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THE SANCTION OF THE VICTIM 10 page

 

"We'll discuss it, you and I," said Mouch amiably. "It might be arranged." He turned to the others; Boyle's face was sagging. "There are many details still to be worked out, but I'm sure that our program won't encounter any major difficulties." He was assuming the tone and manner of a public address; he sounded brisk and almost cheerful. "Rough spots are to be expected. If one thing doesn't work, we'll try another.

 

Trial-and-error is the only pragmatic rule of action. We'll just keep on trying. If any hardships come up, remember that it's only temporary.

 

Only for the duration of the national emergency."

 

"Say," asked Kinnan, "how is the emergency to end if everything is to stand still?"

 

"Don't be theoretical," said Mouch impatiently. "We've got to deal with the situation of the moment. Don't bother about minor details, so long as the broad outlines of our policy are clear. We'll have the power. We'll be able to solve any problem and answer any question."

 

Fred Kinnan chuckled. "Who is John Galt?"

 

"Don't say that!" cried Taggart.

 

"I have a question to ask about Point Seven," said Kinnan. "It says that al! wages, prices, salaries, dividends, profits and so forth will be frozen on the date of the directive. Taxes, too?"

 

"Oh no!" cried Mouch. "How can we tell what funds we'll need in the future?" Kinnan seemed to be smiling. "Well?" snapped Mouch.

 

"What about it?"

 

"Nothing," said Kinnan. "I just asked."

 

Mouch leaned back in his chair. "I must say to all of you that I appreciate your coming here and giving us the benefit of your opinions. It has been very helpful." He leaned forward to look at his desk calendar and sat over it for a moment, toying with his pencil, Then the pencil came down, struck a date and drew a circle around it. "Directive 10-289 will go into effect on the morning of May first."

 

All nodded approval. None looked at his neighbor.

 

James Taggart rose, walked to the window and pulled the blind down over the white obelisk.

 

In the first moment of awakening, Dagny was astonished to find herself looking at the spires of unfamiliar buildings against a glowing, pale blue sky. Then she saw the twisted seam of the thin stocking on her own leg, she felt a wrench of discomfort in the muscles of her waistline, and she realized that she was lying on the couch in her office, with the clock on her desk saying 6:15 and the first rays of the sun giving silver edges to the silhouettes of the skyscrapers beyond the window. The last thing she remembered was that she had dropped down on the couch, intending to rest for ten minutes, when the window was black and the clock stood at 3:30.

 

She twisted herself to her feet, feeling an enormous exhaustion. The lighted lamp on the desk looked futile in the glow of the morning, over the piles of paper which were her cheerless, unfinished task. She tried not to think of the work for a few minutes longer, while she dragged herself past the desk to her washroom and let handfuls of cold water run over her face.



 

The exhaustion was gone by the time she stepped back into the office. No matter what night preceded it, she had never known a morning when she did not feel the rise of a quiet excitement that became a tightening energy in her body and a hunger for action in her mind—because this was the beginning of day and it was a day of her life.

 

She looked down at the city. The streets were still empty, it made them look wider, and in the luminous cleanliness of the spring air they seemed to be waiting for the promise of all the greatness that would take form in the activity about to pour through them. The calendar in the distance said: May 1.

 

She sat down at her desk, smiling in defiance at the distastefulness of her job. She hated the reports that she had to finish reading, but it was her job, it was her railroad, it was morning. She lighted a cigarette, thinking that she would finish this task before breakfast; she turned off the lamp and pulled the papers forward.

 

There were reports from the general managers of the four Regions of the Taggart system, their pages a typewritten cry of despair over the breakdowns of equipment. There was a report about a wreck on the main line near Winston, Colorado. There was the new budget of the Operating Department, the revised budget based on the raise in rates which Jim had obtained last week. She tried to choke the exasperation of hopelessness as she went slowly over the budget's figures: all those calculations had been made on the assumption that the volume of freight would remain unchanged and that the raise would bring them added revenue by the end of the year; she knew that the freight tonnage would go on shrinking, that the raise would make little difference, that by the end of this year their losses would be greater than ever.

 

When she looked up from the pages, she saw with a small jolt of astonishment that the clock said 9:25. She had been dimly aware of the usual sound of movement and voices in the anteroom of her office, as her staff had arrived to begin their day; she wondered why nobody had entered her office and why her telephone had remained silent; as a daily rule, there should have been a rush of business by this hour. She glanced at her calendar; there was a note that the McNeil Car Foundry of Chicago was to phone her at nine A.M. in regard to the new freight cars which Taggart Transcontinental had been expecting for six months.

