Home Random Page


CATEGORIES:

BiologyChemistryConstructionCultureEcologyEconomyElectronicsFinanceGeographyHistoryInformaticsLawMathematicsMechanicsMedicineOtherPedagogyPhilosophyPhysicsPolicyPsychologySociologySportTourism






THE CONCERTO OF DELIVERANCE 18 page

"I see. Are you calling from a public phone booth?"

"Yes."

"You're still in evening clothes, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"Now listen carefully. Go home, change your clothes, pack a few things you'll need, take your jewelry and any valuables that you can carry, take some warm clothing. We won't have time to do it later.

Meet me in forty minutes, on the northwest corner, two blocks east of the main entrance of the Taggart Terminal,"

"Right."

"So long, Slug."

“So long, Frisco."

She was in the bedroom of her apartment, in less than five minutes, tearing off her evening gown. She left it lying in the middle of the floor, like the discarded uniform of an army she was not serving any longer. She put on a dark blue suit and—remembering Galt's words—a white, high-collared sweater. She packed a suitcase and a bag with a strap that she could carry swung over her shoulder. She put her jewelry in a corner of the bag, including the bracelet of Rearden Metal she had earned in the outside world, and the five-dollar gold piece she had earned in the valley.

It was easy to leave the apartment and to lock the door, even though she knew she would probably never open it again. It seemed harder, for a moment, when she came to her office. No one had seen her come in; the anteroom of her office was empty; the great Taggart Building seemed unusually quiet. She stood looking for a moment at this room and at all the years it had contained. Then she smiled—no, it was not too hard, she thought; she opened her safe and took the documents she had come here to get. There was nothing else that she wanted to take from her office—except the picture of Nathaniel Taggart and the map of Taggart Transcontinental. She broke the two frames, folded the picture and the map, and slipped them into her suitcase.

She was locking the suitcase, when she heard the sound of hurrying steps. The door flew open and the chief engineer rushed in; he was shaking; his face was distorted.

"Miss Taggart!" he cried. "Oh, thank God, Miss Taggart, you're here! We've been calling for you all over!"

She did not answer; she looked at him inquiringly.

"Miss Taggart, have you heard?"

"What?"

"Then you haven't! Oh God, Miss Taggart, it's . . . I can't believe it, I still can't believe it, but . . . Oh God, what are we going to do?

The . . . the Taggart Bridge is gone!"

She stared at him, unable to move.

"It's gone! Blown up! Blown up, apparently, in one second! Nobody -knows for certain what happened—but it looks like . . . they think that something went wrong at Project X and . . . it looks like those sound rays, Miss Taggart! We can't get through to any point within a radius of a hundred miles! It's not possible, it can't be possible, but it looks as if everything in that circle has been wiped out! . . . We can't get any answers! Nobody can get an answer—the newspapers, the radio stations, the police! We're still checking, but the stories that are coming from the rim of that circle are—" He shuddered. "Only one thing is certain: the bridge is gone! Miss Taggart! We don't know what to do!"



She leaped to her desk and seized the telephone receiver. Her hand stopped in mid-air. Then, slowly, twistedly, with the greatest effort ever demanded of her, she began to move her arm down to place the receiver back. It seemed to her that it took a long time, as if her arm had to move against some atmospheric pressure that no human body could combat—and in the span of these few brief moments, in the stillness of a blinding pain, she knew what Francisco had felt, that night, twelve years ago—and what a boy of twenty-six had felt when he had looked at his motor for the last time.

"Miss Taggart!" cried the chief engineer. "We don't know what to do!"

The receiver clicked softly back into its cradle. "I don't, either," she answered.

In a moment, she knew it was over. She heard her voice telling the man to check further and report to her later—and she waited for the sound of his steps to vanish in the echoing silence of the hall.

