CHAPTER VIII THE JOHN GALT LINE

The worker smiled, looking at Eddie Willers across the table.  "I feel like a fugitive," said Eddie Willers. 'I guess you know why I haven't been here for months?" He pointed at the underground cafeteria.  "I'm supposed to be a vice-president now. The Vice-President in Charge of Operation. For God's sake, don't take it seriously. I stood it as long as I could, and then I had to escape, if only for one evening. . . . The first time I came down here for dinner, after my alleged promotion, they all stared at me so much, I didn't dare come back. Well, let them stare.  “You don't. I'm glad that it doesn't make any difference to you. . . .  “No, I haven't seen her for two weeks. But I speak to her on the phone every day, sometimes twice a day. . . . Yes, I know how she feels: she loves it. What is it we hear over the telephone-sound vibrations, isn't it? Well, her voice sounds as if it were turning into light vibrations-if you know what I mean. She enjoys running that horrible battle single handed and winning. . . . Oh yes, she's winning! Do you know why you haven't read anything about the John Galt Line in the newspapers for some time? Because it's going so well . . . Only . . . that Rearden Metal rail will be the greatest track ever built, but what will be the use, if we don't have any engines powerful enough to take advantage of it?  “Look at the kind of patched coal-burners we've got left-they can barely manage to drag themselves fast enough for old trolley-car rails. . . .  “Still, there's hope. The United Locomotive Works went bankrupt. That's the best break we've had in the last few weeks, because their plant has been bought by Dwight Sanders. He's a brilliant young engineer who's got the only good aircraft plant in the country. He had to sell the aircraft plant to his brother, in order to take over United Locomotive.  “That's on account of the Equalization of Opportunity Bill. Sure, it's just a setup between them, but can you blame him? Anyway, we'll see Diesels coming out of the United Locomotive Works now. Dwight Sanders will start things going. . . . Yes, she's counting on him. Why do you ask that? . . . Yes, he's crucially important to us right now. We've just signed a contract with him, for the first ten Diesel engines he'll build. When I phoned her that the contract was signed, she laughed and said, "You see? Is there ever any reason to be afraid?' . . . She said that, because she knows-I've never told her, but she knows-that I'm afraid. . . . Yes, I am. . . . I don't know . . . I wouldn't be afraid if I knew of what, I could do something about it. But this . . . Tell me, don't you really despise me for being Operating Vice-President? . . .  “But don't you see that it's vicious? . . . What honor? I don't know what it is that I really am: a clown, a ghost, an understudy or just a rotten stooge. When I sit in her office, in her chair, at her desk, I feel worse than that: I feel like a murderer. . . . Sure, I know that I'm supposed to be a stooge for her-and that would be an honor-but . . . but I feel as if in some horrible way which I can't quite grasp, I'm a stooge for Jim Taggart. Why should it be necessary for her to have a stooge? Why does she have to hide? Why did they throw her out of the building? Do you know that she had to move out into a dinky hole in the back alley, across from our Express and Baggage Entrance? You ought to take a look at it some time, that's the office of John Galt, Inc.  “Yet everybody knows that it's she who's still running Taggart Transcontinental. Why does she have to hide the magnificent job she's doing?  “Why are they giving her no credit? Why are they robbing her of her achievement-with me as the receiver of stolen goods? Why are they doing everything in their power to make it impossible for her to succeed, when she's all they've got standing between them and destruction? Why are they torturing her in return for saving their lives? . . . What's the matter with you? Why do you look at me like that? . . . Yes, I guess you understand. . . . There's something about it all that I can't define, and it's something evil. That's why I'm afraid. . . . I don't think one can get away with it. . . . You know, it's strange, but I think they know it, too, Jim and his crowd and all of them in the building. There's something guilty and sneaky about the whole place. Guilty and sneaky and dead. Taggart Transcontinental is now like a man who's lost his soul . . . who's betrayed his soul. . . . No, she doesn't care. Last time she was in New York, she came in unexpectedly-I was in my office, in her office-and suddenly the door opened and there she was. She came in, saying, 'Mr. Willers, I'm looking for a job as a station operator, would you give me a chance?' I wanted to damn them all, but I had to laugh, I was so glad to see her and she was laughing so happily. She had come straight from the airport-she wore slacks and a flying jacket-she looked wonderful-she'd got windburned, it looked like a suntan, just as if she'd returned from a vacation. She made me remain where I was, in her chair, and she sat on the desk and talked about the new bridge of the John Galt Line. . . . No. No, I never asked her why she chose that name. . . . I don't know what it means to her. A sort of challenge, I guess . . . I don't know to whom . . . Oh, it doesn't matter, it doesn't mean a thing, there isn't any John Galt, but I wish she hadn't used it. I don't like it, do you? . . . You do? You don't sound very happy saying it."  The windows of the offices of the John Galt Line faced a dark alley.  Looking up from her desk, Dagny could not see the sky, only the wall of a building rising past her range of vision. It was the side wall of the great skyscraper of Taggart Transcontinental.  Her new headquarters were two rooms on the ground floor of a half collapsed structure. The structure still stood, but its upper stories were boarded off as unsafe for occupancy. Such tenants as it sheltered were half-bankrupt, existing, as it did, on the inertia of the momentum of the past.  She liked her new place: it saved money. The rooms contained no superfluous furniture or people. The furniture had come from junk shops. The people were the choice best she could find. On her rare visits to New York, she had no time to notice the room where she worked; she noticed only that it served its purpose.  She did not know what made her stop tonight and look at the thin streaks of rain on the glass of the window, at the wall of the building across the alley.  It was past midnight. Her small staff had gone. She was due at the airport at three A.M., to fly her plane back to Colorado. She had little left to do, only a few of Eddie's reports to read. With the sudden break of the tension of hurrying, she stopped, unable to go on. The reports seemed to require an effort beyond her power. It was too late to go home and sleep, too early to go to the airport. She thought: You're tired-and watched her own mood with severe, contemptuous detachment, knowing that it would pass.  She had flown to New York unexpectedly, at a moment's notice, leaping to the controls of her plane within twenty minutes after hearing a brief item in a news broadcast. The radio voice had said that Dwight Sanders had retired from business, suddenly, without reason or explanation. She had hurried to New York, hoping to find him and stop him.  But she had felt, while flying across the continent, that there would be no trace of him to find.  The spring rain hung motionless in the air beyond the window, like a thin mist. She sat, looking across at the open cavern of the Express and Baggage Entrance of the Taggart Terminal. There were naked lights inside, among the steel girders of the ceiling, and a few piles of luggage on the worn concrete of the floor. The place looked abandoned and dead.  She glanced at a jagged crack on the wall of her office. She heard no sound. She knew she was alone in the ruins of a building. It seemed as if she were alone in the city. She felt an emotion held back for years: a loneliness much beyond this moment, beyond the silence of the room and the wet, glistening emptiness of the street; the loneliness of a gray wasteland where nothing was worth reaching; the loneliness of her childhood.  She rose and walked to the window. By pressing her face to the pane, she could see the whole of the Taggart Building, its lines converging abruptly to its distant pinnacle in the sky. She looked up at the dark window of the room that had been her office. She felt as if she were in exile, never to return, as if she were separated from the building by much more than a sheet of glass, a curtain of rain and the span of a few months.  She stood, in a room of crumbling plaster, pressed to the windowpane, looking up at the unattainable form of everything she loved. She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.  Once, when she was sixteen, looking at a long stretch of Taggart track, at the rails that converged-like the lines of a skyscraper-to a single point in the distance, she had told Eddie Willers that she had always felt as if the rails were held in the hand of a man beyond the horizon-no, not her father or any of the men in the office-and some day she would meet him.  She shook her head and turned away from the window.  She went back to her desk. She tried to reach for the reports. But suddenly she was slumped across the desk, her head on her arm. Don't, she thought; but she did not move to rise, it made no difference, there was no one to see her.  This was a longing she had never permitted herself to acknowledge.  She faced it now. She thought: If emotion is one's response to the things the world has to offer, if she loved the rails, the building, and more: if she loved her love for them-there was still one response, the greatest, that she had missed. She thought: To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth . . . To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his . . . No, not Francisco d'Anconia, not Hank Rearden, not any man she had ever met or admired . . . A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience . . . She twisted herself in a slow, faint movement, her breasts pressed to the desk; she felt the longing in her muscles, in the nerves of her body.  Is that what you want? Is it as simple as that?-she thought, but knew that it was not simple. There was some unbreakable link between her love for her work and the desire of her body; as if one gave her the right to the other, the right and the meaning; as if one were the completion of the other-and the desire would never be satisfied, except by a being of equal greatness.  Her face pressed to her arm, she moved her head, shaking it slowly in negation. She would never find it. Her own thought of what life could be like, was all she would ever have of the world she had wanted. Only the thought of it-and a few rare moments, like a few lights reflected from it on her way-to know, to hold, to follow to the end . . .  She raised her head.  On the pavement of the alley, outside her window, she saw the shadow of a man who stood at the door of her office.  The door was some steps away; she could not see him, or the street light beyond, only his shadow on the stones of the pavement. He stood perfectly still.  He was so close to the door, like a man about to enter, that she waited to hear him knock. Instead, she saw the shadow jerk abruptly, as if he were jolted backward, then he turned and walked away. There was only the outline of his hat brim and shoulders left on the ground, when he stopped. The shadow lay still for a moment, wavered, and grew longer again as he came back.  She felt no fear. She sat at her desk, motionless, watching in blank wonder. He stopped at the door, then backed away from it; he stood somewhere in the middle of the alley, then paced restlessly and stopped again. His shadow swung like an irregular pendulum across the pavement, describing the course of a soundless battle: it was a man fighting himself to enter that door or to escape.  She looked on, with peculiar detachment. She had no power to react, only to observe. She wondered numbly, distantly: Who was he? Had he been watching her from somewhere in the darkness? Had he seen her slumped across her desk, in the lighted, naked window? Had he watched her desolate loneliness as she was now watching his? She felt nothing.  