THE CONCERTO OF DELIVERANCE 17 page

He gripped the edge of a table between them, for support and as a protective barrier, even though the figure on the window sill had not moved.

"I didn't bring you to this!" he cried. "I didn't mean to! I couldn't help it! It's not what I intended! . . . John! I'm not to blame for it!

I'm not! I never had a chance against them! They own the world! They left me no place in it! . . . What's reason to them? What's science?

You don't know how deadly they are! You don't understand them! They don't think! They're mindless animals moved by irrational feelings—by their greedy, grasping, blind, unaccountable feelings! They seize whatever they want, that's all they know: that they want it, regardless of cause, effect or logic—they want it, the bloody, grubbing pigs! . . . The mind? Don't you know how futile it is, the mind, against those mindless hordes? Our weapons are so helplessly, laughably childish: truth, knowledge, reason, values, rights! Force is all they know, force, fraud and plunder! . , , John! Don't look at me like that! What could I do against their fists? I had to live, didn't I? It wasn't for myself—it was for the future of science! I had to be left alone, I had to be protected, I had to make terms with them—there's no way to live except on their terms—there isn't!—do you hear me?—there isn't! . . . What did you want me to do? Spend my life begging for jobs? Begging my inferiors for funds and endowments? Did you want my work to depend on the mercy of the ruffians who have a knack for making money? I had no time to compete with them for money or markets or any of their miserable material pursuit! Was that your idea of justice—that they should spend their money on liquor, yachts and women, while the priceless hours of my life were wasted for lack of scientific equipment? Persuasion? How could I persuade them? What language could I speak to men who don't think? . . . You don't know how lonely I was, how starved for some spark of intelligence! How lonely and tired and helpless! Why should a mind like mine have to bargain with ignorant fools?

They'd never contribute a penny to science! Why shouldn't they be forced? It wasn't you that I wanted to force! That gun was not aimed at the intellect! It wasn't aimed at men like you and me, only at mindless materialists! . . . Why do you look at me that way? I had no choice!

There isn't any choice except to beat them at their own game! Oh yes, it is their game, they set the rules! What do we count, the few who can think? We can only hope to get by, unnoticed—and to trick them into serving our aims! . . . Don't you know how noble a purpose it was—my vision of the future of science? Human knowledge set free of material bonds! An unlimited end unrestricted by means! I am not a traitor, John! I'm not! I was serving the cause of the mind! What I saw ahead, what I wanted, what I felt, was not to be measured in their miserable dollars! I wanted a laboratory! I needed it! What do I care where it came from or how? I could do so much! I could reach such heights!

Don't you have any pity? I wanted it! . . . What if they had to be forced? Who are they to think, anyway? Why did you teach them to rebel? It would have worked, if you hadn't withdrawn them! It would have worked, I tell you! It wouldn't be—like this! . . . Don't accuse me! We can't be guilty . . . all of us . . . for centuries. . . . We can't be so totally wrong! . . . We're not to be damned! We had no choice! There is no other way to live on earth! . . . Why don't you answer me? What are you seeing? Are you thinking of that speech you made? I don't want to think of it! It was only logic! One can't live by logic! Do you hear me? . . . Don't look at me! You're asking the impossible! Men can't exist your way! You permit no moments of weakness, you don't allow for human frailties or human feelings! What do you want of us? Rationality twenty-four hours a day, with no loophole, no rest, no escape? . . . Don't look at me, God damn you! I'm not afraid of you any longer! Do you hear me? I am not afraid! Who are you to blame me, you miserable failure? Here's where your road has brought you! Here you are, caught, helpless, under guard, to be killed by those brutes at any moment—and you dare to accuse me of being impractical! Oh yes, you're going to be killed! You won't win! You can't be allowed to win! You are the man who has to be destroyed!"

Dr, Stadler's gasp was a muffled scream, as if the immobility of the figure on the window sill had served as a silent reflector and had suddenly made him see the full meaning of his own words.

"No!" moaned Dr. Stadler, moving his head from side to side, to escape the unmoving green eyes. "No! . . . No! . . . No!"