 

She flicked the switch of the interoffice communicator to call her secretary. The girl's voice answered with a startled little gasp: "Miss Taggart! Are you here, in your office?"

 

"I slept here last night, again. Didn't intend to, but did. Was there a call for me from the McNeil Car Foundry?"

 

"No, Miss Taggart."

 

"Put them through to me immediately, when they call,"

 

"Yes, Miss Taggart."

 

Switching the communicator off, she wondered whether she imagined it or whether there had been something strange in the girl's voice: it had sounded unnaturally tense.

 

She felt the faint light-headedness of hunger and thought that she should go down to get a cup of coffee, but there was still the report of the chief engineer to finish, so she lighted one more cigarette.

 

The chief engineer was out on the road, supervising the reconstruction of the main track with the Rearden Metal rail taken from the corpse of the John Galt Line; she had chosen the sections most urgently in need of repair. Opening his report, she read—with a shock of incredulous anger—that he had stopped work in the mountain section of Winston, Colorado. He recommended a change of plans: he suggested that the rail intended for Winston be used, instead, to repair the track of their Washington-to-Miami branch. He gave his reasons: a derailment had occurred on that branch last week, and Mr. Tinky Holloway of Washington, traveling with a party of friends, had been delayed for three hours; it had been reported to the chief engineer that Mr. Holloway had expressed extreme displeasure. Although, from a purely technological viewpoint—said the chief engineer's report—the rail of the Miami branch was in better condition than that of the Winston section, one had to remember, from a sociological viewpoint, that the Miami branch carried a much more important class of passenger traffic; therefore, the chief engineer suggested that Winston could be kept waiting a little longer, and recommended the sacrifice of an obscure section of mountain trackage for the sake of a branch where "Taggart Transcontinental could not afford to create an unfavorable impression."

 

She read, slashing furious pencil marks on the margins of the pages, thinking that her first duty of the day, ahead of any other, was to stop this particular piece of insanity.

 

The telephone rang.

 

"Yes?" she asked, snatching the receiver. "McNeil Car Foundry?"

 

"No," said the voice of her secretary. "Senor Francisco d'Anconia."

 

She looked at the phone's mouthpiece for the instant of a brief shock. "All right. Put him on."

 

The next voice she heard was Francisco's. "I see that you're in your office just the same," he said; his voice was mocking, harsh and tense.

 

"Where did you expect me to be?"

 

"How do you like the new suspension?"

 

"What suspension?"

 

"The moratorium on brains."

 

"What are you talking about?"

 

"Haven't you seen today's newspapers?"

 

"No."

 

There was a pause; then his voice came slowly, changed and grave: "Better take a look at them, Dagny."

 

"All right."

 

"I'll call you later."

 

She hung up and pressed the switch of the communicator on her desk. "Get me a newspaper," she said to her secretary.

 

"Yes, Miss Taggart," the secretary's voice answered grimly.

 

It was Eddie Willers who came in and put the newspaper down on her desk. The meaning of the look on his face' was the same as the tone she had caught in Francisco's voice: the advance notice of some inconceivable disaster.

 

"None of us wanted to be first to tell you," he said very quietly and walked out.

 

When she rose from her desk, a few moments later, she felt that she had full control of her body and that she was not aware of her body's existence. She felt lifted to her feet and it seemed to her that she stood straight, not touching the ground. There was an abnormal clarity about every object in the room, yet she was seeing nothing around her, but she knew that she would be able to see the thread of a cobweb if her purpose required it, just as she would be able to walk with a somnambulist's assurance along the edge of a roof. She could not know that she was looking at the room with the eyes of a person who had lost the capacity and the concept of doubt, and what remained to her was the simplicity of a single perception and of a single goal. She did not know that the thing which seemed so violent, yet felt like such a still, unfamiliar calm within her, was the power of full certainty—and that the anger shaking her body, the anger which made her ready, with the same passionate indifference, either to kill or to die, was her love of rectitude, the only love to which all the years of her life had been given.

 

Holding the newspaper in her hand, she walked out of her office and on toward the hall. She knew, crossing the anteroom, that the faces of her staff were turned to her, but they seemed to be many years away.

 

She walked down the hall, moving swiftly but without effort, with the same sensation of knowing that her feet were probably touching the ground but that she did not feel it. She did not know how many rooms she crossed to reach Jim's office, or whether there had been any people in her way, she knew the direction to take and the door to pull open to enter unannounced and walk toward his desk.

