CHAPTER II THE UTOPIA OF GREED

"Good morning."  She looked at him across the living room from the threshold of her door. In the windows behind him, the mountains had that tinge of silver-pink which seems brighter than daylight, with the promise of a light to come. The sun. had risen somewhere over the earth, but it had not reached the top of the barrier, and the sky was glowing in its stead, announcing its motion. She had heard the joyous greeting to the sunrise, which was not the song of birds, but the ringing of the telephone a moment ago; she saw the start of day, not in the shining green of the branches outside, but in the glitter of chromium on the stove, the sparkle of a glass ashtray on a table, and the crisp whiteness of his shirt sleeves. Irresistibly, she heard the sound of a smile in her own voice, matching his, as she answered: "Good morning."  He was gathering notes of penciled calculations from his desk and stuffing them into his pocket. "I have to go down to the powerhouse," he said. "They've just phoned me that they're having trouble with the ray screen. Your plane seems to have knocked it off key. I'll be back in half an hour and then I'll cook our breakfast."  It was the casual simplicity of his voice, the manner of taking her presence and their domestic routine for granted, as if it were of no significance to them, that gave her the sense of an underscored significance and the feeling that he knew it.  She answered as casually, "If you'll bring me the cane I left in the car, I'll have breakfast ready for you by the time you come back."  He glanced at her with a slight astonishment; his eyes moved from her bandaged ankle to the short sleeves of the blouse that left her arms bare to display the heavy bandage on her elbow. But the transparent blouse, the open collar, the hair falling down to the shoulders that seemed innocently naked under a thin film of cloth, made her look like a schoolgirl, not an invalid, and her posture made the bandages look irrelevant.  He smiled, not quite at her, but as if in amusement at some sudden memory of his own. "If you wish," he said.  It was strange to be left alone in his house. Part of it was an emotion she had never experienced before: an awed respect that made her hesitantly conscious of her hands, as if to touch any object around her would be too great an intimacy. The other part was a reckless sense of ease, a sense of being at home in this place, as if she owned its owner.  It was strange to feel so pure a joy in the simple task of preparing a breakfast. The work seemed an end in itself, as if the motions of filling a coffee pot, squeezing oranges, slicing bread were performed for their own sake, for the sort of pleasure one expects, but seldom finds, in the motions of dancing. It startled her to realize that she had not experienced this kind of pleasure in her work since her days at the operator's desk in Rockdale Station.  She was setting the table, when she saw the figure of a man hurrying up the path to the house, a swift, agile figure that leaped over boulders with the casual ease of a flight. He threw the door open, calling, "Hey, John!"-and stopped short as he saw her. He wore a dark blue sweater and slacks, he had gold hair and a face of such shocking perfection of beauty that she stood still, staring at him, not in admiration, at first, but in simple disbelief.  He looked at her as if he had not expected to find a woman in this house. Then she saw a look of recognition melting into a different kind of astonishment, part amusement, part triumph melting into a chuckle.  "Oh, have you joined us?" he asked.  "No," she answered dryly, "I haven't. I'm a scab."  He laughed, like an adult at a child who uses technological words beyond its understanding. "If you know what you're saying, you know that it's not possible," he said. "Not here."  "I crashed the gate. Literally."  He looked at her bandages, weighing the question, his glance almost insolent in its open curiosity. "When?"  "Yesterday."  "How?"  "In a plane."  "What were you doing in a plane in this part of the country?"  He had the direct, imperious manner of an aristocrat or a roughneck; he looked like one and was dressed like the other. She considered him for a moment, deliberately letting him wait. "I was trying to land on a prehistorical mirage," she answered. "And I have."  "You are a scab," he said, and chuckled, as if grasping all the implications of the problem. "Where's John?"  "Mr. Galt is at the powerhouse. He should be back any moment."  He sat down in an armchair, asking no permission, as if he were at home. She turned silently to her work. He sat watching her movements with an open grin, as if the sight of her laying out cutlery on a kitchen table were the spectacle of some special paradox.  "What did Francisco say when he saw you here?" he asked.  She turned to him with a slight jolt, but answered evenly, "He is not here yet."  "Not yet?" He seemed startled. "Are you sure?"  "So I was told."  He lighted a cigarette. She wondered, watching him, what profession he had chosen, loved and abandoned in order to join this valley. She could make no guess; none seemed to fit; she caught herself in the preposterous feeling of wishing that he had no profession at all, because any work seemed too dangerous for his incredible kind of beauty. It was an impersonal feeling, she did not look at him as at a man, but as at an animated work of art-and it seemed to be a stressed indignity of the outer world that a perfection such as his should be subjected to the shocks, the strains, the scars reserved for any man who loved his work.  But the feeling seemed the more preposterous, because the lines of his face had the sort of hardness for which no danger on earth was a match, "No, Miss Taggart," he said suddenly, catching her glance, "you've never seen me before."  She was shocked to realize that she had been studying him openly.  "How do you happen to know who I am?" she asked.  "First, I've seen your pictures in the papers many times. Second, you're the only woman left in the outer world, to the best of our knowledge, who'd be allowed to enter Galt's Gulch, Third, you're the only woman who'd have the courage-and prodigality-still to remain a scab."  "What made you certain that I was a scab?"  "If you weren't, you'd know that it's not this valley, but the view of life held by men in the outer world that is a prehistorical mirage."  They heard the sound of the motor and saw the car stopping below, in front of the house. She noticed the swiftness with which he rose to his feet at the sight of Galt in the car; if it were not for the obvious personal eagerness, it would have looked like an instinctive gesture of military respect.  She noticed the way Galt stopped, when he entered and saw his visitor. She noticed that Galt smiled, but that his voice was oddly low, almost solemn, as if weighted with unconfessed relief, when he said very quietly, "Hello."  "Hi, John," said the visitor gaily.  She noticed that their handshake came an instant too late and lasted an instant too long, like the handshake of men who had not been certain that their previous meeting would not be their last.  Galt turned to her. "Have you met?" he asked, addressing them both.  "Not exactly," said the visitor.  "Miss Taggart, may I present Ragnar Danneskjold?"  She knew what her face had looked like, when she heard Danneskjold's voice as from a great distance: "You don't have to be frightened, Miss Taggart .I'm not dangerous to anyone in Galt's Gulch."  She could only shake her head, before she recaptured her voice to say, "It's not what you're doing to anyone . . . it's what they're doing to you. . . . "  His laughter swept her out of her moment's stupor, "Be careful, Miss Taggart. If that's how you're beginning to feel, you won't remain a scab for long." He added, "But you ought to start by adopting the right things from the people in Galt's Gulch, not their mistakes: they've spent twelve years worrying about me-needlessly." He glanced at Galt.  "When did you get in?" asked Galt.  "Late last night."  "Sit down. You're going to have breakfast with us."  "But where's Francisco? Why isn't he here yet?"  "I don't know," said Galt, frowning slightly. "I asked at the airport, just now. Nobody's heard from him."  As she turned to the kitchen, Galt moved to follow. "No," she said, "it's my job today."  "Let me help you."  "This is the place where one doesn't ask for help, isn't it?"  He smiled. "That's right."  She had never experienced the pleasure of motion, of walking as if her feet had no weight to carry, as if the support of the cane in her hand were merely a superfluous touch of elegance, the pleasure of feeling her steps trace swift, straight lines, of sensing the faultless, spontaneous precision of her gestures-as she experienced it while placing their food on the table in front of the two men. Her bearing told them that she knew they were watching her-she held her head like an actress on a stage, like a woman in a ballroom, like the winner of a silent contest.  "Francisco will be glad to know that it's you who were his stand-in today," said Danneskjold, when she joined them at the table.  "His what?"  "You see, today is June first, and the three of us-John, Francisco and I-have had breakfast together on every June first for twelve years."  "Here?"  "Not when we started. But here, ever since this house was built eight years ago." He shrugged, smiling. "For a man who has more centuries of tradition behind him than I have, it's odd that Francisco should be the first to break our own tradition."  "And Mr. Galt?" she asked. "How many centuries does he have behind him?"  "John? None at all. None behind him-but all of those ahead."  "Never mind the centuries," said Galt. "Tell me what sort of year you've had behind you. Lost any men?"  "No."  "Lost any of your time?"  "You mean, was I wounded? No. I haven't had a scratch since that one time, ten years ago, when I was still an amateur, which you ought to forget by now. I wasn't in any danger whatever, this year-in fact, I was much more safe than if I were running a small-town drugstore under Directive 10-289."  "Lost any battles?"  "No. The losses were all on the other side, this year. The looters lost most of their ships to me-and most of their men to you. You've had a good year, too, haven't you? I know, I've kept track of it. Since our last breakfast together, you got everyone you wanted from the state of Colorado, and a few others besides, such as Ken Danagger, who was a great prize to get. But let me tell you about a still greater one, who is almost yours. You're going to get him soon, because he's hanging by a thin thread and is just about ready to fall at your feet. He's a man who saved my life-so you can see how far he's gone."  Galt leaned back, his eyes narrowing. "So you weren't in any danger whatever, were you?"  Danneskjold laughed. "Oh, I took a slight risk. It was worth it. It was the most enjoyable encounter I've ever had. I've been waiting to tell you about it in person. It's a story you'll want to hear. Do you know who the man was? Hank Rearden. I-"  "No!"  It was Galt's voice; it was a command; the brief snap of sound had a tinge of violence neither of them had ever heard from him before.  "What?" asked Danneskjold softly, incredulously.  "Don't tell me about it now."  "But you've always said that Hank Rearden was the one man you wanted to see here most."  "I still do. But you'll tell me later."  She studied Galt's face intently, but she could find no clue, only a closed, impersonal look, either of determination or of control, that tightened the skin of his cheekbones and the line of his mouth. No matter what he knew about her, she thought, the only knowledge that could explain this, was a knowledge he had had no way of acquiring.  "You've met Hank Rearden?" she asked, turning to Danneskjold.  "And he saved your life?"  "Yes."  "I want to hear about it."  "I don't," said Galt.  "Why not?"  "You're not one of us, Miss Taggart."  "I see." She smiled, with a faint touch of defiance. "Were you thinking that I might prevent you from getting Hank Rearden?"  "No, that was not what I was thinking,"  She noticed that Danneskjold was studying Galt's face, as if he, too, found the incident inexplicable. Galt held his glance, deliberately and openly, as if challenging him to find the explanation and promising that he would fail. She knew that Danneskjold had failed, when she saw a faint crease of humor softening Galt's eyelids.  "What else," asked Galt, "have you accomplished this year?"  "I've defied the law of gravitation."  "You've always done that. In what particular form now?"  "In the form of a flight from mid-Atlantic to Colorado in a plane loaded with gold beyond the safety point of its capacity. Wait till Midas sees the amount I have to deposit. My customers, this year, will become richer by- Say, have you told Miss Taggart that she's one of my customers?"  "No, not yet You may tell her, if you wish."  "I'm-What did you say I am?" she asked.  "Don't be shocked, Miss Taggart," said Danneskjold. "And don't object. I'm used to objections. I'm a sort of freak here, anyway. None of them approve of my particular method of fighting our battle. John doesn't, Dr. Akston doesn't. They think that my life is too valuable for it. But, you see, my father was a bishop-and of all his teachings there was only one sentence that I accepted: 'All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.' "  "What do you mean?"  "That violence is not practical. If my fellow men believe that the force of the combined tonnage of their muscles is a practical means to rule me-let them learn the outcome of a contest in which there's nothing but brute force on one side, and force ruled by a mind, on the other. Even John grants me that in our age I had the moral right to choose the course I've chosen. I am doing just what he is doing-only in my own way. He is withdrawing man's spirit from the looters, I'm withdrawing the products of man's spirit. He is depriving them of reason, I'm depriving them of wealth. He is draining the soul of the world, I'm draining its body. His is the lesson they have to learn, only I'm impatient and I'm hastening their scholastic progress. But, like John, I'm simply complying with their moral code and refusing to grant them a double standard at my expense. Or at Rearden's expense. Or at yours."  "What are you talking about?"  "About a method of taxing the income taxers. All methods of taxation are complex, but this one is very simple, because it's the naked essence of all the others. Let me explain it to you."  She listened. She heard a sparkling voice reciting, in the tone of a dryly meticulous bookkeeper, a report about financial transfers, bank accounts, income-tax returns, as if he were reading the dusty pages of a ledger-a ledger where every entry was made by means of offering his own blood as the collateral to be drained at any moment, at any slip of his bookkeeping pen. As she listened, she kept seeing the perfection of his face-and she kept thinking that this was the head on which the world had placed a price of millions for the purpose of delivering it to the rot of death. . . . The face she had thought too beautiful for the scars of a productive career-she kept thinking numbly, missing half his words-the face too beautiful to risk. . . . Then it struck her that his physical perfection was only a simple illustration, a childish lesson given to her in crudely obvious terms on the nature of the outer world and on the fate of any human value in a subhuman age. Whatever the justice or the evil of his course, she thought, how could they . . . no! she thought, his course was just, and this was the horror of it, that there was no other course for justice to select, that she could not condemn him, that she could neither approve nor utter a word of reproach.  ". . . and the names of my customers, Miss Taggart, were chosen slowly, one by one. I had to be certain of the nature of their character and career. On my list of restitution, your name was one of the first."  She forced herself to keep her face expressionlessly tight, and she answered only, "I see."  "Your account is one of the last left unpaid. It is here, at the Mulligan Bank, to be claimed by you on the day when you join us."  "I see."  "Your account, however, is not as large as some of the others, even though huge sums were extorted from you by force in the past twelve years. You will find-as it is marked on the copies o￡ your income-tax returns which Mulligan will hand over to you-that I have refunded only those taxes which you paid on the salary you earned as Operating Vice-President, but not the taxes you paid on your income from your Taggart Transcontinental stock. You deserved every penny of that stock, and in the days of your father I would have refunded every penny of your profit-but under your brother's management, Taggart Transcontinental has taken its share of the looting, it has made profits by force, by means of government favors, subsidies, moratoriums, directives. You were not responsible for it, you were, in fact, the greatest victim of that policy-but I refund only the money which was made by pure productive ability, not the money any part of which was loot taken by force."  "I see."  They had finished their breakfast. Danneskjold lighted a cigarette and watched her for an instant through the first jet of smoke, as if he knew the violence of the conflict in her mind-then he grinned at Galt and rose to his feet.  "I'll run along," he said. "My wife is waiting for me."  "What?" she gasped.  "My wife," he repeated gaily, as if he had not understood the reason of her shock.  "Who is your wife?"  "Kay Ludlow."  The implications that struck her were more than she could bear to consider. "When . . . when were you married?"  "Four years ago."  "How could you show yourself anywhere long enough to go through a wedding ceremony?"  "We were married here, by Judge Narragansett."  "How can"-she tried to stop, but the words burst involuntarily, in helplessly indignant protest, whether against him, fate or the outer world, she could not tell-"how can she live through eleven months of thinking that you, at any moment, might be . . . ?" She did not finish.  He was smiling, but she saw the enormous solemnity of that which he and his wife had needed to earn their right to this kind of smile. "She can live through it, Miss Taggart, because we do not hold the belief that this earth is a realm of misery where man is doomed to destruction. We do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and we do not live in chronic dread of disaster. We do not expect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it-and when we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not happiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life."  Galt accompanied him to the door, then came back, sat down at the table and in a leisurely manner reached for another cup of coffee.  She shot to her feet, as if flung by a jet of pressure breaking a safety valve. "Do you think that I'll ever accept his money?"  He waited until the curving streak of coffee had filled his cup, then glanced up at her and answered, "Yes, I think so."  "Well, I won't! I won't let him risk his life for it!"  "You have no choice about that."  "I have the choice never to claim it!"  "Yes, you have."  "Then it will lie in that bank till doomsday!"  "No, it won't. If you don't claim it, some part of it-a very small part-will be turned over to me in your name."  "In my name? Why?"  "To pay for your room and board."  She stared at him, her look of anger switching to bewilderment, then dropped slowly back on her chair.  He smiled. "How long did you think you were going to stay here, Miss Taggart?" He saw her startled look of helplessness. "You haven't thought of it? I have. You're going to stay here for a month. For the one month of our vacation, like the rest of us. I am not asking for your consent-you did not ask for ours when you came here. You broke our rules, so you'll have to take the consequences. Nobody leaves the valley during this month. I could let you go, of course, but I won't. There's no rule demanding that I hold you, but by forcing your way here, you've given me the right to any choice I make-and I'm going to hold you simply because I want you here. If, at the end of a month, you decide that you wish to go back, you will be free to do so. Not until then."  She sat straight, the planes of her face relaxed, the shape of her mouth softened by the faint, purposeful suggestion of a smile; it was the dangerous smile of an adversary, but her eyes were coldly brilliant and veiled at once, like the eyes of an adversary who fully intends to fight, but hopes to lose.  "Very well," she said.  "I shall charge you for your room and board-it is against our rules to provide the unearned sustenance of another human being. Some of us have wives and children, but there is a mutual trade involved in that, and a mutual payment"-he glanced at her-"of a kind I am not entitled to collect. So I shall charge you fifty cents a day and you will pay me when you accept the account that lies in your name at the Mulligan Bank. If you don't accept the account, Mulligan will charge your debt against it and he will give me the money when I ask for it."  "I shall comply with your terms," she answered; her voice had the shrewd, confident, deliberating slowness of a trader. "But I shall not permit the use of that money for my debts."  "How else do you propose to comply?"  "I propose to earn my room and board."  "By what means?"  "By working."  "In what capacity?"  "In the capacity of your cook and housemaid."  For the first time, she saw him take the shock of the unexpected, in a manner and with a violence she had not foreseen. It was only an explosion of laughter on his part-but he laughed as if he were hit beyond his defenses, much beyond the immediate meaning of her words; she felt that she had struck his past, tearing loose some memory and meaning of his own which she could not know. He laughed as if he were seeing some distant image, as if he were laughing in its face, as if this were his victory-and hers.  "If you will hire me," she said, her face severely polite, her tone harshly clear, impersonal and businesslike, "I shall cook your meals, clean your house, do your laundry and perform such other duties as are required of a servant-in exchange for my room, board and such money as I will need for some items of clothing. I may be slightly handicapped by my injuries for the next few days, but that will not last and I will be able to do the job fully."  "Is that what you want to do?" he asked.  "That is what I want to do-" she answered, and stopped before she uttered the rest of the answer in her mind: more than anything else in the world.  He was still smiling, it was a smile of amusement, but it was as if amusement could be transmuted into some shining glory. "All right, Miss Taggart," he said, "I'll hire you."  She inclined her head in a dryly formal acknowledgment. "Thank you,"  "I will pay you ten dollars a month, in addition to your room and board."  "Very well."  "I shall be the first man in this valley to hire a servant." He got up, reached into his pocket and threw a five-dollar gold piece down on the table. "As advance on your wages," he said.  She was startled to discover, as her hand reached for the gold piece, that she felt the eager, desperate, tremulous hope of a young girl on her first job: the hope that she would be able to deserve it.  "Yes, sir," she said, her eyes lowered.  Owen Kellogg arrived on the afternoon of her third day in the valley.  She did not know which shocked him most: the sight of her standing on the edge of the airfield as he descended from the plane-the sight of her clothes: her delicate, transparent blouse, tailored by the most expensive shop in New York, and the wide, cotton-print skirt she had bought in the valley for sixty cents-her cane, her bandages or the basket of groceries on her arm.  He descended among a group of men, he saw her, he stopped, then ran to her as if flung forward by some emotion so strong that, whatever its nature, it looked like terror.  "Miss Taggart . . ." he whispered-and said nothing else, while she laughed, trying to explain how she had come to beat him to his destination.  He listened, as if it were irrelevant, and then he uttered the thing from which he had to recover, "But we thought you were dead."  "Who thought it?"  "All of us . . . I mean, everybody in the outside world."  Then she suddenly stopped smiling, while his voice began to recapture his story and his first sound of joy. "Miss Taggart, don't you remember? You told me to phone Winston, Colorado, and to tell them that you'd be there by noon of the next day. That was to be the day before yesterday, May thirty-first. But you did not reach Winston-and by late afternoon, the news was on all the radios that you were lost in a plane crash somewhere in the Rocky Mountains."  She nodded slowly, grasping the events she had not thought of considering.  "I heard it aboard the Comet," he said. "At a small station in the middle of New Mexico, The conductor held us there for an hour, while I helped him to check the story on long-distance phones. He was hit by the news just as I was. They all were-the train crew, the station agent, the switchmen. They huddled around me while I called the city rooms of newspapers in Denver and New York. We didn't learn much.  Only that you had left the Afton airfield just before dawn on May thirty-first, that you seemed to be following some stranger's plane, that the attendant had seen you go off southeast-and that nobody had seen you since . . . And that searching parties were combing the Rockies for the wreckage of your plane."  She asked involuntarily, "Did the Comet reach San Francisco?"  "I don't know. She was crawling north through Arizona, when I gave up. There were too many delays, too many things going wrong, and a total confusion of orders. I got off and spent the night hitchhiking my way to Colorado, bumming rides on trucks, on buggies, on horse carts, to get there on time-to get to our meeting place, I mean, where we gather for Midas' ferry plane to pick us up and bring us here."  She started walking slowly up the path toward the car she had left in front of Hammond's Grocery Market. Kellogg followed, and when he spoke again, his voice dropped a little, slowing down with their steps, as if there were something they both wished to delay.  "I got a job for Jeff AlLen," he said; his voice had the peculiarly solemn tone proper for saying: I have carried out your last will. "Your agent at Laurel grabbed him and put him to work the moment we got there. The agent needed every able-bodied-no, able-minded-man he could find."  They had reached the car, but she did not get in.  "Miss Taggart, you weren't hurt badly, were you? Did you say you crashed, but it wasn't serious?"  "No, not serious at all. I'll be able to get along without Mr. Mulligan's car by tomorrow-and in a day or two I won't need this thing, either." She swung her cane and tossed it contemptuously into the car.  They stood in silence; she was waiting.  "The last long-distance call I made from that station in New Mexico," he said slowly, "was to Pennsylvania. I spoke to Hank Rearden. I told him everything I knew. He listened, and then there was a pause, and then he said, 'Thank you for calling me.' " Kellogg's eyes were lowered; he added, "I never want to hear that kind of pause again as long as I live."  He raised his eyes to hers; there was no reproach in his glance, only the knowledge of that which he had not suspected when he heard her request, but had guessed since.  "Thank you," she said, and threw the door of the car open. "Can I give you a lift? I have to get back and get dinner ready before my employer comes home."  It was in the first moment of returning to Galt's house, of standing alone in the silent, sun-filled room, that she faced the full meaning of what she felt. She looked at the window, at the mountains barring the sky in the east. She thought of Hank Rearden as he sat at his desk, now, two thousand miles away, his face tightened into a retaining wall against agony, as it had been tightened under all the blows of all his years-and she felt a desperate wish to fight his battle, to fight for him, for his past, for that tension of his face and the courage that fed it-as she wanted to fight for the Comet that crawled by a last effort across a desert on a crumbling track. She shuddered, closing her eyes, feeling as if she were guilty of double treason, feeling as if she were suspended in space between this valley and the rest of the earth, with no right to either.  The feeling vanished when she sat facing Galt across the dinner table. He was watching her, openly and with an untroubled look, as if her presence were normal-and as if the sight of her were all he wished to allow into his consciousness.  She leaned back a little, as if complying with the meaning of his glance, and said dryly, efficiently, in deliberate denial, "I have checked your shirts and found one with two buttons missing, and another with the left elbow worn through. Do you wish me to mend them?"  "Why, yes-if you can do it."  "I can do it."  It did not seem to alter the nature of his glance; it merely seemed to stress its satisfaction, as if this were what he had wished her to say -except that she was not certain whether satisfaction was the name for the thing she saw in his eyes and fully certain that he had not wished her to say anything.  Beyond the window, at the edge of the table, storm clouds had wiped out the last remnants of light in the eastern sky. She wondered why she felt a sudden reluctance to look out, why she felt as if she wanted to cling to the golden patches of light on the wood of the table, on the buttered crust of the rolls, on the copper coffee pot, on Galt's hair -to cling as to a small island on the edge of a void.  Then she heard her own voice asking suddenly, involuntarily, and she knew that this was the treason she had wanted to escape, "Do you permit any communication with the outside world?"  "No."  "Not any? Not even a note without return address?"  "No."  "Not even a message, if no secret of yours were given away?"  "Not from here. Not during this month. Not to outsiders at any time."  She noticed that she was avoiding his eyes, and she forced herself to lift her head and face him. His glance had changed; it was watchful, unmoving, implacably perceptive. He asked, looking at her as if he knew the reason of her query, "Do you wish to ask for a special exception?"  "No," she answered, holding his glance.  Next morning, after breakfast, when she sat in her room, carefully placing a patch on the sleeve of Galt's shirt, with her door closed, not to let him see her fumbling effort at an unfamiliar task, she heard the sound of a car stopping in front of the house.  She heard Galt's steps hurrying across the living room, she heard him jerk the entrance door open and call out with the joyous anger of relief: "It's about time!"  She rose to her feet, but stopped: she heard his voice, its tone abruptly changed and grave, as if in answer to the shock of some sight confronting him: "What's the matter?"  "Hello, John," said a clear, quiet voice that sounded steady, but weighted with exhaustion.  She sat down on her bed, feeling suddenly drained of strength: the voice was Francisco's.  She heard Galt asking, his tone severe with concern, "What is it?"  "I'll tell you afterwards."  "Why are you so late?"  "I have to leave again in an hour."  "To leave?"  "John, I just came to tell you that I won't be able to stay here this year."  There was a pause, then Galt asked gravely, his voice low, "Is it as bad as that-whatever it is?"  "Yes. I . . . I might be back before the month is over. I don't know." He added, with the sound of a desperate effort, "I don't know whether to hope to be done with it quickly or . . . or not."  "Francisco, could you stand a shock right now?"  "I? Nothing could shock me now."  "There's a person, here, in my guest room, whom you have to see. It will be a shock to you, so I think I'd better warn you in advance that this person is still a scab."  "What? A scab? In your house?"  "Let me tell you how-"  "That's something I want to see for myself!"  She heard Francisco's contemptuous chuckle and the rush of his steps, she saw her door flung open, and she noticed dimly that it was Galt who closed it, leaving them alone.  She did not know how long Francisco stood looking at her, because the first moment that she grasped fully was when she saw him on his knees, holding onto her, his face pressed to her legs, the moment when she felt as if the shudder that ran through his body and left him still, had run into hers and made her able to move.  She saw, in astonishment, that her hand was moving gently over his hair, while she was thinking that she had no right to do it and feeling as if a current of serenity were flowing from her hand, enveloping them both, smoothing the past. He did not move, he made no sound, as if the act of holding her said everything he had to say.  When he raised his head, he looked as she had felt when she had opened her eyes in the valley: he looked as if no pain had ever existed in the world. He was laughing.  "Dagny, Dagny, Dagny"-his voice sounded, not as if a confession resisted for years were breaking out, but as if he were repeating the long since known, laughing at the pretense that it had ever been unsaid -"of course I love you. Were you afraid when he made me say it? I'll say it as often as you wish-I love you, darling, I love you, I always will-don't be afraid for me, I don't care if I'll never have you again, what does that matter?-you're alive and you're here and you know everything now. And it's so simple, isn't it? Do you see what it was and why I had to desert you?" His arm swept out to point at the valley. "There it is-it's your earth, your kingdom, your kind of world-Dagny, I've always loved you and that I deserted you, that was my love."  He took her hands and pressed them to his lips and held them, not moving, not as a kiss, but as a long moment of rest-as if the effort of speech were a distraction from the fact of her presence, and as if he were torn by too many things to say, by the pressure of all the words stored in the silence of years.  "The women I chased-you didn't believe that, did you? I've never touched one of them-but I think you knew it, I think you've known it all along. The playboy-it was a part that I had to play in order not to let the looters suspect me while I was destroying d'Anconia Copper in plain sight of the whole world. That's the joker in their system, they're out to fight any man of honor and ambition, but let them see a worthless rotter and they think he's a friend, they think he's safe-safe!-that's their view of life, but are they learning!-are they learning whether evil is safe and incompetence practical! . . .  “Dagny, it was the night when I knew, for the first time, that I loved you-it was then that I knew I had to go. It was when you entered my hotel room, that night, when I saw what you looked like, what you were, what you meant to me-and what awaited you in the future. Had you been less, you might have stopped me for a while. But it was you, you who were the final argument that made me leave you. I asked for your help, that night-against John Galt. But I knew that you were his best weapon against me, though neither you nor he could know it.  “You were everything that he was seeking, everything he told us to live for or die, if necessary. . . . I was ready for him, when he called me suddenly to come to New York, that spring. I had not heard from him for some time. He was fighting the same problem I was. He solved it. . . . Do you remember? It was the time when you did not hear from me for three years. Dagny, when I took over my father's business, when I began to deal with the whole industrial system of the world, it was then that I began to see the nature of the evil I had suspected, but thought too monstrous to believe. I saw the tax-collecting vermin that had grown for centuries like mildew on d'Anconia Copper, draining us by no right that anyone could name-I saw the government regulations passed to cripple me, because I was successful, and to help my competitors, because they were loafing failures-I saw the labor unions who won every claim against me, by reason of my ability to make their livelihood possible-I saw that any man's desire for money he could not earn was regarded as a righteous wish, but if he earned it, it was damned as greed-I saw the politicians who winked at me, telling me not to worry, because I could just work a little harder and outsmart them all. I looked past the profits of the moment, and I saw that the harder I worked, the more I tightened the noose around my throat, I saw that my energy was being poured down a sewer, that the parasites who fed on me were being fed upon in their turn, that they were caught in their own trap-and that there was no reason for it, no answer known to anyone, that the sewer pipes of the world, draining its productive blood, led into some dank fog nobody had dared to pierce, while people merely shrugged and said that life on earth could be nothing but evil. And then I saw that the whole industrial establishment of the world, with all of its magnificent machinery, its thousand-ton furnaces, its transatlantic cables, its mahogany offices, its stock exchanges, its blazing electric signs, its power, its wealth-all of it was run, not by bankers and boards of directors, but by any unshaved humanitarian in any basement beer joint, by any face pudgy with malice, who preached that virtue must be penalized for being virtue, that the purpose of ability is to serve incompetence, that man has no right to exist except for the sake of others. . . . I knew it. I saw no way to fight it. John found the way. There were just the two of us with him, the night when we came to New York in answer to his call, Ragnar and I. He told us what we had to do and what sort of men we had to reach. He had quit the Twentieth Century. He was living in a garret in a slum neighborhood. He stepped to the window and pointed at the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done. He did not ask us to join him at once. He told us to think it over and to weigh everything it would do to our lives. I gave him my answer on the morning of the second day, and Ragnar a few hours later, in the afternoon. . . Dagny, that was the morning after our last night together. I had seen, in a manner of vision that I couldn't escape, what it was that I had to fight for.  “It was for the way you looked that night, for the way you talked about your railroad-for the way you had looked when we tried to see the skyline of New York from the top of a rock over the Hudson-I had to save you, to clear the way for you, to let you find your city-not to let you stumble the years of your life away, struggling on through a poisoned fog, with your eyes still held straight ahead, still looking as they had looked in the sunlight, struggling on to find, at the end of your road, not the towers of a city, but a fat, soggy, mindless cripple performing his enjoyment of life by means of swallowing the gin your life had gone to pay for! You,-to know no joy in order that he may know it? You-to serve as fodder for the pleasure of others? You-as the means for the subhuman as the end? Dagny, that was what I saw and that was what I couldn't let them do to you! Not to you, not to any child who had your kind of look when-he faced the future, not to any man who had your spirit and was able to experience a moment of being proudly, guiltlessly, confidently, joyously alive. That was my love, that state of the human spirit, and I left you to fight for it, and I knew that if I were to lose you, it was still you that I would be winning with every year of the battle. But you see it now, don't you? You've seen this valley. It's the place we set out to reach when we were children, you and I. We've reached it. What else can I ask for now? Just to see you here-did John say you're still a scab?-oh well, it's only a matter of tune, but you'll be one of us, because you've always been, if you don't see it fully, we'll wait, I don't care-so long as you're alive, so long as I don't have to go on flying over the Rockies, looking for the wreckage of your plane!"  She gasped a little, realizing why he had not come to the valley on time.  He laughed. "Don't look like that. Don't look at me as if I were a wound that you're afraid to touch."  "Francisco, I've hurt you in so many different ways-"  "No! No, you haven't hurt me-and he hasn't either, don't say anything about it, it's he who's hurt, but we'll save him and he'll come here, too, where he belongs, and he'll know, and then he, too, will be able to laugh about it. Dagny, I didn't expect you to wait, I didn't hope, I knew the chance I'd taken, and if it had to be anyone, I'm glad it's he."  She closed her eyes, pressing her lips together not to moan.  "Darling, don't! Don't you see that I've accepted it?"  But it isn't-she thought-it isn't he, and I can't tell you the truth, because it's a man who might never hear it from me and whom I might never have.  "Francisco, I did love you-" she said, and caught her breath, shocked, realizing that she had not intended to say it and, simultaneously, that this was not the tense she had wanted to use.  "But you do," he said calmly, smiling. "You still love me-even if there's one expression of it that you'll always feel and want, but will not give me any longer. I'm still what I was, and you'll always see it, and you'll always grant me the same response, even if there's a greater one that you grant to another man. No matter what you feel for him, it will not change what you feel for me, and it won't be treason to either, because it comes from the same root, it's the same payment in answer to the same values. No matter what happens in the future, we'll always be what we were to each other, you and I, because you'll always love me."  "Francisco," she whispered, "do you know that?"  "Of course. Don't you understand it now? Dagny, every form of happiness is one, every desire is driven by the same motor-by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence-and every achievement is an expression of it. Look around you. Do you see how much is open to us here, on an unobstructed earth? Do you see how much I am free to do, to experience, to achieve? Do you see that all of it is part of what you are to me-as I am part of it for you? And if I'll see you smile with admiration at a new copper smelter that I built, it will be another form of what I felt when I lay in bed beside you. Will I want to sleep with you? Desperately. Will I envy the man who does? Sure. But what does that matter? It's so much-just to have you here, to love you and to be alive."  