where are you going, bud?" he asked.

"Let me in!" Dr. Stadler ordered contemptuously.

"What's your business here?"

"I'm Dr. Robert Stadler."

"I'm Joe Blow. I said, What's your business? Are you one of the new or one of the old?"

"Let me in, you idiot! I'm Dr. Robert Stadler!"

It was not the name, but the tone of voice and the form of address that seemed to convince the soldier. "One of the new," he said and, opening the door, shouted to somebody inside, "Hey, Mac, take care of Grandpaw here, see what he wants!"

In the bare, dim hall of reinforced concrete, he was met by a man who might have been an officer, except that his tunic was open at the throat and a cigarette hung insolently in the corner of his mouth.

"Who are you?" he snapped, his hand jerking too swiftly to the holster on his hip.

"I'm Dr. Robert Stadler."

The name had no effect. "Who gave you permission to come here?"

"I need no permission."

This seemed to have an effect; the man removed the cigarette from his mouth. "Who sent for you?" he asked, a shade uncertainly.

"Will you please let me speak to the commandant?" Dr. Stadler demanded impatiently.

"The commandant? You're too late, brother."

"The chief engineer, then!"

"The chief-who? Oh, Willie? Willie's okay, he's one of us, but he's out on an errand just now."

There were other figures in the hall, listening with an apprehensive curiosity. The officer's hand summoned one of them to approach—an unshaved civilian with a shabby overcoat thrown over his shoulders.

"What do you want?" he snapped at Stadler, "Would someone please tell me where are the gentlemen of the scientific staff?" Dr. Stadler asked in the courteously peremptory tone of an order.

The two men glanced at each other, as if such a question were irrelevant in this place. "Do you come from Washington?" the civilian asked suspiciously.

"I do not. I will have you understand that I'm through with that Washington gang."

"Oh?" The man seemed pleased. "Are you a Friend of the People, then?"

"I would say that I'm the best friend the people ever had. I'm the man who gave them all this." He pointed around him.

"You did?" said the man, impressed. "Are you one of those who made a deal with the Boss?"

"I'm the boss here, from now on,"

The men looked at each other, retreating a few steps. The officer asked, "Did you say the name was Stadler?"

"Robert Stadler, And if you don't know what that means, you'll find out!"

"Will you please follow me, sir?" said the officer, with shaky politeness.

What happened next was not clear to Dr. Stadler, because his mind refused to admit the reality of the things he was seeing. There were shifting figures in half-lighted, disordered offices, there were too many firearms on everybody's hips, there were senseless questions asked of him by jerky voices that alternated between impertinence and fear.

He did not know whether any of them tried to give him an explanation; he would not listen; he could not permit this to be true. He kept stating in the tone of a feudal sovereign, "I'm the boss here, from now on . . . I give the orders . . . I came to take over . . . I own this place.

. . . I am Dr. Robert Stadler—and if you don't know that name in this place, you have no business being here, you infernal idiots! You'll blow yourselves to pieces, if that's the' state of your knowledge! Have you had a high-school course in physics? You don't look to me as if you've ever been allowed inside a high school, any of you! What are you doing here? Who are you?"

It took him a long time to grasp—when his mind could not block it any longer—that somebody had beaten him to his plan: somebody had held the same view of existence as his own and had set out to achieve the same future. He grasped that these men, who called themselves the Friends of the People, had seized possession of Project X, tonight, a few hours ago, intending to establish a reign of their own. He laughed in their faces, with bitterly incredulous contempt, "You don't know what you're doing, you miserable juvenile delinquents! Do you think that you—you!—can handle a high-precision instrument of science? Who is your leader? I demand to see your leader!"

It was his tone of overbearing authority, his contempt and their own panic—the blind panic of men of unbridled violence, who have no standards of safety or danger—that made them waver and wonder whether he was, perhaps, some secret top-level member of their leadership; they were equally ready to defy or to obey any authority. After being shunted from one jittery commander to another, he found himself at last being led down iron stairways and down long, echoing, underground corridors of reinforced concrete to an audience with "The Boss" in person, The Boss had taken refuge in the underground control room.

Among the complex spirals of the delicate scientific machinery that produced the sound ray, against the wall panel of glittering levers, dials and gauges, known as the Xylophone, Robert Stadler faced the new ruler of Project X. It was Cuffy Meigs.

He wore a tight, semi-military tunic and leather leggings; the flesh of his neck bulged over the edge of his collar; his black curls were matted with sweat. He was pacing restlessly, unsteadily in front of the Xylophone, shouting orders to men who kept rushing in and out of the room: "Send couriers to every county seat within our reach! Tell 'em that the Friends of the People have won! Tell 'em they're not to take orders from Washington any longer! The new capital of the People's Commonwealth is Harmony City, henceforth to be known as Meigsville! Tell 'em that I'll expect five hundred thousand dollars per every five thousand heads of population, by tomorrow morning—or else!"