 

The newspaper was twisted into a roll by the time she stood before him. She threw it at his face, it struck his cheek and fell down to the carpet.

 

"There's my resignation, Jim," she said. "I won't work as a slave or as a slave-driver."

 

She did not hear the sound of his gasp; it came with the sound of the door closing after her.

 

She went back to her office and, crossing the anteroom, signaled Eddie to follow her inside.

 

She said, her voice calm and clear, "I have resigned."

 

He nodded silently.

 

"I don't know as yet what I’ll do in the future. I'm going away, to think it over and to decide. If you want to follow me, I'll be at the lodge in Woodstock." It was an old hunting cabin in a forest of the Berkshire Mountains, which she had inherited from her father and had not visited for years.

 

"I want to follow," he whispered, "I want to quit, and . . . and I can't. I can't make myself do it."

 

"Then will you do me a favor?"

 

"Of course."

 

"Don't communicate with me about the railroad. I don't want to hear it. Don't tell anyone where I am, except Hank Rearden. If he asks, tell him about the cabin and how to get there. But no one else. I don't want to see anybody."

 

"AU right."

 

"Promise?"

 

"Of course."

 

"When I decide what's to become of me, I'll let you know."

 

"Ill wait."

 

"That's all, Eddie."

 

He knew that every word was measured and that nothing else could be said between them at this moment. He inclined his head, letting it say the rest, then walked out of the office.

 

She saw the chief engineer's report still lying open on her desk, and thought that she had to order him at once to resume the work on the Winston section, then remembered that it was not her problem any longer. She felt no pain. She knew that the pain would come later and that it would be a tearing agony of pain, and that the numbness of this moment was a rest granted to her, not after, but before, to make her ready to bear it. But it did not matter. If that is required of me, then I'll bear it—she thought.

 

She sat down at her desk and telephoned Rearden at his mills in Pennsylvania.

 

"Hello, dearest," he said. He said it simply and clearly, as if he wanted to say it because it was real and right, and he needed to hold on to the concepts of reality and Tightness.

 

"Hank, I've quit."

 

"I see." He sounded as if he had expected it.

 

"Nobody came to get me, no destroyer, perhaps there never was any destroyer, after all. I don't know what I'll do next, but I have to get away, so that I won't have to see any of them for a while. Then I'll decide. I know that you can't go with me right now."

 

"No. I have two weeks in which they expect me to sign their Gift Certificate. I want to be right here when the two weeks expire."

 

"Do you need me—for the two weeks?"

 

"No. It's worse for you than for me. You have no way to fight them. I have. I think I'm glad they did it. It's clear and final. Don't worry about me. Rest. Rest from all of it, first."

 

"Yes."

 

"Where are you going?"

 

"To the country. To a cabin I own in the Berkshires. If you want to see me, Eddie Willers will tell you the way to get there. I'll be back in two weeks."

 

"Will you do me a favor?"

 

"Yes."

 

"Don't come back until I come for you."

 

"But I want to be here, when it happens."

 

"Leave that up to me."

 

"Whatever they do to you, I want it done to me also."

 

"Leave it up to me. Dearest, don't you understand? I think that what I want most right now is what you want: not to see any of them. But I have to stay here for a while. So it will help me if I know that you, at least, are out of their reach. I want to keep one clean point in my mind, to lean against. It will be only a short while—and then I'll come for you. Do you understand?"

 

"Yes, my darling. So long."

 

It was weightlessly easy to walk out of her office and down the stretching halls of Taggart Transcontinental. She walked, looking ahead, her steps advancing with the unbroken, unhurried rhythm of finality.

 

Her face was held level and it had a look of astonishment, of acceptance, of repose.

 

She walked across the concourse of the Terminal. She saw the statue of Nathaniel Taggart. But she felt no pain from it and no reproach, only the rising fullness of her love, only the feeling that she was going to join him, not in death, but in that which had been his life.

 

The first man to quit at Rearden Steel was Tom Colby, rolling mill foreman, head of the Rearden Steel Workers Union. For ten years, he had heard himself denounced throughout the country, because his was a "company union" and because he had never engaged in a violent conflict with the management. This was true: no conflict had ever been necessary; Rearden paid a higher wage scale than any union scale in the country, for which he demanded—and got—the best labor force to be found anywhere.

