CHAPTER VIII BY OUR LOVE

The sun touched the tree tops on the slope of the hill, and they looked a bluish-silver, catching the color of the sky. Dagny stood at the door of the cabin, with the first sunrays on her forehead and miles of forest spread under her feet. The leaves went down from silver to green to the smoky blue of the shadows on the road below. The light trickled down through the branches and shot upward in sudden spurts when it hit a clump of ferns that became a fountain of green rays. It gave her pleasure to watch the motion of the light over a stillness where nothing else could move.  She had marked the date, as she did each morning, on the sheet of paper she had tacked to the wall of her room. The progression of the dates on that paper was the only movement in the stillness of her days, like the record kept by a prisoner on a desert island. This morning's date was May 28.  She had intended the dates to lead to a purpose, but she could not say whether she had reached it or not. She had come here with three assignments given, as orders, to herself: rest-learn to live without the railroad-get the pain out of the way. Get it out of the way, were the words she used. She felt as if she were tied to some wounded stranger who could be stricken at any moment by an attack that would drown her in his screams. She felt no pity for the stranger, only a contemptuous impatience; she had to fight him and destroy him, then her way would be clear to decide what she wished to do; but the stranger was not easy to fight.  The assignment to rest had been easier. She found that she liked the solitude; she awakened in the morning with a feeling of confident benevolence, the sense that she could venture forth and be willing to deal with whatever she found. In the city, she had lived in chronic tension to withstand the shock of anger, indignation, disgust, contempt.  The only danger to threaten her here was the simple pain of some physical accident; it seemed innocent and easy by comparison, The cabin was far from any traveled road; it had remained as her father had left it. She cooked her meals on a wood-burning stove and gathered the wood on the hillsides. She cleared the brush from under her walls, she reshingled the roof, she repainted the door and the frames of the windows. Rains, weeds and brush had swallowed the steps of what had once been a terraced path rising up the hill from the road to the cabin. She rebuilt it, clearing the terraces, re-laying the stones, bracing the banks of soft earth with walls of boulders. It gave her pleasure to devise complex systems of levers and pulleys out of old scraps of iron and rope, then to move weights of rock that were much beyond her physical power. She planted a few seeds of nasturtiums and morning glories, to see one spreading slowly over the ground and the other climbing up the tree trunks, to see them grow, to see progression and movement.  The work gave her the calm she needed; she had not noticed how she began it or why; she had started without conscious intention, but she saw it growing under her hands, pulling her forward, giving her a healing sense of peace. Then she understood that what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no matter how small or in what form, the sense of an activity going step by step to some chosen end across a span of time. The work of cooking a meal was like a closed circle, completed and gone, leading nowhere. But the work of building a path was a living sum, so that no day was left to die behind her, but each day contained all those that preceded it, each day acquired its immortality on every succeeding tomorrow. A circle, she thought, is the movement proper to physical nature, they say that there's nothing but circular motion in the inanimate universe around us, but the straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end.  The cooking of meals, she thought, is like the feeding of coal to an engine for the sake of a great run, but what would be the imbecile torture of coaling an engine that had no run to make? It is not proper for man's life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him-man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station to-oh, stop it!  Stop it-she told herself in quiet severity, when the scream of the wounded stranger was choked off-don't think of that, don't look too far, you like building this path, build it, don't look beyond the foot of the hill.  She had driven a few times to the store in Woodstock, twenty miles away, to buy supplies and food. Woodstock was a small huddle of dying structures, built generations ago for some reason and hope long since forgotten. There was no railroad to feed it, no electric power, nothing but a county highway growing emptier year by year.  The only store was a wooden hovel, with spider-eaten corners and a rotted patch in the middle of the floor, eaten by the rains that came through the leaking roof. The storekeeper was a fat, pallid woman who moved with effort, but seemed indifferent to her own discomfort. The stock of food consisted of dusty cans with faded labels, some grain, and a few vegetables rotting in ancient bins outside the door. "Why don't you move those vegetables out of the sun?" Dagny asked once. The woman looked at her blankly, as if unable to understand the possibility of such a question. "They've always been there," she answered indifferently.  Driving back to the cabin, Dagny looked up at a mountain stream that fell with ferocious force down a sheer granite wall, its spray hanging like a mist of rainbows in the sun. She thought that one could build a hydroelectric plant, just large enough to supply the power for her cabin and for the town of Woodstock-Woodstock could be made to be productive-those wild apple trees she saw in such unusual numbers among the dense growth on the hillsides, were the remnants of orchards-suppose one were to reclaim them, then build a small spur to the nearest railroad-oh, stop it!  "No kerosene today," the storekeeper told her on her next trip to Woodstock. "It rained Thursday night, and when it rains, the trucks can't get through Fairfield gorge, the road's flooded, and the kerosene truck won't be back this way till next month." "If you know that the road gets flooded every time it rains, why don't you people repair it?"  The woman answered, "The road's always been that way."  Driving back, Dagny stopped on the crest of a hill and looked down at the miles of countryside below. She looked at Fairfield gorge where the county road, twisting through marshy soil below the level of a river, got trapped in a crack between two hills. It would be simple to bypass those hills, she thought, to build a road on the other side of the river-the people of Woodstock had nothing to do, she could teach them-cut a road straight to the southwest, save miles, connect with the state highway at the freight depot of-oh, stop it!  She put her kerosene lamp aside and sat in her cabin after dark by the light of a candle, listening to the music of a small portable radio.  She hunted for symphony concerts and twisted the dial rapidly past whenever she caught the raucous syllables of a news broadcast; she did not want any news from the city.  Don't think of Taggart Transcontinental-she had told herself on her first night in the cabin-don't think of it until you're able to hear the words as if they were "Atlantic Southern" or "Associated Steel," But the weeks passed and no scar would grow over the wound.  It seemed to her as if she were fighting the unpredictable cruelty of her own mind. She would lie in bed, drifting off to sleep-then find herself suddenly thinking that the conveyor belt was worn at the coaling station at Willow Bend, Indiana, she had seen it from the window of her car on her last trip, she must tell them to replace it or they-and then she would be sitting up in bed, crying, Stop it!-and stopping it, but remaining awake for the rest of that night.  She would sit at the door of the cabin at sunset and watch the motion of the leaves growing still in the twilight-then she would see the sparks of the fireflies rising from the grass, flashing on and off in every darkening corner, flashing slowly, as if holding one moment's warning-they were like the lights of signals winking at night over the track of a-Stop it!  