CHAPTER III ANTI-GREED

"What am I doing here?" asked Dr. Robert Stadler. "Why was I asked to come here? I demand an explanation. I'm not accustomed to being dragged halfway across a continent without rhyme, reason or notice."  Dr, Floyd Ferris smiled. "Which makes me appreciate it all the more that you did come, Dr. Stadler." It was impossible to tell whether his voice had a tone of gratitude-or of gloating.  The sun was beating down upon them and Dr. Stadler felt a streak of perspiration oozing along his temple. He could not hold an angrily, embarrassingly private discussion in the middle of a crowd streaming to fill the benches of the grandstand around them-the discussion which he had tried and failed to obtain for the last three days. It occurred to him that that was precisely the reason why his meeting with Dr. Ferris had been delayed to this moment; but he brushed the thought aside, just as he brushed some insect buzzing to reach his wet temple.  "Why was I unable to get in touch with you?" he asked. The fraudulent weapon of sarcasm now seemed to sound less effective than ever, but it was Dr. Stadler's only weapon: "Why did you find it necessary to send me messages on official stationery worded in a style proper, I'm sure, for Army"-orders, he was about to say, but didn't-"communications, but certainly not for scientific correspondence?"  "It is a government matter," said Dr. Ferris gently.  "Do you realize that I was much too busy and that this meant an interruption of my work?"  "Oh yes," said Dr. Ferris noncommittally.  "Do you realize that I could have refused to come?"  "But you didn't," said Dr. Ferris softly.  "Why was I given no explanation? Why didn't you come for me in person, instead of sending those incredible young hooligans with their mysterious gibberish that sounded half-science, half-pulp-magazine?"  "I was too busy," said Dr. Ferris blandly.  "Then would you mind telling me what you're doing in the middle of a plain in Iowa-and what I'm doing here, for that matter?" He waved contemptuously at the dusty horizon of an empty prairie and at the three wooden grandstands. The stands were newly erected, and the wood, too, seemed to perspire; he could see drops of resin sparkling in the sun.  "We are about to witness an historical event, Dr. Stadler. An occasion which will become a milestone on the road of science, civilization, social welfare and political adaptability." Dr. Ferris' voice had the tone of a public relations man's memorized handout. "The turning point of a new era."  "What event? What new era?"  "As you will observe, only the most distinguished citizens, the cream of our intellectual elite, have been chosen for the special privilege of witnessing this occasion. We could not omit your name, could we?-and we feel certain, of course, that we can count on your loyalty and cooperation."  He could not catch Dr. Ferris' eyes. The grandstands were rapidly filling with people, and Dr. Ferris kept interrupting himself constantly to wave to nondescript newcomers, whom Dr. Stadler had never seen before, but who were personages, as he could tell by the particular shade of gaily informal deference in Ferns' waving. They all seemed to know Dr. Ferris and to seek him out, as if he were the master of ceremonies -or the star-of the occasion.  "If you would kindly be specific for a moment," said Dr. Stadler, "and tell me what-"  "Hi, Spud!" called Dr. Ferris, waving to a portly, white-haired man who filled the full-dress uniform of a general.  Dr. Stadler raised his voice: "I said, if you would kindly concentrate long enough to explain to me what in hell is going on-"  "But it's very simple. It's the final triumph of . . . You'll have to excuse me a minute, Dr. Stadler," said Dr. Ferris hastily, tearing forward, like an over trained lackey at the sound of a bell, in the direction of what looked like a group of aging rowdies; he turned back long enough to add two words which he seemed reverently to consider as a full explanation: "The press!"  Dr. Stadler sat down on the wooden bench, feeling unaccountably reluctant to brush against anything around him. The three grandstands were spaced at intervals in a semi-curve, like the tiers of a small, private circus, with room for some three hundred people; they seemed built for the viewing of some spectacle-but they faced the emptiness of a flat prairie stretching off to the horizon, with nothing in sight but the dark blotch of a farmhouse miles away.  There were radio microphones in front of one stand, which seemed reserved for the press. There was a contraption resembling a portable switchboard in front of the stand reserved for officials; a few levers of polished metal sparkled in the sun on the face of the switchboard. In an improvised parking lot behind the stands, the glitter of luxurious new cars seemed a brightly reassuring sight. But it was the building that stood on a knoll some thousand feet away that gave Dr. Stadler a vague sense of uneasiness. It was a small, squat structure of unknown purpose, with massive stone walls, no windows except a few slits protected by stout iron bars, and a large dome, grotesquely too heavy for the rest, that seemed to press the structure down into the soil. A few outlets protruded from the base of the dome, in loose, irregular shapes, resembling badly poured clay funnels; they did not seem to belong to an industrial age or to any known usage. The building had an air of silent malevolence, like a puffed, venomous mushroom; it was obviously modern, but its sloppy, rounded, ineptly unspecific lines made it look like a primitive structure unearthed in the heart of the jungle, devoted to some secret rites of savagery.  