 

When Tom Colby told him that he was quitting, Rearden nodded, without comment or questions.

 

"I won't work under these conditions, myself," Colby added quietly, "and I won't help, to keep the men working. They trust me. I won't be the Judas goat leading them to the stockyards."

 

"What are you going to do for a living?" asked Rearden.

 

"I've saved enough to last me for about a year."

 

"And after that?"

 

Colby shrugged.

 

Rearden thought of the boy with the angry eyes, who mined coal at night as a criminal. He thought of all the dark roads, the alleys, the back yards of the country, where the best of the country's men would now exchange their services in jungle barter, in chance jobs, in unrecorded transactions. He thought of the end of that road.

 

Tom Colby seemed to know what he was thinking. "You're on your way to end up right alongside of me, Mr. Rearden," he said. "Are you going to sign your brains over to them?"

 

"No."

 

"And after that?"

 

Rearden shrugged.

 

Colby's eyes watched him for a moment, pale, shrewd eyes in a furnace-tanned face with soot-engraved wrinkles. "They've been telling us for years that it's you against me, Mr. Rearden. But it isn't. It's Orren Boyle and Fred Kinnan against you and me."

 

"I know it."

 

The Wet Nurse had never entered Rearden's office, as if sensing that that was a place he had no right to enter. He always waited to catch a glimpse of Rearden outside. The directive had attached him to his job, as the mills' official watchdog of over-or-under-production. He stopped Rearden, a few days later, in an alley between the rows of open-hearth furnaces. There was an odd look of fierceness on the boy's face.

 

"Mr. Rearden," he said, "I wanted to tell you that if you want to pour ten times the quota of Rearden Metal or steel or pig iron or anything, and bootleg it all over the place to anybody at any price—I wanted to tell you to go ahead. Ill fix it up. I'll juggle the books, I'll fake the reports, I'll get phony witnesses, I'll forge affidavits, I'll commit perjury—so you don't have to worry, there won't be any trouble!"

 

"Now why do you want to do that?" asked Rearden, smiling, but his smile vanished when he heard the boy answer earnestly: "Because I want, for once, to do something moral."

 

"That's not the way to be moral—" Rearden started, and stopped abruptly, realizing that- it was the way, the only way left, realizing through how many twists of intellectual corruption upon corruption this boy had to struggle toward his momentous discovery.

 

"I guess that's not the word," the boy said sheepishly. "I know it's a stuffy, old-fashioned word. That's not what I meant. I meant—" It was a sudden, desperate cry of incredulous anger: "Mr. Rearden, they have no right to do it!"

 

"What?"

 

"Take Rearden Metal away from you."

 

Rearden smiled and, prompted by a desperate pity, said, "Forget it, Non-Absolute. There are no rights."

 

"I know there aren't. But I mean . . . what I mean is that they can't do it."

 

"Why not?" He could not help smiling.

 

"Mr. Rearden, don't sign the Gift Certificate! Don't sign it, on principle."

 

"I won't sign it. But there aren't any principles."

 

"I know there aren't." He was reciting it in full earnestness, with the honesty of a conscientious student: "I know that everything is relative and that nobody can know anything and that reason is an illusion and that there isn't any reality. But I'm just talking about Rearden Metal.

 

Don't sign, Mr. Rearden. Morals or no morals, principles or no principles, just don't sign it—because it isn't right!"

 

No one else mentioned the directive in Rearden's presence. Silence was the new aspect about the mills. The men did not speak to him when he appeared in the workshops, and he noticed that they did not speak to one another. The personnel office received no formal resignations. But every other morning, one or two men failed to appear and never appeared again. Inquiries at their homes found the homes abandoned and the men gone. The personnel office did not report these desertions, as the directive required; instead, Rearden began to see unfamiliar faces among the workers, the drawn, beaten faces of the long unemployed, and heard them addressed by the names of the men who had quit. He asked no questions.

 

There was silence throughout the country. He did not know how many industrialists had retired and vanished on May I and 2, leaving their plants to be seized. He counted ten among his own customers, including McNeil of the McNeil Car Foundry in Chicago. He had no way of learning about the others; no reports appeared in the newspapers.

 

The front pages of the newspapers were suddenly full of stories about spring floods, traffic accidents, school picnics and golden-wedding anniversaries.

 

There was silence in his own home. Lillian had departed on a vacation trip to Florida, in mid-April; it had astonished him, as an inexplicable whim; it was the first trip she had taken alone since their marriage. Philip avoided him, with a look of panic. His mother stared at Rearden in reproachful bewilderment; she said nothing, but she kept bursting into tears in his presence, her manner suggesting that her tears were the most important aspect to consider in whatever disaster it was that she sensed approaching.