Galt's voice had the same unbending austerity as his eyes: "You have said everything I wanted to say to you."

Dr. Stadler banged his fists against the door; when it was opened, he ran out of the room.

For three days, no one entered Galt's suite except the guards who brought his meals. Early on the evening of the fourth day, the door opened to admit Chick Morrison with two companions. Chick Morrison was dressed in dinner clothes, and his smile was nervous, but a shade more confident than usual. One of his companions was a valet. The other was a muscular man whose face seemed to clash with his tuxedo: it was a stony face with sleepy eyelids, pale, darting eyes and a prizefighter's broken nose; his skull was shaved except for a patch of faded blond curls on top; he kept his right hand in the pocket of his trousers.

"You will please dress, Mr. Galt," said Chick Morrison persuasively, pointing to the door of the bedroom, where a closet had been filled with expensive garments which Galt had not chosen to wear. "You will please put on your dinner clothes." He added, "This is an order, Mr.

Galt."

Galt walked silently into the bedroom. The three men followed. Chick Morrison sat on the edge of a chair, starting and discarding one cigarette after another. The valet went through too many too courteous motions, helping Galt to dress, handing him his shirt studs, holding his coat. The muscular man stood in a corner, his hand in his pocket. No one said a word.

"You will please co-operate, Mr. Galt," said Chick Morrison, when Galt was ready, and indicated the door with a courtly gesture of invitation to proceed.

So swiftly that no one could catch the motion of his hand, the muscular man was holding Galt's arm and pressing an invisible gun against his ribs. "Don't make any false moves," he said in an expressionless voice.

"I never do," said Galt.

Chick Morrison opened the door. The valet stayed behind. The three figures in dinner clothes walked silently down the hall to the elevator.

They remained silent in the elevator, the clicks of the flashing numbers above the door marking their downward progress.

The elevator stopped on the mezzanine floor. Two armed soldiers preceded them and two others followed, as they walked through the long, dim corridors. The corridors were deserted except for armed sentinels posted at the turns. The muscular man's right arm was linked to Galt's left; the gun remained invisible to any possible observer. Galt felt the small pressure of the muzzle against his side; the pressure was expertly maintained: not to be felt as an impediment and not to be forgotten for a moment.

The corridor led to a wide, closed doorway. The soldiers seemed to melt away into the shadows, when Chick Morrison's hand touched the doorknob. It was his hand that opened the door, but the sudden contrast of light and sound made it seem as if the door were flung open by an explosion: the light came from three hundred bulbs in the blazing chandeliers of the grand ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel; the sound was the applause of five hundred people.

Chick Morrison led the way to the speakers' table raised on a platform above the tables filling the room. The people seemed to know, without announcement, that of the two figures following him, it was the tall, slender man with the gold-copper hair that they were applauding. His face had the same quality as the voice they had heard on the radio : calm, confident—and out of reach.

The seat reserved for Galt was the place of honor in the center of the long table, with Mr. Thompson waiting for him at his right and the muscular man slipping skillfully into the seat at his left, not relinquishing his arm or the pressure of the muzzle. The jewels on the naked shoulders of women carried the glitter of the chandeliers to the shadows of the tables crowded against the distant walls; the severe black-and white of the men's figures rescued the room's style of solemnly regal luxury from the discordant slashes made by news cameras, microphones and a dormant array of television equipment. The crowd was on its feet, applauding. Mr. Thompson was smiling and watching Galt's face, with the eager, anxious look of an adult waiting for a child's reaction to a spectacularly generous gift. Galt sat facing the ovation, neither ignoring it nor responding.

"The applause you are hearing," a radio announcer was yelling into a microphone in a corner of the room, "is in greeting to John Galt, who has just taken his place at the speakers' table! Yes, my friends, John Galt in person—as those of you who can find a television set will have a chance to see for yourself in a short while!"