Dr. Stadler sighed with irritation; he was tired of secrets. "Confidential" and "Top Confidential" had been the words stamped on the invitation which had demanded that he travel to Iowa on a two-day notice and for an unspecified purpose. Two young men, who called themselves physicists, had appeared at the Institute to escort him; his calls to Ferris' office in Washington had remained unanswered. The young men had talked-through an exhausting trip by government plane, then a clammy ride in a government car-about science, emergencies, social equilibriums and the need of secrecy, till he knew less than he had known at the start; he noticed only that two words kept recurring in their jabber, which had also appeared in the text of the invitation, two words that had an ominous sound when involving an unknown issue: the demands for his "loyalty" and "co-operation."  The young men had deposited him on a bench in the front row of the grandstand and had vanished, like the folding gear of a mechanism, leaving him to the sudden presence of Dr. Ferris in person. Now, watching the scene around him, watching Dr. Ferris' vague, excited, loosely casual gestures in the midst of a group of newsmen, he had an impression of bewildering confusion, of senseless, chaotic inefficiency-and of a smooth machine working to produce the exact degree of that impression needed at the exact moment.  He felt a single, sudden flash of panic, in which, as in a flash of lightning, he permitted himself to know that he felt a desperate desire to escape. But he slammed his mind shut against it. He knew that the darkest secret of the occasion-more crucial, more untouchable, more deadly than whatever was hidden in the mushroom building-was that which had made him agree to come.  He would never have to learn his own motive, he thought; he thought it, not by means of words, but by means of the brief, vicious spasm of an emotion that resembled irritation and felt like acid. The words that stood in his mind, as they had stood when he had agreed to come, were like a voodoo formula which one recites when it is needed and beyond which one must not look: What can you do when you have to deal with people?  He noticed that the stand reserved for those whom Ferris had called the intellectual elite was larger than the stand prepared for government officials. He caught himself feeling a swift little sneak of pleasure at the thought that he had been placed in the front row. He turned to glance at the tiers behind him. The sensation he experienced was like a small, gray shock: that random, faded, shopworn assembly was not his conception of an intellectual elite. He saw defensively belligerent men and tastelessly dressed women-he saw mean, rancorous, suspicious faces that bore the one mark incompatible with a standard bearer of the intellect: the mark of uncertainty. He could find no face he knew, no face to recognize as famous and none likely ever to achieve such recognition.  He wondered by what standard these people had been selected.  Then he noticed a gangling figure in the second row, the figure of an elderly man with a long, slack face that seemed faintly familiar to him, though he could recall nothing about it, except a vague memory, as of a photograph seen in some unsavory publication. He leaned toward a woman and asked,  pointing, "Could you tell me. the name of that gentleman?" The woman answered in a whisper of awed respect, "That is Dr. Simon Pritchett!" Dr. Stadler turned away, wishing no one would see him, wishing no one would ever learn that he had been a member of that group.  He raised his eyes and saw that Ferris was leading the whole press gang toward him. He saw Ferris sweeping his arm at him, in the manner of a tourist guide, and declaring, when they were close enough to be heard, "But why should you waste your time on me, when there is the source of today's achievement, the man who made it all possible-Dr. Robert Stadler!"  It seemed to him for an instant that he saw an incongruous look on the worn, cynical faces of the newsmen, a look that was not quite respect, expectation or hope, but more like an echo of these, like a faint reflection of the look they might have worn in their youth on hearing the name of Robert Stadler. In that instant, he felt an impulse which he would not acknowledge: the impulse to tell them that he knew nothing about today's event, that his power counted for less than theirs, that he had been brought here as a pawn in some confidence game, almost as . . . as a prisoner.  Instead, he heard himself answering their questions in the smug, condescending tone of a man who shares all the secrets of the highest authorities: "Yes, the State Science Institute is proud of its record of public service. . . . The State Science Institute is not the tool of any private interests or personal greed, it is devoted to the welfare of mankind, to the good of humanity as a whole-" spouting, like a dictaphone, the sickening generalities he had heard from Dr. Ferris.  He would not permit himself to know that what he felt was self loathing; he identified the emotion, but not its object; it was loathing for the men around him, he thought; it was they who were forcing him to go through this shameful performance. What can you do-he thought-when you have to deal with people?  The newsmen were making brief notes of his answers. Their faces now had the look of automatons acting out the routine of pretending that they were hearing news in the empty utterances of another automaton.  "Dr. Stadler," asked one of them, pointing at the building on the knoll, "is it true that you consider Project X the greatest achievement of the State Science Institute?"  There was a dead drop of silence.  "Project . . . X . . . ?" said Dr. Stadler.  He knew that something was ominously wrong in the tone of his voice, because he saw the heads of the newsmen go up, as at the sound of an alarm; he saw them waiting, their pencils poised.  For one instant, while he felt the muscles of his face cracking into the fraud of a smile, he felt a formless, an almost supernatural terror, as if he sensed again the silent working of some smooth machine, as if he were caught in it, part of it and doing its irrevocable will. "Project X?" he said softly, in the mysterious tone of a conspirator. "Well, gentlemen, the value-and the motive-of any achievement of the State Science Institute are not to be doubted, since it is a non-profit venture-need I say more?"  