It took some time before Cuffy Meigs' attention and bleary brown eyes could be drawn to focus on the person of Dr. Stadler. "Well, what is it? What is it?" he snapped.

"I am Dr. Robert Stadler."

"Huh?— Oh, yeah! Yeah! You're the big guy from outer spaces, aren't you? You're the fellow who catches atoms or something. Well, what on earth are you doing here?"

"It is I who should ask you that question."

"Huh? Look, Professor, I'm in no mood for jokes."

"I have come here to take control."

"Control? Of what?"

"Of this equipment. Of this place. Of the countryside within its radius of operation."

Meigs stared at him blankly for a moment, then asked softly, "How did you get here?"

"By car."

"I mean, whom did you bring with you?"

"Nobody."

"What weapons did you bring?"

"None. My name is sufficient."

"You came here alone, with your name and your car?"

"I did."

Cuffy Meigs burst out laughing in his face.

"Do you think," asked Dr. Stadler, "that you can operate an installation of this kind?"

"Run along, Professor, run along! Beat it, before I have you shot!

We've got no use for intellectuals around here!"

"How much do you know about this?" Dr. Stadler pointed at the Xylophone.

"Who cares? Technicians are a dime a dozen these days! Beat it!

This ain't Washington! I'm through with those impractical dreamers in Washington! They won't get anywhere, bargaining with that radio ghost and making speeches! Action—that's what's needed! Direct action!

Beat it, Doc! Your day is over!" He was weaving unsteadily back and forth, catching at a lever of the Xylophone once in a while. Dr. Stadler realized that Meigs was drunk.

"Don't touch those levers, you fool!"

Meigs jerked his hand back involuntarily, then waved it defiantly at the panel. "I'll touch anything I please! Don't you tell-me what to do!"

"Get away from that panel! Get out of here! This is mine! Do you understand? It's my property!"

"Property? Huh!" Meigs gave a brief bark that was a chuckle.

"I invented it! I created it! I made it possible!"

"You did? Well, many thanks, Doc. Many thanks, but we don't need you any longer. We've got our own mechanics."

_ "Have you any idea what I had to know in order to make it possible?

You couldn't think of a single tube of it! Not a single bolt!"

Meigs shrugged. "Maybe not."

"Then how dare you think that you can own it? How dare you come here? What claim do you have to it?"

Meigs patted his holster. "This."

"Listen, you drunken lout!" cried Dr. Stadler. "Do you know what you're playing with?"

"Don't you talk to me like that, you old fool! Who are you to talk to me like that? I can break your neck with my bare hands! Don't you know who I am?"

"You're a scared thug way out of his depth!"

"Oh, I am, am I? I'm the Boss! I'm the Boss and I'm not going to be stopped by an old scarecrow like you! Get out of here!"

They stood staring at each other for a moment, by the panel of the Xylophone, both cornered by terror. The unadmitted root of Dr. Stadler's terror was his frantic struggle not to acknowledge that he was looking at his final product, that this was his spiritual son. Cuffy Meigs' terror had wider roots, it embraced all of existence; he had lived in chronic terror all his life, but now he was struggling not to acknowledge what it was that he had dreaded: in the moment of his triumph, when he expected to be safe, that mysterious, occult breed—the intellectual —was refusing to fear him and defying his power.

"Get out of here!" snarled Cuffy Meigs. "I'll call my men! I'll have you shot!"

"Get out of here, you lousy, brainless, swaggering moron!" snarled Dr. Stadler. "Do you think I'll let you cash in on my life? Do you think it's for you that I . . . that I sold—" He did not finish. "Stop touching those levers, God damn you!"

"Don't you give me orders! I don't need you to tell me what to do!

You're not going to scare me with your classy mumbo-jumbo! I'll do as I please! What did I fight for, if I can't do as I please?" He chuckled and reached for a lever.

"Hey, Cuffy, take it easy!" yelled some figure in the back of the room, darting forward.

"Stand back!" roared Cuffy Meigs. "Stand back, all of you! Scared, am I? I'll show you who's boss!"

Dr. Stadler leaped to stop him—but Meigs shoved him aside with one arm, gave a gulp of laughter at the sight of Stadler falling to the floor, and, with the other arm, yanked a lever of the Xylophone.