I must remember where I am—thought Dagny, clenching her fists under the tablecloth, in the obscurity of a side table. It was hard to maintain a sense of double reality in the presence of Galt, thirty feet away from her. She felt that no danger or pain could exist in the world so long as she could see his face—and, simultaneously, an icy terror, when she looked at those who held him in their power, when she remembered the blind irrationality of the event they were staging. She fought to keep her facial muscles rigid, not to betray herself by a smile of happiness or by a scream of panic.

She wondered how his eyes had been able to find her in that crowd.

She had seen the brief pause of his glance, which no one else could notice; the glance had been more than a kiss, it had been a handshake of approval and support.

He did not glance again in her direction. She could not force herself to look away. It was startling to see him in evening clothes and more startling still that he wore them so naturally; he made them look like a work uniform of honor; his figure suggested the kind of banquet, in the days of a distant past, where he would have been receiving an industrial award. Celebrations—she remembered her own words, with a stab of longing—should be only for those who have something to celebrate.

She turned away. She struggled not to look at him too often, not to attract the attention of her companions. She had been placed at a table prominent enough to display her to the assembly, but obscure enough to keep her out of the line of Galt's sight, along with those who had incurred Galt's disfavor: with Dr. Ferris and Eugene Lawson.

Her brother Jim, she noted, had been placed closer to the platform; she could see his sullen face among the nervous figures of Tinky Holloway, Fred Kinnan, Dr. Simon Pritchett. The tortured faces strung out above the speakers' table were not succeeding in their efforts to hide that they looked like men enduring an ordeal; the calm of Galt's face seemed radiant among them; she wondered who was prisoner here and who was master. Her glance moved slowly down the line-up of his table: Mr. Thompson, Wesley Mouch, Chick Morrison, some generals, some members of the Legislature and, preposterously, Mr. Mowen chosen as a bribe to Galt, as a symbol of big business. She glanced about the room, looking for the face of Dr. Stadler; he was not present.

The voices filling the room were like a fever chart, she thought; they kept darting too high and collapsing into patches of silence; the occasional spurts of someone's laughter broke off, incompleted, and attracted the shuddering turn of the heads at the neighboring tables. The faces were drawn and twisted by the most obvious and least dignified form of tension: by forced smiles. These people—she thought—knew, not by means of their reason, but by means of their panic, that this banquet was the ultimate climax and the naked essence of their world. They knew that neither their God nor their guns could make this celebration mean what they were struggling to pretend it meant.

She could not swallow the food that was placed before her; her throat seemed closed by a rigid convulsion. She noticed that the others at her table were also merely pretending to eat. Dr. Ferris was the only one whose appetite seemed unaffected.

When she saw a slush of ice cream in a crystal bowl before her, she noticed the sudden silence of the room and heard the screeching of the television machinery being dragged forward for action. Now—she thought, with a sinking sense of expectation, and knew that the same question mark was on every mind in the room. They were all staring at Galt. His face did not move or change.

No one had to call for silence, when Mr. Thompson waved to an announcer: the room did not seem to breathe.

"Fellow citizens," the announcer cried into a microphone, "of this country and of any other that's able to listen—from the grand ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel in New York City, we are bringing you the inauguration of the John Galt Plan!"

A rectangle of tensely bluish light appeared on the wall behind the speakers' table—a television screen to project for the guests the images which the country was now to see.

"The John Galt Plan for Peace, Prosperity and Profit!" cried the announcer, while a shivering picture of the ballroom sprang into view on the screen. "The dawn of a new age! The product of a harmonious collaboration between the humanitarian spirit of our leaders and the scientific genius of John Galt! If your faith in the future has been undermined by vicious rumors, you may now see for yourself our happily united family of leadership! . . . Ladies and gentlemen"—as the television camera swooped down to the speakers' table, and the stupefied face of Mr. Mowen filled the screen—"Mr. Horace Bussby Mowen, the American Industrialist!" The camera moved to an aged collection of facial muscles shaped in imitation of a smile. "General of the Array Whittington S. Thorpe!" The camera, like an eye at a police line-up, moved from face to scarred face—scarred by the ravages of fear, of evasion, of despair, of uncertainty, of self-loathing, of guilt. "Majority Leader of the National Legislature, Mr. Lucian Phelps! . . . Mr.