He raised his head and noticed that Dr. Ferris had stood on the edge of the group through the whole of the interview. He wondered whether he imagined that the look on Dr. Ferris' face now seemed less tense-and more impertinent.  Two resplendent cars came shooting at full speed into the parking lot and stopped with a flourish of screeching brakes. The newsmen deserted him in the middle of a sentence and went running to meet the group alighting from the cars.  Dr. Stadler turned to Ferris. "What is Project X?" he asked sternly.  Dr. Ferris smiled in a manner of innocence and insolence together.  "A non-profit venture," he answered-and went running off to meet the newcomers.  From the respectful whispers of the crowd, Dr. Stadler learned that the little man in a wilted linen suit, who looked like a shyster, striding briskly in the center of the new group, was Mr. Thompson, the Head of the State. Mr. Thompson was smiling, frowning and barking answers to the newsmen. Dr. Ferris was weaving through the group, with the grace of a cat rubbing against sundry legs.  The group came closer and he saw Ferris steering them in his direction. "Mr. Thompson," said Dr. Ferris sonorously, as they approached, "may I present Dr. Robert Stadler?"  Dr. Stadler saw the little shyster's eyes studying him for the fraction of a second: the eyes had a touch of superstitious awe, as at the sight of a phenomenon from a mystical realm forever incomprehensible to Mr. Thompson-and they had the piercing, calculating shrewdness of a ward heeler who feels certain that nothing is immune from his standards, a glance like the visual equivalent of the words: What's your angle?  "It's an honor, Doctor, an honor, I'm sure," said Mr. Thompson briskly, shaking his hand.  He learned that the tall, stoop-shouldered man with a crew haircut was Mr. Wesley Mouch. He did not catch the names of the others, whose hands he shook. As the group proceeded toward the officials' grandstand, he was left with the burning sensation of a discovery he dared not face: the discovery that he had felt anxiously pleased by the little shyster's nod of approval.  A party of young attendants, who looked like movie theater ushers, appeared- from, somewhere with handcarts of glittering objects, which they proceeded to distribute to the assembly. The objects were field glasses. Dr. Ferns took his place at the microphone of a public-address system by the officials' stand. At a signal from Wesley Mouch, his voice boomed suddenly over the prairie, an unctuous, fraudulently solemn voice magnified by the microphone inventor's ingenuity into the sound and power of a giant: "Ladies and gentlemen . . . !"  The crowd was struck into silence, all heads jerking unanimously toward the graceful figure of Dr. Floyd Ferris.  "Ladies and gentlemen, you have been chosen-in recognition of your distinguished public service and social loyalty-to witness the unveiling of a scientific achievement of such tremendous importance, such staggering scope, such epoch-making possibilities that up to this moment it has been known only to a very few and only as Project X."  Dr. Stadler focused his field glasses on the only thing in sight-on the blotch of the distant farm.  He saw that it was the deserted ruin of a farmhouse, which had obviously been abandoned years ago. The light of the sky showed through the naked ribs of the roof, and jagged bits of glass framed the darkness of empty windows. He saw a sagging barn, the rusted tower of a water wheel, and the remnant of a tractor lying upturned with its treads in the air.  Dr. Ferris was talking about the crusaders of science and about the years of selfless devotion, unremitting toil and persevering research that had gone into Project X.  It was odd-thought Dr. Stadler, studying the ruins of the farm-that there should be a herd of goats in the midst of such desolation. There were six or seven of them, some drowsing, some munching lethargically at whatever grass they could find among the sun-scorched weeds.  "Project X," Dr. Ferris was saying, "was devoted to some special research in the field of sound. The science of sound has astonishing aspects, which laymen would scarcely suspect. . . ."  Some fifty feet away from the farmhouse, Dr. Stadler saw a structure, obviously new and of no possible purpose whatever: it looked like a few spans of a steel trestle, rising into empty space, supporting nothing, leading nowhere.  Dr. Ferris was now talking about the nature of sound vibrations.  Dr. Stadler aimed his field glasses at the horizon beyond the farm, but there was nothing else to be seen for dozens of miles. The sudden, straining motion of one of the goats brought his eyes back to the herd.  He noticed that the goats were chained to stakes driven at intervals into the ground.  ". . . And it was discovered," said Dr. Ferris, "that there are certain frequencies of sound vibration which no structure, organic or inorganic, can withstand. . . ."  Dr. Stadler noticed a silvery spot bouncing over the weeds among the herd. It was a kid that had not been chained; it kept leaping and weaving about its mother.  ". . . The sound ray is controlled by a panel inside the giant underground laboratory," said Dr. Ferris, pointing at the building on the knoll. "That panel is known to us affectionately as the 'Xylophone'-because one must be darn careful to strike the right keys, or, rather, to pull the right levers. For this special occasion, an extension Xylophone, connected to the one inside, has been erected here"-he pointed to the switchboard in front of the officials’ stand-"so that you may witness the entire operation and see the simplicity of the whole procedure. . . ."  