The crash of sound—the screeching crash of ripped metal and of pressures colliding on conflicting circuits, the sound of a monster turn' ing upon itself—was heard only inside the structure. No sound was heard outside. Outside, the structure merely rose into the air, suddenly and silently, cracked open into a 'few large pieces, shot some hissing streaks of blue light to the sky and came down as a pile of rubble. Within the circle of a radius of a hundred miles, enclosing parts of four states, telegraph poles fell like matchsticks, farmhouses collapsed into chips, city buildings went down as if slashed and minced by a single second's blow, with no time for a sound to be heard by the twisted bodies of the victims—and, on the circle's periphery, halfway across the Mississippi, the engine and the first six cars of a passenger train flew as a shower of metal into the water of the river, along with the western spans of the Taggart Bridge, cut in half.

On the site of what had once been Project X, nothing remained alive among the ruins—except, for some endless minutes longer, a huddle of torn flesh and screaming pain that had once been a great mind.

There was a sense of weightless freedom—thought Dagny—in the feeling that a telephone booth was her only immediate, absolute goal, with no concern for any of the goals of the passers-by in the streets around her. It did not make her feel estranged from the city: it made her feel, for the first time, that she owned the city and that she loved it, that she had never loved it before as she did in this moment, with so personal, solemn and confident a sense of possession. The night was still and clear; she looked at the sky; as her feeling was more solemn than joyous, but held the sense of a future joy—so the air was more windless than warm, but held the hint of a distant spring.

Get the hell out of my way—she thought, not with resentment, but almost with amusement, with a sense of detachment and deliverance, addressing it to the passers-by, to the traffic when it impeded her hurried progress, and to any fear she had known in the past. It was less than an hour ago that she had heard him utter that sentence, and his voice still seemed to ring in the air of the streets, merging into a distant hint of laughter.

She had laughed exultantly, in the ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland, when she had heard him say it; she had laughed, her hand pressed to her mouth, so that the laughter was only in her eyes—and in his, when he had looked straight at her and she had known that he heard it. They had looked at each other for the span of a second, above the heads of the gasping, screaming crowd—above the crash of the microphones being shattered, though all stations had been instantly cut off—above the bursts of breaking glass on falling tables, as some people went stampeding to the doors.

Then she had heard Mr. Thompson cry, waving his arm at Galt, "Take him back to his room, but guard him with your lives!"—and the crowd had parted as three men led him out. Mr. Thompson seemed to collapse for a moment, dropping his forehead on his arm, but he rallied, jumped to his feet, waved vaguely at his henchmen to follow and rushed out, through a private side exit. No one addressed or instructed the guests: some were running blindly to escape, others sat still, not daring to move. The ballroom was like a ship without captain. She cut through the crowd and followed the clique. No one tried to stop her.

She found them huddled in a small, private study: Mr. Thompson was slumped in an armchair, clutching his head with both hands, Wesley Mouch was moaning, Eugene Lawson was sobbing with the sound of a nasty child's rage, Jim was watching the others with an oddly expectant intensity. "I told you so!" Dr. Ferris was shouting. "I told you so, didn't I? That's where you get with your 'peaceful persuasion'!"

She remained standing by the door. They seemed to notice her presence, but they did not seem to care.

"I resign!" yelled Chick Morrison. "I resign! I'm through! I don't know what to say to the country! I can't think! I won't try! It's no use!

I couldn't help it! You're not going to blame me! I've resigned!" He waved his arms in some shapeless gesture of futility or farewell, and ran out of the room, "He has a hide-out all stocked for himself in Tennessee," said Tinky Holloway reflectively, as if he, too, had taken a similar precaution and were now wondering whether the time had come.

"He won't keep it for long, if he gets there at all," said Mouch. "With the gangs of raiders and the state of transportation—" He spread his hands and did not finish.

She knew what thoughts were filling the pause; she knew that no matter what private escapes these men had once provided for themselves, they were now grasping the fact that all of them were trapped.

She observed that there was no terror in their faces; she saw hints of it, but it looked like a perfunctory terror. Their expressions ranged from blank apathy to the relieved look of cheats who had believed that the game could end no other way and were making no effort to contest it or regret it—to the petulant blindness of Lawson, who refused to be conscious of anything—to the peculiar intensity of Jim, whose face suggested a secret smile.

"Well? Well?" Dr. Ferris was asking impatiently, with the crackling energy of a man who feels at home in a world of hysteria. "What are you now going to do with him? Argue? Debate? Make speeches?"

No one answered.

"He . . . has . . . to . . . save . . . us," said Mouch slowly, as if straining the last of his mind into blankness and delivering an ultimatum to reality. "He has to . . . take over . . . and save the system."

"Why don't you write him a love letter about it?" said Ferris.

"We've got to . . . make him . . . take over . . . We've got to force him to rule," said Mouch in the tone of a sleepwalker.