Crossing the concourse of the Terminal for the last time, she glanced at the statue of Nathaniel Taggart—and remembered a promise she had made. It would be only a symbol now, she thought, but it would be the kind of farewell that Nathaniel Taggart deserved. She had no other writing instrument, so she took the lipstick from her bag and, smiling up at the marble face of the man who would have understood, she drew a large sign of the dollar on the pedestal under his feet.

She was first to reach the corner, two blocks east of the Terminal entrance. As she waited, she observed the first trickles of the panic that was soon to engulf the city: there were automobiles driving too fast, some of them loaded with household effects, there were too many police cars speeding by, and too many sirens bursting in the distance.

The news of the destruction of the Bridge was apparently spreading through the city; they would know that the city was doomed and they would start a stampede to escape—but they had no place to go, and it was not her concern any longer.

She saw Francisco's figure approaching from some distance away; she recognized the swiftness of his walk, before she could distinguish the face under the cap pulled low over his eyes. She caught the moment when he saw her, as he came closer. He waved his arm, with a smile of greeting. Some conscious stress in the sweep of his arm made it the gesture of a d'Anconia, welcoming the arrival of a long-awaited traveler at the gates of his own domain.

When he approached, she stood solemnly straight and, looking at his face and at the buildings of the greatest city in the world, as at the kind of witnesses she wanted, she said slowly, her voice confident and steady: "I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

He inclined his head, as if in sign of admittance. His smile was now a salute.

Then he took her suitcase with one hand, her arm with the other, and said, "Come on."

The unit known as "Project F"—in honor of its originator, Dr. Ferns—was a small structure of reinforced concrete, low on the slope of the hill that supported the State Science Institute on a higher, more public level. Only the small gray patch of the unit's roof could be seen from the Institute's windows, hidden in a jungle of ancient trees; it looked no bigger than the cover of a manhole.

The unit consisted of two stories in the shape of a small cube placed asymmetrically on top of a larger one. The first story had no windows, only a door studded with iron spikes; the second story had but one window, as if in reluctant concession to daylight, like a face with a single eye. The men on the staff of the Institute felt no curiosity about that structure and avoided the paths that led down to its door; nobody had ever suggested it, but they had the impression that the structure housed a project devoted to experiments with the germs of deadly diseases.

The two floors were occupied by laboratories that contained a great many cages with guinea pigs, dogs and rats. But the heart and meaning of the structure was a room in its cellar, deep under the ground; the room had been incompetently lined with the porous sheets of soundproofing material; the sheets had begun to crack and the naked rock of a cave showed through.

The unit was always protected by a squad of four special guards.

Tonight, the squad had been augmented to sixteen, summoned for emergency duty by a long-distance telephone call from New York. The guards, as well as all other employees of "Project F," had been carefully chosen on the basis of a single qualification: an unlimited capacity for obedience.

The sixteen were stationed for the night outside the structure and in the deserted laboratories above the ground, where they remained uncritically on duty, with no curiosity about anything that might be taking place below.

In the cellar room, under the ground, Dr. Ferris, Wesley Mouch and James Taggart sat in armchairs lined up against one wall. A machine that looked like a small cabinet of irregular shape stood in a corner across from them. Its face bore rows of glass dials, each dial marked by a segment of red, a square screen that looked like an amplifier, rows of numbers, rows of wooden knobs and plastic buttons, a single lever controlling a switch at one side and a single red glass button at the other. The face of the machine seemed to have more expression than the face of the mechanic in charge of it; he was a husky young man in a sweat-stained shirt with sleeves rolled above the elbows; his pale blue eyes were glazed by an enormously conscientious concentration on his task; he moved his lips once in a while, as if reciting a memorized lesson.

A short wire led from the machine to an electric storage battery behind it. Long coils of wire, like the twisted arms of an octopus, stretched forward across the stone floor, from the machine to a leather mattress spread under a cone of violent light. John Galt lay strapped to the mattress. He was naked; the small metal disks of electrodes at the ends of the wires were attached to his wrists, his shoulders, his hips and his ankles; a device resembling a stethoscope was attached to his chest and connected to the amplifier.