It was the times when she could not stop it that she dreaded, the times when, unable to stand up-as in physical pain, with no limit to divide it from the pain of her mind-she would fall down on the floor of the cabin or on the earth of the woods and sit still, with her face pressed to a chair or a rock, and fight not to let herself scream aloud, while they were suddenly as close to her and as real as the body of a lover: the two lines of rail going off to a single point in the distance-the front of an engine cutting space apart by means of the letters TT-the sound of the wheels clicking in accented rhythm under the floor of her car-the statue of Nat Taggart in the concourse of the Terminal. Fighting not to know them,  not to feel them, her body rigid but for the grinding motion of her face against her arm, she would draw whatever power over her consciousness still remained to her into the soundless, toneless repetition of the words: Get it over with. There were long stretches of calm, when she was able to face her problem with the dispassionate clarity of weighing a problem in engineering. But she could find no answer. She knew that her desperate longing for the railroad would vanish, were she to convince herself that it was impossible or improper. But the longing came from the certainty that the truth and the right were hers-that the enemy was the irrational and the unreal-that she could not set herself another goal or summon the love to achieve it, while her rightful achievement had been lost, not to some superior power, but to a loathsome evil that conquered by means of impotence.  She could renounce the railroad, she thought; she could find contentment here, in this forest; but she would build the path, then reach the road below, then rebuild the road-and then she would reach the storekeeper of Woodstock and that would be the end, and the empty white face staring at the universe in stagnant apathy would be the limit placed on her effort. Why?-she heard herself screaming aloud. There was no answer.  Then stay here until you answer it, she thought. You have no place to go, you can't move, you can't start grading a right-of-way until . . .until you know enough to choose a terminal.  There were long, silent evenings when the emotion that made her sit still and look at the unattainable distance beyond the fading light to the south, was loneliness for Hank Rearden. She wanted the sight of his unyielding face, the confident face looking at her with the hint of a smile. But she knew that she could not see him until her battle was won. His smile had to be deserved, it was intended for an adversary who traded her strength against his, not for a pain-beaten wretch who would seek relief in that smile and thus destroy its meaning. He could help her to live; he could not help her to decide for what purpose she wished to go on living.  She had felt a faint touch of anxiety since the morning when she marked "May 15" on her calendar. She had forced herself to listen to news broadcasts, once in a while; she had heard no mention of his name. Her fear for him was her last link to the city; it kept drawing her eyes to the horizon at the south and down to the road at the foot of the hill. She found herself waiting for him to come. She found herself listening for the sound of a motor. But the only sound to give her a futile start of hope at times, was the sudden crackle of some large bird's wings hurtling through the branches into the sky.  There was another link to the past, that still remained as an unsolved question: Quentin Daniels and the motor that he was trying to rebuild.  By June 1, she would owe him his monthly check. Should she tell him that she had quit, that she would never need that motor and neither would the world? Should she tell him to stop and to let the remnant of the motor vanish in rust on some such junk pile as the one where she had found it? She could not force herself to do it. It seemed harder than leaving the railroad. That motor, she thought, was not a link to the past: it was her last link to the future. To kill it seemed like an act, not of murder, but of suicide: her order to stop it would be her signature under the certainty that there was no terminal for her to seek ahead.  But it is not true-she thought, as she stood at the door of her cabin, on this morning of May 28-it is not true that there is no place in the future for a superlative achievement of man's mind; it can never be true. No matter what her problem, this would always remain to her-this immovable conviction that evil was unnatural and temporary. She felt it more clearly than ever this morning: the certainty that the ugliness of the men in the city and the ugliness of her suffering were transient accidents-while the smiling sense of hope within her at the sight of a sun-flooded forest, the sense of an unlimited promise, was the permanent and the real.  She stood at the door, smoking a cigarette. In the room behind her, the sounds of a symphony of her grandfather's time were coming from the radio. She barely listened, she was conscious only of the flow of chords that seemed to play an underscoring harmony for the flow of the smoke curving slowly from her cigarette, for the curving motion of her arm moving the cigarette to her lips once in a while. She closed her eyes and stood still, feeling the rays of the sun on her body. This was the achievement, she thought-to enjoy this moment, to let no memory of pain blunt her capacity to feel as she felt right now; so long as she could preserve this feeling, she would have the fuel to go on.  She was barely aware of a faint noise that came through the music, like the scratching of an old record. The first thing to reach her consciousness was the sudden jerk of her own hand flinging the cigarette aside. It came in the same instant as the realization that the noise was growing loader and that it was the sound of a motor. Then she knew that she had not admitted to herself how much she had wanted to hear that sound, how desperately she had waited for Hank Rearden.  She heard her own chuckle-it was humbly, cautiously low, as if not to disturb the drone of revolving metal which was now the unmistakable sound of a car rising up the mountain road.  She could not see the road-the small stretch under the arch of branches at the foot of the hill was her only view of it-but she watched the car's ascent by the growing, imperious strain of the motor against the grades and the screech of the tires on curves.  The car stopped under the arch of branches. She did not recognize it -it was not the black Hammond, but a long, gray convertible. She saw the driver step out: it was a man whose presence here could not be possible. It was Francisco d'Anconia.  The shock she felt was not disappointment, it was more like the sensation that disappointment would now be irrelevant. It was eagerness and an odd, solemn stillness, the sudden certainty that she was facing the approach of something unknown and of the gravest importance.  The swiftness of Francisco's movements was carrying him toward the hill while he was raising his head to glance up. He saw her above, at the door of the cabin, and stopped. She could not distinguish the expression on his face. He stood still for a long moment, his face raised to her. Then he started up the hill.  She felt-almost as if she had expected it-that this was a scene from their childhood. He was coming toward her, not running, but moving upward with a kind of triumphant, confident eagerness. No, she thought, this was not their childhood-it was the future as she would have seen it then, in the days when she waited for him as for her release from prison. It was a moment's view of a morning they would have reached, if her vision of life had been fulfilled, if they had both gone the way she had then been so certain of going. Held motionless by wonder, she stood looking at him, taking this moment, not in the name of the present, but as a salute to their past.  When he was close enough and she could distinguish his face, she saw the look of that luminous gaiety which transcends the solemn by proclaiming the great innocence of a man who has earned the right to be light-hearted. He was smiling and whistling some piece of music that seemed to flow like the long, smooth, rising flight of his steps.  The melody seemed distantly familiar to her, she felt that it belonged with this moment, yet she felt also that there was something odd about it, something important to grasp, only she could not think of it now.  "Hi, Slug!"  "Hi, Frisco!"  She knew-by the way he looked at her, by an instant's drop of his eyelids closing his eyes, by the brief pull of his head striving to lean back and resist, by the faint, half-smiling, half-helpless relaxation of his lips, then by the sudden harshness of his arms as he seized her-that it was involuntary, that he had not intended it, and that it was irresistibly right for both of them.  The desperate violence of the way he held her, the hurting pressure of his mouth on hers, the exultant surrender of his body to the touch of hers, were not the form of a moment's pleasure- she knew that no physical hunger could bring a man to this-she knew that it was the statement she had never heard from him, the greatest confession of love a man could make. No matter what he had done to wreck his life, this was still the Francisco d'Anconia in whose bed she had been so proud of belonging-no matter what betrayals she had met from the world, her vision of life had been true and some indestructible part of it had remained within him-and in answer to it, her body responded to his, her arms and mouth held him, confessing her desire, confessing an acknowledgment she had always given him and always would.  Then the rest of his years came back to her, with a stab of the pain of knowing that the greater his person, the more terrible his guilt hi destroying it. She pulled herself away from him, she shook her head, she said, in answer to both of them, "No."  He stood looking at her, disarmed and smiling. "Not yet. You have a great deal to forgive me, first. But I can tell you everything now."  She had never heard that low, breathless quality of helplessness in his voice. He was fighting to regain control, there was almost a touch of apology in his smile, the apology of a child pleading for indulgence, but there was also an adult's amusement, the laughing declaration that he did not have to hide his struggle, since it was happiness that he was wrestling with, not pain.  She backed away from him; she felt as if emotion had flung her ahead of her own consciousness, and questions were now catching up with her, groping toward the form of words.'  "Dagny, that torture you've been going through, here, for the last month . . . answer me as honestly as you can . . . do you think you could have borne it twelve years ago?"  "No," she answered; he smiled. "Why do you ask that?"  "To redeem twelve years of my life, which I won't have to regret."  "What do you mean? And"-her questions had caught up with her-"and what do you know about my torture here?"  "Dagny, aren't you beginning to see that I would know everything about it?"  "How did you . . . Francisco! What were you whistling when you were coming up the hill?"  "Why, was I? I don't know."  "It was the Fifth Concerto by Richard Halley, wasn't it?"  "Oh . . . I," He looked startled, then smiled in amusement at himself, then answered gravely, "I'll tell you that later."  "How did you find out where I was?"  "I'll tell you that, too."  "You forced it out of Eddie."  "I haven't seen Eddie for over a year."  "He was the only one who knew it."  "It wasn't Eddie who told me."  "I didn't want anybody to find me."  He glanced slowly about him, she saw his eyes stop on the path she had built, on the planted flowers, on the fresh-shingled roof. He chuckled, as if he understood and as if it hurt him. "You shouldn't have been left here for a month," he said. "God, you shouldn't have! It's my first failure, at the one time when I didn't want to fail. But I didn't think you were ready to quit. Had I known it, I would have watched you day and night."  "Really? What for?"  "To spare you"-he pointed at her work-"all this."  "Francisco," she said, her voice low, "if you're concerned about my torture, don't you know that I don't want to hear you speak of it, because-" She stopped; she had never complained to him, not in all those years; her voice flat, she said only, "-that I don't want to hear it?"  "Because I'm the one man who has no right to speak of it? Dagny, if you think that I don't know how much I've hurt you, I'll tell you about the years when I . . . But it's over. Oh, darling, it's over!"  "Is it?"  "Forgive me, I mustn't say that. Not until you say it," He was trying to control his voice, but the look of happiness was beyond his power of control.  "Are you happy because I've lost everything I lived for? All right, I'll say it, if this is what you've come to hear: you were the first thing I lost-does it amuse you now to see that I've lost the rest?"  He glanced straight at her, his eyes drawn narrow by such an intensity of earnestness that the glance was almost a threat, and she knew that whatever the years had meant to him, "amusement" was the one word she had no right to utter.  "Do you really think that?" he asked.  She whispered, "No . . ."  "Dagny, we can never lose the things we live for. We may have to change their form at times, if we've made an error, but the purpose remains the same and the forms are ours to make."  "'That is what I've been telling myself for a month. But there's no way left open toward any purpose whatever."  He did not answer. He sat down on a boulder by the door of the cabin, watching her as if he did not want to miss a single shadow of reaction on her face. "What do you think now of the men who quit and vanished?" he asked.  She shrugged, with a faint smile of helpless sadness, and sat down on the ground beside him. "You know," she said, "I used to think that there was some destroyer who came after them and made them quit. But I guess there wasn't. There have been times, this past month, when I've almost wished he would come for me, too. But nobody came."  "No?"  "No. I used to think that he gave them some inconceivable reason to make them betray everything they loved. But that wasn't necessary. I know how they felt. I can't blame them any longer. What I don't know is how they learned to exist afterward-if any of them still exist."  "Do you feel that you've betrayed Taggart Transcontinental?"  "No. I . . . I feel that I would have betrayed it by remaining at work."  "You would have."  "If I had agreed to serve the looters, it's . . . it's Nat Taggart that I would have delivered to them. I couldn't. I couldn't let his achievement, and mine, end up with the looters as our final goal."  "No, you couldn't. Do you call this indifference? Do you think that you love the railroad less than you did a month ago?"  "I think that I would give my life for just one more year on the railroad . . . But I can't go back to it."  "Then you know what they felt, all the men who quit, and what it was that they loved when they gave up."  "Francisco," she asked, not looking at him, her head bent, "why did you ask me whether I could have given it up twelve years ago?"  "Don't you know what night I am thinking of, just as you are?"  "Yes . . ." she whispered.  "That was the night I gave up d'Anconia Copper."  Slowly, with a long effort, she moved her head to glance up at him.  His face had the expression she had seen then, on that next morning, twelve years ago: the look of a smile, though he was not smiling, the quiet look of victory over pain, the look of a man's pride in the price he paid and in that which made it worth paying.  "But you didn't give it up," she said. "You didn't quit. You're still the President of d'Anconia Copper, only it means nothing to you now."  "It means as much to me now as it did that night."  "Then how can you let it go to pieces?"  "Dagny, you're more fortunate than I. Taggart Transcontinental is a delicate piece of precision machinery. It will not last long without you. It cannot be run by slave labor. They will mercifully destroy it for you and you won't have to see it serving the looters. But copper mining is a simpler job. D'Anconia Copper could have lasted for generations of looters and slaves. Crudely, miserably, ineptly-but it could have lasted and helped them to last. I had to destroy it myself."  “You-what?"  "I am destroying d'Anconia Copper, consciously, deliberately, by plan and by my own hand. I have to plan it as carefully and work as hard as if I were producing a fortune-in order not to let them notice it and stop me, in order not to let them seize the mines until it is too late. All the effort and energy I had hoped to spend on d'Anconia Copper, I'm spending them, only . . . only it's not to make it grow. I shall destroy every last bit of it and every last penny of my fortune and every ounce of copper that could feed the looters. I shall not leave it as I found it-I shall leave it as Sebastian d'Anconia found it-then let them try to exist without him or me!"  "Francisco!" she screamed. "How could you make yourself do it?"  "By the grace of the same love as yours," he answered quietly, "my love for d'Anconia Copper, for the spirit of which it was the shape. Was-and, some day, will be again."  She sat still, trying to grasp all the implications of what she now grasped only as the numbness of shock. In the silence, the music of the radio symphony went on, and the rhythm of the chords reached her like the slow, solemn pounding of steps, while she struggled to see at once the whole progression of twelve years: the tortured boy who called for help on her breasts-the man who sat on the floor of a drawing room, playing marbles and laughing at the destruction of great industries-the man who cried, "My love, I can't!" while refusing to help her-the man who drank a toast, in the dim booth of a barroom, to the years which Sebastian d'Anconia had had to wait. . . .  "Francisco . . . of all the guesses I tried to make about you . . . I never thought of it . . . I never thought that you were one of those men who had quit . . ."  "I was one of the first of them."  "I thought that they always vanished . . ."  "Well, hadn't I? Wasn't it the worst of what I did to you-that I left you looking at a cheap playboy who was not the Francisco d'Anconia you had known?"  "Yes . . ." she whispered, "only the worst was that I couldn't believe it . . . I never did . . . It was Francisco d'Anconia that I kept seeing every time I saw you. . . ."  "I know. And I know what it did to you. I tried to help you understand, but it was too soon to tell you. Dagny, if I had told you- that night or the day when you came to damn me for the San Sebastian Mines-that I was not an aimless loafer, that I was out to speed up the destruction of everything we had held sacred together, the destruction of d'Anconia Copper, of Taggart Transcontinental, of Wyatt Oil, of Rearden Steel-would you have found it easier to take?"  "Harder," she whispered. "I'm not sure I can take it, even now. Neither your kind of renunciation nor my own . . . But, Francisco"-she threw her head back suddenly to look up at him-"if this was your secret, then of all the hell you had to take, I was-"  "Oh yes, my darling, yes, you were the worst of it!" It was a desperate cry, its sound of laughter and of release confessing all the agony he wanted to sweep away. He seized her hand, he pressed his mouth to it, then his face, not to let her see the reflection of what his years had been like. "If it's any kind of atonement, which it isn't . . .whatever I made you suffer, that's how I paid for it . . . by knowing what I was doing to you and having to do it . . . and waiting, waiting to . . . But it's over."  He raised his head, smiling, he looked down at her and she saw a look of protective tenderness come into his face, which told her of the despair he saw in hers.  "Dagny, don't think of that. I won't claim any suffering of mine as my excuse. Whatever my reason, I knew what I was doing and I've hurt you terribly. I'll need years to make up for it. Forget what"-she knew that he meant: what his embrace had confessed-"what I haven't said. Of all the things I have to tell you, that is the one I'll say last." But his eyes, his smile, the grasp of his fingers on her wrist were saying it against his will. "You've borne too much, and there's a great deal that you have to learn to understand in order to lose every scar of the torture you never should have had to bear. All that matters now is that you're free to recover. We're free, both of us, we're free of the looters, we're out of their reach."  She said, her voice quietly desolate, "That's what I came here for-to try to understand. But I can't. It seems monstrously wrong to surrender the world to the looters, and monstrously wrong to live under their rule. I can neither give up nor go back. I can neither exist without work nor work as a serf. I had always thought that any sort of battle was proper, anything, except renunciation. I'm not sure we're right to quit, you and I, when we should have fought them. But there is no way to fight. It's surrender, if we leave-and surrender, if we remain. I don't know what is right any longer."  "Check your premises, Dagny. Contradictions don't exist."  "But I can't find any answer. I can't condemn you for what you're doing, yet it's horror that I feel-admiration and horror, at the same time. You, the heir of the d'Anconias, who could have surpassed all his ancestors of the miraculous hand that produced, you're turning your matchless ability to the job of destruction. And I-I'm playing with cobblestones and shingling a roof, while a transcontinental railroad system is collapsing in the hands of congenital ward heelers. Yet you and I were the kind who determine the fate of the world. If this is what we let it come to, then it must have been our own guilt. But I can't see the nature of our error."  "Yes, Dagny, it was our own guilt."  "Because we didn't work hard enough?"  "Because we worked too hard-and charged too little."  "What do you mean?"  "We never demanded the one payment that the world owed us-and we let our best reward go to the worst of men. The error was made centuries ago, it was made by Sebastian d'Anconia, by Nat Taggart, by every man who fed the world and received no thanks in return. You don't know what is right any longer? Dagny, this is not a battle over material goods. It's a moral crisis, the greatest the world has ever faced and the last. Our age is the climax of centuries of evil. We must put an end to it, once and for all, or perish-we, the men of the mind. It was our own guilt. We produced the wealth of the world-but we let our enemies write its moral code."  "But we never accepted their code. We lived by our own standards."  "Yes-and paid ransoms for it! Ransoms in matter and in spirit-in money, which our enemies received, but did not deserve, and in honor, which we deserved, but did not receive. That was our guilt-that we were willing to pay. We kept mankind alive, yet we allowed men to despise us and to worship our destroyers. We allowed them to worship incompetence and brutality, the recipients and the dispensers of the unearned. By accepting punishment, not for any sins, but for our virtues, we betrayed our code and made theirs possible. Dagny, theirs is the morality of kidnappers. They use your love of virtue as a hostage. They know that you'll bear anything in order to work and produce, because you know that achievement is man's highest moral purpose, that he can't exist without it, and your love of virtue is your love of life. They count on you to assume any burden. They count on you to feel that no effort is too great in the service of your love. Dagny, your enemies are destroying you by means of your own power. Your generosity and your endurance are their only tools. Your unrequited rectitude is the only hold they have upon you. They know it. You don't. The day when you'll discover it is the only thing they dread. You must learn to understand them. You won't be free of them, until you do. But when you do, you'll reach such a stage of rightful anger that you'll blast every rail of Taggart Transcontinental, rather than let it serve them!"  "But to leave it to them!" she moaned. "To abandon it . . . To abandon Taggart Transcontinental . . . when it's . . . it's almost like a living person . . ."  "It was. It isn't any longer. Leave it to them. It won't do them any good. Let it go. We don't need it. We can rebuild it. They can't. We'll survive without it. They won't."  "But we, brought down to renouncing and giving up!"  "Dagny, we who've been called 'materialists' by the killers of the human spirit, we're the only ones who know how little value or meaning there is in material objects as such, because we're the ones who create their value and meaning. We can afford to give them up, for a short while, in order to redeem something much more precious. We are the soul, of which railroads, copper mines, steel mills and oil wells are the body-and they are living entities that beat day and night, like our hearts, in the sacred function of supporting human life, but only so long as they remain our body, only so long as they remain the expression, the reward and the property of achievement. Without us, they are corpses and their sole product is poison, not wealth or food, the poison of disintegration that turns men into hordes of scavengers. Dagny, learn to understand the nature of your own power and you'll understand the paradox you now see around you. You do not have to depend on any material possessions, they depend on you, you create them, you own the one and only tool of production. Wherever you are, you will always be able to produce. But the looters-by their own stated theory-are in desperate, permanent, congenital need and at the blind mercy of matter. Why don't you take them at their word? They need railroads, factories, mines, motors, which they cannot make or run. Of what use will your railroad be to them without you? Who held it together? Who kept it alive? Who saved it, time and time again? Was it your brother James? Who fed him? Who fed the looters? Who produced their weapons? Who gave them the means to enslave you? The impossible spectacle of shabby little incompetents holding control over the products of genius-who made it possible? Who supported your enemies, who forged your chains, who destroyed your achievement?"  The motion that threw her upright was like a silent cry. He shot to his feet with the stored abruptness of a spring uncoiling, his voice driving on in merciless triumph: "You're beginning to see, aren't you? Dagny! Leave them the carcass of that railroad, leave them all the rusted rails and rotted ties and gutted engines-but don't leave them your mind! Don't leave them your mind! The fate of the world rests on that decision!"  "Ladies and gentlemen," said the panic-pregnant voice of a radio announcer, breaking off the chords of the symphony, "we interrupt this broadcast to bring you a special news bulletin. The greatest disaster in railroad history occurred in the early hours of the morning on the main line of Taggart Transcontinental, at Winston, Colorado, demolishing the famous Taggart Tunnel!"  Her scream sounded like the screams that had rung out in the one last moment in the darkness of the tunnel. Its sound remained with him through the rest of the broadcast-as they both ran to the radio in the cabin and stood, in equal terror, her eyes staring at the radio, his eyes watching her face.  "The details of the story were obtained from Luke Beal, fireman of the Taggart luxury main liner, the Comet, who was found unconscious at the western portal of the tunnel this morning, and who appears to be the sole survivor of the catastrophe. Through some astounding infraction of safety rules-in circumstances not yet fully established-the Comet, westbound for San Francisco, was sent into the tunnel with a coal-burning steam locomotive. The Taggart Tunnel, an eight-mile bore, cut through the summit of the Rocky Mountains and regarded as an engineering achievement not to be equaled in our time, was built by the grandson of Nathaniel Taggart, in the great age of the clean, smokeless Diesel-electric engine. The tunnel's ventilation system was not designed to provide for the heavy smoke and fumes of coal-burning locomotives-and it was known to every railroad employee in the district that to send a train into the tunnel with such a locomotive would mean death by suffocation for everyone aboard. The Comet, none the less, was so ordered to proceed. According to Fireman Beal, the effects of the fumes began to be felt when the train was about three miles inside the tunnel. Engineer Joseph Scott threw the throttle wide open, in a desperate attempt to gain speed, but the old, worn engine was inadequate for the weight of the long train and the rising grade of the track. Struggling through the thickening fumes, engineer and fireman had barely managed to force the leaking steam boilers up to a speed of forty miles per hour-when some passenger, prompted undoubtedly by the panic of choking, pulled the emergency brake cord. The sudden jolt of the stop apparently broke the engine's airhose, for the train could not be started again. There were screams coming from the cars. Passengers were breaking windows. Engineer Scott struggled frantically to make the engine start, but collapsed at the throttle, overcome by the fumes.  “Fireman Beal leaped from the engine and ran. He was within sight of the western portal, when he heard the blast of the explosion, which is the last thing he remembers. The rest of the story was gathered from railroad employees at Winston Station. It appears that an Army Freight Special, westbound, carrying a heavy load of explosives, had been given no warning about the presence of the Comet on the track just ahead. Both trains had encountered delays and were running off their schedules. It appears that the Freight Special had been ordered to proceed regardless of signals, because the tunnel's signal system was out of order. It is said that in spite of speed regulations and in view of the frequent breakdowns of the ventilating system, it was the tacit custom of all engineers to go full speed while in the tunnel. It appears, as far as can be established at present, that the Comet was stalled just beyond the point where the tunnel makes a sharp curve. It is believed that everyone aboard was dead by that time. It is doubted that the engineer of the Freight Special, turning a curve at eighty miles an hour, would have been able to see, in time, the observation window of the Comet's last car, which was brightly lighted when it left Winston Station. What is known is that the Freight Special crashed into the rear of the Comet. The explosion of the Special's cargo broke windows in a farmhouse five miles away and brought down such a weight of rock upon the tunnel that rescue parties have not yet been able to come within three miles of where either train had been. It is not expected that any survivors will be found-and it is not believed that the Taggart Tunnel can ever be rebuilt."  She stood still. She looked as if she were seeing, not the room around her, but the scene in Colorado. Her sudden movement had the abruptness of a convulsion. With the single-tracked rationality of a somnambulist,, she whirled to find her handbag, as if it were the only object in existence, she seized it, she whirled to the door and ran.  "Dagny!" he screamed. "Don't go back!"  The scream had no more power to reach her than if he were calling to her across the miles between him and the mountains of Colorado.  He ran after her, he caught her, seizing her by both elbows, and he cried, "Don't go back! Dagny! In the name of anything sacred to you, don't go back!"  She looked as if she did not know who he was. In a contest of physical strength, he could have broken the bones of her arms without effort.  But with the force of a living creature fighting for life, she tore herself loose so violently that she threw him off balance for a moment. When he regained his footing, she was running down the hill-running as he had run at the sound of the alarm siren in Rearden's mills-running to her car on the road below.  His letter of resignation lay on the desk before him-and James Taggart sat staring at it, hunched by hatred. He felt as if his enemy were this piece of paper, not the words on it, but the sheet and the ink that had given the words a material finality. He had always regarded thoughts and words as inconclusive, but a material shape was that which he had spent his life escaping: a commitment.  He had not decided to resign-not really, he thought; he had dictated the letter for a motive which he identified to himself only as "just in case." The letter, he felt, was a form of protection; but he had not signed it yet, and that was his protection against the protection. The hatred was directed at whatever had brought him to feel that he would not be able to continue extending this process much longer.  He had received word of the catastrophe at eight o'clock this morning; by noon, he had arrived at his office. An instinct that came from reasons which he knew, but spent his whole effort on not knowing, had told him that he had to be there, this time.  The men who had been his marked cards-in a game he knew how to play-were gone. Clifton Locey was barricaded behind the statement of a doctor who had announced that Mr. Locey was suffering from a heart condition which made it impossible to disturb him at present. One of Taggart's executive assistants was said to have left for Boston last night, and the other was said to have been called unexpectedly to an unnamed hospital, to the bedside of a father nobody had ever suspected him of having. There was no answer at the home of the chief engineer. The vice-president in charge of public relations could not be found.  