They were alone in the silence of a dead city-it seemed to her that he was miles away, a reflection of suffering without identity, a fellow survivor whose problem was as distant to her as hers would be to him.  He paced, moving out of her sight, coming back again. She sat, watching-on the glistening pavement of a dark alley-the shadow of an unknown torment.  The shadow moved away once more. She waited. It did not return.  Then she leaped to her feet. She had wanted to see the outcome of the battle; now that he had won it-or lost-she was struck by the sudden, urgent need to know his identity and motive. She ran through the dark anteroom, she threw the door open and looked out.  The alley was empty. The pavement went tapering off into the distance, like a band of wet mirror under a few spaced lights. There was no one in sight. She saw the dark hole of a broken window in an abandoned shop. Beyond it, there were the doors of a few rooming houses. Across the alley, streaks of rain glittered under a light that hung over the black gap of an open door leading down to the underground tunnels of Taggart Transcontinental.  * * *  Rearden signed the papers, pushed them across the desk and looked away, thinking that he would never have to think of them again, wishing he were carried to the time when this moment would be far behind him.  Paul Larkin reached for the papers hesitantly; he looked ingratiatingly helpless, "It's only a legal technicality, Hank," he said. "You know that I'll always consider these ore mines as yours."  Rearden shook his head slowly; it was just a movement of his neck muscles; his face looked immovable, as if he were speaking to a stranger.  "No!" he said. "Either I own a property or I don't."  "But . . . but you know that you can trust me. You don't have to worry about your supply of ore. We've made an agreement. You know that you can count on me."  "I don't know it. I hope I can."  "But I've given you my word."  "I have never been at the mercy of anyone's word before."  "Why . . . why do you say that? We're friends. I'll do anything you wish. You'll get my entire output. The mines are still yours-just as good as yours. You have nothing to fear. I'll . . . Hank, what's the matter?"  "Don't talk."  "But . . . but what's the matter?"  "I don't like assurances. I don't want any pretense about how safe I am. I'm not. We have made an agreement which I can't enforce. I want you to know that I understand my position fully. If you intend to keep your word, don't talk about it, just do it."  "Why do you look at me as if it were my fault? You know how badly I feel about it. I bought the mines only because I thought it would help you out-I mean, I thought you'd rather sell them to a friend than to some total stranger. It's not my fault. I don't like that miserable Equalization Bill, I don't know who's behind it, I never dreamed they'd pass it, it was such a shock to me when they-"  "Never mind."  "But I only-"  "Why do you insist on talking about it?"  "I . . ." Larkin's voice was pleading. "I gave you the best price, Hank. The law said 'reasonable compensation.' My bid was higher than anyone else's."  Rearden looked at the papers still lying across the desk. He thought of the payment these papers gave him for his ore mines. Two-thirds of the sum was money which Larkin had obtained as a loan from the government; the new law made provisions for such loans "in order to give a fair opportunity to the new owners who have never had a chance."  Two-thirds of the rest was a loan he himself had granted to Larkin, a mortgage he had accepted on his own mines. . . . And the government money, he thought suddenly, the money now given to him as payment for his property, where had that come from? Whose work had provided it?  "'You don't have to worry, Hank," said Larkin, with that incomprehensible, insistent note of pleading in his voice. "It's just a paper formality."  Rearden wondered dimly what it was that Larkin wanted from him.  He felt that the man was waiting for something beyond the physical fact of the sale, some words which he, Rearden, was supposed to pronounce, some action pertaining to mercy which he was expected to grant. Larkin's eyes, in this moment of his best fortune, had the sickening look of a beggar.  "Why should you be angry, Hank? It's only a new form of legal red tape. Just a new historical condition. Nobody can help it, if it's, a historical condition. Nobody can be blamed for it. But there's always a way to get along. Look at all the others. They don't mind. They're-"  "They're setting up stooges whom they control, to run the properties extorted from them. I-"  "Now why do you want to use such words?"  "I might as well tell you-and I think you know it-that I am not good at games of that kind. I have neither the time nor the stomach to devise some form of blackmail in order to tie you up and own my mines through you. Ownership is a thing I don't share. And I don't wish to hold it by the grace of your cowardice-by means of a constant struggle to outwit you and keep some threat over your head. I don't do business that way and I don't deal with cowards. The mines are yours. If you wish to give me first call on all the ore produced, you will do so. If you wish to double-cross me, it's in your power."  Larkin looked hurt. "That's very unfair of you," he said; there was a dry little note of righteous reproach in his voice. "I have never given you cause to distrust me." He picked up the papers with a hasty movement.  Rearden saw the papers disappear into Larkin's inside coat pocket.  He saw the flare of the open coat, the wrinkles of a vest pulled tight over flabby bulges, and a stain of perspiration in the armpit of the shirt.  Unsummoned, the picture of a face seen twenty-seven years ago rose suddenly in his mind. It was the face of a preacher on a street corner he had passed, in a town he could not remember any longer. Only the dark walls of the slums remained in his memory, the rain of an autumn evening, and the righteous malice of the man's mouth, a small mouth stretched to yell into the darkness: ". . . the noblest ideal-that man live for the sake of his brothers, that the strong work for the weak, that he who has ability serve him who hasn't . . ."  Then he saw the boy who had been Hank Rearden at eighteen. He saw the tension of the face, the speed of the walk, the drunken exhilaration of the body, drunk on the energy of sleepless nights, the proud lift of the head, the clear, steady, ruthless eyes, the eyes of a man who drove himself without pity toward that which he wanted. And he saw what Paul Larkin must have been at that time-a youth with an aged baby's face, smiling ingratiatingly, joylessly, begging to be spared, pleading with the universe to give him a chance. If someone had shown that youth to the Hank Rearden of that time and told him that this was to be the goal of his steps, the collector of the energy of his aching tendons, what would he have-  It was not a thought, it was like the punch of a fist inside his skull.  Then, when he could think again, Rearden knew what the boy he had been would have felt: a desire to step on the obscene thing which was Larkin and grind every wet bit of it out of existence.  He had never experienced an emotion of this kind. It took him a few moments to realize that this was what men called hatred.  He noticed that rising to leave and muttering some sort of good-byes, Larkin had a wounded, reproachful, mouth-pinched look, as if he, Larkin, were the injured party.  When he sold his coal mines to Ken Danagger, who owned the largest coal company in Pennsylvania, Rearden wondered why he felt as if it were almost painless. He felt no hatred. Ken Danagger was a man in his fifties, with a hard, closed face; he had started in life as a miner.  When Rearden handed to him the deed to his new property, Danagger said impassively, "I don't believe I've mentioned that any coal you buy from me, you'll get it at cost."  Rearden glanced at him, astonished. "It's against the law," he said.  "Who's going to find out what sort of cash I hand to you in your own living room?"  "You're talking about a rebate."  "I am."  "That's against two dozen laws. They'll sock you worse than me, if they catch you at it."  "Sure. That's your protection-so you won't be left at the mercy of my good will."  Rearden smiled; it was a happy smile, but he closed his eyes as under a blow. Then he shook his head. "Thanks," he said. "But I'm not one of them. I don't expect anybody to work for me at cost."  "I'm not one of them, either," said Danagger angrily. "Look here, Rearden, don't you suppose I know what I'm getting, unearned? The money doesn't pay you for it. Not nowadays."  "You didn't volunteer to bid to buy my property. I asked you to buy it. I wish there had been somebody like you in the ore business, to take over my mines. There wasn't. If you want to do me a favor, don't offer me rebates. Give me a chance to pay you higher prices, higher than anyone else will offer, sock me anything you wish, just so I'll be first to get the coal. I'll manage my end of it. Only let me have the coal."  "You'll have it."  Rearden wondered, for a while, why he heard no word from Wesley Mouch. His calls to Washington remained unanswered. Then he received a letter consisting of a single sentence which informed him that Mr. Mouch was resigning from his employ. Two weeks later, he read in the newspapers that Wesley Mouch had been appointed Assistant Coordinator of the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources.  Don't dwell on any of it-thought Rearden, through the silence of many evenings, fighting the sudden access of that new emotion which he did not want to feel-there is an unspeakable evil in the world, you know it, and it's no use dwelling on the details of it. You must work a little harder. Just a little harder. Don't let it win.  The beams and girders of the Rearden Metal bridge were coming daily out of the rolling mills, and were being shipped to the site of the John Galt Line, where the first shapes of green-blue metal, swung into space to span the canyon, glittered in the first rays of the spring sun.  He had no time for pain, no energy for anger. Within a few weeks, it was over; the blinding stabs of hatred ceased and did not return.  He was back in confident self-control on the evening when he telephoned Eddie Willers, "Eddie, I'm in New York, at the Wayne-Falkland. Come to have breakfast with me tomorrow morning. There's something I'd like to discuss with you."  Eddie Willers went to the appointment with a heavy feeling of guilt.  He had not recovered from the shock of the Equalization of Opportunity Bill; it had left a dull ache within him, like the black-and-blue mark of a blow. He disliked the sight of the city: it now looked as if it hid the threat of some malicious unknown. He dreaded facing one of the Bill's victims: he felt almost as if he, Eddie Willers, shared the responsibility for it in some terrible way which he could not define.  When he saw Rearden, the feeling vanished. There was no hint suggesting a victim, in Rearden's bearing. Beyond the windows of the hotel room, the spring sunlight of early morning sparkled on the windows of the city, the sky was a very pale blue that seemed young, the offices were still closed, and the city did not look as if it held malice, but as if it were joyously, hopefully ready to swing into action-in the same manner as Rearden. He looked refreshed by an untroubled sleep, he wore a dressing gown, he seemed impatient of the necessity to dress, unwilling to delay the exciting game of his business duties.  "Good morning, Eddie. Sorry if I got you out so early. It's the only time I had. Have to go back to Philadelphia right after breakfast. We can talk while we're eating."  The dressing gown he wore was of dark blue flannel, with the white initials "H R" on the breast pocket. He looked young, relaxed, at home in this room and in the world.  Eddie watched a waiter wheel the breakfast table into the room with a swift efficiency that made him feel braced. He found himself enjoying the stiff freshness of the white tablecloth and the sunlight sparkling on the silver, on the two bowls of crushed ice holding glasses of orange juice; he had not known that such things could give him an invigorating pleasure.  "I didn't want to phone Dagny long distance about this particular matter," said Rearden. "She has enough to do. We can settle it in a few minutes, you and I."  "If I have the authority to do it,"  Rearden smiled. "You have." He leaned forward across the table.  "Eddie, what's the financial state of Taggart Transcontinental at the moment? Desperate?"  "Worse than that, Mr. Rearden."  "Are you able to meet pay rolls?"  "Not quite. We've kept it out of the newspapers, but I think everybody knows it. We're in arrears all over the system and Jim is running out of excuses."  "Do you know that your first payment for the Rearden Metal rail is due next week?"  "Yes, I know it."  "Well, let's agree on a moratorium. I'm going to give you an extension-you won't have to pay me anything until six months after the opening of the John Galt Line."  Eddie Willers put down his cup of coffee with a sharp thud. He could not say a word.  Rearden chuckled. "What's the matter? You do have the authority to accept, don't you?"  "Mr. Rearden . . . I don't know . . . what to say to you."  "Why, just 'okay' is all that's necessary,"  "Okay, Mr. Rearden." Eddie's voice was barely audible.  "I'll draw up the papers and send them to you. You can tell Jim about it and have him sign them."  "Yes, Mr. Rearden."  "I don't like to deal with Jim. He'd waste two hours trying to make himself believe that he's made me believe that he's doing me a favor by accepting."  Eddie sat without moving, looking down at his plate.  "What's the matter?"  "Mr. Rearden, I'd like . . . to say thank you . . . but there isn't any form of it big enough to-"  "Look, Eddie. You've got the makings of a good businessman, so you'd better get a few things straight. There aren't any thank-you's in situations of this kind. I'm not doing it for Taggart Transcontinental. It's a simple, practical, selfish matter on my part. Why should I collect my money from you now, when it might prove to be the death blow to your company? If your company were no good, I'd collect, and fast. I don't engage in charity and I don't gamble on incompetents. But you're still the best railroad in the country. When the John Galt Line is completed, you'll be the soundest one financially. So I have good reason to wait. Besides, you're in trouble on account of my rail. I intend to see you win."  "I still owe you thanks, Mr. Rearden . . . for something much greater than charity."  "No. Don't you see? I have just received a great deal of money . . . which I didn't want. I can't invest it. It's of no use to me whatever. . . . So, in a way, it pleases me that I can turn that money against the same people in the same battle. They made it possible for me to give you an extension to help you fight them."  He saw Eddie wincing, as if he had hit a wound. "That's what's horrible about it!"  "What?"  "What they've done to you-and what you're doing in return. I mean-" He stopped. "Forgive me, Mr. Rearden. I know this is no way to talk business."  Rearden smiled. "Thanks, Eddie. I know what you mean. But forget it. To hell with them."  "Yes. Only . . . Mr. Rearden, may I say something to you? I know it's completely improper and I'm not speaking as a vice-president."  "Go ahead."  "I don't have to tell you what your offer means to Dagny, to me, to every decent person on Taggart Transcontinental. You know it. And you know you can count on us. But . . . but I think it's horrible that Jim Taggart should benefit, too-that you should be the one to save him and people like him, after they-"  Rearden laughed. "Eddie, what do we care about people like him?  We're driving an express, and they're riding on the roof, making a lot of noise about being leaders. Why should we care? We have enough power to carry them along-haven't we?"  "It won't stand."  The summer sun made blotches of fire on the windows of the city, and glittering sparks in the dust of the streets. Columns of heat shimmered through the air, rising from the roofs to the white page of the calendar. The calendar's motor ran on, marking off the last days of June.  "It won't stand," people said. "When they run the first train on the John Galt Line, the rail will split. They'll never get to the bridge. If they do, the bridge will collapse under the engine."  From the slopes of Colorado, freight trains rolled down the track of the Phoenix-Durango, north to Wyoming and the main line of Taggart Transcontinental, south to New Mexico and the main line of the Atlantic Southern. Strings of tank cars went radiating in all directions from the Wyatt oil fields to industries in distant states. No one spoke about them. To the knowledge of the public, the tank trains moved as silently as rays and, as rays, they were noticed only when they became the light of electric lamps, the heat of furnaces, the movement of motors; but as such, they were not noticed, they were taken for granted.  The Phoenix-Durango Railroad was to end operations on July 25.  "Hank Rearden is a greedy monster," people said. "Look at the fortune he's made. Has he ever given anything in return? Has he ever shown any sign of social conscience? Money, that's all he's after. He'll do anything for money. What does he care if people lose their lives when his bridge collapses?"  "The Taggarts have been a band of vultures for generations," people said. "It's in their blood. Just remember that the founder of that family was Nat Taggart, the most notoriously anti-social scoundrel that ever lived, who bled the country white to squeeze a fortune for himself. You can be sure that a Taggart won't hesitate to risk people's lives in order to make a profit. They bought inferior rail, because it's cheaper than steel-what do they care about catastrophes and mangled human bodies, after they've collected the fares?"  People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. They did not give or ask for reasons. "Reason," Dr. Pritchett had told them, "is the most naive of all superstitions."  "The source of public opinion?" said Claude Slagenhop in a radio speech. 'There is no source of public opinion. It is spontaneously general. It is a reflex of the collective instinct of the collective mind."  Orren Boyle gave an interview to Globe, the news magazine with the largest circulation. The interview was devoted to the subject of the grave social responsibility of metallurgists, stressing the fact that metal performed so many crucial tasks where human lives depended on its quality. "One should not, it seems to me, use human beings as guinea pigs in the launching of a new product," he said. He mentioned no names.  "Why, no, I don't say that that bridge will collapse," said the chief metallurgist of Associated Steel, on a television program. "I don't say it at all. I just say that if I had any children, I wouldn't let them ride on the first train that's going to cross that bridge. But it's only a personal preference, nothing more, just because I'm overly fond of children."  "I don't claim that the Rearden-Taggart contraption will collapse," wrote Bertram Scudder in The Future. "Maybe it will and maybe it won't. That's not the important issue. The important issue is: what protection does society have against the arrogance, selfishness and greed of two unbridled individualists, whose records are conspicuously devoid of any public-spirited actions? These two, apparently, are willing to stake the lives of their fellow men on their own conceited notions about their powers of judgment, against the overwhelming majority opinion of recognized experts. Should society permit it? If that thing does collapse, won't it be too late to take precautionary measures? Won't it be like locking the barn after the horse has escaped? It has always been the belief of this column that certain kinds of horses should be kept bridled and locked, on general social principles."  A group that called itself "Committee of Disinterested Citizens" collected signatures on a petition demanding a year's study of the John Galt Line by government experts before the first train were allowed to run. The petition stated that its signers had no motive other than "a sense of civic duty." The first signatures were those of Balph Eubank and Mort Liddy. The petition was given a great deal of space and comment in all the newspapers. The consideration it received was respectful, because it came from people who were disinterested.  No space was given by the newspapers to the progress of the construction of the John Galt Line. No reporter was sent to look at the scene. The general policy of the press had been stated by a famous editor five years ago. "There are no objective facts," he had said. "Every report on facts is only somebody's opinion. It is, therefore, useless to write about facts."  A few businessmen thought that one should think about the possibility that there might be commercial value in Rearden Metal. They undertook a survey of the question. They did not hire metallurgists to examine samples, nor engineers to visit the site of construction. They took a public poll. Ten thousand people, guaranteed to represent every existing kind of brain, were asked the question: "Would you ride on the John Galt Line?" The answer, overwhelmingly, was: "No, sir-ree!"  No voices were heard in public in defense of Rearden Metal. And nobody attached significance to the fact that the stock of Taggart Transcontinental was rising on the market, very slowly, almost furtively.  There were men who watched and played safe. Mr. Mowen bought Taggart stock in the name of his sister. Ben Nealy bought it in the name of a cousin. Paul Larkin bought it under an alias. "I don't believe in raising controversial issues," said one of these men.  "Oh yes, of course, the construction is moving on schedule," said James Taggart, shrugging, to his Board of Directors. "Oh yes, you may feel full confidence. My dear sister does not happen to be a human being, but just an internal combustion engine, so one must not wonder at her success."  When James Taggart heard a rumor that some bridge girders had split and crashed, killing three workmen, he leaped to his feet and ran to his secretary's office, ordering him to call Colorado. He waited, pressed against the secretary's desk, as if seeking protection; his eyes had the unfocused look of panic. Yet his mouth moved suddenly into almost a smile and he said, "I'd give anything to see Henry Rearden's face right now." When he heard that the rumor was false, he said, "Thank God!"  But his voice had a note of disappointment.  "Oh well!" said Philip Rearden to his friends, hearing the same rumor. "Maybe he can fail, too, once in a while. Maybe my great brother isn't as great as he thinks."  "Darling," said Lillian Rearden to her husband, "I fought for you yesterday, at a tea where the women were saying that Dagny Taggart is your mistress. . . . Oh, for heaven's sake, don't look at me like that! I know it's preposterous and I gave them hell for it. It's just that those silly bitches can't imagine any other reason why a woman would take such a stand against everybody for the sake of your Metal. Of course, I know better than that. I know that the Taggart woman is perfectly sexless and doesn't give a damn about you-and, darling, I know that if you ever had the courage for anything of the sort, which you haven't, you wouldn't go for an adding machine in tailored suits, you'd go for some blond, feminine chorus girl who-oh, but Henry, I'm only joking! -don't look at me like that!"  "Dagny," James Taggart said miserably, "what's going to happen to us? Taggart Transcontinental has become so unpopular!"  Dagny laughed, in enjoyment of the moment, any moment, as if the undercurrent of enjoyment was constant within her and little was needed to tap it. She laughed easily, her mouth relaxed and open. Her teeth were very white against her sun-scorched face. Her eyes had the look, acquired in open country, of being set for great distances. On her last few visits to New York, he had noticed that she looked at him as if she did not see him.  "What are we going to do? The public is so overwhelmingly against us!"  "Jim, do you remember the story they tell about Nat Taggart? He said that he envied only one of his competitors, the one who said The public be damned!' He wished he had said it."  