"Get this straight," said Dr. Ferris, addressing him for the first time.

"We want you to take full power over the economy of the country. We want you to become a dictator. We want you to rule. Understand?

We want you to give orders and to figure out the right orders to give.

What we want, we mean to get Speeches, logic, arguments or passive obedience won't save you now. We want ideas—or else. We won't let you out of here until you tell us the exact measures you'll take to save our system. Then we'll have you tell it to the country over the radio."

He raised his wrist, displaying a stop-watch. "I'll give you thirty seconds to decide whether you want to start talking right now. If not, then we'll start. Do you understand?"

Galt was looking straight at them, his face expressionless, as if he understood too much. He did not answer.

They heard the sound of the stop-watch in the silence, counting off the seconds, and the sound of Mouch's choked, irregular breathing as he gripped the arms of his chair.

Ferris waved a signal to the mechanic at the machine. The mechanic threw the switch; it lighted the red glass button and set off two sounds: one was the low, humming drone of an electric generator, the other was a peculiar beat, as regular as the ticking of a clock, but with an oddly muffled resonance. It took them a moment to realize that it came from the amplifier and that they were hearing the beat of Galt's heart.

"Number three," said Ferris, raising a finger in signal.

The mechanic pressed a button under one of the dials. A long shudder ran through Galt's body; his left arm shook in jerking spasms, convulsed by the electric current that circled between his wrist and shoulder. His head fell back, his eyes closed, his lips drawn tight. He made no sound.

When the mechanic lifted his finger off the button, Galt's arm stopped shaking. He did not move.

The three men glanced about them with an instant's look of groping.

Ferris' eyes were blank, Mouch's terrified, Taggart's disappointed. The sound of the thumping beat went on through the silence.

"Number two," said Ferris, It was Galt's right leg that twisted in convulsions, with the current now circling between his hip and ankle. His hands gripped the edges of the mattress. His head jerked once, from side to side, then lay still.

The beating of the heart grew faintly faster.

Mouch was drawing away, pressing against the back of his armchair.

Taggart was sitting on the edge of Ms, leaning forward.

"Number one, gradual," said Ferris.

Galt's torso jerked upward and fell back and twisted in long shudders, straining against his strapped wrists—as the current was now running from his one wrist to the other, across his lungs. The mechanic was slowly turning a knob, increasing the voltage of the current; the needle on the dial was moving toward the red segment that marked danger. Galt's breath was coming in broken, panting sounds out of convulsed lungs.

"Had enough?" snarled Ferris, when the current went off.

Galt did not answer. His lips moved faintly, opening for air. The beat from the stethoscope was racing. But his breath was falling to an even rhythm, by a controlled effort at relaxation.

"You're too easy on him!" yelled Taggart, staring at the naked body on the mattress.

Galt opened his eyes and glanced at them for a moment. They could tell nothing, except that his glance was steady and fully conscious. Then he dropped his head again and lay still, as if he had forgotten them.

His naked body looked strangely out of place in this cellar. They knew it, though none of them would identify that knowledge. The long lines of his body, running from his ankles to the flat hips, to the angle of the waist, to the straight shoulders, looked like a statue of ancient Greece, sharing that statue's meaning, but stylized to a longer, lighter, more active form and a gaunter strength, suggesting more restless an energy—the body, not of a chariot driver, but of a builder of airplanes. And as the meaning of a statue of ancient Greece—the statue of man as a god—clashed with the spirit of this century's halls, so his body clashed with a cellar devoted to prehistorical activities. The clash was the greater, because he seemed to belong with electric wires, with stainless steel, with precision instruments, with the levers of a control board. Perhaps—this was the thought most fiercely resisted and most deeply buried at the bottom of his watchers sensations, the thought they knew only as a diffused hatred and an unfocused terror—perhaps it was the absence of such statues from the modern world that had transformed a generator into an octopus and brought a body such as his into its tentacles.