"Now," said Ferris, suddenly dropping his voice, "do you see what a valuable establishment the State Science Institute really is?"

Mouch did not answer him, but she observed that they all seemed to know what he meant.

"You objected to that private research project of mine as 'impractical,' " said Ferris softly. "But what did I tell you?"

Mouch did not answer; he was cracking his knuckles.

"This is no time for squeamishness," James Taggart spoke up with unexpected vigor, but his voice, too, was oddly low. "We don't have to be sissies about it."

"It seems to me . . ." said Mouch dully, "that . . . that the end justifies the means . . ."

"It's too late for any scruples or any principles," said Ferris. "Only direct action can work now."

No one answered; they were acting as if they wished that their pauses, not their words, would state what they were discussing.

"It won't work," said Tinky Holloway, "He won't give in."

"That's what you think!" said Ferris, and chuckled, "You haven't seen our experimental model in action. Last month, we got three confessions in three unsolved murder cases."

"If . . ." started Mr. Thompson, and his voice cracked suddenly into a moan, "if he dies, we all perish!"

"Don't worry," said Ferris. "He won't. The Ferris Persuader is safely calculated against that possibility."

Mr. Thompson did not answer.

"It seems to me . . . that we have no other choice . . ." said Mouch; it was almost a whisper.

They remained silent; Mr. Thompson was struggling not to see that they were all looking at him. Then he cried suddenly, "Oh, do anything you want! I couldn't help it! Do anything you want!"

Dr. Ferris turned to Lawson. "Gene," he said tensely, still whispering, "run to the radio-control office. Order all stations to stand by. Tell them that I'll have Mr. Galt on the air within three hours."

Lawson leaped to his feet, with a sudden, mirthful grin, and ran out of the room.

She knew. She knew what they intended doing and what it was within them that made it possible. They did not think that this would succeed. They did not think that Galt would give in; they did not want him to give in. They did not think that anything could save them now; they did not want to be saved. Moved by the panic of their nameless emotions, they had fought against reality all their lives—and now they had reached a moment when at last they felt at home. They did not have to know why they felt it, they who had chosen never to know what they felt—they merely experienced a sense of recognition, since this was what they had been seeking, this was die kind of reality that had been implied in all of their feelings, their actions, their d3sires, their choices, their dreams. This was the nature and the method of the rebellion against existence and of the undefined quest for an unnamed Nirvana. They did not want to live; they wanted him to die.

The horror she felt was only a brief stab, like the wrench of a switching perspective: she grasped that the objects she had thought to be human were not. She was left with a sense of clarity, of a final answer and of the need to act. He was in danger; there was no time and no room in her consciousness to waste emotion on the actions of the subhuman.

"We must make sure," Wesley Mouch was whispering, "that nobody -ever learns about it . . ."

"Nobody will," said Ferris; their voices had the cautious drone of conspirators. "It's a secret, separate unit on the Institute grounds . . .

Sound-proofed and safely distant from the rest . . . Only a very few of our staff have ever entered it. . . ."

"If we were to fly—" said Mouch, and stopped abruptly, as if he had caught some warning in Ferris' face.

She saw Ferris' eyes move to her, as if he had suddenly remembered her presence. She held his glance, letting him see the untroubled indifference of hers, as if she had neither cared nor understood. Then, as if merely grasping the signal of a private discussion, she turned slowly, with the suggestion of a shrug, and left the room. She knew that they were now past the stage of worrying about her.

She walked with the same unhurried indifference through the halls and through the exit of the hotel. But a block away, when she had turned a corner, her head flew up and the folds of her evening gown slammed like a sail against her legs with the sudden violence of the speed of her steps.

And now, as she rushed through the darkness, thinking only of finding a telephone booth, she felt a new sensation rising irresistibly within her, past the immediate tension of danger and concern: it was the sense of freedom of a world that had never had to be obstructed.

She saw the wedge of light on the sidewalk, that came from the window of a bar. No one gave her a second glance, as she crossed the half deserted room: the few customers were still waiting and whispering tensely in front of the crackling blue void of an empty television screen.

Standing in the tight space of the telephone booth, as in the cabin of a ship about to take off for a different planet, she dialed the number OR 6-5693.

The voice that answered at once was Francisco's. "Hello?"

"Francisco?"

"Hello, Dagny. I was expecting you to call."

"Did you hear the broadcast?"

"I did."

"They are now planning to force him to give in." She kept her voice to the tone of a factual report. "They intend to torture him. They have some machine called the Ferris Persuader, in an isolated unit on the grounds of the State Science Institute. It's in New Hampshire. They mentioned flying. They mentioned that they would have him on the radio within three hours."

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 587