Driving through the streets to his office, Taggart had seen the black letters of the headlines. Walking down the corridors of Taggart Transcontinental, he had heard the voice of a speaker pouring from a radio in someone's office, the kind of voice one expects to hear on unlighted street corners: it was screaming demands for the nationalization of the railroads.  He had walked through the corridors, his steps noisy, in order to be seen, and hasty, in order not to be stopped for questions. He had locked the door of his office, ordering his secretary not to admit any person or phone call and to tell all comers that Mr. Taggart was busy.  Then he sat at his desk, alone with blank terror. He felt as if he were trapped in a subterranean vault and the lock could never be broken again-and as if he were held on display in the sight of the whole city below, hoping that the lock would hold out for eternity. He had to be here, in this office, it was required of him, he had to sit idly and wait-wait for the unknown to descend upon him and to determine his actions-and the terror was both of who would come for him and of the fact that nobody came, nobody to tell him what to do.  The ringing of the telephones in the outer office sounded like screams for help. He looked at the door with a sensation of malevolent triumph at the thought of all those voices being defeated by the innocuous figure of his secretary, a young man expert at nothing but the art of evasion, which he practiced with the gray, rubber limpness of the amoral. The voices, thought Taggart, were coming from Colorado, from every center of the Taggart system, from every office of the building around him. He was safe so long as he did not have to hear them.  His emotions had clogged into a still, solid, opaque ball within him, which the thought of the men who operated the Taggart system could not pierce; those men were merely enemies to be outwitted. The sharper bites of fear came from the thought of the men on the Board of Directors; but his letter of resignation was his fire escape, which would leave them stuck with the fire. The sharpest fear came from the thought of the men in Washington. If they called, he would have to answer; his rubber secretary would know whose voices superseded his orders. But Washington did not call.  The fear went through him in spasms, once in a while, leaving his mouth dry. He did not know what he dreaded. He knew that it was not the threat of the radio speaker. What he had experienced at the sound of the snarling voice had been more like a terror which he felt because he was expected to feel it, a duty-terror, something that went with his position, like well-tailored suits and luncheon speeches. But under it, he had felt a sneaking little hope, swift and furtive like the course of a cockroach: if that threat took form, it would solve everything, save him from decision, save him from signing the letter . . . he would not be President of Taggart Transcontinental any longer, but neither would anyone else . . . neither would anyone else. . . .  He sat, looking down at his desk, keeping his eyes and his mind out of focus. It was as if he were immersed in a pool of fog, struggling not to let it reach the finality of any form. That which exists possesses identity; he could keep it out of existence by refusing to identify it.  He did not examine the events in Colorado, he did not attempt to grasp their cause, he did not consider their consequences. He did not think. The clogged ball of emotion was like a physical weight in his chest, filling his consciousness, releasing him from the responsibility of thought. The ball was hatred-hatred as his only answer, hatred as the sole reality, hatred without object, cause, beginning or end, hatred as his claim against the universe, as a justification, as a right, as an absolute.  The screaming of the telephones went on through the silence. He knew that those pleas for help were not addressed to him, but to an entity whose shape he had stolen. It was this shape that the screams were now tearing away from him; he felt as if the ringing ceased to be sounds and became a succession of slashes hitting his skull. The object of the hatred began to take form, as if summoned by the bells. The solid ball exploded within him and flung him blindly into action.  Rushing out of the room, in defiance of all the faces around him, he went running down the halls to the Operating Department and into the anteroom of the Operating Vice-President's office.  The door to the office was open: he saw the sky in the great windows beyond an empty desk. Then he saw the staff in the anteroom around him, and the blond head of Eddie Willers in the glass cubbyhole. He walked purposefully straight toward Eddie Willers, he flung the glass door open and, from the threshold, in the sight and hearing of the room, he screamed: "Where is she?"  Eddie Willers rose slowly to his feet and stood looking at Taggart with an odd kind of dutiful curiosity, as if this were one more phenomenon to observe among all the unprecedented things he had observed. He did not answer.  "Where is she?"  "I cannot tell you."  "Listen, you stubborn little punk, this is no time for ceremony! If you're trying to make me believe that you don't know where she is, I don't believe you! You know it and you're going to tell me, or I'll report you to the Unification Board! I'll swear to them that you know it-then try and prove that you don't!"  There was a faint tone of astonishment in Eddie's voice as he answered, "I've never attempted to imply that I don't know where she is, Jim, I know it. But I won't tell you."  Taggart's scream rose to the shrill, impotent sound that confesses a miscalculation: "Do you realize what you're saying?"  "Why, yes, of course."  "Will you repeat it"-he waved at the room-"for these witnesses?"  Eddie raised his voice a little, more in precision and clarity than in volume: "I know where she is. But I will not tell you."  "You're confessing that you're an accomplice who's aiding and abetting a deserter?"  "If that's what you wish to call it."  "But it's a crime! It's a crime against the nation. Don't you know that?"  "No."  "It's against the law!"  "Yes."  "This is a national emergency! You have no right to any private secrets! You're withholding vital information! I'm the President of this railroad! I'm ordering you to tell me! You can't refuse to obey an order! It's a penitentiary offense! Do you understand?"  "Yes."  "Do you refuse?"  "I do."  Years of training had made Taggart able to watch any audience around him, without appearing to do so. He saw the tight, closed faces of the staff, faces that were not his allies. All had a look of despair, except the face of Eddie Willers. The "feudal serf" of Taggart Transcontinental was the only one who seemed untouched by the disaster. He looked at Taggart with the lifelessly conscientious glance of a scholar confronted by a field of knowledge he had never wanted to study.  "Do you realize that you're a traitor?" yelled Taggart.  Eddie asked quietly, 'To whom?"  "To the people! It's treason to shield a deserter! It's economic treason! Your duty to feed the people comes first, above anything else whatever! Every public authority has said so! Don't you know it? Don't you know what they'll do to you?"  "Don't you see that I don't give a damn about that?"  "Oh, you don't? I'll quote that to the Unification Board! I have all these witnesses to prove that you said-"  "Don't bother about witnesses, Jim. Don't put them on the spot. I'll write down everything I said, I'll sign it, and you can take it to the Board."  The sudden explosion of Taggart's voice sounded as if he had been slapped: "Who are you to stand against the government? Who are you, you miserable little office rat, to judge national policies and hold opinions of your own? Do you think the country has time to bother about your opinions, your wishes or your precious little conscience? You're going to learn a lesson-all of you!-all of you spoiled, self-indulgent, undisciplined little two-bit clerks, who strut as if that crap about your rights was serious! You're going to learn that these are not the days of Nat Taggart!"  