"I understand you're some sort of electrical expert," said Ferris, and chuckled. "So are we—don't you think so?"

Two sounds answered him in the silence: the drone of the generator and the beating of Galt's heart.

"The mixed series!" ordered Ferris, waving one finger at the mechanic.

The shocks now came at irregular, unpredictable intervals, one after another or minutes apart. Only the shuddering convulsions of Galt's legs, arms, torso or entire body showed whether the current was racing between two particular electrodes or through all of them at once. The needles on the dials kept coming close to the red marks, then receding: the machine was calculated to inflict the maximum intensity of pain without damaging the body of the victim.

It was the watchers who found it unbearable to wait through the minutes of the pauses filled with the sound of the heartbeat: the heart was now racing in an irregular rhythm. The pauses were calculated to let that beat slow down, but allow no relief to the victim, who had to wait for a shock at any moment.

Galt lay relaxed, as if not attempting to fight the pain, but surrendering to it, not attempting to negate it, but to bear it. When his lips parted for breath and a sudden jolt slammed them tight again, he did not resist the shaking rigidity of his body, but he let it vanish the instant the current left him. Only the skin of his face was pulled tight, and the sealed line of his lips twisted sidewise once in a while. When a shock raced through his chest, the gold-copper strands of his hair flew with the jerking of his head, as if waving in a gust of wind, beating against his face, across his eyes. The watchers wondered why his hair seemed to be growing darker, until they realized that it was drenched in sweat.

The terror of hearing one's own heart struggling as if about to burst at any moment, had been intended to be felt by the victim. It was the torturers who were trembling with terror, as they listened to the jagged, broken rhythm and missed a breath with every missing beat. It sounded now as if the heart were leaping, beating frantically against its cage of ribs, in agony and in a desperate anger. The heart was protesting; the man would not. He lay still, his eyes closed, his hands relaxed, hearing his heart as it fought for his life.

Wesley Mouch was first to break. "Oh God, Floyd!" he screamed.

"Don't kill him! Don't dare kill him! If he dies, we die!"

"He won't," snarled Ferris. "He'll wish he did, but he won't! The machine won't let him! It's mathematically computed! It's safe!"

"Oh, isn't it enough? He'll obey us now! I'm sure he'll obey!"

"No! It's not enough! I don't want him to obey! I want him to believe! To accept! To want to accept! We've got to have him work for us voluntarily!"

"Go ahead!" cried Taggart. "What are you waiting for? Can't you make the current stronger? He hasn't even screamed yet!"

"What's the matter with you?" gasped Mouch, catching a glimpse of Taggart's face while a current was twisting Galt's body: Taggart was staring at it intently, yet his eyes seemed glazed and dead, but around that inanimate stare the muscles of his face were pulled into an obscene caricature of enjoyment.

"Had enough?" Ferris kept yelling to Galt. "Are you ready to want what we want?"

They heard no answer. Galt raised his head once in a while and looked at them. There were dark rings under his eyes, but the eyes were clear and conscious.

In mounting panic, the watchers lost their sense of context and language—and their three voices blended into a progression of indiscriminate shrieks: "We want you to take over! . . . We want you to rule!

. . . We order you to give orders! . . . We demand that you dictate!

. . . We order you to save us! . . . We order you to think! . . ."

They heard no answer but the beating of the heart on which their own lives depended.

The current was shooting through Galt's chest and the beating was coming in irregular spurts, as if it were racing and stumbling—when suddenly his body fell still, relaxing: the beating had stopped.

The silence was like a stunning blow, and before they had time to scream, their horror was topped by another: by the fact that Galt opened his eyes and raised his head.

Then they realized that the drone of the motor had ceased, too, and that the red light had gone out on the control panel: the current had stopped; the generator was dead.