In the summer days and in the heavy stillness of the evenings of the city, there were moments when a lonely man or woman-on a park bench, on a street corner, at an open window-would see in a newspaper a brief mention of the progress of the John Galt Line, and would look at the city with a sudden stab of hope. They were the very young, who felt that it was the kind of event they longed to see happening in the world-or the very old, who had seen a world in which such events did happen. They did not care about railroads, they knew nothing about business, they knew only that someone was fighting against great odds and winning. They did not admire the fighters' purpose, they believed the voices of public opinion-and yet, when they read that the Line was growing, they felt a moment's sparkle and wondered why it made their own problems seem easier.  Silently, unknown to everyone except to the freight yard of Taggart Transcontinental in Cheyenne and the office of the John Galt Line in the dark alley, freight was rolling in and orders for cars were piling up- for the first train to run on the John Galt Line. Dagny Taggart had announced that the first train would be, not a passenger express loaded with celebrities and politicians, as was the custom, but a freight special.  The freight came from farms, from lumber yards, from mines all over the country, from distant places whose last means of survival were the new factories of Colorado. No one wrote about these shippers, because they were men who were not disinterested.  The Phoenix-Durango Railroad was to close on July 25. The first train of the John Galt Line was to run on July 22.  "Well, it's like this, Miss Taggart," said the delegate of the union of Locomotive Engineers. "I don't think we're going to allow you to run that train."  Dagny sat at her battered desk, against the blotched wall of her office.  She said, without moving, "Get out of here."  It was a sentence the man had never heard in the polished offices of railroad executives. He looked bewildered. "I came to tell you-"  "If you have anything to say to me, start over again."  "What?"  "Don't tell me what you're going to allow me to do."  "Well, I meant we're not going to allow our men to run your train."  "That's different."  "Well, that's what we've decided."  "Who's decided it?"  "The committee. What you're doing is a violation of human rights. You can't force men to go out to get killed-when that bridge collapses -just to make money for you."  She reached for a sheet of blank paper and handed it to him. "Put it down in writing," she said, "and we'll sign a contract to that effect."  "What contract?"  "That no member of your union will ever be employed to run an engine on the John Galt Line."  "Why . . . wait a minute . . . I haven't said-"  "You don't want to sign such a contract?"  -No, I-"  "Why not, since you know that the bridge is going to collapse?"  "I only want-"  "I know what you want. You want a stranglehold on your men by means of the jobs which I give them-and on me, by means of your men. You want me to provide the jobs, and you want to make it impossible for me to have any jobs to provide. Now I'll give you a choice. That train is going to be run. You have no choice about that. But you can choose whether it's going to be run by one of your men or not. If you choose not to let them, the train will still run, if I have to drive the engine myself. Then, if the bridge collapses, there won't be any railroad left in existence, anyway. But if it doesn't collapse, no member of your union will ever get a job on the John Galt Line. If you think that I need your men more than they need me, choose accordingly. If you know that I can run an engine, but they can't build a railroad, choose according to that. Now are you going to forbid your men to run that train?"  "I didn't say we'd forbid it. I haven't said anything about forbidding. But . . . but you can't force men to risk their lives on something nobody's ever tried before."  "I'm not going to force anyone to take that run."  "What are you going to do?"  "I'm going to ask for a volunteer."  "And if none of them volunteers?"  "Then it will be my problem, not yours."  "Well, let me tell you that I'm going to advise them to refuse."  "Go ahead. Advise them anything you wish. Tell them whatever, you like. But leave the choice to them. Don't try to forbid it."  The notice that appeared in every roundhouse of the Taggart system was signed "Edwin Willers, Vice-President in Charge of Operation." It asked engineers, who were willing to drive the first train on the John Galt Line, so to inform the office of Mr. Willers., not later than eleven A.M. of July 15.  It was a quarter of eleven, on the morning of the fifteenth, when the telephone rang in her office. It was Eddie, calling from high up in the Taggart Building outside her window. "Dagny, I think you'd better come over." His voice sounded queer.  She hurried across the street, then down the marble-floored halls, to the door that still carried the name "Dagny Taggart" on its glass panel.  She pulled the door open.  The anteroom of the office was full. Men stood jammed among the desks, against the walls. As she entered, they took their hats off in sudden silence. She saw the graying heads, the muscular shoulders, she saw the smiling faces of her staff at their desks and the face of Eddie Willers at the end of the room. Everybody knew that nothing had to be said.  Eddie stood by the open door of her office. The crowd parted to let her approach him. He moved his hand, pointing at the room, then at a pile of letters and telegrams.  "Dagny, every one of them," he said. "Every engineer on Taggart Transcontinental. Those who could, came here, some from as far as the Chicago Division." He pointed at the mail. "There's the rest of them.  To be exact, there's only three I haven't heard from: one's on a vacation in the north woods, one's in a hospital, and one's in jail for reckless driving-of his automobile."  She looked at the men. She saw the suppressed grins on the solemn faces. She inclined her head, in acknowledgment. She stood for a moment, head bowed, as if she were accepting a verdict, knowing that the verdict applied to her, to every man in the room and to the world beyond the walls of the building.  "Thank you," she said.  Most of the men had seen her many times. Looking at her, as she raised her head, many of them thought-in astonishment and for the first time-that the face of their Operating Vice-President was the face of a woman and that it was beautiful.  Someone in the back of the crowd cried suddenly, cheerfully, 'To hell with Jim Taggart!"  An explosion answered him. The men laughed, they cheered, they broke into applause. The response was out of all proportion to the sentence. But the sentence had given them the excuse they needed. They seemed to be applauding the speaker, in insolent defiance of authority.  But everyone in the room knew who it was that they were cheering.  She raised her hand. "We're too early," she said, laughing. "Wait till a week from today. That's when we ought to celebrate. And believe me, we will!"  They drew lots for the run. She picked a folded slip of paper from among a pile containing all their names. The winner was not in the room, but he was one of the best men on the system, Pat Logan, engineer of the Taggart Comet on the Nebraska Division.  "Wire Pat and tell him he's been demoted to a freight," she said to Eddie. She added casually, as if it were a last-moment decision, but it fooled no one, "Oh yes, tell him that I'm going to ride with him in the cab of the engine on that run."  An old engineer beside her grinned and said, "I thought you would, Miss Taggart."  Rearden was in New York on the day when Dagny telephoned him from her office. "Hank, I'm going to have a press conference tomorrow."  He laughed aloud. "No!"  "Yes." Her voice sounded earnest, but, dangerously, a bit too earnest.  "The newspapers have suddenly discovered me and are asking questions. I'm going to answer them."  "Have a good time."  "I will. Are you going to be in town tomorrow? I'd like to have you in on it."  "Okay. I wouldn't want to miss it."  The reporters who came to the press conference in the office of the John Galt Line were young men who had been trained to think that their job consisted of concealing from the world the nature of its events. It was their daily duty to serve as audience for some public- figure who made utterances about the public good, in phrases carefully chosen to convey no meaning. It was their daily job to sling words together in any combination they pleased, so long as the words did not fall into a sequence saying something specific. They could not understand the interview now being given to them.  Dagny Taggart sat behind her desk in an office that looked like a slum basement. She wore a dark blue suit with a white blouse, beautifully tailored, suggesting an air of formal, almost military elegance. She sat straight, and her manner was severely dignified, just a shade too dignified.  Rearden sat in a corner of the room, sprawled across a broken armchair, his long legs thrown over one of its arms, his body leaning against the other. His manner was pleasantly informal, just a bit too informal.  In the clear, monotonous voice of a military report, consulting no papers, looking straight at the men, Dagny recited the technological facts about the John Galt Line, giving exact figures on the nature of the rail, the capacity of the bridge, the method of construction, the costs. Then, in the dry tone of a banker, she explained the financial prospects of the Line and named the large profits she expected to make. 'That is all," she said.  "All?" said one of the reporters. "Aren't you going to give us a message for the public?"  "That was my message."  "But hell-I mean, aren't you going to defend yourself?"  "Against what?"  "Don't you want to tell us something to justify your Line?"  "I have."  A man with a mouth shaped as a permanent sneer asked, "Well, what I want to know, as Bertram Scudder stated, is what protection do we have against your Line being no good?"  "Don't ride on it."  Another asked, "Aren't you going to tell us your motive for building that Line?"  "I have told you: the profit which I expect to make."  "Oh, Miss Taggart, don't say that!" cried a young boy. He was new, he was still honest about his job, and he felt that he liked Dagny Taggart, without knowing why. "That's the wrong thing to say. That's what they're all saying about you."  "Are they?"  "I'm sure you didn't mean it the way it sounds and . . . and I'm sure you'll want to clarify it."  "Why, yes, if you wish me to. The average profit of railroads has been two per cent of the capital invested. An industry that does so much and keeps so little, should consider itself immoral. As I have explained, the cost of the John Galt Line in relation to the traffic which it will carry makes me expect a profit of not less than fifteen per cent on our investment. Of course, any industrial profit above four per cent is considered usury nowadays. I shall, nevertheless, do my best to make the John Galt Line earn a profit of twenty per cent for me, if possible. That was my motive for building the Line. Have I made myself clear now?"  The boy was looking at her helplessly. "You don't mean, to earn a profit for you, Miss Taggart? You mean, for the small stockholders, of course?" he prompted hopefully.  "Why, no. I happen to be one of the largest stockholders of Taggart Transcontinental, so my share of the profits will be one of the largest, Now, Mr. Rearden is in a much more fortunate position, because he has no stockholders to share with-or would you rather make your own statement, Mr. Rearden?"  "Yes, gladly," said Rearden. "Inasmuch as the formula of Rearden Metal is my own personal secret, and in view of the fact that the Metal costs much less to produce than you boys can imagine, I expect to skin the public to the tune of a profit of twenty-five per cent in the next few years."  "What do you mean, skin the public, Mr. Rearden?" asked the boy.  "If it's true, as I've read in your ads, that your Metal will last three times longer than any other and at half the price, wouldn't the public be getting a bargain?"  "Oh, have you noticed that?" said Rearden.  "Do the two of you realize you're talking for publication?" asked the man with the sneer.  "But, Mr. Hopkins," said Dagny, in polite astonishment, "is there any reason why we would talk to you, if it weren't for publication?"  "Do you want us to quote all the things you said?"  "I hope I may trust you to be sure and quote them. Would you oblige me by taking this down verbatim?" She paused to see their pencils ready, then dictated: "Miss Taggart says-quote-I expect to make a pile of money on the John Galt Line. I will have earned it. Close quote. Thank you so much."  "Any questions, gentlemen?" asked Rearden.  There were no questions.  "Now I must tell you about the opening of the John Galt Line," said Dagny. "The first train will depart from the station of Taggart Transcontinental in Cheyenne, Wyoming, at four P.M. on July twenty-second.  It will be a freight special, consisting of eighty cars. It will be driven by an eight-thousand-horsepower, four-unit Diesel locomotive-which I'm leasing from Taggart Transcontinental for the occasion. It will run non-stop to Wyatt Junction, Colorado, traveling at an average speed of one hundred miles per hour. I beg your pardon?" she asked, hearing the long, low sound of a whistle.  "What did you say, Miss Taggart?"  "I said, one hundred miles per hour-grades, curves and all."  "But shouldn't you cut the speed below normal rather than . . . Miss Taggart, don't you have any consideration whatever for public opinion?"  "But I do. If it weren't for public opinion, an average speed of sixty-five miles per hour would have been quite sufficient."  "Who's going to run that train?"  "I had quite a bit of trouble about that. All the Taggart engineers volunteered to do it. So did the firemen, the brakemen and the conductors. We had to draw lots for every job on the train's crew. The engineer will be Pat Logan, of the Taggart Comet, the fireman-Ray McKim.  I shall ride in the cab of the engine with them."  "Not really!"  "Please do attend the opening. It's on July twenty-second. The press is most eagerly invited. Contrary to my usual policy, I have become a publicity hound. Really. I should like to have spotlights, radio microphones and television cameras. I suggest that you plant a few cameras around the bridge. The collapse of the bridge would give you some interesting shots."  "Miss Taggart," asked Rearden, "why didn't you mention that I'm going to ride in that engine, too?"  She looked at him across the room, and for a moment they were alone, holding each other's glance.  "Yes, of course, Mr. Rearden," she answered.  She did not see him again until they looked at each other across the platform of the Taggart station in Cheyenne, on July 22.  She did not look for anyone when she stepped out on the platform: she felt as if her senses had merged, so that she could not distinguish the sky, the sun or the sounds of an enormous crowd, but perceived only a sensation of shock and light.  Yet he was the first person she saw, and she could not tell for how long a time he was also the only one. He stood by the engine of the John Galt train, talking to somebody outside the field of her consciousness.  He was dressed in gray slacks and shirt, he looked like an expert mechanic, but he was stared at by the faces around him, because he was Hank Rearden of Rearden Steel. High above him, she saw the letters TT on the silver front of the engine. The lines of the engine slanted back, aimed at space.  There was distance and a crowd between them, but his eyes moved to her the moment she came out. They looked at each other and she knew that he felt as she did. This was not to be a solemn venture upon which their future depended, but simply their day of enjoyment. Their work was done. For the moment, there was no future. They had earned the present.  Only if one feels immensely important, she had told him, can one feel truly light. Whatever the train's run would mean to others, for the two of them their own persons were this day's sole meaning. Whatever it was that others sought in life, their right to what they now felt was all the two of them wished to find. It was as if, across the platform, they said it to each other.  Then she turned away from him.  She noticed that she, too, was being stared at, that there were people around her, that she was laughing and answering questions.  She had not expected such a large crowd. They filled the platform, the tracks, the square beyond the station; they were on the roofs of the boxcars on the sidings, at the windows of every house in sight. Something had drawn them here, something in the air which, at the last moment, had made James Taggart want to attend the opening of the John Galt Line. She had forbidden it. "If you come, Jim," she had said, "I'll have you thrown out of your own Taggart station. This is one event you're not going to see." Then she had chosen Eddie Willers to represent Taggart Transcontinental at the opening.  She looked at the crowd and she felt, simultaneously, astonishment that they should stare at her, when this event was so personally her own that no communication about it was possible, and a sense of fitness that they should be here, that they should want to see it, because the sight of an achievement was the greatest gift a human being could offer to others.  She felt no anger toward anyone on earth. The things she had endured had now receded into some outer fog, like pain that still exists, but has no power to hurt. Those things could not stand in the face of this moment's reality, the meaning of this day was as brilliantly, violently clear as the splashes of sun on the silver of the engine, all men had to perceive it now, no one could doubt it and she had no one to hate.  Eddie Willers was watching her. He stood on the platform, surrounded by Taggart executives, division heads, civic leaders, and the various local officials who had been out argued, bribed or threatened, to obtain permits to run a train through town zones at a hundred miles an hour. For once, for this day and event, his title of Vice-president was real to him and he carried it well. But while he spoke to those around him, his eyes kept following Dagny through the crowd. She was dressed in blue slacks and shirt, she was unconscious of official duties, she had left them to him, the train was now her sole concern, as if she were only a member of its crew.  She saw him, she approached, and she shook his hand; her smile was like a summation of all the things they did not have to say. "Well, Eddie, you're Taggart Transcontinental now."  "Yes," he said solemnly, his voice low.  There were reporters asking questions, and they dragged her away from him. They were asking him questions, too. "Mr. Willers, what is the policy of Taggart Transcontinental in regard to this line?" "So Taggart Transcontinental is just a disinterested observer, is it, Mr. Willers?"  He answered as best he could. He was looking at the sun on a Diesel engine. But what he was seeing was the sun in a clearing of the woods and a twelve-year-old girl telling him that he would help her run the railroad some day.  He watched from a distance while the train's crew was lined up in front of the engine, to face a firing squad of cameras. Dagny and Rearden were smiling, as if posing for snapshots of a summer vacation. Pat Logan, the engineer, a short, sinewy man with graying hair and a contemptuously inscrutable face, posed in a manner of amused indifference.  Ray McKim, the fireman, a husky young giant, grinned with an air of embarrassment and superiority together. The rest of the crew looked as if they were about to wink at the cameras. A photographer said, laughing, "Can't you people look doomed, please? I know that's what the editor wants."  Dagny and Rearden were answering questions for the press. There was no mockery in their answers now, no bitterness. They were enjoying it. They spoke as if the questions were asked in good faith. Irresistibly, at some point which no one noticed, this became true, "What do you expect to happen on this run?" a reporter asked one of the brakemen. "Do you think you'll get there?"  "I think we'll get there," said the brakeman, "and so do you, brother."  "Mr. Logan, do you have any children? Did you take out any extra insurance? I'm just thinking of the bridge, you know."  "Don't cross that bridge till I come to it," Pat Logan answered contemptuously.  "Mr. Rearden, how do you know that your rail will hold?"  'The man who taught people to make a printing press," said Rearden, "how did he know it?"  "Tell me, Miss Taggart, what's going to support a seven-thousand-ton train on a three-thousand-ton bridge?"  "My judgment," she answered.  The men of the press, who despised their own profession, did not know why they were enjoying it today. One of them, a young man with years of notorious success behind him and a cynical look of twice his age, said suddenly, "I know what I'd like to be: I wish I could be a man who covers news!"  The hands of the clock on the station building stood at 3:45. The crew started off toward the caboose at the distant end of the train. The movement and noise of the crowd were subsiding. Without conscious intention, people were beginning to stand still.  The dispatcher had received word from every local operator along the line of rail that wound through the mountains to the Wyatt oil fields three hundred miles away. He came out of the station building and, looking at Dagny, gave the signal for clear track ahead. Standing by the engine, Dagny raised her hand, repeating his gesture in sign of an order received and understood.  The long line of boxcars stretched off into the distance, in spaced, rectangular links, like a spinal cord. When the conductor's arm swept through the air, far at the end, she moved her arm in answering signal.  Rearden, Logan and McKim stood silently, as if at attention, letting her be first to get aboard. As she started up the rungs on the side of the engine, a reporter thought of a question he had not asked.  "Miss Taggart," he called after her, "who is John Galt?"  She turned, hanging onto a metal bar with one hand, suspended for an instant above the heads of the crowd.  "We are!" she answered.  Logan followed her into the cab, then McKim; Rearden went last, then the door of the engine was shut, with the tight finality of sealed metal.  The lights, hanging on a signal bridge against the sky, were green.  There were green lights between the tracks, low over the ground, dropping off into the distance where the rails turned and a green light stood at the curve, against leaves of a summer green that looked as if they, too, were lights.  Two men held a white silk ribbon stretched across the track in front of the engine. They were the superintendent of the Colorado Division and Nealy's chief engineer, who had remained on the job. Eddie Willers was to cut the ribbon they held and thus to open the new line.  The photographers posed him carefully, scissors in hand, his back to the engine. He would repeat the ceremony two or three times, they explained, to give them a choice of shots; they had a fresh bolt of ribbon ready. He was about to comply, then stopped. "No," he said suddenly.  "It's not going to be a phony."  In a voice of quiet authority, the voice of a vice-president, he ordered, pointing at the cameras, "Stand back-way back. Take one shot when I cut it, then get out of the way, fast."  They obeyed, moving hastily farther down the track. There was only one minute left. Eddie turned his back to the cameras and stood between the rails, facing the engine. He held the scissors ready over the white ribbon. He took his hat off and tossed it aside. He was looking up at the engine. A faint wind stirred his blond hair. The engine was a great silver shield bearing the emblem of Nat Taggart.  Eddie Willers raised his hand as the hand of the station clock reached the instant of four.  "Open her up, Pat!" he called.  In the moment when the engine started forward, he cut the white ribbon and leaped out of the way.  From the side track, he saw the window of the cab go by and Dagny waving to him in an answering salute. Then the engine was gone, and he stood looking across at the crowded platform that kept appearing and vanishing as the freight cars clicked past him.  The green-blue rails ran to meet them, like two jets shot out of a single point beyond the curve of the earth. The crossties melted, as they approached, into a smooth stream rolling down under the wheels. A blurred streak clung to the side of the engine, low over the ground. Trees and telegraph poles sprang into sight abruptly and went by as if jerked back. The green plains stretched past, in a leisurely flow. At the edge of the sky, a long wave of mountains reversed the movement and seemed to follow the train.  She felt no wheels under the floor. The motion was a smooth flight on a sustained impulse, as if the engine hung above the rails, riding a current. She felt no speed. It seemed strange that the green lights of the signals kept coming at them and past, every few seconds. She knew that the signal lights were spaced two miles apart.  