Her eyes lowered, her face stern, holding her head bowed as in an act of reverence, she said slowly, as if fulfilling a solemn promise, "Will you forgive me?"  He looked astonished, then chuckled gaily, remembering, and answered, "Not yet. There's nothing to forgive, but I'll forgive it when you join us." He rose, he drew her to her feet-and when his arms closed about her, their kiss was the summation of their past, its end and their seal of acceptance.  Galt turned to them from across the living room, when they came out. He had been standing at a window, looking at the valley-and she felt certain that he had stood there all that time. She saw his eyes studying their faces, his glance moving slowly from one to the other.  His face relaxed a little at the sight of the change in Francisco's.  Francisco smiled, asking him, "Why do you stare at me?"  "Do you know what you looked like when you came in?"  "Oh, did I? That's because I hadn't slept for three nights. John, will you invite me to dinner? I want to know how this scab of yours got here, but I think that I might collapse sound asleep in the middle of a sentence-even though right now I feel as if I'll never need any sleep at all-so I think I'd better go home and stay there till evening."  Galt was watching him with a faint smile. "But aren't you going to leave the valley in an hour?"  "What? No . . ." he said mildly, in momentary astonishment. "No!" he laughed exultantly. "I don't have to! That's right, I haven't told you what it was, have I? I was searching for Dagny. For . . . for the wreck of her plane. She'd been reported lost in a crash in the Rockies."  "I see," said Galt quietly.  "I could have thought of anything, except that she would choose to crash in Galt's Gulch," Francisco said happily; he had the tone of that joyous relief which almost relishes the horror of the past, defying it by means of the present. "I kept flying over the district between Afton, Utah, and Winston, Colorado, over every peak and crevice of it, over every remnant of a car in any gully below, and whenever I saw one, I-" He stopped; it looked like a shudder. "Then at night, we went out on foot-the searching parties of railroad men from Winston-we went climbing at random, with no clues, no plan, on and on, until it was daylight again, and-" He shrugged, trying to dismiss it and to smile. "I wouldn't wish it on my worst-" He stopped short; his smile vanished and a dim reflection of the look he had worn for three days came back to his face, as if at the sudden presence of an image he had forgotten.  After a long moment, he turned to Galt. "John," his voice sounded peculiarly solemn, "could we notify those outside that Dagny is alive . . . in case there's somebody who . . . who'd feel as I did?"  Galt was looking straight at him. "Do you wish to give any outsider any relief from the consequences of remaining outside?"  Francisco dropped his eyes, but answered firmly, "No."  "Pity, Francisco?"  "Yes. Forget it. You're right."  Galt turned away with a movement that seemed oddly out of character: it had the unrhythmical abruptness of the involuntary.  He did not turn back; Francisco watched him in astonishment, then asked softly, "What's the matter?"  Galt turned and looked at him for a moment, not answering. She could not identify the emotion that softened the lines of Galt's face: it had the quality of a smile, of gentleness, of pain, and of something greater that seemed to make these concepts superfluous.  "Whatever any of us has paid for this battle," said Galt, "you're the one who's taken the hardest beating, aren't you?"  "Who? I?" Francisco grinned with shocked, incredulous amusement.  "Certainly not! What's the matter with you?" He chuckled and added, "Pity, John?"  "No," said Galt firmly.  She saw Francisco watching him with a faint, puzzled frown-because Galt had said it, looking, not at him, but at her.  The emotional sum that struck her as an immediate impression of Francisco's house, when she entered it for the first time, was not the sum she had once drawn from the sight of its silent, locked exterior. She felt, not a sense of tragic loneliness, but of invigorating brightness. The rooms were bare and crudely simple, the house seemed built with the skill, the decisiveness and the impatience typical of Francisco; it looked like a frontiersman's shanty thrown together to serve as a mere springboard for a long flight into the future-a future where so great a field of activity lay waiting that no time could be wasted on the comfort of its start. The place had the brightness, not of a home, but of a fresh wooden scaffolding erected to shelter the birth of a skyscraper.  Francisco, in shirt sleeves, stood in the middle of his twelve-foot square living room, with the look of a host in a palace. Of all the places where she had ever seen him, this was the background that seemed most properly his. Just as the simplicity of his clothes, added to his bearing, gave him the air of a superlative aristocrat, so the crudeness of the room gave it the appearance of the most patrician retreat; a single royal touch was added to the crudeness: two ancient silver goblets stood in a small niche cut in a wall of bare logs; their ornate design had required the luxury of some craftsman's long and costly labor, more labor than had gone to build the shanty, a design dimmed by the polish of more centuries than had gone to grow the log wall's pines. In the midst of that room, Francisco's easy, natural manner had a touch of quiet pride, as if his smile were silently saying to her: This is what I am and what I have been all these years.  She looked up at the silver goblets.  "Yes," he said, in answer to her silent guess, "they belonged to Sebastian d'Anconia and his wife. That's the only thing I brought here from my palace in Buenos Aires. That, and the crest over the door. It's all I wanted to save. Everything else will go, in a very few months now." He chuckled. "They'll seize it, all of it, the last dregs of d'Anconia Copper, but they'll be surprised. They won't find much for their trouble. And as to that palace, they won't be able to afford even its heating bill."  "And then?" she asked. "Where will you go from there?"  "I? I will go to work for d'Anconia Copper."  "What do you mean?"  "Do you remember that old slogan: ‘The king is dead, long live the king?’ When the carcass of my ancestors' property is out of the way, then my mine will become the young new body of d'Anconia Copper, the kind of property my ancestors had wanted, had worked for, had deserved, but had never owned."  "Your mine? What mine? Where?"  "Here," he said, pointing toward the mountain peaks. "Didn't you know it?"  "No."  "I own a copper mine that the looters won't reach. It's here, in these mountains. I did the prospecting, I discovered it, I broke the first excavation. It was over eight years ago. I was the first man to whom Midas sold land in this valley. I bought that mine. I started it with my own hands, as Sebastian d'Anconia had started. I have a superintendent in charge of it now, who used to be my best metallurgist in Chile. The mine produces all the copper we require. My profits are deposited at the Mulligan Bank. That will be all I'll have, a few months from now. That will be all I'll need." -to conquer the world, was the way his voice sounded on his last sentence-and she marveled at the difference between that sound and the shameful, mawkish tone, half-whine, half-threat, the tone of beggar and thug combined, which the men of their century had given to the word "need."  "Dagny," he was saying, standing at the window, as if looking out at the peaks, not of mountains, but of time, "the rebirth of d'Anconia Copper-and of the world-has to start here, in the United States. This country was the only country in history born, not of chance and blind tribal warfare, but as a rational product of man's mind. This country was built on the supremacy of reason-and, for one magnificent century, it redeemed the world. It will have to do so again. The first step of d'Anconia Copper, as of any other human value, has to come from here-because the rest of the earth has reached the consummation of the beliefs it has held through the ages: mystic faith, the supremacy of the irrational, which has but two monuments at the end of its course: the lunatic asylum and the graveyard. . . . Sebastian d'Anconia committed one error: he accepted a system which declared that the property he had earned by right, was to be his, not by right, but by permission. His descendants paid for that error. I have made the last payment. . . . I think that I will see the day when, growing out from their root in this soil, the mines, the smelters, the ore docks of d'Anconia Copper will spread again through the world and down to my native country, and I will be the first to start my country's rebuilding.  I may see it, but I cannot be certain. No man can predict the time when others will choose to return to reason. It may be that at the end of my life, I shall have established nothing but this single mine-d'Anconia Copper No. 1, Galt's Gulch, Colorado, U.S.A. But, Dagny, do you remember that my ambition was to double my father's production of copper? Dagny, if at the end of my life, I produce but one pound of copper a year, I will be richer than my father, richer than all my ancestors with all their thousands of tons-because that one pound will be mine by right and will be used to maintain a world that knows it!"  This was the Francisco of their childhood, in bearing, in manner, in the unclouded brilliance of his eyes-and she found herself questioning him about his copper mine, as she had questioned him about his industrial projects on their walks on the shore of the Hudson, recapturing the sense of an unobstructed future.  "I'll take you to see the mine," he said, "as soon as your ankle recovers completely. We have to climb a steep trail to get there, just a mule trail, there's no truck road as yet. Let me show you the new smelter I'm designing. I've been working on it for some time, it's too complex for our present volume of production, but when the mine's output grows to justify it-just take a look at the time, labor and money that it will save!"  They were sitting together on the floor, bending over the sheets of paper he spread before her, studying the intricate sections of the smelter-with the same joyous earnestness they had once brought to the study of scraps in a junk yard.  She leaned forward just as he moved to reach for another sheet, and she found herself leaning against his shoulder.Involuntarily, she held still for one instant, no longer than for a small break in the flow of a single motion, while her eyes rose to his. He was looking down at her, neither hiding what he felt nor implying any further demand. She drew back, knowing that she had felt the same desire as his.  Then, still holding the recaptured sensation of what she had felt for him in the past, she grasped a quality that had always been part of it, now suddenly clear to her for the first time: if that desire was a celebration of one's life, then what she had felt for Francisco had always been a celebration of her future, like a moment of splendor gained in part payment of an unknown, total, affirming some promise to come. In the instant when she grasped it, she knew also the only desire she had ever experienced not in token of the future but of the full and final present. She knew it by means of an image-the image of a man's figure standing at the door of a small granite structure. The final form of the promise that had kept her moving, she thought, was the man who would, perhaps, remain a promise never to be reached.  But this-she thought in consternation-was that view of human destiny which she had most passionately hated and rejected: the view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve. Her life and her values could not bring her to that, she thought; she had never found beauty in longing for the impossible and had never found the possible to be beyond her reach. But she had come to it and she could find no answer.  She could not give him up or give up the world-she thought, looking at Galt, that evening. The answer seemed harder to find in his presence. She felt that no problem existed, that nothing could stand beside the fact of seeing him and nothing would ever have the power to make her leave-and, simultaneously, that she would have no right to look at him if she were to renounce her railroad. She felt that she owned him, that the unnamed had been understood between them from the start-and, simultaneously, that he was able to vanish from her mind and, on some future street of the outside world, to pass her by in unweighted indifference.  She noted that he did not question her about Francisco. When she spoke of her visit, she could find no reaction in his face, neither of approval nor of resentment. It seemed to her that she caught an imperceptible shading in his gravely attentive expression: he looked as if this were a matter about which he did not choose to feel.  Her faint apprehension grew into a question mark, and the question mark turned into a drill, cutting deeper and deeper into her mind through the evenings that followed-when Galt left the house and she remained alone. He went out every other night, after dinner, not telling her where he went, returning at midnight or later. She tried not to allow herself fully to discover with what tension and. restlessness she waited for his return. She did not ask him where he spent his evenings. The reluctance that stopped her was her too urgent desire to know; she kept silent in some dimly intentional form of defiance, half in defiance of him, half of her own anxiety.  She would not acknowledge the things she feared or give them the solid shape of words, she knew them only by the ugly, nagging pull of an unadmitted emotion. Part of it was a savage resentment, of a kind she had never experienced before, which was her answer to the dread that there might be a woman in his life; yet the resentment was softened by some quality of health in the thing she feared, as if the threat could be fought and even, if need be, accepted. But there was another, uglier dread: the sordid shape of self-sacrifice, the suspicion, not to be uttered about him, that he wished to remove himself from her path and let its emptiness force her back to the man who was his best-loved friend.  Days passed before she spoke of it. Then, at dinner, on an evening when he was to leave, she became suddenly aware of the peculiar pleasure she experienced while watching him eat the food she had prepared-and suddenly, involuntarily, as if that pleasure gave her a right she dared not identify, as if enjoyment, not pain, broke her resistance, she heard herself asking him, "What is it you're doing every other evening?"  He answered simply, as if he had taken for granted that she knew it, "Lecturing."  "What?"  "Giving a course of lectures on physics, as I do every year during this month. It's my . . . What are you laughing at?" he asked, seeing the look of relief, of silent laughter that did not seem to be directed at his words-and then, before she answered, he smiled suddenly, as if he had guessed the answer, she saw some particular, intensely personal quality in his smile, which was almost a quality of insolent intimacy-in contrast to the calmly impersonal, casual manner with which he went on. "You know that this is the month when we all trade the achievements of our real professions. Richard Halley is to give concerts, Kay Ludlow is to appear in two plays written by authors who do not write for the outside world-and I give lectures, reporting on the work I've done during the year."  "Free lectures?"  "Certainly not. It's ten dollars per person for the course."  "I want to hear you."  He shook his head. "No. You'll be allowed to attend the concerts, the plays or any form of presentation for your own enjoyment, but not my lectures or any other sale of ideas which you might carry out of this valley. Besides, my customers, or students, are only those who have a practical purpose in taking my course: Dwight Sanders, Lawrence Hammond, Dick McNamara, Owen Kellogg, a few others. I've added one beginner this year: Quentin Daniels."  "Really?" she said, almost with a touch of jealousy. "How can he afford anything that expensive?"  "On credit. I've given him a time-payment plan. He's worth it."  "Where do you lecture?"  "In the hangar, on Dwight Sanders' farm."  "And where do you work during the year?"  "In my laboratory."  She asked cautiously, "Where is your laboratory? Here, in the valley?"  He held her eyes for a moment, letting her see that his glance was amused and that he knew her purpose, then answered, "No."  "You've lived in the outside world for all of these twelve years?"  "Yes."  "Do you"-the thought seemed unbearable-"do you hold some such job as the others?"  "Oh yes." The amusement in his eyes seemed stressed by some special meaning.  "Don't tell me that you're a second assistant bookkeeper!"  "No, I'm not."  "Then what do you do?"  "I hold the kind of job that the world wishes me to hold."  "Where?"  He shook his head. "No, Miss Taggart. If you decide to leave the valley, this is one of the things that you are not to know."  He smiled again with that insolently personal quality which now seemed to say that he knew the threat contained in his answer and what it meant to her, then he rose from the table.  When he had gone, she felt as if the motion of time were an oppressive weight in the stillness of the house, like a stationary, half-solid mass slithering slowly into some faint elongation by a tempo that left her no measure to know whether minutes had passed or hours. She lay half-stretched in an armchair of the living room, crumpled by that heavy, indifferent lassitude which is not the will to laziness, but the frustration of the will to a secret violence that no lesser action can satisfy.  That special pleasure she had felt in watching him eat the food she had prepared-she thought, lying still, her eyes closed, her mind moving, like time, through some realm of veiled slowness-it had been the pleasure of knowing that she had provided him with a sensual enjoyment, that one form of his body's satisfaction had come from her.  . . . There is reason, she thought, why a woman would wish to cook for a man . . . oh, not as a duty, not as a chronic career, only as a rare and special rite in symbol of . . . but what have they made of it, the preachers of woman's duty? . . . The castrated performance of a sickening drudgery was held to be a woman's proper virtue-while that which gave it meaning and sanction was held as a shameful sin . . . the work of dealing with grease, steam and slimy peelings in a reeking kitchen was held to be a spiritual matter, an act of compliance with her moral duty-while the meeting of two bodies in a bedroom was held to be a physical indulgence, an act of surrender to an animal instinct, with no glory, meaning or pride of spirit to be claimed by the animals involved.  She leaped abruptly to her feet. She did not want to think of the outer world or of its moral code. But she knew that that was not the subject of her thoughts. And she did not want to think of the subject her mind was intent on pursuing, the subject to which it kept returning against her will, by some will of its own. . . .She paced the room, hating the ugly, jerky, uncontrolled looseness of her movements-torn between the need to let her motion break the stillness, and the knowledge that this was not the form of break she wanted. She lighted cigarettes, for an instant's illusion of purposeful action-and discarded them within another instant, feeling the weary distaste of a substitute purpose. She looked at the room like a restless beggar, pleading with physical objects to give her a motive, wishing she could find something to clean, to mend, to polish-while knowing that no task was worth the effort. When nothing seems worth the effort-said some stern voice in her mind-it's a screen to hide a wish that's worth too much; what do you want? . . . She snapped a match, viciously jerking the flame to the tip of a cigarette she noticed hanging, unlighted, in the corner of her mouth. . . . What do you want?-repeated the voice that sounded severe as a judge. I want him to come back!-she answered, throwing the words, as a soundless cry, at some accuser within her, almost as one would throw a bone to a pursuing beast, in the hope of distracting it from pouncing upon the rest.  I want him back-she said softly, in answer to the accusation that there was no reason for so great an impatience. . . . I want him back -she said pleadingly, in answer to the cold reminder that her answer did not balance the judge's scale. . . . I want him back!-she cried defiantly, fighting not to drop the one superfluous, protective word in that sentence. She felt her head drooping with exhaustion, as after a prolonged beating. The cigarette she saw between her fingers had burned the mere length of half an inch. She ground it out and fell into the armchair again.  I'm not evading it-she thought-I'm not evading it, it's just that I can see no way to any answer. . . . That which you want-said the voice, while she stumbled through a thickening fog-is yours for the taking, but anything less than your full acceptance, anything less than your full conviction, is a betrayal of everything he is. . . . Then let him damn me-she thought, as if the voice were now lost in the fog and would not hear her-let him damn me tomorrow. . . . I want him . . . back. . . . She heard no answer, because her head had fallen softly against the chair; she was asleep.  