Wesley Mouch! . . . Mr. Thompson!" The camera paused on Mr.

Thompson; he gave a big grin to the nation, then turned and looked off screen, to his left, with an air of triumphant expectancy. "Ladies and gentlemen," the announcer said solemnly, "John Galt!"

Good God!—thought Dagny—what are they doing? From the screen, the face of John Galt was looking at the nation, the face without pain or fear or guilt, implacable by virtue of serenity, invulnerable by virtue of self-esteem. This face—she thought—among those others?

Whatever it is that they're planning, she thought, it's undone—nothing more can or has to be said—there's the product of one code and of the other, there's the choice, and whoever is human will know it.

"Mr. Galt's personal secretary," said the announcer, while the camera blurred hastily past the next face and went on. "Mr. Clarence 'Chick' Morrison . . . Admiral Homer Dawley . . . Mr.—"

She looked at the faces around her, wondering: Did they see the contrast? Did they know it? Did they see him? Did they want him to be real?

"This banquet," said Chick Morrison, who had taken over as master of ceremonies, "is in honor of the greatest figure of our time, the ablest producer, the man of the 'know-how,' the new leader of our economy—John Galt! If you have heard his extraordinary radio speech, you can "have no doubt that he can make things work. Now he is here to tell you that he will make them work for you. If you have been misled by those old-fashioned extremists who claimed that he would never join us, that no merger is possible between his way of life and ours, that it's either one or the other—tonight's event will prove to you that anything can be reconciled and united!"

Once they have seen him—thought Dagny—can they wish to look at anybody else? Once they know that he is possible, that this is what man can be, what else can they want to seek? Can they now feel any desire except to achieve in their souls what he has achieved in his? Or are they going to be stopped by the fact that the Mouches, the Morrisons, the Thompsons of the world had not chosen to achieve it? Are they going to regard the Mouches as the human and him as the impossible?

The camera was roving over the ballroom, flashing to the screen and to the country the faces of the prominent guests, the faces of the tensely watchful leaders and—once in a while—the face of John Galt. He looked as if his perceptive eyes were studying the men outside this room, the men who were seeing him across the country; one could not tell whether he was listening: no reaction altered the composure of his face.

"I am proud to pay tribute tonight," said the leader of the Legislature, the next speaker, "to the greatest economic organizer the world has ever discovered, the most gifted administrator, the most brilliant planner—John Galt, the man who will save us! I am here to thank him in the name of the people!"

This—thought Dagny, with a sickened amusement—was the spectacle of the sincerity of the dishonest. The most fraudulent part of the fraud was that they meant it. They were offering Galt the best that their view of existence could offer, they were trying to tempt him with that which was their dream of life's highest fulfillment: this spread of mindless adulation, the unreality of this enormous pretense—approval without standards, tribute without content, honor without causes, admiration without reasons, love without a code of values.

"We have discarded all our petty differences," Wesley Mouch was now saying into the microphone, "all partisan opinions, all personal interests and selfish views—in order to serve under the selfless leadership of John Galt!"

Why are they listening?—thought Dagny. Don't they see the hallmark of death in those faces, and the hallmark of life in his?

Which state do they wish to choose? Which state do they seek for mankind? . . . She looked at the faces in the ballroom. They were nervously blank; they showed nothing but the sagging weight of lethargy and the staleness of a chronic fear. They were looking at Galt and at Mouch, as if unable to perceive any difference between them or to feel concern if a difference existed, their empty, uncritical, unvaluing stare declaring: "Who am I to know?" She shuddered, remembering his sentence: "The man who declares, (Who am I to know?' is declaring, 'Who am I to live?' " Did they care to live?—she thought. They did not seem to care even for the effort of raising that question. . . . She saw a few faces who seemed to care. They were looking at Galt with a desperate plea, with a wistfully tragic admiration—and with hands lying limply on the tables before them.