The needle on the speedometer in front of Pat Logan stood at one hundred.  She sat in the fireman's chair and glanced across at Logan once in a while. He sat slumped forward a little, relaxed, one hand resting lightly on the throttle as if by chance; but his eyes were fixed on the track ahead. He had the ease of an expert, so confident that it seemed casual, but it was the ease of a tremendous concentration, the concentration on one's task that has the ruthlessness of an absolute. Ray McKim sat on a bench behind them. Rearden stood in the middle of the cab.  He stood, hands in pockets, feet apart, braced against the motion, looking ahead. There was nothing he could now care to see by the side of the track: he was looking at the rail.  Ownership-she thought, glancing back at him-weren't there those who knew nothing of its nature and doubted its reality? No, it was not made of papers, seals, grants and permissions. There it was-in his eyes.  The sound filling the cab seemed part of the space they were crossing. It held the low drone of the motors-the sharper clicking of the many parts that rang in varied cries of metal-and the high, thin chimes of trembling glass panes.  Things streaked past-a water tank, a tree, a shanty, a grain silo.  They had a windshield-wiper motion: they were rising, describing a curve and dropping back. The telegraph wires ran a race with the train, rising and falling from pole to pole, in an even rhythm, like the cardiograph record of a steady heartbeat written across the sky.  She looked ahead, at the haze that melted rail and distance, a haze that could rip apart at any moment to some shape of disaster. She wondered why she felt safer than she had ever felt in a car behind the engine, safer here, where it seemed as if, should an obstacle rise, her breast and the glass shield would be first to smash against it. She smiled, grasping the answer: it was the security of being first, with full sight and full knowledge of one's course-not the blind sense of being pulled into the unknown by some unknown power ahead. It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust, but to know.  The glass sheets of the cab's windows made the spread of the fields seem vaster: the earth looked as open to movement as it was to sight.  Yet nothing was distant and nothing was out of reach. She had barely grasped the sparkle of a lake ahead-and in the next instant she was beside it, then past.  It was a strange foreshortening between sight and touch, she thought, between wish and fulfillment, between-the words clicked sharply in her mind after a startled stop-between spirit and body. First, the vision-then the physical shape to express it. First, the thought-then the purposeful motion down the straight line of a single track to a chosen goal. Could one have any meaning without the other? Wasn't it evil to wish without moving-or to move without aim? Whose malevolence was it that crept through the world, struggling to break the two apart and set them against each other?  She shook her head. She did not want to think or to wonder why the world behind her was as it was. She did not care. She was flying away from it, at the rate of a hundred miles an hour. She leaned to the open window by her side, and felt the wind of the speed blowing her hair off her forehead. She lay back, conscious of nothing but the pleasure it gave her.  Yet her mind kept racing. Broken bits of thought flew past her attention, like the telegraph poles by the track. Physical pleasure?-she thought. This is a train made of steel . . . running on rails of Rearden Metal . . . moved by the energy of burning oil and electric generators . . . it's a physical sensation of physical movement through space . . . but is that the cause and the meaning of what I now feel?  . . . Do they call it a low, animal joy-this feeling that I would not care if the rail did break to bits under us now-it won't-but I wouldn't care, because I have experienced this? A low, physical, material, degrading pleasure of the body?  She smiled, her eyes closed, the wind streaming through her hair.  She opened her eyes and saw that Rearden stood looking down at her. It was the same glance with which he had looked at the rail. She felt her power of volition knocked out by some single, dull blow that made her unable to move. She held his eyes, lying back in her chair, the wind pressing the thin cloth of her shirt to her body.  He looked away, and she turned again to the sight of the earth tearing open before them.  She did not want to think, but the sound of thought went on, like the drone of the motors under the sounds of the engine. She looked at the cab around her. The fine steel mesh of the ceiling, she thought, and the row of rivets in the corner, holding sheets of steel sealed together-who made them? The brute force of men's muscles? Who made it possible for four dials and three levers in front of Pat Logan to hold the incredible power of the sixteen motors behind them and deliver it to the effortless control of one man's hand?  These things and the capacity from which they came-was this the pursuit men regarded as evil? Was this what they called an ignoble concern with the physical world? Was this the state of being enslaved by matter? Was this the surrender of man's spirit to his body?  She shook her head, as if she wished she could toss the subject out of the window and let it get shattered somewhere along the track. She looked at the sun on the summer fields. She did not have to think, because these questions were only details of a truth she knew and had always known. Let them go past like the telegraph poles. The thing she knew was like the wires flying above in an unbroken line. The words for it, and for this journey, and for her feeling, and for the whole of man's earth, were: It's so simple and so right!  She looked out at the country. She had been aware for some time of the human figures that flashed with an odd regularity at the side of the track. But they went by so fast that she could not grasp their meaning until, like the squares of a movie film, brief flashes blended into a whole and she understood it. She had had the track guarded since its completion, but she had not hired the human chain she saw strung out along the right-of-way. A solitary figure stood at every mile post. Some were young schoolboys, others were so old that the silhouettes of their bodies looked bent against the sky. All of them were armed, with anything they had found, from costly rifles to ancient muskets. All of them wore railroad caps. They were the sons of Taggart employees, and old railroad men who had retired after a full lifetime of Taggart service. They had come, unsummoned, to guard this train. As the engine went past him, every man in his turn stood erect, at attention, and raised his gun in a military salute.  When she grasped it, she burst out laughing, suddenly, with the abruptness of a cry. She laughed, shaking, like a child; it sounded like sobs of deliverance. Pat Logan nodded to her with a faint smile; he had noted the guard of honor long ago. She leaned to the open window, and her arm swept in wide curves of triumph, waving to the men by the track.  On the crest of a distant hill, she saw a crowd of people, their arms swinging against the sky. The gray houses of a village were scattered through a valley below, as if dropped there once and forgotten; the roof lines slanted, sagging, and the years had washed away the color of the walls. Perhaps generations had lived there, with nothing to mark the passage of their days but the movement of the sun from east to west.  Now, these men had climbed the hill to see a silver-headed comet cut through their plains like the sound of a bugle through a long weight of silence.  As houses began to come more frequently, closer to the track, she saw people at the windows, on the porches, on distant roofs. She saw crowds blocking the roads at grade crossings. The roads went sweeping past like the spokes of a fan, and she could not distinguish human figures, only their arms greeting the train like branches waving in the wind of its speed. They stood under the swinging red lights of warning signals, under the signs saying; "Stop. Look. Listen."  The station past which they flew, as they went through a town at a hundred miles an hour, was a swaying sculpture of people from platform to roof. She caught the flicker of waving arms, of hats tossed in the air, of something flung against the side of the engine, which was a bunch of flowers.  As the miles clicked past them, the towns went by, with the stations at which they did not stop, with the crowds of people who had come only to see, to cheer and to hope. She saw garlands of flowers under the sooted eaves of old station buildings, and bunting of red-white-and-blue on the time-eaten walls. It was like the pictures she had seen-and envied-in schoolbook histories of railroads, from the era when people gathered to greet the first run of a train. It was like the age when Nat Taggart moved across the country, and the stops along his way were marked by men eager for the sight of achievement. That age, she had thought, was gone; generations had passed, with no event to greet anywhere, with nothing to see but the cracks lengthening year by year on the walls built by Nat Taggart. Yet men came again, as they had come in his time, drawn by the same response.  She glanced at Rearden. He stood against the wall, unaware of the crowds, indifferent to admiration. He was watching the performance of track and train with an expert's intensity of professional interest; his bearing suggested that he would kick aside, as irrelevant, any thought such as 'They like it," when the thought ringing in his mind was "It works!"  His tall figure in the single gray of slacks and shirt looked as if his body were stripped for action. The slacks stressed the long lines of his legs, the light, firm posture of standing without effort or being ready to swing forward at an instant's notice; the short sleeves stressed the gaunt strength of his arms; the open shirt bared the tight skin of his chest.  She turned away, realizing suddenly that she had been glancing back at him too often. But this day had no ties to past or future-her thoughts were cut off from implications-she saw no further meaning, only the immediate intensity of the feeling that she was imprisoned with him, sealed together in the same cube of air, the closeness of his presence underscoring her awareness of this day, as his rails underscored the flight of the train.  She turned deliberately and glanced back. He was looking at her.  He did not turn away, but held her glance, coldly and with full intention.  She smiled defiantly, not letting herself know the full meaning of her smile, knowing only that it was the sharpest blow she could strike at his inflexible face. She felt a sudden desire to see him trembling, to tear a cry out of him. She turned her head away, slowly, feeling a reckless amusement, wondering why she found it difficult to breathe.  She sat leaning back in her chair, looking ahead, knowing that he was as aware of her as she was of him. She found pleasure in the special self-consciousness it gave her. When she crossed her legs, when she leaned on her arm against the window sill, when she brushed her hair off her forehead-every movement of her body was underscored by a feeling the unadmitted words for which were: Is he seeing it?  The towns had been left behind. The track was rising through a country growing more grimly reluctant to permit approach. The rails kept vanishing behind curves, and the ridges of hills kept moving closer, as if the plains were being folded into pleats. The flat stone shelves of Colorado were advancing to the edge of the track-and the distant reaches of the sky were shrinking into waves of bluish mountains.  Far ahead, they saw a mist of smoke over factory chimneys-then the web of a power station and the lone needle of a steel structure. They were approaching Denver.  She glanced at Pat Logan. He was leaning forward a little farther; she saw a slight tightening in the fingers of his hand and in his eyes. He knew, as she did, the danger of crossing a city at the speed they were traveling.  