Dr. Stadler found pleasure in watching the kid, a soothing, reassuring kind of pleasure. The little creature seemed barely a week old, it looked like a ball of white fur with graceful long legs, it kept bounding in a manner of deliberate, gaily ferocious awkwardness, all four of its legs held stiff and straight. It seemed to be leaping at the sunrays, at the summer air, at the joy of discovering its own existence.  ". . . The sound ray is invisible, inaudible and fully controllable in respect to target, direction and range. Its first public test, which you are about to witness, has been set to cover a small sector, a mere two miles, in perfect safety, with all space cleared for twenty miles beyond. The present generating equipment in our laboratory is capable of producing rays to cover-through the outlets which you may observe under the dome-the entire countryside within a radius of a hundred miles, a circle with a periphery extending from the shore of the Mississippi, roughly from the bridge of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, to Des Moines and Fort Dodge, Iowa, to Austin, Minnesota, to Woodman, Wisconsin, to Rock Island, Illinois. This is only a modest beginning. We possess the technical knowledge to build generators with a range of two and three hundred miles-but due to the fact that we were unable to obtain in time a sufficient quantity of a highly heat resistant metal, such as Rearden Metal, we had to be satisfied with our present equipment and radius of control. In honor of our great executive, Mr. Thompson, under whose far-sighted administration the State Science Institute was granted the funds without which Project X would not have been possible, this great invention will henceforth be known as the Thompson Harmonizer!"  The crowd applauded. Mr. Thompson sat motionless, with his face held self-consciously stiff. Dr. Stadler felt certain that this small-time shyster had had as little to do with the Project as any of the movie usher attendants, that he possessed neither the mind nor the initiative nor even the sufficient degree of malice to cause a new gopher trap to be brought into the world, that he, too, was only the pawn of a silent machine-a machine that had no center, no leader, no direction, a machine that had not been set in motion by Dr. Ferris or Wesley Mouch, or any of the cowed creatures in the grandstands, or any of the creatures behind the scenes-an impersonal, unthinking, unembodied machine, of which none was the driver and all were the pawns, each to the degree of his evil. Dr. Stadler gripped the edge of the bench: he felt a desire to leap to his feet and run.  ". . . As to the function and the purpose of the sound ray, I shall say nothing. I shall let it speak for itself. You will now see it work. When Dr. Blodgett pulls the levers of the Xylophone, I suggest that you keep your eyes on the target-which is that farmhouse two miles away. There will be nothing else to see. The ray itself is invisible. It has long been conceded by all progressive thinkers that there are no entities, only actions-and no values, only consequences. Now, ladies and gentlemen, you will see the action and the consequences of the Thompson Harmonizer."  Dr. Ferris bowed, walked slowly away from the microphone and came to take his seat on the bench beside Dr. Stadler.  A youngish, fattish kind of man took his stand by the switchboard-and raised his eyes expectantly toward Mr. Thompson. Mr. Thompson looked blankly bewildered for an instant, as if something had slipped his mind, until Wesley Mouch leaned over and whispered some word into his ear. "Contact!" said Mr. Thompson loudly.  Dr. Stadler could not bear to watch the graceful, undulating, effeminate motion of Dr. Blodgett's hand as it pulled the first lever of the switchboard, then the next. He raised his field glasses and looked at the farmhouse.  In the instant when he focused his lens, a goat was pulling at its chain, reaching placidly for a tall, dry thistle. In the next instant, the goat rose into the air, upturned, its legs stretched upward and jerking, then fell into a gray pile made of seven goats in convulsions. By the time Dr. Stadler believed it, the pile was motionless, except for one beast's leg sticking out of the mass, stiff as a rod and shaking as in a strong wind. The farmhouse tore into strips of clapboard and went down, followed by a geyser of the bricks of its chimney. The tractor vanished into a pancake. The water tower cracked and its shreds hit the ground white its wheel was still describing a long curve through the air, as if of its own leisurely volition. The steel beams and girders of the solid new trestle collapsed like a structure of matchsticks under the breath of a sigh. It was so swift, so uncontested, so simple, that Dr. Stadler felt no horror, he felt nothing, it was not the reality he had known, it was the realm of a child's nightmare where material objects could be dissolved by means of a single malevolent wish.  He moved the field glasses from his eyes. He was looking at an empty prairie. There was no farm, there was nothing in the distance except a darkish strip that looked like the shadow of a cloud. A single, high, thin scream rose from the tiers behind him, as some woman fainted. He wondered why she should scream so long after the fact-and then he realized that the time elapsed since the touch of the first lever was not a full minute.  He raised his field glasses again, almost as if he were suddenly hoping that the cloud shadow would be all he would see. But the material objects were still there; they were a mount of refuse. He moved his glasses over the wreckage; in a moment, he realized that he was looking for the kid. He could not find it; there was nothing but a pile of gray fur.  When he lowered the glasses and turned, he found Dr. Ferns looking at him. He felt certain that through the whole of the test, it was not the target, it was his face that Ferris had watched, as if to see whether he, Robert Stadler, could withstand the ray.  "That's all there is to it," the fattish Dr. Blodgett announced through the microphone, in the ingratiating sales tone of a department-store floorwalker. "There is no nail or rivet remaining in the frame of the structures and there is no blood vessel left unbroken in the bodies of the animals."  The crowd was rustling with jerky movements and high-pitched whispers. People were looking at one another, rising uncertainly and dropping down again, restlessly demanding anything but this pause. There was a sound of submerged hysteria in the whispers. They seemed to be waiting to be told what to think.  Dr. Stadler saw a woman being escorted down the steps from the back row, her head bent, a handkerchief pressed to her mouth: she was sick at her stomach.  He turned away and saw that Dr. Ferris was still watching him. Dr. Stadler leaned back a little, his face austere and scornful, the face of the nation's greatest scientist, and asked, "Who invented that ghastly thing?"  "You did."  Dr. Stadler looked at him, not moving.  "It is merely a practical appliance," said Dr. Ferris pleasantly, "based upon your theoretical discoveries. It was derived from your invaluable research into the nature of cosmic rays and of the spatial transmission of energy."  "Who worked on the Project?"  "A few third-raters, as you would call them. Really, there was very little difficulty. None of them could have begun to conceive of the first step toward the concept of your energy-transmission formula, but given that-the rest was easy."  "What is the practical purpose of this invention? What are the 'epoch-making possibilities'?"  "Oh, but don't you see? It is an invaluable instrument of public security. No enemy would attack the possessor of such a weapon. It will set the country free from the fear of aggression and permit it to plan its future in undisturbed safety." His voice had an odd carelessness, a tone of offhand improvisation, as if he were neither expecting nor attempting to be believed. "It will relieve social frictions. It will promote peace, stability and-as we have indicated-harmony. It will eliminate all danger of war."  "What war? What aggression? With the whole world starving and all those People's States barely subsisting on handouts from this country-where do you see any danger of war? Do you expect those ragged savages to attack you?"  Dr. Ferris looked straight into his eyes. "Internal enemies can be as great a danger to the people as external ones," he answered. "Perhaps greater." This time his voice sounded as if he expected and was certain to be understood. "Social systems are so precarious. But think of what stability could be achieved by a few scientific installations at strategic key points. It would guarantee a state of permanent peace-don't you think so?"  Dr. Stadler did not move or answer; as the seconds clicked past and his face still held an unchanged expression, it began to look paralyzed.  His eyes had the stare of a man who suddenly sees that which he had known, had known from the first, had spent years trying not to see, and who is now engaged in a contest between the sight and his power to deny its existence. "I don't know what you're talking about!" he snapped at last.  Dr. Ferris smiled. "No private businessman or greedy industrialist would have financed Project X," he said softly, in the tone of an idle, informal discussion. "He couldn't have afforded it. It's an enormous investment, with no prospect of material gain. What profit could he expect from it? There are no profits henceforth to be derived from that farm." He pointed at the dark strip in the distance. "But, as you have so well observed, Project X had to be a non-profit venture. Contrary to a business firm, the State Science Institute had no trouble in obtaining funds for the Project. You have not heard of the Institute having any financial difficulties in the past two years, have you? And it used to be such a problem-getting them to vote the funds necessary for the advancement of science. They always demanded gadgets for their cash, as you used to say. Well, here was a gadget which some people in power could fully appreciate. They got the others to vote for it. It wasn't difficult. In fact, a great many of those others felt safe in voting money for a project that was secret-they felt certain it was important, since they were not considered important enough to be let in on it. There were, of course, a few skeptics and doubters. But they gave in when they were reminded that the head of the State Science Institute was Dr. Robert Stadler-whose judgment and integrity they could not doubt."  Dr. Stadler was looking down at his fingernails.  The sudden screech of the microphone jerked the crowd into an instantaneous attentiveness; people seemed to be a second's worth of self-control away from panic. An announcer, with a voice like a machine gun spitting smiles, barked cheerily that they were now to witness the radio broadcast that would break the news of the great discovery to the whole nation. Then, with a glance at his watch, his script and the signaling arm of Wesley Mouch, he yelled into the sparkling snake-head of the microphone-into the living rooms, the offices, the studies, the nurseries of the country: "Ladies and gentlemen! Project X!"  Dr. Ferris leaned toward Dr. Stadler-through the staccato hoof beats of the announcer's voice galloping across the continent with a description of the new invention-and said in the tone of a casual remark, "It is vitally important that there be no criticism of the Project in the country at this precarious time," then added semi-accidentally, as a semi-joke, "that there be no criticism of anything at any time."  "-and the nation's political, cultural, intellectual and moral leaders," the announcer was yelling into the microphone, "who have witnessed this great event, as your representatives and in your name, will now tell you their views of it in person!"  