When she opened her eyes, she saw him standing three feet away, looking down at her, as if he had been watching her for some time. She saw his face and, with the clarity of undivided perception, she saw the meaning of the expression on his face: it was the meaning she had fought for hours. She saw it without astonishment, because she had not yet regained her awareness of any reason why it should astonish her.  "This is the way you look," he said softly, "when you fall asleep in your office," and she knew that he, too, was not fully aware of letting her hear it: the way he said it told her how often he had thought of it and for what reason. "You look as if you would awaken in a world where you had nothing to hide or to fear," and she knew that the first movement of her face had been a smile, she knew it in the moment when it vanished, when she grasped that they were both awake. He added quietly, with full awareness, "But here, it's true."  Her first emotion of the realm of reality was a sense of power. She sat up with a flowing, leisurely movement of confidence, feeling the flow of the motion from muscle to muscle through her body. She asked, and it was the slowness, the sound of casual curiosity, the tone of taking the implications for granted, that gave to her voice the faintest sound of disdain, "How did you know what I look like in . . . my office?"  "I told you that I've watched you for years."  "How were you able to watch me that thoroughly? From where?"  "I will not answer you now," he said, simply, without defiance.  The slight movement of her shoulder leaning back, the pause, then the lower, huskier tone of her voice, left a hint of smiling triumph to trail behind her words: "When did you see me for the first time?"  "Ten years ago," he answered, looking straight at her, letting her see that he was answering the full, unnamed meaning of her question.  "Where?" The word was almost a command.  He hesitated, then she saw a faint smile that touched only his lips, not his eyes, the kind of smile with which one contemplates-with longing, bitterness and pride-a possession purchased at an excruciating cost; his eyes seemed directed, not at her, but at the girl of that time.  "Underground, in the Taggart Terminal," he answered.  She became suddenly conscious of her posture: she had let her shoulder blades slide down against the chair, carelessly, half-lying, one leg stretched forward-and with her sternly tailored, transparent blouse, her wide peasant skirt hand-printed in violent colors, her thin stocking and high-heeled pump, she did not look like a railroad executive-the consciousness of it struck her in answer to his eyes that seemed to be seeing the unattainable-she looked like that which she was: his servant girl. She knew the moment when some faintest stress of the brilliance in his dark green eyes removed the veil of distance, replacing the vision of the past by the act of seeing her immediate person.  She met his eyes with that insolent glance which is a smile without movement of facial muscles.  He turned away, but as he moved across the room his steps were as eloquent as the sound of a voice. She knew that he wanted to leave the room, as he always left it, he had never stayed for longer than a brief good night when he came home. She watched the course of his struggle, whether by means of his steps, begun in one direction and swerving in another, or by means of her certainty that her body had become an instrument for the direct perception of his, like a screen reflecting both movements and motives-she could not tell. She knew only that he who had never started or lost a battle against himself, now had no power to leave this room.  His manner seemed to show no sign of strain. He took off his coat, throwing it aside, remaining in shirt sleeves, and sat down, facing her, at the window across the room. But he sat down on the arm of a chair, as if he were neither leaving nor staying.  She felt the light-headed, the easy, the almost frivolous sensation of triumph in the knowledge that she was holding him as surely as by a physical touch; for the length of a moment, brief and dangerous to endure, it was a more satisfying form of contact.  Then she felt a sudden, blinding shock, which was half-blow, half scream within her, and she groped, stunned, for its cause-only to realize that he had leaned a little to one side and it had been no more than the sight of an accidental posture, of the long line running from his shoulder to the angle of his waist, to his hips, down his legs. She looked away, not to let him see that she was trembling-and she dropped all thoughts of triumph and of whose was the power.  "I've seen you many times since," he said, quietly, steadily, but a little more slowly than usual, as if he could control everything except his need to speak.  "Where have you seen me?"  "Many places."  "But you made certain to remain unseen?" She knew that his was a face she could not have failed to notice.  "Yes."  "Why? Were you afraid?"  "Yes."  He said it simply, and it took her a moment to realize that he was admitting he knew what the sight of his person would have meant to her. "Did you know who I was, when you saw me for the first time?"  "Oh yes. My worst enemy but one."  "What?" She had not expected it; she added, more quietly, "Who's the worst one?"  "Dr. Robert Stadler."  "Did you have me classified with him?"  "No. He's my conscious enemy. He's the man who sold his soul. We don't intend to reclaim him. You-you were one of us. I knew it, long before I saw you. I knew also that you would be the last to join us and the hardest one to defeat."  "Who told you that?"  "Francisco."  She let a moment pass, then asked, "What did he say?"  "He said that of all the names on our list, you'd be the one most difficult to win. That was when I heard of you for the first time. It was Francisco who put your name on our list. He told me that you were the sole hope and future of Taggart Transcontinental, that you'd stand against us for a long time, that you'd fight a desperate battle for your railroad-because you had too much endurance, courage and consecration to your work." He glanced at her. "He told me nothing else. He spoke of you as if he were merely discussing one of our future strikers. I knew that you and he had been childhood friends, that was all."  "When did you see me?"  "Two years later."  "How?"  "By chance. It was late at night . . . on a passenger platform of the Taggart Terminal." She knew that this was a form of surrender, he did not want to say it, yet he had to speak, she heard both the muted intensity and the pull of resistance in his voice-he had to speak, because he had to give himself and her this one form of contact. "You wore an evening gown. You had a cape half-slipping off your body-I saw, at first, only your bare shoulders, your back and your profile-it looked for a moment as if the cape would slip further and you would stand there naked. Then I saw that you wore a long gown, the color of ice, like the tunic of a Grecian goddess, but had the short hair and the imperious profile of an American woman. You looked preposterously out of place on a railroad platform-and it was not on a railroad platform that I was seeing you, I was seeing a setting that had never haunted me before-but then, suddenly, I knew that you did belong among the rails, the soot and the girders, that that was the proper setting for a flowing gown and naked shoulders and a face as alive as yours-a railroad platform, not a curtained apartment-you looked like a symbol of luxury and you belonged in the place that was its source-you seemed to bring wealth, grace, extravagance and the enjoyment of life back to their rightful owners, to the men who created railroads and factories-you had a look of energy and of its reward, together, a look of competence and luxury combined-and I was the first man who had ever stated in what manner these two were inseparable-and I thought that if our age gave form to its proper gods and erected a statue to the meaning of an American railroad, yours would be that statue. . . . Then I saw what you were doing-and I knew who you were. You were giving orders to three Terminal officials, I could not hear your words, but your voice sounded swift, clear-cut and confident. I knew that you were Dagny Taggart. I came closer, close enough to hear two sentences. 'Who said so?' asked one of the men. 'I did,' you answered. That was all I heard. That was enough."  "And then?"  He raised his eyes slowly to hold hers across the room, and the submerged intensity that pulled his voice down, blurring its tone to softness, gave it a sound of self-mockery that was desperate and almost gentle: "Then I knew that abandoning my motor was not the hardest price I would have to pay for this strike."  She wondered which anonymous shadow-among the passengers who had hurried past her, as insubstantial as the steam of the engines and as ignored-which shadow and face had been his; she wondered how close she had come to him for the length of that unknown moment. "Oh, why didn't you speak to me, then or later?"  "Do you happen to remember what you were doing in the Terminal that night?"  "I remember vaguely a night when they called me from some party I was attending. My father was out of town and the new Terminal manager had made some sort of error that tied up all traffic in the tunnels. The old manager had quit unexpectedly the week before."  "It was I who made him quit."  "I see . . ."  Her voice trailed off, as if abandoning sound, as her eyelids dropped, abandoning sight. If he had not withstood it then-she thought-if he had come to claim her, then or later, what sort of tragedy would they have had to reach? . . . She remembered what she had felt when she had cried that she would shoot the destroyer on sight. . . .I would have-the thought was not in words, she knew it only as a trembling pressure in her stomach-I would have shot him, afterward, if I discovered his role . . . and I would have had to discover it . . .and yet-she shuddered, because she knew she still wished he had come to her, because the thought not to be admitted into her mind, but flowing as a dark warmth through her body, was: I would have shot him, but not before.  She raised her eyelids-and she knew that that thought was as naked to him in her eyes, as it was to her in his. She saw his veiled glance and the tautness of his mouth, she saw him reduced to agony, she felt herself drowned by the exultant wish to cause him pain, to see it, to watch it, to watch it beyond her own endurance and his, then to reduce him to the helplessness of pleasure.  He got up, he looked away, and she could not tell whether it was the slight lift of his head or the tension of his features that made his face look oddly calm and clear, as if it were stripped of emotion down to the naked purity of its structure.  "Every man that your railroad needed and lost in the past ten years," he said, "it was I who made you lose him." His voice had the single toned flatness and the luminous simplicity of an accountant who reminds a reckless purchaser that cost is an absolute which cannot be escaped, "I have pulled every girder from under Taggart Transcontinental and, if you choose to go back, I will see it collapse upon your head."  He turned to leave the room. She stopped him. It was her voice, more than her words, that made him stop: her voice was low, it had no quality of emotion, only of a sinking weight, and its sole color was some dragging undertone, like an inner echo, resembling a threat; it was the voice of the plea of a person who still retains a concept of honor, but is long past caring for it: "You want to hold me here, don't you?"  "More than anything else in the world."  "You could hold me."  "I know it."  His voice had said it with the same sound as hers. He waited, to regain his breath. When he spoke, his voice was low and clear, with some stressed quality of awareness, which was almost the quality of a smile of understanding: "It's your acceptance of this place that I want. What good would it do me, to have your physical presence without any meaning? That's the kind of faked reality by which most people cheat themselves of their lives. I'm not capable of it." He turned to go. "And neither are you. Good night, Miss Taggart."  He walked out, into his bedroom, closing the door.  She was past the realm of thought-as she lay in bed in the darkness of her room, unable to think or to sleep-and the moaning violence that filled her mind seemed only a sensation of her muscles, but its tone and its twisting shades were like a pleading cry, which she knew, not as words, but as pain: Let him come here, let him break -let it be damned, all of it, my railroad and his strike and everything we've lived by!-let it be damned, everything we've been and are!-he would, if tomorrow I were to die-then let me die, but tomorrow -let him come here, be it any price he names, I have nothing left that's not for sale to him any longer-is this what it means to be an animal?-it does and I am. . . . She lay on her back, her palms pressed to the sheet at her sides, to stop herself from rising and walking into his room, knowing that she was capable even of that. . . .It's not I, it's a body I can neither endure nor control. . . . But somewhere within her, not as words, but as a radiant point of stillness, there was the presence of the judge who seemed to observe her, not in stern condemnation any longer, but in approval and amusement, as if saying: Your body?-if he were not what you know him to be, would your body bring you to this?-why is it his body that you want, and no other?-do you think that you are damning them, the things you both have lived by?-are you damning that which you are honoring in this very moment, by your very desire? . . . She did not have to hear the words, she knew them, she had always known them. . . . After a while, she lost the glow of that knowledge, and there was nothing left but pain and the palms that were pressed to the sheet-and the almost indifferent wonder whether he, too, was awake and fighting the same torture.  She heard no sound in the house and saw no light from his window on the tree trunks outside. After a long while she heard, from the darkness of his room, two sounds that gave her a full answer; she knew that he was awake and that he would not come; it was the sound of a step and the click of a cigarette lighter.  Richard Halley stopped playing, turned away from the piano and glanced at Dagny, He saw her drop her face with the involuntary movement of hiding too strong an emotion, he rose, smiled and said softly, "Thank you."  "Oh no . . ." she whispered, knowing that the gratitude was hers and that it was futile to express it. She was thinking of the years when the works he had just played for her were being written, here, in his small cottage on a ledge of the valley, when all this prodigal magnificence of sound was being shaped by him as a flowing monument to a concept which equates the sense of life with the sense of beauty-while she had walked through the streets of New York in a hopeless quest for some form of enjoyment, with the screeches of a modern symphony running after her, as if spit by the infected throat of a loud-speaker coughing its malicious hatred of existence.  "But I mean it," said Richard Halley, smiling. "I'm a businessman and I never do anything without payment. You've paid me. Do you see why I wanted to play for you tonight?"  She raised her head. He stood in the middle of his living room, they were alone, with the window open to the summer night, to the dark trees on a long sweep of ledges descending toward the glitter of the valley's distant lights.  "Miss Taggart, how many people are there to whom my work means as much as it does to you?"  "Not many," she answered simply, neither as boast nor flattery, but as an impersonal tribute to the exacting values involved.  "That is the payment I demand. Not many can afford it. I don't mean your enjoyment, I don't mean your emotion-emotions be damned!-I mean your understanding and the fact that your enjoyment was of the same nature as mine, that it came from the same source: from your intelligence, from the conscious judgment of a mind able to judge my work by the standard of the same values that went to write it-I mean, not the fact that you felt, but that you felt what I wished you to feel, not the fact that you admire my work, but that you admire it for the things I wished to be admired." He chuckled.  "There's only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive. But it's a fear I've never shared. I do not fool myself about my work or the response I seek-I value both too highly. I do not care to be admired causelessly, emotionally, intuitively, instinctively-or blindly, I do not care for blindness in any form, I have too much to show-or for deafness, I have too much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone's heart-only by someone's head. And when I find a customer with that invaluable capacity, then my performance is a mutual trade to mutual profit. An artist is a trader, Miss Taggart, the hardest and most exacting of all traders. Now do you understand me?"  "Yes," she said incredulously, "I do," incredulously because she was hearing her own symbol of moral pride, chosen by a man she had least expected to choose it.  "If you do, why did you look quite so tragic just a moment ago? What is it that you regret?"  "The years when your work has remained unheard."  "But it hasn't. I've given two or three concerts every year. Here, in Galt's Gulch. I am giving one next week. I hope you'll come. The price of admission is twenty-five cents."  She could not help laughing. He smiled, then his face slipped slowly into earnestness, as under the tide of some unspoken contemplation of his own. He looked at the darkness beyond the window, at a spot where, in a clearing of the branches, with the moonlight draining its color, leaving only its metallic luster, the sign of the dollar hung like a curve of shining steel engraved on the sky.  "Miss Taggart, do you see why I'd give three dozen modern artists for one real businessman? Why I have much more in common with Ellis Wyatt or Ken Danagger-who happens to be tone deaf-than with men like Mort Liddy and Balph Eubank? Whether it's a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one's own eyes-which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification --which means: the capacity to sew, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before. That shining vision which they talk about as belonging to the authors of symphonies and novels-what do they think is the driving faculty of men who discover how to use oil, how to run a mine, how to build an electric motor? That sacred fire which is said to burn within musicians and poets-what do they suppose moves an industrialist to defy the whole world for the sake of his new metal, as the inventors of the airplane, the builders of the railroads, the discoverers of new germs or new continents have done through all the ages? . . . An intransigent devotion to the pursuit of truth, Miss Taggart? Have you heard the moralists and the art lovers of the centuries talk about the artist's intransigent devotion to the pursuit of truth? Name me a greater example of such devotion than the act of a man who says that the earth does turn, or the act of a man who says that an alloy of steel and copper has certain properties which enable it to do certain things, that it is and does-and let the world rack him or ruin him, he will not bear false witness to the evidence of his mind! This, Miss Taggart, this sort of spirit, courage and love for truth-as against a sloppy bum who goes around proudly assuring you that he has almost reached the perfection of a lunatic, because he's an artist who hasn't the faintest idea what his art work is or means, he's not restrained by such crude concepts as 'being' or 'meaning' he's the vehicle of higher mysteries, he doesn't know how he created his work or why, it just came out of him spontaneously, like vomit out of a drunkard, he did not think, he wouldn't stoop to thinking, he just felt it, all he has to do is feel-he feels, the flabby, loose-mouthed, shifty-eyed, drooling, shivering, uncongealed bastard! I, who know what discipline, what effort, what tension of mind, what unrelenting strain upon one's power of clarity are needed to produce a work of art-I, who know that it requires a labor which makes a chain gang look like rest and a severity no army drilling sadist could impose-I'll take the operator of a coal mine over any walking vehicle of higher mysteries. The operator knows that it's not his feelings that keep the coal carts moving under the earth-and he knows what does keep them moving. Feelings? Oh yes, we do feel, he, you and I-we are, in fact, the only people capable of feeling-and we know where our feelings come from. But what we did not know and have delayed learning for too long is the nature of those who claim that they cannot account for their feelings. We did not know what it is that they feel. We are learning it now. It was a costly error. And those most guilty of it, will pay the hardest price-as, in justice, they must. Those most guilty of it were the real artists, who will now see that they are first to be exterminated and that they had prepared the triumph of their own exterminators by helping to destroy their only protectors. For if there is more tragic a fool than the businessman who doesn't know that he's an exponent of man's highest creative spirit-it's the artist who thinks that the businessman is his enemy."  