It was a succession of minutes, but it hit them as a single whole. First, they saw the lone shapes, which were factories, rolling across their windowpanes-then the shapes fused into the blur of streets-then a delta of rails spread out before them, like the mouth of a funnel sucking them into the Taggart station, with nothing to protect them but the small green beads of lights scattered over the ground-from the height of the cab, they saw boxcars on sidings streak past as flat ribbons of roof tops -the black hole of the train-shed flew at their faces-they hurtled through an explosion of sound, the beating of wheels against the glass panes of a vault, and the screams of cheering from a mass that swayed like a liquid in the darkness among steel columns-they flew toward a glowing arch and the green lights hanging in the open sky beyond, the green lights that were like the doorknobs of space, throwing door after door open before them. Then, vanishing behind them, went the streets clotted with traffic, the open windows bulging with human figures, the screaming sirens, and-from the top of a distant skyscraper-a cloud of paper snowflakes shimmering on the air, flung by someone who saw the passage of a silver bullet across a city stopped still to watch it.  Then they were out again, on a rocky grade-and with shocking suddenness, the mountains were before them, as if the city had flung them straight at a granite wall, and a thin ledge had caught them in time. They were clinging to the side of a vertical cliff, with the earth rolling down, dropping away, and giant tiers of twisted boulders streaming up and shutting out the sun, leaving them to speed through a bluish twilight, with no sight of soil or sky.  The curves of rail became coiling circles among walls that advanced to grind them off their sides. But the track cut through at times and the mountains parted, flaring open like two wings at the tip of the rail-one wing green, made of vertical needles, with whole pines serving as the pile of a solid carpet-the other reddish-brown, made of naked rock.  She looked down through the open window and saw the silver side of the engine hanging over empty space. Far below, the thin thread of a stream went falling from ledge to ledge, and the ferns that drooped to the water were the shimmering tops of birch trees. She saw the engine's tail of boxcars winding along the face of a granite drop-and miles of contorted stone below, she saw the coils of green-blue rail unwinding behind the train.  A wall of rock shot upward in their path, filling the windshield, darkening the cab, so close that it seemed as if the remnant of time could not let them escape it. But she heard the screech of wheels on curve, the light came bursting back-and she saw an open stretch of rail on a narrow shelf. The shelf ended in space. The nose of the engine was aimed straight at the sky. There was nothing to stop them but two strips of green-blue metal strung in a curve along the shelf.  To take the pounding violence of sixteen motors, she thought, the thrust of seven thousand tons of steel and freight, to withstand it, grip it and swing it around a curve, was the impossible feat performed by two strips of metal no wider than her arm. What made it possible? What power had given to an unseen arrangement of molecules the power on which their lives depended and the lives of all the men who waited for the eighty boxcars? She saw a man's face and hands in the glow of a laboratory oven, over the white liquid of a sample of metal.  She felt the sweep of an emotion which she could not contain, as of something bursting upward. She turned to the door of the motor units, she threw it open to a screaming jet of sound and escaped into the pounding of the engine's heart.  For a moment, it was as if she were reduced to a single sense, the sense of hearing, and what remained of her hearing was only a long, rising, falling, rising scream. She stood in a swaying, sealed chamber of metal, looking at the giant generators. She had wanted to see them, because the sense of triumph within her was bound to them, to her love for them, to the reason of the life-work she had chosen. In the abnormal clarity of a violent emotion, she felt as if she were about to grasp something she had never known and had to know. She laughed aloud, but heard no sound of it; nothing could be heard through the continuous explosion. "The John Galt Line!" she shouted, for the amusement of feeling her voice swept away from her lips.  She moved slowly along the length of the motor units, down a narrow passage between the engines and the wall. She felt the immodesty of an intruder, as if she had slipped inside a living creature, under its silver skin, and were watching its life beating in gray metal cylinders, in twisted coils, in sealed tubes, in the convulsive whirl of blades in wire cages. The enormous complexity of the shape above her was drained by invisible channels, and the violence raging within it was led to fragile needles on glass dials, to green and red beads winking on panels, to tall, thin cabinets stenciled "High Voltage."  Why had she always felt that joyous sense of confidence when looking at machines?-she thought. In these giant shapes, two aspects pertaining to the inhuman were radiantly absent: the causeless and the purposeless. Every part of the motors was an embodied answer to "Why?" and "What for?"-like the steps of a life-course chosen by the sort of mind she worshipped. The motors were a moral code cast in steel.  They are alive, she thought, because they are the physical shape of the action of a living power-of the mind that had been able to grasp the whole of this complexity, to set its purpose, to give it form. For an instant, it seemed to her that the motors were transparent and she was seeing the net of their nervous system. It was a net of connections, more intricate, more crucial than all of their wires and circuits: the rational connections made by that human mind which had fashioned any one part of them for the first time.  They are alive, she thought, but their soul operates them by remote control. Their soul is in every man who has the capacity to equal this achievement. Should the soul vanish from the earth, the motors would stop, because that is the power which keeps them going-not the oil under the floor under her feet, the oil that would then become primeval ooze again-not the steel cylinders that would become stains of rust on the walls of the caves of shivering savages-the power of a living mind -the power of thought and choice and purpose.  She was making her way back toward the cab, feeling that she wanted to laugh, to kneel or to lift her arms, wishing she were able to release the thing she felt, knowing that it had no form of expression.  She stopped. She saw Rearden standing by the steps of the door to the cab. He was looking at her as if he knew why she had escaped and what she felt. They stood still, their bodies becoming a glance that met across a narrow passage. The beating within her was one with the beating of the motors-and she felt as if both came from him; the pounding rhythm wiped out her will. They went back to the cab, silently, knowing that there had been a moment which was not to be mentioned between them.  The cliffs ahead were a bright, liquid gold. Strips of shadow were lengthening in the valleys below. The sun was descending to the peaks in the west. They were going west and up, toward the sun.  The sky had deepened to the greenish-blue of the rails, when they saw smokestacks in a distant valley. It was one of Colorado's new towns, the towns that had grown like a radiation from the Wyatt oil fields. She saw the angular lines of modern houses, flat roofs, great sheets of windows. It was too far to distinguish people. In the moment when she thought that they would not be watching the train at that distance, a rocket shot out from among the buildings, rose high above the town and broke as a fountain of gold stars against the darkening sky. Men whom she could not see, were seeing the streak of the train on the side of the mountain, and were sending a salute, a lonely plume of fire in the dusk, the symbol of celebration or of a call for help.  Beyond the next turn, in a sudden view of distance, she saw two dots of electric light, white and red, low in the sky. They were not airplanes '-she saw the cones of metal girders supporting them-and in the moment when she knew that they were the derricks of Wyatt Oil, she saw that the track was sweeping downward, that the earth flared open, as if the mountains were flung apart-and at the bottom, at the foot of the Wyatt hill, across the dark crack of a canyon, she saw the bridge of Rearden Metal.  They were flying down, she forgot the careful grading, the great curves of the gradual descent, she felt as if the train were plunging downward, head first, she watched the bridge growing to meet them-a small, square tunnel of metal lace work, a few beams criss-crossed through the air, green-blue and glowing, struck by a long ray of sunset light from some crack in the barrier of mountains. There were people by the bridge, the dark splash of a crowd, but they rolled off the edge of her consciousness. She heard the rising, accelerating sound of the wheels-and some theme of music, heard to the rhythm of wheels, kept tugging at her mind, growing louder-it burst suddenly within the cab, but she knew that it was only in her mind; the Fifth Concerto by Richard Halley-she thought: did he write it for this? had he known a feeling such as this?-they were going faster, they had left the ground, she thought, flung off by the mountains as by a springboard, they were now sailing through space-it's not a fair test, she thought, we're not going to touch that bridge-she saw Rearden's face above her, she held his eyes and her head leaned back, so that her face lay still on the air under his face-they heard a ringing blast of metal, they heard a drum roll under their feet, the diagonals of the bridge went smearing across the windows with the sound of a metal rod being run along the pickets of a fence-then the windows were too suddenly clear, the sweep of their downward plunge was carrying them up a hill, the derricks of Wyatt Oil were reeling before them-Pat Logan turned, glancing up at Rearden with the hint of a smile-and Rearden said, "That's that."  The sign on the edge of a roof read: Wyatt Junction. She stared, feeling that there was something odd about it, until she grasped what it was: the sign did not move. The sharpest jolt of the journey was the realization that the engine stood still.  She heard voices somewhere, she looked down and saw that there were people on the platform. Then the door of the cab was flung open, she knew that she had to be first to descend, and she stepped to the edge.  For the flash of an instant, she felt the slenderness of her own body, the lightness of standing full-figure in a current of open air. She gripped the metal bars and started down the ladder. She was halfway down when she felt the palms of a man's hands slam tight against her ribs and waistline, she was torn off the steps, swung through the air and deposited on the ground. She could not believe that the young boy laughing in her face was Ellis Wyatt. The tense, scornful face she remembered, now had the purity, the eagerness, the joyous benevolence of a child in the kind of world for which he had been intended.  She was leaning against his shoulder, feeling unsteady on the motionless ground, with his arm about her, she was laughing, she was listening to the things he said, she was answering, "But didn't you know we would?"  In a moment, she saw the faces around them. They were the bondholders of the John Galt Line, the men who were Nielsen Motors, Hammond Cars, Stockton Foundry and all the others. She shook their hands, and there were no speeches; she stood against Ellis Wyatt, sagging a little, brushing her hair away from her eyes, leaving smudges of soot on her forehead. She shook the hands of the men of the train's crew, without words, with the seal of the grins on their faces. There were flash bulbs exploding around them, and men waving to them from the riggings of the oil wells on the slopes of the mountains. Above her head, above the heads of the crowd, the letters TT on a silver shield were hit by the last ray of a sinking sun.  Ellis Wyatt had taken charge. He was leading her somewhere, the sweep of his arm cutting a path for them through the crowd, when one of the men with the cameras broke through to her side. "Miss Taggart," he called, "will you give us a message for the public?" Ellis Wyatt pointed at the long string of freight cars. "She has."  