These were the men who saw what he was, who lived in frustrated longing for his world—but tomorrow, if they saw him being murdered before them, their hands would hang as limply and their eyes would look away, saying, "Who am I to act?"

"Unity of action and purpose," said Mouch, "will bring us to a happier world. . . ."

Mr. Thompson leaned toward Galt and whispered with an amiable smile, "You'll have to say a few words to the country, later on, after me. No, no, not a long speech, just a sentence or two, no more.

Just 'hello, folks' or something like that, so they'll recognize your voice." The faintly stressed pressure of the "secretary's" muzzle against Galt's side added a silent paragraph. Galt did not answer.

"The John Galt Plan," Wesley Mouch was saying, "will reconcile all conflicts. It will protect the property of the rich and give a greater share to the poor. It will cut down the burden of your taxes and provide you with more government benefits. It will lower prices and raise wages. It will give more freedom to the individual and strengthen the bonds of collective obligations. It will combine the efficiency of free enterprise with the generosity of a planned economy,"

Dagny observed some faces—it took her an effort fully to believe it—who were looking at Galt with hatred. Jim was one of them, she noted. When the image of Mouch held the screen, these faces were relaxed in bored contentment, which was not pleasure, but the comfort of license, of knowing that nothing was demanded of them and nothing was firm or certain. When the camera flashed the image of Galt, their lips grew tight and their features were sharpened by a look of peculiar caution. She felt with sudden certainty that they feared the precision of his face, the unyielding clarity of his features, the look of being an entity, a look of asserting existence. They hate him for being himself—she thought, feeling a touch of cold horror, as the nature of their souls became real to her—they hate him for his capacity to live.

Do they want to live?—she thought in self-mockery. Through the stunned numbness of her mind, she remembered the sound of his sentence: "The desire not to be anything, is the desire not to be."

It was now Mr. Thompson who was yelling into the microphone in his briskest and folksiest manner: "And I say to you: kick them in the teeth, all those doubters who're spreading disunity and fear! They told you that John Galt would never join us, didn't they? Well, here he is, in person, of his own free choice, at this table and at the head of our State! Ready, willing and able to serve the people's cause!

Don't you ever again, any of you, start doubting or running or giving up! Tomorrow is here today—and what a tomorrow! With three meals a day for everyone on earth, with a car in every garage, and with electric power given free, produced by some sort of a motor the like of which we've never seen! And all you have to do is just be patient a little while longer! Patience, faith and unity—that's the recipe, for progress! We must stand united among ourselves and united with the rest of the world, as a great big happy family, all working for the good of all! We have found a leader who will beat the record of our richest and busiest past! It's his love for mankind that has made him come here—to serve you, protect you and take care of you! He has heard your pleas and has answered the call of our common human duty! Every man is his brother's keeper! No man is an island unto himself! And now you will hear his voice—now you will hear his own message! . . . 'Ladies and gentlemen," he said solemnly, "John Galt—to the collective family of mankind!"

The camera moved to Galt. He remained still for a moment. Then, with so swift and expert a movement that his secretary's hand was unable to match it, he rose to his feet, leaning sidewise, leaving the pointed gun momentarily exposed to the sight of the world—then, standing straight, facing the cameras, looking at all his invisible viewers, he said: "Get the hell out of my way!"

CHAPTER IX

THE GENERATOR

"Get the hell out of my way!"

Dr. Robert Stadler heard it on the radio in his car. He did not know whether the next sound, part-gasp, part-scream, part-laughter, started rising from him or from the radio—but he heard the click that cut them both off. The radio went dead. No further sounds came from the Wayne-Falkland Hotel.

He jerked his hand from knob to knob under the lighted dial. Nothing came through, no explanations, no pleas of technical trouble, no silence-hiding music. All stations were off the air.

He shuddered, he gripped the wheel, leaning forward across it, like a jockey at the close of a race, and his foot pressed down on the accelerator. The small stretch of highway before him bounced with the leaping of his headlights. There was nothing beyond the lighted strip but the emptiness of the prairies of Iowa.

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. . . .

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 488