It was true-she thought, when she walked through the streets of the valley, looking with a child's excitement at the shop windows sparkling in the sun-that the businesses here had the purposeful selectiveness of art-and that the art-she thought, when she sat in the darkness of a clapboard concert hall, listening to the controlled violence and the mathematical precision of Halley's music-had the stern discipline of business.  Both had the radiance of engineering-she thought, when she sat among rows of benches under the open sky, watching Kay Ludlow on the stage. It was an experience she had not known since childhood -the experience of being held for three hours by a play that told a story she had not seen before, in lines she had not heard, uttering a theme that had not been picked from the hand-me-downs of the centuries.  It was the forgotten delight of being held in rapt attention by the reins of the ingenious, the unexpected, the logical, the purposeful, the new-and of seeing it embodied in a performance of superlative artistry by a woman playing a character whose beauty of spirit matched her own physical perfection.  "That's why I'm here, Miss Taggart," said Kay Ludlow, smiling in answer to her comment, after the performance. "Whatever quality of human greatness I have the talent to portray-that was the quality the outer world sought to degrade. They let me play nothing but symbols of depravity, nothing but harlots, dissipation-chasers and home-wreckers, always to be beaten at the end by the little girl next door, personifying the virtue of mediocrity. They used my talent-for the defamation of itself. That was why I quit."  Not since childhood, thought Dagny, had she felt that sense of exhilaration after witnessing the performance of a play-the sense that life held things worth reaching, not the sense of having studied some aspect of a sewer there had been no reason to see. As the audience filed away into the darkness from the lighted rows of benches, she noticed Ellis Wyatt, Judge Narragansett, Ken Danagger, men who had once been said to despise all forms of art.  The last image she caught, that evening, was the sight of two tall, straight, slender figures walking away together down a trail among the rocks, with the beam of a spotlight flashing once on the gold of their hair. They were Kay Ludlow and Ragnar Danneskjold-and she wondered whether she could bear to return to a world where these were the two doomed to destruction.  The recaptured sense of her own childhood kept coming back to her whenever she met the two sons of the young woman who owned the bakery shop. She often saw them wandering down the trails of the valley-two fearless beings, aged seven and four. They seemed to face life as she had faced it. They did not have the look she had seen in the children of the outer world-a look of fear, half-secretive, half sneering, the look of a child's defense against an adult, the look of a being in the process of discovering that he is hearing lies and of learning to feel hatred. The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt, they had an innocently natural, non-boastful sense of their own value and as innocent a trust in any stranger's ability to recognize it, they had the eager curiosity that would venture anywhere with the certainty that life held nothing unworthy of or closed to discovery, and they looked as if, should they encounter malevolence, they would reject it contemptuously, not as dangerous, but as stupid, they would not accept it in bruised resignation as the law of existence, "They represent my particular career, Miss Taggart," said the young mother in answer to her comment, wrapping a loaf of fresh bread and smiling at her across the counter. "They're the profession I've chosen to practice, which, in spite of all the guff about motherhood, one can't practice successfully in the outer world. I believe you've met my husband, he's the teacher of economics who works as linesman for Dick McNamara. You know, of course, that there can be no collective commitments in this valley and that families or relatives are not allowed to come here, unless each person takes the striker's oath by his own independent conviction. I came here, not merely for the sake of my husband's profession, but for the sake of my own. I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings. I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child's brain, to convince him that reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he's unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror. You marvel at the difference between my children and those outside, Miss Taggart? Yet the cause is so simple. The cause is that here, in Galt's Gulch, there's no person who would not consider it monstrous ever to confront a child with the slightest suggestion of the irrational."  She thought of the teachers whom the schools of the world had lost -when she looked at the three pupils of Dr. Akston, on the evening of their yearly reunion.  The only other guest he had invited was Kay Ludlow. The six of them sat in the back yard of his house, with the light of the sunset on their faces, and the floor of the valley condensing into a soft blue vapor far below.  She looked at his pupils, at the three pliant, agile figures half stretched on canvas chairs in poses of relaxed contentment, dressed in slacks, windbreakers and open-collared shirts: John Galt, Francisco d'Anconia, Ragnar Danneskjold.  "Don't be astonished, Miss Taggart," said Dr. Akston, smiling, "and don't make the mistake of thinking that these three pupils of mine are some sort of superhuman creatures. They're something much greater and more astounding than that: they're normal men-a thing the world has never seen-and their feat is that they managed to survive as such. It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world's doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuries-to remain human, since the human is the rational."  She felt some new quality in Dr. Akston's attitude, some change in the sternness of his usual reserve; he seemed to include her in their circle, as if she were more than a guest. Francisco acted as if her presence at their reunion were natural and to be taken gaily for granted. Galt's face gave no hint of any reaction; his manner was that of a courteous escort who had brought her here at Dr. Akston's request.  She noticed that Dr. Akston's eyes kept coming back to her, as if with the quiet pride of displaying his students to an appreciative observer. His conversation kept returning to a single theme, in the manner of a father who has found a listener interested in his most cherished subject: "You should have seen them, when they were in college, Miss Taggart. You couldn't have found three boys 'conditioned' to such different backgrounds, but-conditioners be damned!-they must have picked one another at first sight, among the thousands on that campus.  Francisco, the richest heir- in the world-Ragnar, the European aristocrat-and John, the self-made man, self-made in every sense, out of nowhere, penniless, parentless, tie-less. Actually, he was the son of a gas-station mechanic at some forsaken crossroads in Ohio, and he had left home at the age of twelve to make his own way-but I've always thought of him as if he had come into the world like Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, who sprang forth from Jupiter's head, fully grown and fully armed. . . . I remember the day when I saw the three of them for the first time. They were sitting at the back of the classroom-I was giving a special course for postgraduate students, so difficult a course that few outsiders ever ventured to attend these particular lectures. Those three looked too young even for freshmen-they were sixteen at the time, as I learned later. At the end of that lecture, John got up to ask me a question. It was a question which, as a teacher, I would have been proud to hear from a student who'd taken six years of philosophy. It was a question pertaining to Plato's metaphysics, which Plato hadn't had the sense to ask of himself. I answered-and I asked John to come to my office after the lecture.  He came-all three of them came-I saw the two others in my anteroom and let them in. I talked to them for an hour-then I cancelled all my appointments and talked to them for the rest of the day. After which, I arranged to let them take that course and receive their credits for it. They took the course. They got the highest grades in the class. . . . They were majoring in two subjects: physics and philosophy. Their choice amazed everybody but me: modern thinkers considered it unnecessary to perceive reality, and modern physicists considered it unnecessary to think. I knew better; what amazed me was that these children knew it, too. . . . Robert Stadler was head of the Department of Physics, as I was head of the Department of Philosophy. He and I suspended all rules and restrictions for these three students, we spared them all the routine, unessential courses, we loaded them with nothing but the hardest tasks, and we cleared their way to major in our two subjects within their four years. They worked for it. And, during those four years, they worked for their living, besides. Francisco and Ragnar were receiving allowances from their parents, John had nothing, but all three of them held part-time jobs to earn their own experience and money. Francisco worked in a copper foundry, John worked in a railroad roundhouse, and Ragnar-no, Miss Taggart, Ragnar was not the least, but the most studiously sedate of the three-he worked as clerk in the university library. They had time for everything they wanted, but no time for people or for any communal campus activities. They . . . Ragnar!" he interrupted himself suddenly, sharply. "Don't sit on the ground!"  Danneskjold had slipped down and was now sitting on the grass, with his head leaning against Kay Ludlow's knees. He rose obediently, chuckling. Dr. Akston smiled with a touch of apology.  "It's an old habit of mine," he explained to Dagny. "A 'conditioned' reflex, I guess. I used to tell him that in those college years, when I'd catch him sitting on the ground in my back yard, on cold, foggy evenings-he was reckless that way, he made me worry, he should have known it was dangerous and-" He stopped abruptly; he read in Dagny's startled eyes the same thought as his own: the thought of the kind of dangers the adult Ragnar had chosen to face. Dr. Akston shrugged, spreading his hands in a gesture of helpless self-mockery. Kay Ludlow smiled at him in understanding.  "My house stood just outside the campus," he continued, sighing, "on a tall bluff over Lake Erie. We spent many evenings together, the four of us. We would sit just like this, in my back yard, on the nights of early fall or in the spring, only instead of this granite mountainside, we had the spread of the lake before us, stretching off into a peacefully unlimited distance. I had to work harder on those nights than in any classroom, answering all the questions they'd ask me, discussing the kind of issues they'd raise. About midnight, I would fix some hot chocolate and force them to drink it-the one thing I suspected was that they never took time to eat properly-and then we'd go on talking, while the lake vanished into solid darkness and the sky seemed lighter than the earth. There were a few times when we stayed there till I noticed suddenly that the sky was turning darker and the lake was growing pale and we were within a few sentences of daylight. I should have known better, I knew that they weren't getting enough sleep as it was, but I forgot it occasionally, I lost my sense of time-you see, when they were there, I always felt as ft it were early morning and a long, inexhaustible day were stretching ahead before us. They never spoke of what they wished they might do in the future, they never wondered whether some mysterious omnipotence had favored them with some unknowable talent to achieve the things they wanted-they spoke of what they would do. Does affection tend to make one a coward? I know that the only times I felt fear were occasional moments when I listened to them and thought of what the world was becoming and what they would have to encounter in the future. Fear?  “Yes-but it was more than fear. It was the kind of emotion that makes men capable of killing-when I thought that the purpose of the world's trend was to destroy these children, that these three sons of mine were marked for immolation. Oh yes, I would have killed-but whom was there to kill? It was everyone and no one, there was no single enemy, no center and no villain, it was not the simpering social worker incapable of earning a penny or the thieving bureaucrat scared of his own shadow, it was the whole of the earth rolling into an obscenity of horror, pushed by the hand of every would-be decent man who believed that need is holier than ability, and pity is holier than justice. But these were only occasional moments. It was not my constant feeling. I listened to my children and I knew that nothing would defeat them. I looked at them, as they sat in my back yard, and beyond my house there were the tall, dark buildings of what was still a monument to unenslaved thought-the Patrick Henry University-and farther in the distance there were the lights of Cleveland, the orange glow of steel mills behind batteries of smokestacks, the twinkling red dots of radio towers, the long white rays of airports on the black edge of the sky-and I thought that in the name of any greatness that had ever existed and moved this world, the greatness of which they were the last descendants, they would win, . . . I remember one night when I noticed that John had been silent for a long time -and I saw that he had fallen asleep, stretched there on the ground.  “The two others confessed that he had not slept for three days. I sent the two of them home at once, but I didn't have the heart to disturb him. It was a warm spring night, I brought a blanket to cover him, and I let him sleep where he was. I sat there beside him till morning-and as I watched his face in the starlight, then the first ray of the sun on his untroubled forehead and closed eyelids, what I experienced was not a prayer, I do not pray, but that state of spirit at which a prayer is a misguided attempt: a full, confident, affirming self-dedication to my love of the right, to the certainty that the right would win and that this boy would have the kind of future he deserved." He moved his arm, pointing to the valley. "I did not expect it to be as great as this-or as hard."  It had grown dark and the mountains had blended with the sky.  Hanging detached in space, there were the lights of the valley below them, the red breath of Stockton's foundry above, and the lighted string of windows of Mulligan's house, like a railroad car imbedded in the sky.  "I did have a rival," said Dr. Akston slowly. "It was Robert Stadler. . . . Don't frown, John-it's past. . . . John- did love him, once. Well, so did I-no, not quite, but what one felt for a mind like Stadler's was painfully close to love, it was that rarest of pleasures: admiration. No, I did not love him, but he and I had always felt as if we were fellow survivors from some vanishing age or land, in the gibbering swamp of mediocrity around us. The mortal sin of Robert Stadler was that he never identified his proper homeland. . . . He hated stupidity. It was the only emotion I had ever seen him display toward people-a biting, bitter, weary hatred for any ineptitude that dared to oppose him. He wanted his own way, he wanted to be left alone to pursue it, he wanted to brush people out of his path-and he never identified the means to it or the nature of his path and of his enemies. He took a short cut. Are you smiling, Miss Taggart? You hate him, don't you? Yes, you know the kind of short cut he took. . . . He told you that we were rivals for these three students.  ”That was true-or rather, that was not the way I thought of it, but I knew that he did. Well, if we were rivals, I had one advantage: I knew why they needed both our professions; he never understood their interest in mine. He never understood its importance to himself-which, incidentally, is what destroyed him. But in those years he was still alive enough to grasp at these three students. 'Grasp' was the word for it. Intelligence being the only value he worshipped, he clutched them as if they were a private treasure of his own. He had always been a very lonely man. I think that in the whole of his life, Francisco and Ragnar were his only love, and John was his only passion. It was John whom he regarded as his particular heir, as his future, as his own immortality. John intended to be an inventor, which meant that he was to be a physicist; he was to take his postgraduate course under Robert Stadler. Francisco intended to leave after graduation and go to work; he was to be the perfect blend of both of us, his two intellectual fathers: an industrialist. And Ragnar-you didn't know what profession Ragnar had chosen, Miss Taggart? No, it wasn't stunt pilot, or jungle explorer, or deep-sea diver. It was something much more courageous than these. Ragnar intended to be a philosopher. An abstract, theoretical, academic, cloistered, ivory-tower philosopher. . . .Yes, Robert Stadler loved them. And yet-I have said that I would have killed to protect them, only there was no one to kill. If that were the solution-which, of course, it isn't-the man to kill was Robert Stadler. Of any one person, of any single guilt for the evil which is now destroying the world-his was the heaviest guilt. He had the mind to know better. His was the only name of honor and achievement, used to sanction the rule of the looters. He was the man who delivered science into the power of the looters' guns. John did not expect it. Neither did I. . . . John came back for his postgraduate course in physics. But he did not finish it. He left, on the day when Robert Stadler endorsed the establishment of a State Science Institute.  I met Stadler by chance in a corridor of the university, as he came out of his office after his last conversation with John. He looked changed. I hope that I shall never have to see again a change of that kind in a man's face. He saw me approaching-and he did not know, but I knew, what made him whirl upon me and cry, Tin so sick of all of you impractical idealists!1 I turned away. I knew that I had heard a man pronounce a death sentence upon himself. . . . Miss Taggart, do you remember the question you asked me about my three pupils?"  "Yes," she whispered.  "I could gather, from your question, the nature of what Robert Stadler had said to you about them. Tell me, why did he speak of them at all?"  He saw the faint movement of her bitter smile. "He told me their story as a justification for his belief in the futility of human intelligence. He told it to me as an example of his disillusioned hope. ‘Theirs was the kind of ability,' he said, 'one expects to see, in the future, changing the course of the world'."  "Well, haven't they done so?"  She nodded, slowly, holding her head inclined for a long moment in acquiescence and in homage.  "What I want you to understand, Miss Taggart, is the full evil of those who claim to have become convinced that this earth, by its nature, is a realm of malevolence where the good has no chance to win. Let them check their premises. Let them check their standards of value. Let them check-before they grant themselves the unspeakable license of evil-as-necessity-whether they know what is the good and what are the conditions it requires. Robert Stadler now believes that intelligence is futile and that human life can be nothing but irrational. Did he expect John Galt to become a great scientist, willing to work under the orders of Dr. Floyd Ferris? Did he expect Francisco d'Anconia to become a great industrialist, willing to produce under the orders and for the benefit of Wesley Mouch? Did he expect Ragnar Danneskjold to become a great philosopher, willing to preach, under the orders of Dr. Simon Pritchett, that there is no mind and that might is right? Would that have been a future which Robert Stadler would have considered rational? I want you to observe, Miss Taggart, that those who cry the loudest about their disillusionment, about the failure of virtue, the futility of reason, the impotence of logic-are those who have achieved the full, exact, logical result of the ideas they preached, so mercilessly logical that they dare not identify it. In a world that proclaims the non-existence of the mind, the moral righteousness of rule by brute force, the penalizing of the competent in favor of the incompetent, the sacrifice of the best to the worst -in such a world, the best have to turn against society and have to become its deadliest enemies. In such a world John Galt, the man of incalculable intellectual power, will remain an unskilled laborer- Francisco d'Anconia, the miraculous producer of wealth, will become a wastrel-and Ragnar Danneskjold, the man of enlightenment, will become the man of violence. Society-and Dr. Robert Stadler-have achieved everything they advocated. What complaint do they now have to make? That the universe is irrational? Is it?"  