The mechanic was jabbing his ringer at the button, to no avail. He yanked the lever of the switch again and again. He kicked the side of the machine. The red light would not go on; the sound did not return.

"Well?" snapped Ferris. "Well? What's the matter?"

"The generator's on the blink," said the mechanic helplessly.

"What's the matter with it?"

"I don't know."

"Well, find out and fix it!"

The man was not a trained electrician; he had been chosen, not for his knowledge, but for his uncritical capacity for pushing any buttons; the effort he needed to learn his task was such that his consciousness could be relied upon to have no room for anything else. He opened the rear panel of the machine and stared in bewilderment at the intricate coils: he could find nothing visibly out of order. He put on his rubber gloves, picked up a pair of pliers, tightened a few bolts at random, and scratched his head.

"I don't know," he said; his voice had a sound of helpless docility.

"Who am I to know?"

The three men were on their feet, crowding behind the machine to stare at its recalcitrant organs. They were acting merely by reflex: they knew that they did not know.

"But you've got to fix it!" yelled Ferris. "It's got to work! We've got to have electricity!"

"We must continue!" cried Taggart; he was shaking, "It's ridiculous!

I won't have it! I won't be interrupted! I won't let him off!" He pointed in the direction of the mattress.

"Do something!" Ferris was crying to the mechanic. "Don't just stand there! Do something! Fix it! I order you to fix it!"

"But I don't know what's wrong with it," said the man, blinking.

"Then find out!"

"How am I to find out?"

"I order you to fix it! Do you hear me? Make it work—or I'll fire you and throw you in jail!"

"But I don't know what's wrong with it." The man sighed, bewildered. "I don't know what to do."

"It's the vibrator that's out of order," said a voice behind them; they whirled around; Galt was struggling for breath, but he was speaking in the brusque, competent tone of an engineer. "Take it out and pry off the aluminum cover. You'll find a pair of contacts fused together. Force them apart, take a small file and clean up the pitted surfaces. Then replace the cover, plug it back into the machine—and your generator will work."

There was a long moment of total silence.

The mechanic was staring at Galt; he was holding Galt's glance—and even he was able to recognize the nature of the sparkle in the dark green eyes; it was a sparkle of contemptuous mockery.

He made a step back. In the incoherent dimness of his consciousness, in some wordless, shapeless, unintelligible manner, even he suddenly grasped the meaning of what was occurring in that cellar.

He looked at Galt—he looked at the three men—he looked at the machine. He shuddered, he dropped his pliers and ran out of the room.

Galt burst out laughing.

The three men were backing slowly away from the machine. They were struggling not to allow themselves to understand what the mechanic had understood.

"No!" cried Taggart suddenly, glancing at Galt and leaping forward, "No! I won't let him get away with it!" He fell down on his knees, groping frantically to find the aluminum cylinder of the vibrator.

"I'll fix it! I'll work it myself! We've got to go on! We've got to break him!"

"Take it easy, Jim," said Ferris uneasily, jerking him up to his feet.

"Hadn't we . . . hadn't we better lay off for the night?" said Mouch pleadingly; he was looking at the door through which the mechanic had escaped, his glance part-envy, part-terror.

"No!" cried Taggart, "Jim, hasn't he had enough? Don't forget, we have to be careful."

"No! He hasn't had enough! He hasn't even screamed yet!"

"Jim!" cried Mouch suddenly, terrified by something in Taggart's face. "We can't afford to kill him! You know it!"

"I don't care! I want to break him! I want to hear Mm scream! I want—"

And then it was Taggart who screamed. It was a long, sudden, piercing scream, as if at some sudden sight, though his eyes were staring at space and seemed blankly sightless. The sight he was confronting was within him. The protective walls of emotion, of evasion, of pretense, of semi-thinking and pseudo-words, built up by him through all of his years, had crashed in the span of one moment—the moment when he knew that he wanted Galt to die, knowing fully that his own death would follow.