Then she was sitting in the back seat of an open car, driving up the curves of a mountain road. The man beside her was Rearden, the driver was Ellis Wyatt.  They stopped at a house that stood on the edge of a cliff, with no other habitation anywhere in sight, with the whole of the oil fields spread on the slopes below.  "Why, of course you're staying at my house overnight, both of you," said Ellis Wyatt, as they went in. "Where did you expect to stay?"  She laughed. "I don't know, I hadn't thought of it at all."  "The nearest town is an hour's drive away. That's where your crew has gone: your boys at the division point are giving a party in their honor. So is the whole town. But I told Ted Nielsen and the others that we'd have no banquets for you and no oratory. Unless you'd like it?"  "God, no!" she said. "Thanks, Ellis."  It was dark when they sat at the dinner table in a room that had large windows and a few pieces of costly furniture. The dinner was served by a silent figure in a white jacket, the only other inhabitant of the house, an elderly Indian with a stony face and a courteous manner. A few points of fire were scattered through the room, running over and out beyond the windows: the candles on the table, the lights on the derricks, and the stars.  "Do you think that you have your hands full now?" Ellis Wyatt was saying. "Just give me a year and I'll give you something to keep you busy. Two tank trains a day, Dagny? It's going to be four or six or as many as you wish me to fill." His hand swept over the lights on the mountains. "This? It's nothing, compared to what I've got coming." He pointed west. "The Buena Esperanza Pass. Five miles from here. Everybody's wondering what I'm doing with it. Oil shale. How many years ago was it that they gave up trying to get oil from shale, because it was too expensive? Well, wait till you see the process I've developed. It will be the cheapest oil ever to splash in their faces, and an unlimited supply of it, an untapped supply that will make the biggest oil pool look like a mud puddle. Did I order a pipe line? Hank, you and I will have to build pipe lines in all directions to . . . Oh, I beg your pardon. I don't believe I introduced myself when I spoke to you at the station. I haven't even told you my name."  Rearden grinned. "I've guessed it by now."  "I'm sorry, I don't like to be careless, but I was too excited."  "What were you excited about?" asked Dagny, her eyes narrowed in mockery.  Wyatt held her glance for a moment; his answer had a tone of solemn intensity strangely conveyed by a smiling voice. "About the most beautiful slap in the face I ever got and deserved."  "Do you mean, for our first meeting?"  "I mean, for our first meeting."  "Don't. You were right."  "I was. About everything but you. Dagny, to find an exception after years of . . . Oh, to hell with them! Do you want me to turn on the radio and hear what they're saying about the two of you tonight?"  "No."  "Good. I don't want to hear them. Let them swallow their own speeches. They're all climbing on the band wagon now. We're the band."  He glanced at Rearden. "What are you smiling at?"  "I've always been curious to see what you're like."  "I've never had a chance to be what I'm like-except tonight."  "Do you live here alone, like this, miles away from everything?"  Wyatt pointed at the window. "I'm a couple of steps away from-everything."  "What about people?"  "I have guest rooms for the kind of people who come to see me on business. I want as many miles as possible between myself and all the other kinds." He leaned forward to refill their wine glasses. "Hank, why don't you move to Colorado? To hell with New York and the Eastern Seaboard! This is the capital of the Renaissance. The Second Renaissance-not of oil paintings and cathedrals-but of oil derricks, power plants, and motors made of Rearden Metal. They had the Stone Age and the Iron Age and now they're going to call it the Rearden Metal Age-because there's no limit to what your Metal has made possible."  "I'm going to buy a few square miles of Pennsylvania," said Rearden.  "The ones around my mills. It would have been cheaper to build a branch here, as I wanted, but you know why I can't, and to hell with them! I’ll beat them anyway. I'm going to expand the mills-and if she can give me three-day freight service to Colorado, I'll give you a race for who's going to be the capital of the Renaissance!"  "Give me a year," said Dagny, "of running trains on the John Galt Line, give me time to pull the Taggart system together-and I'll give you three-day freight service across the continent, on a Rearden Metal track from ocean to ocean!"  "Who was it that said he needed a fulcrum?" said Ellis Wyatt. "Give me an unobstructed right-of-way and I'll show them how to move the earth!"  She wondered what it was that she liked about the sound of Wyatt's laughter. Their voices, even her own, had a tone she had never heard before. When they rose from the table, she was astonished to notice that the candles were the only illumination of the room: she had felt as if she were sitting in a violent light.  Ellis Wyatt picked up his glass, looked at their faces and said, "To the world as it seems to be right now!"  He emptied the glass with a single movement.  She heard the crash of the glass against the wall in the same instant that she saw a circling current-from the curve of his body to the sweep of his arm to the terrible violence of his hand that flung the glass across the room. It was not the conventional gesture meant as celebration, it was the gesture of a rebellious anger, the vicious gesture which is movement substituted for a scream of pain.  "Ellis," she whispered, "what's the matter?"  He turned to look at her. With the same violent suddenness, his eyes were clear, his face was calm; what frightened her was seeing him smile gently. "I'm sorry," he said. "Never mind. We'll try to think that it will last."  The earth below was streaked with moonlight, when Wyatt led them up an outside stairway to the second floor of the house, to the open gallery at the doors of the guest rooms. He wished them good night and they heard his steps descending the stairs. The moonlight seemed to drain sound as it drained color. The steps rolled into a distant past, and when they died, the silence had the quality of a solitude that had lasted for a long time, as if no person were left anywhere in reach.  She did not turn to the door of her room. He did not move. At the level of their feet, there was nothing but a thin railing and a spread of space. Angular tiers descended below, with shadows repeating the steel tracery of derricks, criss-crossing sharp, black lines on patches of glowing rock. A few lights, white and red, trembled in the clear air, like drops of rain caught on the edges of steel girders. Far in the distance, three small drops were green, strung in a line along the Taggart track.  Beyond them, at the end of space, at the foot of a white curve, hung a webbed rectangle which was the bridge.  She felt a rhythm without sound or movement, a sense of beating tension, as if the wheels of the John Galt Line were still speeding on.  Slowly, in answer and in resistance to an unspoken summons, she turned and looked at him.  The look she saw on his face made her know for the first time that she had known this would be the end of the journey. That look was not as men are taught to represent it, it was not a matter of loose muscles, hanging lips and mindless hunger. The lines of his face were pulled tight, giving it a peculiar purity, a sharp precision of form, making it clean and young. His mouth was taut, the lips faintly drawn inward, stressing the outline of its shape. Only his eyes were blurred, their lower lids swollen and raised, their glance intent with that which resembled hatred and pain.  The shock became numbness spreading through her body-she felt a tight pressure in her throat and her stomach-she was conscious of nothing but a silent convulsion that made her unable to breathe. But what she felt, without words for it, was: Yes, Hank, yes-now-because it is part of the same battle, in some way that I can't name . . . because it is our being, against theirs . . . our great capacity, for which they torture us, the capacity of happiness . . . Now, like this, without words or questions . . . because we want it. . . .  It was like an act of hatred, like the cutting blow of a lash encircling her body: she felt his arms around her, she felt her legs pulled forward against him and her chest bent back under the pressure of his, his mouth on hers.  Her hand moved from his shoulders to his waist to his legs, releasing the unconfessed desire of her every meeting with him. When she tore her mouth away from him, she was laughing soundlessly, in triumph, as if saying: Hank Rearden-the austere, unapproachable Hank Rearden of the monk like office, the business conferences, the harsh bargains-do you remember them now?-I'm thinking of it, for the pleasure of knowing that I've brought you to this. He was not smiling, his face was tight, it was the face of an enemy, he jerked her head and caught her mouth again, as if he were inflicting a wound.  She felt him trembling and she thought that this was the kind of cry she had wanted to tear from him-this surrender through the shreds of his tortured resistance. Yet she knew, at the same time, that the triumph was his, that her laughter was her tribute to him, that her defiance was submission, that the purpose of all of her violent strength was only to make his victory the greater-he was holding her body against his, as if stressing his wish to let her know that she was now only a tool for the satisfaction of his desire-and his victory, she knew, was her wish to let him reduce her to that. Whatever I am, she thought, whatever pride of person I may hold, the pride of my courage, of my work, of my mind and my freedom-that is what I offer you for the pleasure of your body, that is what I want you to use in your service-and that you want it to serve you is the greatest reward I can have.  There were lights burning in the two rooms behind them. He took her wrist and threw her inside his room, making the gesture tell her that he needed no sign of consent or resistance. He locked the door, watching her face. Standing straight, holding his glance, she extended her arm to the lamp on the table and turned out the light. He approached. He turned the light on again, with a single, contemptuous jerk of his wrist.  She saw him smile for the first time, a slow, mocking, sensual smile that stressed the purpose of his action.  He was holding her half-stretched across the bed, he was tearing her clothes off. while her face was pressed against him, her mouth, moving down the line of his neck, down his shoulder. She knew that every gesture of her desire for him struck him like a blow, that there was some shudder of incredulous anger within him-yet that no gesture would satisfy his greed for every evidence of her desire.  He stood looking down at her naked body, he leaned over, she heard his voice-it was more a statement of contemptuous triumph than a question: "You want it?" Her answer was more a gasp than a word, her eyes closed, her mouth open: "Yes."  She knew that what she felt with the skin of her arms was the cloth of his shirt, she knew that the lips she felt on her mouth were his, but in the rest of her there was no distinction between his being and her own, as there was no division between body and spirit. Through all the steps of the years behind them, the steps down a course chosen in the courage of a single loyalty: their love of existence-chosen in the knowledge that nothing will be given, that one must make one's own desire and every shape of its fulfillment-through the steps of shaping metal, rails and motors-they had moved by the power of the thought that one remakes the earth for one's enjoyment, that man's spirit gives meaning to insentient matter by molding it to serve one's chosen goal. The course led them to the moment when, in answer to the highest of one's values, in an admiration not to be expressed by any other form of tribute, one's spirit makes one's body become the tribute, recasting it-as proof, as sanction, as reward-into a single sensation of such intensity of joy that no other sanction of one's existence is necessary. He heard the moan of her breath, she felt the shudder of his body, in the same instant.