Eddie said nothing. For an instant, they stood looking at each other across the desk. Taggart's face was distorted by terror, Eddie's remained sternly serene. James Taggart believed the existence of an Eddie Willers too well; Eddie Willers could not believe the existence of a James Taggart.  "Do you think the nation will bother about your wishes or hers?" screamed Taggart. "It's her duty to come back! It's her duty to work! What do we care whether she wants to work or not? We need her!"  "Do you, Jim?"  An impulse pertaining to self-preservation made Taggart back a step away from the sound of that particular tone, a very quiet tone, in the voice of Eddie Willers. But Eddie made no move to follow. He remained standing behind his desk, in a manner suggesting the civilized tradition of a business office.  "You won't find her," he said, "She won't be back. I'm glad she won't. You can starve, you can close the railroad, you can throw me in jail, you can have me shot-what does it matter? I won't tell you where she is. If I see the whole country crashing, I won't tell you. You won't find her. You-"  They whirled at the sound of the entrance door flung open. They saw Dagny standing on the threshold. She wore a wrinkled cotton dress, and her hair was disheveled by hours of driving. She stopped for the duration of a glance around her, as if to recapture the place, but there was no recognition of persons in her eyes, the glance merely swept through the room, as if making a swift inventory of physical objects. Her face was not the face they remembered; it had aged, not by means of lines, but by means of a still, naked look stripped of any quality save ruthlessness.  Yet their first response, ahead of shock or wonder, was a single emotion that went through the room like a gasp of relief. It was in all their faces but one: Eddie Willers, who alone had been calm a moment ago, collapsed with his face down on his desk; he made no sound, but the movements of his shoulders were sobs.  Her face gave no sign of acknowledgment to anyone, no greeting, as if her presence here were inevitable and no words were necessary. She went straight to the door of her office; passing the desk of her secretary, she said, her voice like the sound of a business machine, neither rude nor gentle, "Ask Eddie to come in."  James Taggart was the first one to move, as if dreading to let her out of his sight. He rushed in after her, he cried, "I couldn't help it!" and then, life returning to him, his own, his normal kind of life, he screamed, "It was your fault! You did it! You're to blame for it! Because you left!"  He wondered whether his scream had been an illusion inside his own ears. Her face remained blank; yet she had turned to him; she looked as if sounds had reached her, but not words, not the communication of a mind. What he felt for a moment was his closest approach to a sense of his own non-existence.  Then he saw the faintest change in her face, merely the indication of perceiving a human presence, but she was looking past him and he turned and saw that Eddie Willers had entered the office. There were traces of tears in Eddie's eyes, but he made no attempt to hide them, he stood straight, as if the tears or any embarrassment or any apology for them were as irrelevant to him as to her.  She said, "Get Ryan on the telephone, tell him I'm here, then let me speak to him." Ryan had been the general manager of the railroad's Central Region.  Eddie gave her a warning by not answering at once, then said, his voice as even as hers, "Ryan's gone, Dagny. He quit last week."  They did not notice Taggart, as they did not notice the furniture around them. She had not granted him even the recognition of ordering him out of her office. Like a paralytic, uncertain of his muscles’ obedience, he gathered his strength and slipped out. But he was certain of the first thing he had to do: he hurried to his office to destroy his letter of resignation.  She did not notice his exit; she was looking at Eddie. "Is Knowland here?" she asked.  "No. He's gone."  "Andrews?"  "Gone."  "McGuire?"  "Gone."  He went on quietly to recite the list of those he knew she would ask for, those most needed in this hour, who had resigned and vanished within the past month. She listened without astonishment or emotion, as one listens to the casualty list of a battle where all are doomed and it makes no difference whose names fall first.  When he finished, she made no comment, but asked, "What has been done since this morning?"  "Nothing."  "Nothing?"  "Dagny, any office boy could have issued orders here since this morning and everybody would have obeyed him, But even the office boys know that whoever makes the first move today will be held responsible for the future, the present and the past-when the buck passing begins. He would not save the system, he would merely lose his job by the time he saved one division. Nothing has been done. It's stopped still. Whatever is moving, is moving on anyone's blind guess-out on the line where they don't know whether they're to move or to stop. Some trains are held at stations, others are going on, waiting to be stopped before they reach Colorado. It's whatever the local dispatchers decide. The Terminal manager downstairs has cancelled all transcontinental traffic for today, including tonight's Comet. I don't know what the manager in San Francisco is doing. Only the wrecking crews are working. At the tunnel. They haven't come anywhere near the wreck as yet. I don't think they will."  "Phone the Terminal manager downstairs and tell him to put all transcontinental trains back on the schedule at once, including tonight's Comet. Then come back here."  When he came back, she was bending over the maps she had spread on a table, and she spoke while he made rapid notes: "Route all westbound trains south from Kirby, Nebraska, down the spur track to Hastings, down the track of the Kansas Western to Laurel, Kansas, then to the track of the Atlantic Southern at Jasper, Oklahoma. West on the Atlantic Southern to Flagstaff, Arizona, north on the track of the Flagstaff-Homedale to Elgin, Utah, north to Midland, northwest on the track of the Wasatch Railway to Salt Lake City. The Wasatch Railway is an abandoned narrow-gauge. Buy it. Have the gauge spread to standard. If the owners are afraid, since sales are illegal, pay them twice the money and proceed with the work. There is no rail between Laurel, Kansas, and Jasper, Oklahoma-three miles, no rail between Elgin and Midland, Utah-five and a half miles. Have the rail laid.  Have construction crews start at once-recruit every local man available, pay twice the legal wages, three times, anything they ask-put three shifts on-and have the job done overnight. For rail, tear up the sidings at Winston, Colorado, at Silver Springs, Colorado, at Leeds, Utah, at Benson, Nevada. If any local stooges of the Unification Board come to stop the work-give authority to our local men, the ones you trust, to bribe them. Don't put that through the Accounting Department, charge it to me, I'll pay it. If they find some case where it doesn't work, have them tell the stooge that Directive 10-289 does not provide for local injunctions, that an injunction has to be brought against our headquarters and that they have to sue me, if they wish to stop us."  "Is that true?"  "How do I know? How can anybody know? But by the time they untangle it and decide whatever it is they please to decide-our track will be built."  "I see."  "I'll go over the lists and give you the names of our local men to put in charge-if they're still there. By the time tonight's Comet reaches Kirby, Nebraska, the track will be ready. It will add about thirty-six hours to the transcontinental schedule-but there will be a transcontinental schedule. Then have them get for me out of the files the old maps of our road as it was before Nat Taggart's grandson built the tunnel."  "The . . . what?" He did not raise his voice, but the catch of his breath was the break of emotion he had wanted to avoid.  Her face did not change, but a fault note in her voice acknowledged him, a note of gentleness, not reproof: "The old maps of the days before the tunnel. We're going back, Eddie. Let's hope we can. No, we won't rebuild the tunnel. There's no way to do it now. But the old grade that crossed the Rockies is still there. It can be reclaimed. Only it will be hard to get the rail for it and the men to do it. Particularly the men."  