He smiled; his smile had the pitiless gentleness of certainty.  "Every man builds his world in his own image," he said. "He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence-by his own choice. Whoever preserves a single thought uncorrupted by any concession to the will of others, whoever brings into reality a matchstick or a patch of garden made in the image of his thought-he, and to that extent, is a man, and that extent is the sole measure of his virtue. They"-he pointed at his pupils-"made no concessions. This"-he pointed at the valley-"is the measure of what they preserved and of what they are. . . . Now I can repeat my answer to the question you asked me, knowing that you will understand it fully. You asked me whether I was proud of the way my three sons had turned out. I am more proud than I had ever hoped to be. I am proud of their every action, of their every goal-and of every value they've chosen. And this, Dagny, is my full answer."  The sudden sound of her first name was pronounced in the tone of a father; he spoke his last two sentences, looking, not at her, but at Galt.  She saw Galt answering him by an open glance held steady for an instant, like a signal of affirmation. Then Galt's eyes moved to hers. She saw him looking at her as if she bore the unspoken title that hung in the silence between them, the title Dr. Akston had granted her, but had not pronounced and none of the others had caught-she saw, in Galt's eyes, a glance of amusement at her shock, of support and, incredibly, of tenderness.  D'Anconia Copper No. 1 was a small cut on the face of the mountain, that looked as if a knife had made a few angular slashes, leaving shelves of rock, red as a wound, on the reddish-brown flank.  The sun beat down upon it. Dagny stood at the edge of a path, holding on to Galt's arm on one side and to Francisco's on the other, the wind blowing against their faces and out over the valley, two thousand feet below.  This-she thought, looking at the mine-was the story of human wealth written across the mountains: a few pine trees hung over the cut, contorted by the storms that had raged through the wilderness for centuries, six men worked on the shelves, and an inordinate amount of complex machinery traced delicate lines against the sky; the machinery did most of the work.  She noticed that Francisco was displaying his domain to Galt as much as to her, as much or more. "You haven't seen it since last year, John. . . . John, wait till you see it a year from now. I'll be through, outside, in just a few months-and then this will be my full-time job."  "Hell, no, John!" he said, laughing, in answer to a question-but she caught suddenly the particular quality of his glance whenever it rested on Galt: it was the quality she had seen in his eyes when he had stood in her room, clutching the edge of a table to outlive an unlivable moment; he had looked as if he were seeing someone before him; it was Galt, she thought; it was Galt's image that had carried him through.  Some part of her felt a dim dread: the effort which Francisco had made in that moment to accept her loss and his rival, as the payment demanded of him for his battle, had cost him so much that he was now unable to suspect the truth Dr. Akston had guessed. What will it do to him when he learns?-she wondered, and felt a bitter voice reminding her that there would, perhaps, never be any truth of this kind to learn.  Some part of her felt a dim tension as she watched the way Galt looked at Francisco: it was an open, simple, unreserved glance of surrender to an unreserved feeling. She felt the anxious wonder she had never fully named or dismissed: wonder whether this feeling would bring him down to the ugliness of renunciation.  But most of her mind seemed swept by some enormous sense of release, as if she were laughing at all doubts. Her glance kept going back over the path they had traveled to get here, over the two exhausting miles of a twisted trail that ran, like a precarious corkscrew, from the tip of her feet down to the floor of the valley. Her eyes kept studying it, her mind racing with some purpose of its own.  Brush, pines and a clinging carpet of moss went climbing from the green slopes far below, up the granite ledges. The moss and the brush vanished gradually, but the pines went on, struggling upward in thinning strands, till only a few dots of single trees were left, rising up the naked rock toward the white sunbursts of snow in the crevices at the peaks. She looked at the spectacle of the most ingenious mining machinery she had ever seen, then at the trail where the plodding hoofs and swaying shapes of mules provided the most ancient form of transportation.  "Francisco," she asked, pointing, "who designed the machines?"  "They're just adaptations of standard equipment."  "Who designed them?"  "I did. We don't have many men to spare. We had to make up for it."  "You're wasting an unconscionable amount of manpower and time, carting your ore on muleback. You ought to build a railroad down to the valley."  She was looking down and did not notice the sudden, eager shot of his glance to her face or the sound of caution in his voice: "I know it, but it's such a difficult job that the mine's output won't justify it at present."  "Nonsense! It's much simpler than it looks. There's a pass to the east where there's an easier grade and softer stone, I watched it on the way up, it wouldn't take so many curves, three miles of rail or less would do it."  She was pointing east, she did not notice the intensity with which the two men were watching her face.  "Just a narrow-gauge track is all you'll need . . . like the first railroads . . . that's where the first railroads started-at mines, only they were coal mines. . . . Look, do you see that ridge? There's plenty of clearance for a three-foot gauge, you wouldn't need to do any blasting or widening. Do you see where there's a slow rise for a stretch of almost half a mile? That would be no worse than a four per cent grade, any engine could manage it." She was speaking with a swift, bright certainty, conscious of nothing but the joy of performing her natural function in her natural world where nothing could take precedence over the act of offering a solution to a problem. "The road will pay for itself within three years. I think, at a rough glance, that the costliest part of the job will be a couple of steel trestles-and there's one spot where I might have to blast a tunnel, but it's only for a hundred feet or less. I'll need a steel trestle to throw the track across that gorge and bring it here, but it's not as hard as it looks-let me show you, have you got a piece of paper?"  She did not notice with what speed Galt produced a notebook and a pencil and thrust them into her hands-she seized them, as if she expected them to be there, as if she were giving orders on a construction site where details of this kind were not to delay her.  "Let me give you a rough idea of what I mean. If we drive diagonal piles into the rock"-she was sketching rapidly-"the actual steel span would be only six hundred feet long-it would cut off this last half mile of your corkscrew turns-I could have the rail laid in three months and-"  She stopped. When she looked up at their faces, the fire had gone out of hers. She crumpled her sketch and flung it aside into the red dust of the gravel. "Oh, what for?" she cried, the despair breaking out for the first time. "To build three miles of railroad and abandon a transcontinental system!"  The two men were looking at her, she saw no reproach in their faces, only a look of understanding which was almost compassion.  "I'm sorry," she said quietly, dropping her eyes.  "If you change your mind," said Francisco, "I'll hire you on the spot--or Midas will give you a loan in five minutes to finance that railroad, if you want to own it yourself."  She shook her head. "I can't . . ." she whispered, "not yet . . ."  She raised her eyes, knowing that they knew the nature of her despair and that it was useless to hide her struggle. "I've tried it once," she said. "I've tried to give it up . . . I know what it will mean . . .I'll think of it with every crosstie I'll see laid here, with every spike driven . . . I'll think of that other tunnel and . . . and of Nat Taggart's bridge. . . . Oh, if only I didn't have to hear about it! If only I could stay here and never know what they're doing to the railroad, and never learn when it goes!"  "You'll have to hear about it," said Galt; it was that ruthless tone, peculiarly his, which sounded implacable by being simple, devoid of any emotional value, save the quality of respect for facts. "You'll hear the whole course of the last agony of Taggart Transcontinental. You'll hear about every wreck. You'll hear about every discontinued train. You'll hear about every abandoned line. You'll hear about the collapse of the Taggart Bridge. Nobody stays in this valley except by a full, conscious choice based on a full, conscious knowledge of every fact involved in his decision. Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever."  She looked at him, her head lifted, knowing what chance he was rejecting. She thought that no man of the outer world would have said this to her at this moment-she thought of the world's code that worshipped white lies as an act of mercy-she felt a stab of revulsion against that code, suddenly seeing its full ugliness for the first time-she felt an enormous pride for the tight, clean face of the man before her-he saw the shape of her mouth drawn firm in self-control, yet softened by some tremulous emotion, while she answered quietly, "Thank you. You're right."  "You don't have to answer me now," he said. "You'll tell me when you've decided. There's still a week left."  "Yes," she said calmly, "just one more week."  He turned, picked up her crumpled sketch, folded it neatly and slipped it into his pocket.  "Dagny," said Francisco, "when you weigh your decision, consider the first time you quit, if you wish, but consider everything about it. In this valley, you won't have to torture yourself by shingling roofs and building paths that lead nowhere."  "Tell me," she asked suddenly, "how did you find out where I was, that time?”  He smiled. "It was John who told me. The destroyer, remember? You wondered why the destroyer had not sent anyone after you. But he had. It was he who sent me there."  "He sent you?"  "Yes."  "What did he say to you?"  "Nothing much. Why?"  "What did he say? Do you remember the exact words?"  "Yes, I do remember. He said, 'If you want your chance, take it. You've earned it.' I remember, because-" He turned to Galt with the untroubled frown of a slight, casual puzzle. "John, I never quite understood why you said it. Why that? Why-my chance?"  "Do you mind if I don't answer you now?"  "No, but-"  Someone hailed him from the ledges of the mine, and he went off swiftly, as if the subject required no further attention.  She was conscious of the long span of moments she took while turning her head to Galt. She knew that she would find him looking at her. She could read nothing in his eyes, except a hint of derision, as if he knew what answer she was seeking and that she would not find it in his face.  "You gave him a chance that you wanted?"  "I could have no chance till he'd had every chance possible to him."  "How did you know what he had earned?"  "I had been questioning him about you for ten years, every time I could, in every way, from every angle. No, he did not tell me-it was the way he spoke of you that did. He didn't want to speak, but he spoke too eagerly, eagerly and reluctantly together-and then I knew that it had not been just a childhood friendship. I knew how much he had given up for the strike and how desperately he hadn't given it up forever. I? I was merely questioning him about one of our most important future strikers-as I questioned him about many others."  The hint of derision remained in his eyes; he knew that she had wanted to hear this, but that this was not the answer to the one question she feared.  She looked from his face to Francisco's approaching figure, not hiding from herself any longer that her sudden, heavy, desolate anxiety was the fear that Galt might throw the three of them into the hopeless waste of self-sacrifice.  Francisco approached, looking at her thoughtfully, as if weighing some question of his own, but some question that gave a sparkle of reckless gaiety to his eyes. "Dagny, there's only one week left," he said. "If you decide to go back, it will be the last, for a long time," There was no reproach and no sadness in his voice, only some softened quality as sole evidence of emotion. "If you leave now-oh yes, you'll still come back -but it won't be soon. And I-in a few months, I'll come to live here permanently, so if you go, I won't see you again, perhaps for years. I'd like you to spend this last week with me. I'd like you to move to my house. As my guest, nothing else, for no reason, except that I'd like you to."  He said it simply, as if nothing were or could be hidden among the three of them. She saw no sign of astonishment in Galt's face. She felt some swift tightening in her chest, something hard, reckless and almost vicious that had the quality of a dark excitement driving her blindly into action.  "But I'm an employee," she said, with an odd smile, looking at Galt, "I have a job to finish."  "I won't hold you to it," said Galt, and she felt anger at the tone of his voice, a tone that granted her no hidden significance and answered nothing but the literal meaning of her words. "You can quit the job any time you wish. It's up to you."  "No, it isn't. I'm a prisoner here. Don't you remember? I'm to take orders. I have no preferences to follow, no wishes to express, no decisions to make. I want the decision to be yours."  "You want it to be mine?"  "Yes!"  "You've expressed a wish."  The mockery of his voice was in its seriousness-and she threw at him defiantly, not smiling, as if daring him to continue pretending that he did not understand: "All right. That's what I wish!"  He smiled, as at a child's complex scheming which he had long since seen through. "Very well." But he did not smile, as he said, turning to Francisco, "Then-no."  The defiance toward an adversary who was the sternest of teachers, was all that Francisco had read in her face. He shrugged, regretfully, but gaily. "You're probably right. If you can't prevent her from going back-nobody can."  She was not hearing Francisco's words. She was stunned by the magnitude of the relief that hit her at the sound of Galt's answer, a relief that told her the magnitude of the fear it swept away. She knew, only after it was over, what had hung for her on his decision; she knew that had his answer been different, it would have destroyed the valley in her eyes.  She wanted to laugh, she wanted to embrace them both and laugh with them in celebration., it did not seem to matter whether she would stay here or return to the world, a week was like an endless span of time, either course seemed flooded by an unchanging sunlight-and no struggle was hard, she thought, if this was the nature of existence. The relief did not come from the knowledge that he would not renounce her, nor from any assurance that she would win-the relief came from the certainty that he would always remain what he was.  "I don't know whether I'll go back to the world or not," she said soberly, but her voice was trembling with a subdued violence, which was pure gaiety. "I'm sorry that I'm still unable to make a decision. I'm certain of only one thing: that I won't be afraid to decide."  Francisco took the sudden brightness of her face as proof that the incident had been of no significance. But Galt understood; he glanced at her and the glance was part amusement, part contemptuous reproach.  He said nothing, until they were alone, walking down the trail to the valley. Then he glanced at her again, the amusement sharper in his eyes, and said, "You had to put me to a test in order to learn whether I'd fall to the lowest possible stage of altruism?"  She did not answer, but looked at him in open, undefensive admission.  He chuckled and looked away, and a few steps later said slowly, in the tone of a quotation, "Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever."  Part of the intensity of her relief-she thought, as she walked silently by his side-was the shock of a contrast: she had seen, with the sudden, immediate vividness of sensory perception, an exact picture of what the code of self-sacrifice would have meant, if enacted by the three of them. Galt, giving up the woman he wanted, for the sake of his friend, faking his greatest feeling out of existence and himself out of her life, no matter what the cost to him and to her, then dragging the rest of his years through the waste of the unreached and unfulfilled -she, turning for consolation to a second choice, faking a love she did not feel, being willing to fake, since her will to self-deceit was the essential required for Galt's self-sacrifice, then living out her years in hopeless longing, accepting, as relief for an unhealing wound, some moments of weary affection, plus the tenet that love is futile and happiness is not to be found on earth-Francisco, struggling in the elusive fog of a counterfeit reality, his life a fraud staged by the two who were dearest to him and most trusted, struggling to grasp what was missing from his happiness, struggling down the brittle scaffold of a lie over the abyss of the discovery that he was not the man she loved, but only a resented substitute, half-charity-patient, half-crutch, his perceptiveness becoming his danger and only his surrender to lethargic stupidity protecting the shoddy structure of his joy, struggling and giving up and settling into the dreary routine of the conviction that fulfillment is impossible to man-the three of them, who had had all the gifts of existence spread out before them, ending up as embittered hulks, who cry in despair that life is frustration-the frustration of not being able to make unreality real.  But this-she thought-was men's moral code in the outer world, a code that told them to act on the premise of one another's weakness, deceit and stupidity, and this was the pattern of their lives, this struggle through a fog of the pretended and unacknowledged, this belief that facts are not solid or final, this state where, denying any form to reality, men stumble through life, unreal and unformed, and die having never been born. Here-she thought, looking down through green branches at the glittering roofs of the valley-one dealt with men as clear and firm as sun and rocks, and the immense light-heartedness of her relief came from the knowledge that no battle was hard, no decision was dangerous where there was no soggy uncertainty, no shapeless evasion to encounter.  "Did it ever occur to you, Miss Taggart," said Galt, in the casual tone of an abstract discussion, but as if he had known her thoughts, "that there is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires-if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical? There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of another-if men understand that reality is an absolute not to be faked, that lies do not work, that the unearned cannot be had, that the undeserved cannot be given, that the destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't. The businessman who wishes to gain a market by throttling a superior competitor, the worker who wants a share of his employer's wealth, the artist who envies a rival's higher talent-they're all wishing facts out of existence, and destruction is the only means of their wish. If they pursue it, they will not achieve a market, a fortune or an immortal fame-they will merely destroy production, employment and art. A wish for the irrational is not to be achieved, whether the sacrificial victims are willing or not. But men will not cease to desire the impossible and will not lose their longing to destroy-so long as self-destruction and self-sacrifice are preached to them as the practical means of achieving the happiness of the recipients."  He glanced at her and added slowly, a slight emphasis as sole change in the impersonal tone of his voice, "No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy. You should have had more respect for him and for me than to fear what you had feared."  She did not answer, she felt as if a word would overfill the fullness of this moment, she merely turned to him with a look of acquiescence that was disarmed, childishly humble and would have been an apology but for its shining joy, He smiled-in amusement, in understanding, almost in comradeship of the things they shared and in sanction of the things she felt.  They went on in silence, and it seemed to her that this was a summer day out of a carefree youth she had never lived, it was just a walk through the country by two people who were free for the pleasure of motion and sunlight, with no unsolved burdens left to carry. Her sense of lightness blended with the weightless sense of walking downhill, as if she needed no effort to walk, only to restrain herself from flying, and she walked, fighting the speed of the downward pull, her body leaning back, the wind blowing her skirt like a sail to brake her motion.  