Mr. Thompson was the first to mount the wooden steps to the platform of the microphone. He snapped his way through a brief speech, hailing a new era and declaring-in the belligerent tone of a challenge to unidentified enemies-that science belonged to the people and that every man on the face of the globe had a right to a share of the advantages created by technological progress.  Wesley Mouch came next. He spoke about social planning and the necessity of unanimous rallying in support of the planners. He spoke about discipline, unity, austerity and the patriotic duty of bearing temporary hardships. "We have mobilized the best brains of the country to work for your welfare. This great invention was the product of the genius of a man whose devotion to the cause of humanity is not to be questioned, a man acknowledged by all as the greatest mind of the century-Dr. Robert Stadler!"  "What?" gasped Dr. Stadler, whirling toward Ferris.  Dr. Ferris looked at him with a glance of patient mildness.  "He didn't ask my permission to say that!" Dr. Stadler half-snapped, half-whispered.  Dr. Ferris spread out his hands in a gesture of reproachful helplessness. "Now you see, Dr. Stadler, how unfortunate it is if you allow yourself to be disturbed by political matters, which you have always considered unworthy of your attention and knowledge. You see, it is not Mr. Mouch's function to ask permissions."  The figure now slouching against the sky on the speakers platform, coiling itself about the microphone, talking in the bored, contemptuous tone of an off-color story, was Dr. Simon Pritchett. He was declaring that the new invention was an instrument of social welfare, which guaranteed general prosperity, and that anyone who doubted this self evident fact was an enemy of society, to be treated accordingly.  "This invention, the product of Dr. Robert Stadler, the pre-eminent lover of freedom-"  Dr. Ferris opened a briefcase, produced some pages of neatly typed copy and turned to Dr. Stadler. "You are to be the climax of the broadcast," he said. "You will speak last, at the end of the hour." He extended the pages. "Here's the speech you'll make," His eyes said the rest: they said that his choice of words had not been accidental.  Dr. Stadler took the pages, but held them between the tips of two straight fingers, as one might hold a scrap of waste paper about to be tossed aside. "I haven't asked you to appoint yourself as my ghost writer," he said. The sarcasm of the voice gave Ferris his clue: this was not a moment for sarcasm.  "I couldn't have allowed your invaluable time to be taken up by the writing of radio speeches," said Dr. Ferris. "I felt certain that you would appreciate it." He said it in a tone of spurious politeness intended to be recognized as spurious, the tone of tossing to a beggar the alms of face-saving.  Dr. Stadler's answer disturbed him: Dr. Stadler did not choose to answer or to glance down at the manuscript.  "Lack of faith," a beefy speaker was snarling on the platform, in the tone of a street brawl, "lack of faith is the only thing we got to fear! If we have faith in the plans of our leaders, why, the plans will work and we'll all have prosperity and ease and plenty. It's the fellows who go around doubting and destroying our morale, it's they who're keeping us in shortages and misery. But we're not going to let them do it much longer, we're here to protect the people-and if any of those doubting smarties come around, believe you me, we'll take care of them!"  "It would be unfortunate," said Dr. Ferris in a soft voice, "to arouse popular resentment against the State Science Institute at an explosive time like the present. There's a great deal of dissatisfaction and unrest in the country-and if people should misunderstand the nature of the new invention, they're liable to vent their rage on all scientists. Scientists have never been popular with the masses."  "Peace," a tall, willowy woman was signing into the microphone, "this invention is a great, new instrument of peace. It will protect us from the aggressive designs of selfish enemies, it will allow us to breathe freely and to learn to love our fellow men." She had a bony face with a mouth embittered at cocktail parties, and wore a flowing pale blue gown, suggesting the concert garment of a harpist. "It may well be considered as that miracle which was thought impossible in history-the dream of the ages-the final synthesis of science and love!"  Dr. Stadler looked at the faces in the grandstands. They were sitting quietly now, they were listening, but their eyes had an ebbing look of twilight, a look of fear in the process of being accepted as permanent, the look of raw wounds being dimmed by the veil of infection. They knew, as he knew it, that they were the targets of the shapeless funnels protruding from the mushroom building's dome-and he wondered in what manner they were now extinguishing their minds and escaping that knowledge; he knew that the words they were eager to absorb and believe were the chains slipping in to hold them, like the goats, securely within the range of those funnels. They were eager to believe; he saw the tightening lines of their lips, he saw the occasional glances of suspicion they threw at their neighbors-as if the horror that threatened them was not the sound ray, but the men who would make them acknowledge it as horror. Their eyes were veiling over, but the remnant look of a wound was a cry for help.  "Why do you think they think?" said Dr. Ferris softly. "Reason is the scientist's only weapon-and reason has no power over men, has it? At a time like ours, with the country falling apart, with the mob driven by blind desperation to the edge of open riots and violence-order must be maintained by any means available. What can we do when we have to deal with people?"  Dr. Stadler did not answer.  A fat, jellied woman, with an inadequate brassiere under a dark, perspiration-stained dress, was saying into the microphone-Dr. Stadler could not believe it at first-that the new invention was to be greeted with particular gratitude by the mothers of the country.  