He knew, as he had known from the first, that she had seen his tears and that she had not walked past in indifference, even though her clear, toneless voice and unmoving face gave him no sign of feeling. There was some quality in her manner, which he sensed but could not translate. Yet the feeling it gave him, translated, was as if she were saying to him: I know, I understand, I would feel compassion and gratitude, if we were alive and free to feel, but we're not, are we, Eddie?-we're on a dead planet, like the moon, where we must move, but dare not stop for a breath of feeling or we'll discover that there is no air to breathe.  "We have today and tomorrow to get things started," she said. "I'll leave for Colorado tomorrow night."  "If you want to fly, I'll have to rent a plane for you somewhere. Yours is still in the shops, they can't get the parts for it."  "No, I'll go by rail. I have to see the line. I'll take tomorrow's Comet."  It was two hours later, in a brief pause between long-distance phone calls, that she asked him suddenly the first question which did not pertain to the railroad: "What have they done to Hank Rearden?"  Eddie caught himself in the small evasion of looking away, forced his glance back to meet hers, and answered, "He gave in. He signed their Gift Certificate, at the last moment."  "Oh." The sound conveyed no shock or censure, it was merely a vocal punctuation mark, denoting the acceptance of a fact. "Have you heard from Quentin Daniels?"  "No."  "He sent no letter or message for me?"  "No."  He guessed the thing she feared and it reminded him of a matter he had not reported. "Dagny, there's another problem that's been growing all over the system since you left. Since May first. It's the frozen trains."  "The what?"  "We've had trains abandoned on the line, on some passing track, in the middle of nowhere, usually at night-with the entire crew gone. They just leave the train and vanish. There's never any warning given or any special reason, it's more like an epidemic, it hits the men suddenly and they go. It's been happening on other railroads, too. Nobody can explain it. But I think that everybody understands. It's the directive that's doing it. It's our men's form of protest. They try to go on and then they suddenly reach a moment when they can't take it any longer. What can we do about it?" He shrugged. "Oh well, who is John Galt?"  She nodded thoughtfully; she did not look astonished.  The telephone rang and the voice of her secretary said, "Mr. Wesley Mouch calling from Washington, Miss Taggart."  Her lips stiffened a little, as at the unexpected touch of an insect. "It must be for my brother," she said.  "No, Miss Taggart. For you."  "All right. Put him on."  "Miss Taggart," said the voice of Wesley Mouch in the tone of a cocktail-party host, "I was so glad to hear you've regained your health that I wanted to welcome you back in person. I know that your health required a long rest and I appreciate the patriotism that made you cut your leave of absence short in this terrible emergency. I wanted to assure you that you can count on our co-operation in any step you now find it necessary to take. Our fullest co-operation, assistance and support. If there are any . . . special exceptions you might require, please feel certain that they can be granted."  She let him speak, even though he had made several small pauses inviting an answer. When his pause became long enough, she said, "I would be much obliged if you would let me speak to Mr. Weatherby."  "Why, of course, Miss Taggart, any time you wish . . . why . . .that is . . . do you mean, now?"  "Yes. Right now."  He understood. But he said, "Yes, Miss Taggart."  When Mr. Weatherby's voice came on the wire, it sounded cautious: "Yes, Miss Taggart? Of what service can I be to you?"  "You can tell your boss that if he doesn't want me to quit again, as he knows I did, he is never to call me or speak to me. Anything your gang has to tell me, let them send you to tell it. I'll speak to you, but not to him. You may tell him that my reason is what he did to Hank Rearden when he was on Rearden's payroll. If everybody else has forgotten it, I haven't."  "It is my duty to assist the nation's railroads at any time, Miss Taggart." Mr. Weatherby sounded as if he were trying to avoid the commitment of having heard what he had heard; but a sudden note of interest crept into his voice as he asked slowly, thoughtfully, with guarded shrewdness, "Am I to understand, Miss Taggart, that it is your wish to deal exclusively with me in all official matters? May I take this as your policy?"  She gave a brief, harsh chuckle. "Go ahead," she said. "You may list me as your exclusive property, use me as a special item of pull, and trade me all over Washington. But I don't know what good that will do you, because I'm not going to play the game, I'm not going to trade favors, I'm simply going to start breaking your laws right now-and you can arrest me when you feel that you can afford to."  "I believe that you have an old-fashioned idea about law, Miss Taggart. Why speak of rigid, unbreakable laws? Our modern laws are elastic and open to interpretation according to . . . circumstances."  "Then start being elastic right now, because I'm not and neither are railroad catastrophes."  She hung up, and said to Eddie, in the tone of an estimate passed on physical objects, "They'll leave us alone for a while."  She did not seem to notice the changes in her office: the absence of Nat Taggart's portrait, the new glass coffee table where Mr. Locey had spread, for the benefit of visitors, a display of the loudest humanitarian magazines with titles of articles headlined on their covers. She heard-with the attentive look of a machine equipped to record, not to react-Eddie's account of what one month had done to the railroad. She heard his report on what he guessed about the causes of the catastrophe. She faced, with the same look of detachment, a succession of men who went in and out of her office with over hurried steps and hands fumbling in superfluous gestures. He thought that she had become impervious to anything. But suddenly-while pacing the office, dictating to him a list of track-laying materials and where to obtain them illegally-she stopped and looked down at the magazines on the coffee table. Their headlines said: "The New Social Conscience," "Our Duty to the Underprivileged," "Need versus Greed." With a single movement of her arm, the abrupt, explosive movement of sheer physical brutality, such as he had never seen from her before, she swept the magazines off the table and went on,  her voice reciting a list of figures without a break, as if there were no connection between her mind and the violence of her body.  Late in the afternoon, finding a moment alone in her office, she telephoned Hank Rearden.  She gave her name to his secretary-and she heard, in the way he said it, the haste with which he had seized the receiver: "Dagny?"  "Hello, Hank. I'm back."  "Where?"  "In my office."  She heard the things he did not say, in the moment's silence on the wire, then he said, "1 suppose I'd better start bribing people at once to get the ore to start pouring rail for you."  "Yes. As much of it as you can. It doesn't have to be Rearden Metal. It can be-" The break in her voice was almost too brief to notice, but what it held was the thought: Rearden Metal rail for going back to the time before heavy steel?-perhaps back to the time of wooden rails with strips of iron? "It can be steel, any weight, anything you can give me."  "All right. Dagny, do you know that I've surrendered Rearden Metal to them? I've signed the Gift Certificate."  "Yes, I know."  "I've given in."  "Who am I to blame you? Haven't I?" He did not answer, and she said, "Hank, I don't think they care whether there's a train or a blast furnace left on earth. We do. They're holding us by our love of it, and we'll go on paying so long as there's still one chance left to keep one single wheel alive and moving in token of human intelligence. We'll go on holding it afloat, like our drowning child, and when the flood swallows it, we'll go down with the last wheel and the last syllogism. I know what we're paying, but-price is no object any longer."  "I know."  "Don't be afraid for me, Hank, I'll be all right by tomorrow morning."  "I'll never be afraid for you, darling. I'll see you tonight."