They parted at the bottom of the trail; he went to keep an appointment with Midas Mulligan, while she went to Hammond's Market with a list of items for the evening's dinner as the sole concern of her world.  His wife-she thought, letting herself hear consciously the word Dr. Akston had not pronounced, the word she had long since felt, but never named-for three weeks she had been his wife in every sense but one, and that final one was still to be earned, but this much was real and today she could permit herself to know it, to feel it, to live with that one thought for this one day.  The groceries, which Lawrence Hammond was lining up at her order on the polished counter of his store, had never appeared to her as such shining objects-and, intent upon them, she was only half-conscious of some disturbing element, of something that was wrong but that her mind was too full to notice. She noticed it only when she saw Hammond pause, frown and stare upward, at the sky beyond his open store front.  In time with his words: "I think somebody's trying to repeat your stunt, Miss Taggart," she realized that it was the sound of an airplane overhead and that it had been there for some time, a sound which was not to be heard in the valley after the first of this month.  They rushed out to the street. The small silver cross of a plane was circling above the ring of mountains, like a sparkling dragonfly about to brush the peaks with its wings.  "What does he think he's doing?" said Lawrence Hammond.  There were people at the doors of the shops and standing still all down the street, looking up.  "Is . . . is anyone expected?" she asked and was astonished by the anxiety of her own voice.  "No," said Hammond. "Everyone who's got any business here is here." He did not sound disturbed, but grimly curious.  The plane was now a small dash, like a silver cigarette, streaking against the flanks of the mountains: it had dropped lower.  "Looks like a private monoplane," said Hammond, squinting against the sun. "Not an army model."  "Will the ray screen hold out?" she asked tensely, in a tone of defensive resentment against the approach of an enemy.  He chuckled. "Hold out?"  "Will he see us?"  "That screen is safer than an underground vault, Miss Taggart. As you ought to know."  The plane rose, and for a moment it was only a bright speck, like a bit of paper blown by the wind-it hovered uncertainly., then dropped down again into another circling spiral.  "What in hell is he after?" said Hammond.  Her eyes shot suddenly to his face.  "He's looking for something," said Hammond. "What?"  "Is there a telescope somewhere?"  "Why-yes, at the airfield, but-" He was about to ask what was the matter with her voice-but she was running across the road, down the path to the airfield, not knowing that she was running, driven by a reason she had no time and no courage to name.  She found Dwight Sanders at the small telescope of the control tower; he was watching the plane attentively, with a puzzled frown.  "Let me see it!" she snapped.  She clutched the metal tube, she pressed her eye to the lens, her hand guiding the tube slowly to follow the plane-then he saw that her hand had stopped, but her fingers did not open and her face remained bent over the telescope, pressed to the lens, until he looked closer and saw that the lens was pressed to her forehead.  "What's the matter, Miss Taggart?"  She raised her head slowly.  "Is it anyone you know, Miss Taggart?"  She did not answer. She hurried away, her steps rushing with the zigzagging aimlessness of uncertainty-she dared not run, but she had to escape, she had to hide, she did not know whether she was afraid to be seen by the men around her or by the plane above-the plane whose silver wings bore the number that belonged to Hank Rearden.  She stopped when she stumbled over a rock and fell and noticed that she had been running. She was on a small ledge in the cliffs above the airfield, hidden from the sight of the town, open to the view of the sky. She rose, her hands groping for support along a granite wall, feeling the warmth of the sun on the rock under her palms-she stood, her back pressed to the wall, unable to move or to take her eyes off the plane.  The plane was circling slowly, dipping down, then rising again, struggling-she thought-as she had struggled, to distinguish the sight of a wreck in a hopeless spread of crevices and boulders, an elusive spread neither clear enough to abandon nor to survey. He was searching for the wreck of her plane, he had not given up, and whatever the three weeks of it had cost him, whatever he felt, the only evidence he would give to the world and his only answer was this steady, insistent, monotonous drone of a motor carrying a fragile craft over every deadly foot of an inaccessible chain of mountains.  Through the brilliant purity of the summer air, the plane seemed intimately close, she could see it rock on precarious currents and bank under the thrusts of wind. She could see, and it seemed impossible that so clear a sight was closed to his eyes. The whole of the valley lay below him, flooded by sunlight, flaming with glass panes and green lawns, screaming to be seen-the end of his tortured quest, the fulfillment of more than his wishes, not the wreck of her plane and her body, but her living presence and his freedom-all that he was seeking or had ever sought was now spread open before him, open and waiting, his to be reached by a straight-line dive through the pure, clear air-his and asking nothing of him but the capacity to see. "Hank!" she screamed, waving her arms in desperate signal. "Hank!"  She fell back against the rock, knowing that she had no way to reach him, that she had no power to give him sight, that no power on earth could pierce that screen except his own mind and vision.  Suddenly and for the first time, she felt the screen, not as the most intangible, but as the most grimly absolute barrier in the world. Slumped against the rock, she watched, in silent resignation, the hopeless circles of the plane's struggle and its motor's uncomplaining cry for help, a cry she had no way to answer. The plane swooped down abruptly, but it was only the start of its final rise, it cut a swift diagonal across the mountains and shot into the open sky. Then, as if caught in the spread of a lake with no shores and no exit, it went sinking slowly and drowning out of sight.  She thought, in bitter compassion, of how much he had failed to see. And I?-she thought. If she left the valley, the screen would close for her as tightly, Atlantis would descend under a vault of rays more impregnable than the bottom of the ocean, and she, too, would be left to struggle for the things she had not known how to see, she, too, would be left to fight a mirage of primordial savagery, while the reality of all that she desired would never come again within her reach, But the pull of the outer world, the pull that drew her to follow the plane, was not the image of Hank Rearden-she knew that she could not return to him, even if she returned to the world-the pull was the vision of Hank Rearden's courage and the courage of all those still fighting to stay alive. He would not give up the search for her plane, when all others had long since despaired, as he would not give up his mills, as he would not give up any goal he had chosen if a single chance was left. Was she certain that no chance remained for the world of Taggart Transcontinental? Was she certain that the terms of the battle were such that she could not care to win? They were right, the men of Atlantis, they were right to vanish if they knew that they left no value behind them-but until and unless she saw that no chance was untaken and no battle unfought, she had no right to remain among them. This was the question that had lashed her for weeks, but had not driven her to a glimpse of the answer.  She lay awake, through the hours of that night, quietly motionless, following-like an engineer and like Hank Rearden-a process of dispassionate, precise, almost mathematical consideration, with no regard for cost or feeling. The agony which he lived in his plane, she lived it in a soundless cube of darkness, searching, but finding no answer. She looked at the inscriptions on the walls of her room, faintly visible in patches of starlight, but the help those men had called in their darkest hour was not hers to call.  "Yes or no, Miss Taggart?"  She looked at the faces of the four men in the soft twilight of Mulligan's living room: Galt, whose face had the serene, impersonal attentiveness of a scientist-Francisco, whose face was made expressionless by the hint of a smile, the kind of smile that would fit either answer-Hugh Akston who looked compassionately gentle-Midas Mulligan, who had asked the question with no touch of rancor in his voice. Somewhere two thousand miles away, at this sunset hour, the page of a calendar was springing into light over the roofs of New York, saying: June 28-and it seemed to her suddenly that she was seeing it, as if it were hanging over the heads of these men.  "I have one more day," she said steadily. "Will you let me have it? I think I've reached my decision, but I am not fully certain of it and I'll need all the certainty possible to me."  "Of course," said Mulligan. "You have, in fact, until morning of the day after tomorrow. We'll wait."  "We'll wait after that as well," said Hugh Akston, "though in your absence, if that be necessary."  She stood by the window, facing them, and she felt a moment's satisfaction in the knowledge that she stood straight, that her hands did not tremble, that her voice sounded as controlled, uncomplaining and unpitying as theirs; it gave her a moment's feeling of a bond to them.  "If any part of your uncertainty," said Galt, "is a conflict between your heart and your mind-follow your mind."  "Consider the reasons which make us certain that we are right," said Hugh Akston, "but not the fact that we are certain. If you are not convinced, ignore our certainty. Don't be tempted to substitute our judgment for your own."  "Don't rely on our knowledge of what's best for your future," said Mulligan. "We do know, but it can't be best until you know it."  "Don't consider our interests or desires," said Francisco. "You have no duty to anyone but yourself."  She smiled, neither sadly nor gaily, thinking that none of it was the sort of advice she would have been given in the outer world. And knowing how desperately they wished to help her where no help was possible, she felt it was her part to give them reassurance.  "I forced my way here," she said quietly, "and I was to bear responsibility for the consequences. I'm bearing it."  Her reward was to see Galt smile; the smile was like a military decoration bestowed upon her.  Looking away, she remembered suddenly Jeff Allen, the tramp aboard the Comet, in the moment when she had admired him for attempting to tell her that he knew where he was going, to spare her the burden of his aimlessness. She smiled faintly, thinking that she had now experienced it in both roles and knew that no action could be lower or more futile than for one person to throw upon another the burden of his abdication of choice. She felt an odd calm, almost a confident repose; she knew that it was tension, but the tension of a great clarity. She caught herself thinking: She's functioning well in an emergency, I'll be all right with her-and realized that she was thinking of herself.  "Let it go till day after tomorrow, Miss Taggart," said Midas Mulligan. "Tonight you're still here."  "Thank you," she said.  She remained by the window, while they went on discussing the valley's business; it was their closing conference of the month. They had just finished dinner-and she thought of her first dinner in this house a month ago; she was wearing, as she had then worn, the gray suit that belonged in her office, not the peasant skirt that had been so easy to wear in the sun. I'm still here tonight, she thought, her hand pressed possessively to the window sill.  The sun had not yet vanished beyond the mountains, but the sky was an even, deep, deceptively clear blue that blended with the blue of invisible clouds into a single spread, hiding the sun; only the edges of the clouds were outlined by a thin thread of flame, and it looked like a glowing, twisted net of neon tubing, she thought . . . like a chart of winding rivers . . . like . . . like the map of a railroad traced in white fire on the sky.  She heard Mulligan giving Galt the names of those who were not returning to the outer world. "We have jobs for all of them," said Mulligan. "In fact, there's only ten or twelve men who're going back this year-mostly to finish off, convert whatever they own and come here permanently. I think this was our last vacation month, because before another year is over we'll all be living in this valley."  "Good," said Galt.  "We'll have to, from the way things are going outside."  "Yes."  "Francisco," said Mulligan, "you'll come back in a few months?"  "In November at the latest," said Francisco. "I'll send you word by short wave, when I'm ready to come back-will you turn the furnace on in my house?"  "I will," said Hugh Akston. "And I'll have your supper ready for you when you arrive."  "John, I take it for granted," said Mulligan, "that you're not returning to New York this time."  Galt took a moment to glance at him, then answered evenly, "I have not decided it yet."  She noticed the shocked swiftness with which Francisco and Mulligan bent forward to stare at him-and the slowness with which Hugh Akston's glance moved to his face; Akston did not seem to be astonished.  "You're not thinking of going back to that hell for another year, are you?" said Mulligan.  "I am."  "But-good God, John!-what for?"  "I'll tell you, when I've decided."  "But there's nothing left there for you to do. We got everybody we knew of or can hope to know of. Our list is completed, except for Hank Rearden-and we'll get him before the year is over-and Miss Taggart, if she so chooses. That's all. Your job is done. There's nothing to look for, out there-except the final crash, when the roof comes down on their heads."  "I know it."  "John, yours is the one head I don't want to be there when it happens."  "You've never had to worry about me."  "But don't you realize what stage they're coming to? They're only one step away from open violence-hell, they've taken the step and sealed and declared it long ago!-but in one more moment they'll see the full reality of what they've taken, exploding in their damned faces-plain, open, blind, arbitrary, blood shedding violence, running amuck, hitting anything and anyone at random. That's what I don't want to see you in the midst of."  "I can take care of myself."  "John, there's no reason for you to take the risk," said Francisco.  "What risk?"  "The looters are. worried about the men who've disappeared. They're suspecting something. You, of all people, shouldn't stay there any longer. There's always a chance that they might discover just who and what you are."  "There's some chance. Not much."  "But there's no reason whatever to take it. There's nothing left that Ragnar and I can't finish."  Hugh Akston was watching them silently, leaning back in his chair; his face had that look of intensity, neither quite bitterness nor quite a smile, with which a man watches a progression that interests him, but that lags a few steps behind his vision.  "If I go back," said Galt, "it won't be for our work. It will be to win the only thing I want from the world for myself, now that the work is done. I've taken nothing from the world and I've wanted nothing. But there's one thing which it's still holding and which is mine and which I won't let it have. No, I don't intend to break my oath, I won't deal with the looters, I won't be of any value or help to anyone out there, neither to looters nor neutrals-nor scabs. If I go, it won't be for anyone's sake but mine-and I don't think I'm risking my life, but if I am-well, I'm now free to risk it."  He was not looking at her, but she had to turn away and stand pressed against the window frame, because her hands were trembling.  "But, John!" cried Mulligan, waving his arm at the valley, "if anything happens to you, what would we-" He stopped abruptly and guiltily.  Galt chuckled. "What were you about to say?" Mulligan waved his hand sheepishly, in a gesture of dismissal. "Were you about to say that if anything happens to me, I'll die as the worst failure in the world?"  "All right," said Mulligan guiltily, "I won't say it. I won't say that we couldn't get along without you-we can, I won't beg you to stay here for our sake-I didn't think I'd ever revert to that rotten old plea, but, boy!-what a temptation it was, I can almost see why people do it. I know that whatever it is you want, if you wish to risk your life, that's all there is to it-but I'm thinking only that it's . . . oh God, John, it's such a valuable life!"  Galt smiled. "I know it. That's why I don't think I'm risking it-I think I'll win."  Francisco was now silent, he was watching Galt intently, with a frown of wonder, not as if he had found an answer, but as if he had suddenly glimpsed a question.  "Look, John," said Mulligan, "since you haven't decided whether you'll go-you haven't decided it yet, have you?"  "No, not yet."  "Since you haven't, would you let me remind you of a few things, just for you to consider?"  "Go ahead."  "It's the chance dangers that I'm afraid of-the senseless, unpredictable dangers of a world falling apart. Consider the physical risks of complex machinery in the hands of blind fools and fear-crazed cowards. Just think of their railroads-you'd be taking a chance on some such horror as that Winston tunnel incident every time you stepped aboard a train-and there will be more incidents of that kind, coming faster and faster. They'll reach the stage where no day will pass without a major wreck."  "I know it."  "And the same will be happening in every other industry, wherever machines are used-the machines which they thought could replace our minds. Plane crashes, oil tank explosions, blast-furnace break-outs, high-tension wire electrocutions, subway cave-ins and trestle collapses -they'll see them all. The very machines that had made their life so safe, will now make it a continuous peril."  "I know it."  "I know that you know it, but have you considered it in every specific detail? Have you allowed yourself to visualize it? I want you to see the exact picture of what it is that you propose to enter-before you decide whether anything can justify your entering it. You know that the cities will be hit worst of all. The cities were made by the railroads and will go with them."  "That's right."  "When the rails are cut, the city of New York will starve in two days. That's all the supply of food it's got. It's fed by a continent three thousand miles long. How will they carry food to New York? By directive and oxcart? But first, before it happens, they'll go through the whole of the agony-through the shrinking, the shortages, the hunger riots, the stampeding violence in the midst of the growing stillness."  "They will."  "They'll lose their airplanes first, then their automobiles, then their trucks, then their horse carts."  "They will."  "Their factories will stop, then their furnaces and their radios. Then their electric light system will go."  "It will."  "There's only a worn thread holding that continent together. There will be one train a day, then one train a week-then the Taggart Bridge will collapse and-"  "No, it won't!"  It was her voice and they whirled to her. Her face was white, but calmer than it had been when she had answered them last.  Slowly, Galt rose to his feet and inclined his head, as in acceptance of a verdict. "You've made your decision," he said.  "I have."  "Dagny," said Hugh Akston, "I'm sorry." He spoke softly, with effort, as if his words were struggling and failing to fill the silence of the room. "I wish it were possible not to see this happen, I would have preferred anything-except to see you stay here by default of the courage of your convictions."  She spread her hands, palms out, her arms at her sides, in a gesture of simple frankness, and said, addressing them all, her manner so calm that she could afford to show emotion, "I want you to know this: I have wished it were possible for me to die in one more month, so that I could spend it in this valley. This is how much I've wanted to remain. But so long as I choose to go on living, I can't desert a battle which I think is mine to fight."  "Of course," said Mulligan respectfully, "if you still think it."  "If you want to know the one reason that's taking me back, I’ll tell you; I cannot bring myself to abandon to destruction all the greatness of the world, all that which was mine and yours, which was made by us and is still ours by right-because I cannot believe that men can refuse to see, that they can remain blind and deaf to us forever, when the truth is ours and their lives depend on accepting it. They still love their lives-and that is the uncorrupted remnant of their minds. So long as men desire to live, I cannot lose my battle."  "Do they?" said Hugh Akston softly. "Do they desire it? No, don't answer me now. I know that the answer was the hardest thing for any of us to grasp and to accept. Just take that question back with you, as the last premise left for you to check."  "You're leaving as our friend," said Midas Mulligan, "and we'll be fighting everything you'll do, because we know you're wrong, but it's not you that we'll be damning."  "You'll come back," said Hugh Akston, "because yours is an error of knowledge, not a moral failure, not an act of surrender to evil, but only the last act of being victim to your own virtue. We'll wait for you-and, Dagny, when you come back, you will have discovered that there need never be any conflict among your desires, nor so tragic a clash of values as the one you've borne so well."  "Thank you," she said, closing her eyes.  "We must discuss the conditions of your departure," said Galt; he spoke in the dispassionate manner of an executive. "First, you must give us your word that you will not disclose our secret or any part of it-neither our cause nor our existence nor this valley nor your whereabouts for the past month-to anyone in the outer world, not at any time or for any purpose whatsoever."  "I give you my word."  "Second, you must never attempt to find this valley again. You are not to come here uninvited. Should you break the first condition, it will not place us in serious danger. Should you break the second-it will. It is not our policy ever to be at the arbitrary mercy of the good faith of another person, or at the mercy of a promise that cannot be enforced. Nor can we expect you to place our interests above your own. Since you believe that your course is right, the day may come when you may find it necessary to lead our enemies to this valley. We shall, therefore, leave you no means to do it. You will be taken out of the valley by plane, blindfolded, and you will be flown a distance sufficient to make it impossible for you ever to retrace the course."  She inclined her head. "You are right."  "Your plane has been repaired. Do you wish to reclaim it by signing a draft on your account at the Mulligan Bank?"  "No."  "Then we shall hold it, until such time as you choose to pay for it. Day after tomorrow, I will take you in my plane to a point outside the valley and leave you within reach of further transportation."  She inclined her head. "Very well."  It had grown dark, when they left Midas Mulligan's. The trail back to Galt's house led across the valley, past Francisco's cabin, and the three of them walked home together. A few squares of lighted  windows hung scattered through the darkness, and the first streams of mist were weaving slowly across the panes, like shadows cast by a distant sea.  They walked in silence, but the sound of their steps, blending into a single, steady beat, was like a speech to be grasped and not to be uttered in any other form.  After a while, Francisco said, "It changes nothing, it only makes the span a little longer, and the last stretch is always the hardest-but it's the last."  "I will hope so," she said. In a moment, she repeated quietly, "The last is the hardest." She turned to Galt. "May I make one request?"  "Yes."  "Will you let me go tomorrow?"  "If you wish."  When Francisco spoke again, moments later, it was as if he were addressing the unnamed wonder in her mind; his voice had the tone of answering, a question: "Dagny, all three of us are in love"-she jerked her head to him-"with the same thing, no matter what its forms. Don't wonder why you feel no breach among us. You'll be one of us, so long as you'll remain in love with your rails and your engines-and they'll lead you back to us, no matter how many times you lose your way. The only man never to be redeemed is the man without passion."  "Thank you," she said softly.  "For what?"  "For . . . for the way you sound."  "How do I sound? Name it, Dagny."  "You sound . . . as if you're happy."  "I am-in exactly the same way you are. Don't tell me what you feel. I know it. But, you see, the measure of the hell you're able to endure is the measure of your love. The hell I couldn't bear to witness would be to see you being indifferent."  She nodded silently, unable to name as joy any part of the things she felt, yet feeling that he was right.  Clots of mist were drifting, like smoke, across the moon, and in the diffused glow she could not distinguish the expressions of their faces, as she walked between them: the only expressions to perceive were the straight silhouettes of their bodies, the unbroken sound of then- steps and her own feeling that she wished to walk on and on, a feeling she could not define, except that it was neither doubt nor pain, When they approached his cabin, Francisco stopped, the gesture of his hand embracing them both as he pointed to his door. "Will you come in -since it's to be our last night together for some time? Let's have a drink to that future of which all three of us are certain."  "Are we?" she asked.  "Yes," said Galt, "we are."  She looked at their faces when Francisco switched on the light in his house. She could not define their expressions, it was not happiness or any emotion pertaining to joy, their faces were taut and solemn, but it was a glowing solemnity-she thought-if this were possible, and the odd glow she felt within her, told her that her own face had the same look.  Francisco reached for three glasses from a cupboard, but stopped, as at a sudden thought. He placed one glass on the table, then reached for the two silver goblets of Sebastian d'Anconia and placed them beside it.  "Are you going straight to New York, Dagny?" he asked, in the calm, unstrained tone of a host, bringing out a bottle of old wine, "Yes," she answered as calmly.  "I'm flying to Buenos Aires day after tomorrow," he said, uncorking the bottle. "I'm not sure whether I'll be back in New York later, but if I am, it will be dangerous for you to see me."  "I won't care about that," she said, "unless you feel that I'm not entitled to see you any longer."  "True, Dagny. You're not. Not in New York."  He was pouring the wine and he glanced up at Galt. "John, when will you decide whether you're going back or staying here?"  Galt looked straight at him, then said slowly, in the tone of a man who knows all the consequences of his words, "I have decided, Francisco. I'm going back."  Francisco's hand stopped. For a long moment, he was seeing nothing but Galt's face. Then his eyes moved to hers. He put the bottle down and he did not step back, but it was as if his glance drew back to a wide range, to include them both, "But of course," he said.  He looked as if he had moved still farther and were now seeing the whole spread of their years; his voice had an even, uninflected sound, quality that matched the size of the vision.  "I knew it twelve years ago," he said. "I knew it before you could have known, and it's I who should have seen that you would see. That night, when you called us to New York, I thought of it then as"-he was speaking to Galt, but his eyes moved to Dagny-"as everything that you were seeking . . . everything you told us to live for or die, if necessary. I should have seen that you would think it, too. It could not have been otherwise. It is as it had-and ought-to be. It was set then, twelve years ago." He looked at Galt and chuckled softly. "And you say that it's I who've taken the hardest beating?"  He turned with too swift a movement-then, too slowly, as if in deliberate emphasis, he completed the task of pouring the wine, filling the three vessels on the table. He picked up the two silver goblets, looked down at them for the pause of an instant, then extended one to Dagny, the other to Galt.  "Take it," he said. "You've earned it-and it wasn't chance."  Galt took the goblet from his hand, but it was as if the acceptance was done by their eyes as they looked at each other.  "I would have given anything to let it be otherwise," said Galt, "except that which is beyond giving."  She held her goblet, she looked at Francisco and she let him see her eyes glance at Galt. "Yes," she said in the tone of an answer, "But I have not earned it-and what you've paid, I'm paying it now, and I don't know whether I'll ever earn enough to hold clear title, but if hell is the price-and the measure-then let me be the greediest of the three of us."  As they drank, as she stood, her eyes closed, feeling the liquid motion of the wine inside her throat, she knew that for all three of them this was the most tortured-and the most exultant-moment they had ever reached.  She did not speak to Galt, as they walked down the last stretch of the trail to his house. She did not turn her head to him, feeling that even a glance would be too dangerous. She felt, in their silence, both the calm of a total understanding and the tension of the knowledge that they were not to name the things they understood.  But she faced him, when they were in his living room, with full confidence and as if in sudden certainty of a right-the certainty that she would not break and that it was now safe to speak. She said evenly, neither as plea nor as triumph, merely as the statement of a fact, "You are going back to the outer world because I will be there."  "Yes."  "I do not want you to go."  "You have no choice about it."  "You are going for my sake."  "No, for mine."  "Will you allow me to see you there?"  "No."  "I am not to see you?"  "No."  "I am not to know where you are or what you do?"  "You're not."  "Will you be watching me, as you did before?"  "More so."  "Is your purpose to protect me?"  "No."  "What is it, then?"  "To be there on the day when you decide to join us."  She looked at him attentively, permitting herself no other reaction, but as if groping for an answer to the first point she had not fully understood.  "All the rest of us will be gone," he explained. "It will become too dangerous to remain. I will remain as your last key, before the door of this valley closes altogether."  "Oh!" She choked it off before it became a moan. Then, regaining the manner of impersonal detachment, she asked, "Suppose I were to tell you that my decision is final and that I am never to join you?"  "It would be a lie."  "Suppose I were now to decide that I wish to make it final and to stand by it, no matter what the future?"  "No matter what future evidence you observe and what convictions you form?"  "Yes."  "That would be worse than a lie."  "You are certain that I have made the wrong decision?"  "I am."  "Do you believe that one must be responsible for one's own errors?"  "I do."  "Then why aren't you letting me bear the consequences of mine?"  "I am and you will."  "If I find, when it is too late, that I want to return to this valley -why should you have to bear the risk of keeping that door open to me?"  "I don't have to. I wouldn't do it if I had no selfish end to gain."  "What selfish end?"  "I want you here."  She closed her eyes and inclined her head in open admission of defeat-defeat in the argument and in her attempt to face calmly the full meaning of that which she was leaving.  Then she raised her head and, as if she had absorbed his kind of frankness, she looked at him, hiding neither her suffering nor her longing nor her calm, knowing that all three were in her glance.  His face was as it had been in the sunlight of the moment when she had seen it for the first time: a face of merciless serenity and unflinching perceptiveness, without pain or fear or guilt. She thought that were it possible for her to stand looking at him, at the straight lines of his eyebrows over the dark green eyes, at the curve of the shadow underscoring the shape of his mouth, at the poured-metal planes of his skin in the open collar of his shirt and the casually immovable posture of his legs-she would wish to spend the rest of her life on this spot and in this manner. And in the next instant she knew that if her wish were granted, the contemplation would lose all meaning, because she would have betrayed all the things that gave it value.  Then, not as memory, but as an experience of the present, she felt herself reliving the moment when she had stood at the window of her room in New York, looking at a fogbound city, at the unattainable shape of Atlantis sinking out of reach-and she knew that she was now seeing the answer to that moment. She felt, not the words she had then addressed to the city, but that untranslated sensation from which the words had come: You, whom I have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon- Aloud, she said, "I want you to know this. I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle"-you whose presence I had always felt in the streets of the city, the wordless voice within her was saying, and whose world I had wanted to build-"Now I know that I was fighting for this valley"-it is my love for you that had kept me moving-"It was this valley that I saw as possible and would exchange for nothing less and would not give up to a mindless evil"-my love and my hope to reach you and my wish to be worthy of you on the day when I would stand before you face to face-"I am going back to fight for this valley-to release it from its underground, to regain for it its full and rightful realm, to let the earth belong to you in fact, as it does in spirit-and to meet you again on the day when I'm able to deliver to you the whole of the world-or, if I fail, to remain in exile from this valley to the end of my life"-but what is left of my life will still be yours, and I will go on in your name, even though it is a name I'm never to pronounce, I will go on serving you, even though I'm never to win, I will go on, to be worthy of you on the day when I would have met you, even though I won't-"I will fight for it, even if I have to fight against you, even if you damn me as a traitor . . . even if I am never to see you again."  He had stood without moving, he had listened with no change in his face, only his eyes had looked at her as if he were hearing every word, even the words she had not pronounced. He answered, with the same look, as if the look were holding some circuit not yet to be broken, his voice catching some tone of hers, as if in signal of the same code, a voice with no sign of emotion except in the spacing of the words: "If you fail, as men have failed in their quest for a vision that should have been possible, yet has remained forever beyond their reach-if, like them, you come to think that one's highest values are not to be attained and one's greatest vision is not to be made real-don't damn this earth, as they did, don't damn existence. You have seen the Atlantis they were seeking, it is here, it exists-but one must enter it naked and alone, with no rags from the falsehoods of centuries, with the purest clarity of mind-not an innocent heart, but that which is much rarer: an intransigent mind-as one's only possession and key. You will not enter it until you learn that you do not need to convince or to conquer the world. When you learn it, you will see that through all the years of your struggle, nothing had barred you from Atlantis and there were no chains to hold you, except the chains you were willing to wear. Through all those years, that which you most wished to win was waiting for you"-he looked at her as if he were speaking to the unspoken words in her mind-"waiting as unremittingly as you were fighting, as passionately, as desperately-but with a greater certainty than yours. Go out to continue your struggle. Go on carrying unchosen burdens, taking undeserved punishment and believing that justice can be served by the offer of your own spirit to the most unjust of tortures. But in your worst and darkest moments, remember that you have seen another kind of world. Remember that you can reach it whenever you choose to see. Remember that it will be waiting and that it's real, it's possible-it's yours."  Then, turning his head a little, his voice as clear, but his eyes breaking the circuit, he asked, "What time do you wish to leave tomorrow?"  "Oh . . . ! As early as it will be convenient for you."  "Then have breakfast ready at seven and we'll take off at eight."  "I will."  He reached into his pocket and extended to her a small, shining disk which she could not distinguish at first. He dropped it on the palm of her hand: it was a five-dollar gold piece.  "The last of your wages for the month," he said.  Her fingers snapped closed over the coin too tightly, but she answered calmly and tonelessly, "Thank you."  "Good night, Miss Taggart."  "Good night."  She did not sleep in the hours that were still left to her. She sat on the floor of her room, her face pressed to the bed, feeling nothing but the sense of his presence beyond the wall. At times, she felt as if he were before her, as if she were sitting at his feet. She spent her last night with him in this manner.  She left the valley as she had come, carrying away nothing that belonged to it. She left the few possessions she had acquired-her peasant skirt, a blouse, an apron, a few pieces of underwear-folded neatly in a drawer of the chest in her room. She looked at them for a moment, before she closed the drawer, thinking that if she came back, she would, perhaps, still find them there. She took nothing with her but the five-dollar gold piece and the band of tape still wound about her ribs.  The sun touched the peaks of the mountains, drawing a shining circle as a frontier of the valley-when she climbed aboard the plane.  She leaned back in the seat beside him and looked at Galt's face bent over her, as it had been bent when she had opened her eyes on the first morning. Then she closed her eyes and felt his hands tying the blindfold across her face.  She heard the blast of the motor, not as sound, but as the shudder of an explosion inside her body; only it felt like a distant shudder, as if the person feeling it would have been hurt if she were not so far away.  She did not know when the wheels left the ground or when the plane crossed the circle of the peaks. She lay still, with the pounding beat of the motor as her only perception of space, as if she were carried inside a current of sound that rocked once in a while. The sound came from his engine, from the control of his hands on the wheel; she held onto that; the rest was to be endured, not resisted.  She lay still, her legs stretched forward, her hands on the arms of the seat, with no sense of motion, not even her own, to give her a sense of time, with no space, no sight, no future, with the night of closed eyelids under the pressure of the cloth-and with the knowledge of his presence beside her as her single, unchanging reality, They did not speak. Once, she said suddenly, "Mr. Galt."  "Yes?"  "No. Nothing. I just wanted to know whether you were still there."  "I will always be there."  She did not know for how many miles the memory of the sound of words seemed like a small landmark rolling away into the distance, then vanishing. Then there was nothing but the stillness of an indivisible present.  She did not know whether a day had passed or an hour, when she felt the downward, plunging motion which meant that they were about to land or to crash; the two possibilities seemed equal to her mind.  She felt the jolt of the wheels against the ground as an oddly delayed sensation: as if some fraction of time had gone to make her believe it.  She felt the running streak of jerky motion, then the jar of the stop and of silence, then the touch of his hands on her hair, removing the blindfold.  She saw a glaring sunlight, a stretch of scorched weeds going off into the sky, with no mountains to stop it, a deserted highway and the hazy outline of a town about a mile away. She glanced at her watch: forty seven minutes ago, she had still been in the valley.  "You'll find a Taggart station there," he said, pointing at the town, "and you'll be able to take a train."  She nodded, as if she understood.  He did not follow her as she descended to the ground. He leaned across the wheel toward the open door of the plane, and they looked at each other. She stood, her face raised to him, a faint wind stirring her hair, the straight line of her shoulders sculptured by the trim suit of a business executive amidst the flat immensity of an empty prairie.  The movement of his hand pointed east, toward some invisible cities.  "Don't look for me out there," he said. "You will not find me-until you want me for what I am. And when you'll want me, I'll be the easiest man to find."  She heard the sound of the door falling closed upon him; it seemed louder than the blast of the propeller that followed. She watched the run of the plane's wheels and the trail of weeds left flattened behind them.  Then she saw a strip of sky between wheels and weeds.  She looked around her. A reddish haze of heat hung over the shapes of the town in the distance, and the shapes seemed to sag under a rusty tinge; above their roofs, she saw the remnant of a crumbled smokestack. She saw a dry, yellow scrap rustling faintly in the weeds beside her: it was a piece of newspaper. She looked at these objects blankly, unable to make them real.  She raised her eyes to the plane. She watched the spread of its wings grow smaller in the sky, draining away in its wake the sound of its motor. It kept rising, wings first, like a long silver cross; then the curve of its motion went following the sky, dropping slowly closer to the earth; then it seemed not to move any longer, but only to shrink. She watched it like a star in the process of extinction, while it shrank from cross to dot to a burning spark which she was no longer certain of seeing. When she saw that the spread of the sky was strewn with such sparks all over, she knew that the plane was gone.