He was suddenly seeing the motive that had directed all the actions of his life. It was not his incommunicable soul or his love for others or his social duty or any of the fraudulent sounds by which he had maintained his self-esteem: it was the lust to destroy whatever was living, for the sake of whatever was not. It was the urge to defy reality by the destruction of every living value, for the sake of proving to himself that he could exist in defiance of reality and would never have to be bound by any solid, immutable facts. A moment ago, he had been able to feel that he hated Galt above all men, that the hatred was {woof of Galt's evil, which he need define no further, that he wanted Galt to be destroyed for the sake of his own survival. Now he knew that he had wanted Galt's destruction at the price of his own destruction to follow, he knew that he had never wanted to survive, he knew that it was Galt's greatness he had wanted to torture and destroy—he was seeing, it as greatness by his own admission, greatness by the only standard that existed, whether anyone chose to admit it or not: the greatness of a- man who was master of reality in a manner no other had equaled. In the moment when he, lames Taggart, had found himself facing the ultimatum: to accept reality or die, it was death his emotions had chosen, death, rather than surrender to that realm of which Galt was so radiant a son. In the person of Galt—he knew—he had sought the destruction of all existence.

It was not by means of words that this knowledge confronted his consciousness: as all his knowledge had consisted of emotions, so now he was held by an emotion and a vision that he had no power to dispel. He was no longer able to summon the fog to conceal the sight of all those blind alleys he had struggled never to be forced to see: now, at the end of every alley, he was seeing his hatred of existence—he was seeing the face of Cherryl Taggart with her joyous eagerness to live and that it was this particular eagerness he had always wanted to defeat—he was seeing his face as the face of a killer whom all men should rightfully loathe, who destroyed values for being values, who killed in order not to discover his own irredeemable evil.

"No . . ." he moaned, staring at that vision, shaking his head to escape it. "No . . . No . . . "

"Yes," said Galt.

He saw Galt's eyes looking straight at his, as if Galt were seeing the things he was seeing.

"1 told you that on the radio, didn't I?" said Galt.

This was the stamp James Taggart had dreaded, from which there was no escape: the stamp and proof of objectivity. "No . . ." he said feebly once more, but it was no longer the voice of a living consciousness.

He stood for a moment, staring blindly at space, then his legs gave way, folding limply, and he sat on the floor, still staring, unaware of his action or surroundings.

"Jim . . . !" called Mouch. There was no answer.

Mouch and Ferris did not ask themselves or wonder what it was that had happened to Taggart: they knew that they must never attempt to discover it, under peril of sharing his fate. They knew who it was that had been broken tonight. They knew that this was the end of James Taggart, whether his physical body survived or not.

"Let's . . . let's get Jim out of here," said Ferris shakily. "Let's get him to a doctor . . . or somewhere . . ."

They pulled Taggart to his feet; he did not resist, he obeyed lethargically, and he moved his feet when pushed. It was he who had reached the state to which he had wanted Galt to be reduced. Holding his arms at both sides, his two friends led him out of the room.

He saved them from the necessity of admitting to themselves that they wanted to escape Galt's eyes. Galt was watching them; his glance was too austerely perceptive.

"We'll be back," snapped Ferris to the chief of the guards. "Stay here and don't let anyone in. Understand? No one."

They pushed Taggart into their car, parked by the trees at the entrance. "We'll be back." said Ferris to no one in particular, to the trees and the darkness of the sky.

For the moment, their only certainty was that they had to escape from that cellar—the cellar where the living generator was left tied by the side of the dead one.

 

CHAPTER X


Date: 2015-12-17; view: 581


<== previous page | next page ==>
THE CONCERTO OF DELIVERANCE 17 page | THE TOP AND THE BOTTOM 1 page
doclecture.net - lectures - 2014-2024 year. Copyright infringement or personal data (0.017 sec.)