Dr. Stadler turned away; watching him, Ferris could see nothing but the noble line of the high forehead and the deep cut of bitterness at the corner of the mouth.  Suddenly, without context or warning, Robert Stadler whirled to face him. It was like a spurt of blood from a sudden crack in a wound that had almost closed: Stadler's face was open, open in pain, in horror, in sincerity, as if, for that moment, both he and Ferris were human beings, while he moaned with incredulous despair: "In a civilized century, Ferris, in a civilized century!"  Dr. Ferris took his time to produce and prolong a soft chuckle. "I don't know what you're talking about," he answered in the tone of a quotation.  Dr. Stadler lowered his eyes.  When Ferris spoke again, his voice had the faintest edge of a tone which Stadler could not define, except that it did not belong in any civilized discussion: "It would be unfortunate if anything were to happen to jeopardize the State Science Institute. It would be most unfortunate if the Institute were to be closed-or if any one of us were to be forced to leave it. Where would we go? Scientists are an inordinate luxury these days-and there aren't many people or establishments left who're able to afford necessities, let alone luxuries. There are no doors left open to us. We wouldn't be welcome in the research department of an industrial concern, such as-let us say-Rearden Steel. Besides, if we should happen to make enemies, the same enemies would be feared by any person tempted to employ our talents. A man like Rearden would have fought for us. Would a man like Orren Boyle? But this is purely theoretical speculation, because, as a matter of practical fact, all private establishments of scientific research have been closed by law-by Directive 10-289, issued, as you might not realize, by Mr. Wesley Mouch. Are you thinking, perhaps, of universities? They are in the same position. They can't afford to make enemies. Who would speak up for us? I believe that some such man as Hugh Akston would have come to our defense-but to think of that is to be guilty of an anachronism. He belonged to a different age. The conditions set up in our social and economic reality have long since made his continued existence impossible. And I don't think that Dr. Simon Pritchett, or the generation reared under his guidance, would be able or willing to defend us. I have never believed in the efficacy of idealists-have you?-and this is no age for impractical idealism. If anyone wished to oppose a government policy, how would he make himself heard? Through these gentlemen of the press, Dr. Stadler? Through this microphone? Is there an independent newspaper left in the country? An uncontrolled radio station? A private piece of property, for that matter-or a personal opinion?" The tone of the voice was obvious now: it was the tone of a thug. "A personal opinion is the one luxury that nobody can afford today."  Dr. Stadler's lips moved stiffly, as stiffly as the muscles of the goats, "You are speaking to Robert Stadler."  "I have not forgotten that. It is precisely because I have not forgotten it that I am speaking, 'Robert Stadler' is an illustrious name, which I would hate to see destroyed. But what is an illustrious name nowadays? In whose eyes?" His arm swept over the grandstands. "In the eyes of people such as you see around you? If they will believe, when so told, that an instrument of death is a tool of prosperity-would they not believe it if they were told that Robert Stadler is a traitor and an enemy of the State? Would you then rely on the fact that this is not true? Are you thinking of truth, Dr. Stadler? Questions of truth do not enter into social issues. Principles have no influence on public affairs. Reason has no power over human beings. Logic is impotent. Morality is superfluous. Do not answer me now, Dr. Stadler. You will answer me over the microphone. You're the next speaker."  Looking off at the dark strip of the farm in the distance, Dr. Stadler knew that what he felt was terror, but he would not permit himself to know its nature. He, who had been able to study the particles and sub particles of cosmic space, would not permit himself to examine his feeling and to know that it was made of three parts: one part was terror of a vision that seemed to stand before his eyes, the vision of the inscription cut, in his honor, over the door of the Institute: "To the fearless mind, to the inviolate truth"-another part was a plain, brute, animal fear of physical destruction, a humiliating fear which, in the civilized world of his youth, he had not expected ever to experience-and the third was the terror of the knowledge that by betraying the first, one delivers oneself into the realm of the second.  He walked toward the speaker's scaffold, his steps firm and slow, his head lifted, the manuscript of the speech held crumpled in his fingers. It looked like a walk to mount either a pedestal or a guillotine. As the whole of a man's life flashes before him in his dying moment, so he walked to the sound of the announcer's voice reading to the country the list of Robert Stadler's achievements and career. A faint convulsion ran over Robert Stadler's face at the words: "-former head of the Department of Physics of the Patrick Henry University." He knew, distantly, not as if the knowledge were within him, but as if it were within some person he was leaving behind, that the crowd was about to witness an act of destruction more terrible than the destruction of. the farm.  He had mounted the first three steps of the scaffold, when a young newsman tore forward, ran to him and, from below, seized the railing to stop him. "Dr. Stadler!" he cried in a desperate whisper. "Tell them the truth! Tell them that you had nothing to do with it! Tell them what sort of infernal machine it is and for what purpose it's intended to be used! Tell the country what sort of people are trying to rule it! Nobody can doubt your word! Tell them the truth! Save us! You're the only one who can!"  