 

On the morning of May 15, he sat at the desk in his office, above the spread of the mills, and watched the colors of the smoke rising to the clear, blue sky. There were spurts of transparent smoke, like waves of heat, invisible but for the structures that shivered behind them; there were streaks of red smoke, and sluggish columns of yellow, and light, floating spirals of blue—and the thick, tight, swiftly pouring coils that looked like twisted bolts of satin tinged a mother-of-pearl pink by the summer sun.

 

The buzzer rang on his desk, and Miss Ives voice said, "Dr. Floyd Ferris to see you, without appointment, Mr. Rearden." In spite of its rigid formality, her tone conveyed the question: Shall I throw him out?

 

There was a faint movement of astonishment in Rearden's face, barely above the line of indifference: he had not expected that particular emissary. He answered evenly, "Ask him to come in."

 

Dr. Ferris did not smile as he walked toward Rearden's desk; he merely wore a look suggesting that Rearden knew full well that he had good reason to smile and so he would abstain from the obvious.

 

He sat down in front of the desk, not waiting for an invitation; he carried a briefcase, which he placed across his knees; he acted as if words were superfluous, since his reappearance in this office had made everything clear.

 

Rearden sat watching him in patient silence.

 

"Since the deadline for the signing of the national Gift Certificates expires tonight at midnight," said Dr. Ferris, in the tone of a salesman extending a special courtesy to a customer, "I have come to obtain your signature, Mr. Rearden."

 

He paused, with an air of suggesting that the formula now called for an answer.

 

"Go on," said Rearden. "I am listening."

 

"Yes, I suppose I should explain," said Dr. Ferris, "that we wish to get your signature early in the day in order to announce the fact on a national news broadcast. Although the gift program has gone through quite smoothly, there are still a few stubborn individualists left, who have failed to sign—small fry, really, whose patents are of no crucial value, but we cannot let them remain unbound, as a matter of principle, you understand. They are, we believe, waiting to follow your lead. You have a great popular following, Mr. Rearden, much greater than you suspected or knew how to use. Therefore, the announcement that you have signed will remove the last hopes of resistance and, by midnight, will bring in the last signatures, thus completing the program on schedule."

 

Rearden knew that of all possible speeches, this was the last Dr.

 

Ferris would make if any doubt of his surrender remained in the man's mind.

 

"Go on," said Rearden evenly. "You haven't finished."

 

"You know—as you have demonstrated at your trial—how important it is, and why, that we obtain all that property with the voluntary consent of the victims." Dr. Ferris opened his briefcase. "Here is the Gift Certificate, Mr. Rearden. We have filled it out and all you have to do is to sign your name at the bottom."

 

The piece of paper, which he placed in front of Rearden, looked like a small college diploma, with the text printed in old-fashioned script and the particulars inserted by typewriter. The thing stated that he, Henry Rearden, hereby transferred to the nation all rights to the metal alloy now known as "Rearden Metal," which would henceforth be manufactured by all who so desired, and which would bear the name of "Miracle Metal," chosen by the representatives of the people.

 

Glancing at the paper, Rearden wondered whether it was a deliberate mockery of decency, or so low an estimate of their victims' intelligence, that had made the designers of this paper print the text across a faint drawing of the Statue of Liberty.

 

His eyes moved slowly to Dr. Ferris' face. "You would not have come here," he said, "unless you had some extraordinary kind of blackjack to use on me. What is it?"

 

"Of course," said Dr. Ferris. "I would expect you to understand that. That is why no lengthy explanations are necessary." He opened his briefcase. "Do you wish to see my blackjack? I have brought a few samples."

 

In the manner of a cardsharp whisking out a long fan of cards with one snap of the hand, he spread before Rearden a line of glossy photographic prints. They were photostats of hotel and auto court registers, bearing in Rearden's handwriting the names of Mr. and Mrs. J.

 

Smith.

 

"You know, of course," said Dr. Ferris softly, "but you might wish to see whether we know it, that Mrs. J. Smith is Miss Dagny Taggart."

 

He found nothing to observe in Rearden's face. Rearden had not moved to bend over the prints, but sat looking down at them with grave attentiveness, as if, from the perspective of distance, he were discovering something about them which he had not known.


Date: 2015-12-17; view: 288


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