Dr. Stadler looked down at him. He was young; his movements and voice had that swift, sharp clarity which belongs to competence; among his aged, corrupt, favor-ridden and pull-created colleagues, he had managed to achieve the rank of elite of the political press, by means and in the role of a last, irresistible spark of ability. His eyes had the look of an eager, unfrightened intelligence; they were the kind of eyes Dr. Stadler had seen looking up at him from the benches of classrooms.  He noticed that this boy's eyes were hazel; they had a tinge of green.  Dr. Stadler turned his head and saw that Ferris had come rushing to his side, like a servant or a jailer. "I do not expect to be insulted by disloyal young punks with treasonable motives," said Dr. Stadler loudly.  Dr. Ferris whirled upon the young man and snapped, his face out of control, distorted by rage at the unexpected and unplanned, "Give me your press card and your work permit!"  "I am proud," Dr. Robert Stadler read-into the microphone and into the attentive silence of a nation, "that my years of work in the service of science have brought me the honor of placing into the hands of our great leader, Mr. Thompson, a new instrument with an incalculable potential for a civilizing and liberating influence upon the mind of man. . . . "  The sky had the stagnant breath of a furnace and the streets of New York were like pipes running, not with air and light, but with melted dust. Dagny stood on a street corner, where the airport bus had left her, looking at the city in passive astonishment. The buildings seemed worn by weeks of summer heat, but the people seemed worn by centuries of anguish. She stood watching them, disarmed by an enormous sense of unreality.  That sense of unreality had been her only feeling since the early hours of the morning-since the moment when, at the end of an empty highway, she had walked into an unknown town and stopped the first passer-by to ask where she was.  "Watsonville," he answered. "What state, please?" she asked. The man glanced at her, said, "Nebraska," and walked hastily away. She smiled mirthlessly, knowing that he wondered where she had come from and that no explanation he could imagine would be as fantastic as the truth. Yet it was Watsonville that seemed fantastic to her, as she walked through its streets to the railroad station. She had lost the habit of observing despair as the normal and dominant aspect of human existence, so normal as to become unnoticed-and the sight of it struck her in all of its senseless futility. She was seeing the brand of pain and fear on the faces of people, and the look of evasion that refuses to know it-they seemed to be going through the motions of some enormous pretense, acting out a ritual to ward off reality, letting the earth remain unseen and their lives unlived, in dread of something namelessly forbidden-yet the forbidden was the simple act of looking at the nature of their pain and questioning their duty to bear it. She was seeing it so clearly that she kept wanting to approach strangers, to shake them, to laugh in their faces and to cry, "Snap out of it!"  There was no reason for people to be as unhappy as that, she thought, no reason whatever . . . and then she remembered that reason was the one power they had banished from their existence.  She boarded a Taggart train for the nearest airfield; she did not identify herself to anyone: it seemed irrelevant. She sat at the window of a coach, like a stranger who has to learn the incomprehensible language of those around her. She picked up a discarded newspaper; she managed, with effort, to understand what was written, but not why it should ever have been written: it all seemed so childishly senseless.  She stared in astonishment at a paragraph in a syndicated column from New York, which stated over emphatically that Mr. James Taggart wished it to be known that his sister had died in an airplane crash, any unpatriotic rumors to the contrary notwithstanding. Slowly, she remembered Directive 10-289 and realized that Jim was embarrassed by the public suspicion that she had vanished as a deserter.  The wording of the paragraph suggested that her disappearance had been a prominent public issue, not yet dropped. There were other suggestions of it: a mention of Miss Taggart's tragic death, in a story about the growing number of plane crashes-and, on the back page, an ad, offering a $100,000 reward to the person who would find the wreckage of her plane, signed by Henry Rearden.  The last gave her a stab of urgency; the rest seemed meaningless.  Then, slowly, she realized that her return was a public event which would be taken as big news. She felt a lethargic weariness at the prospect of a dramatic homecoming, of facing Jim and the press, of witnessing the excitement. She wished they would get it over with in her absence.  At the airfield, she saw a small-town reporter interviewing some departing officials. She waited till he had finished, then she approached him, extended her credentials and said quietly, to the gaping stare of his eyes, "I'm Dagny Taggart. Would you make it known, please, that I'm alive and that I'll be in New York this afternoon?" The plane was about to take off and she escaped the necessity of answering questions.  She watched the prairies, the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below-and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer, The passengers were listening to some radio broadcast, which appeared to be important, judging by their earnest attentiveness. She caught brief snatches of fraudulent voices talking about some sort of new invention that was to bring some undefined benefits to some undefined public's welfare. The words were obviously chosen to convey no specific meaning whatever; she wondered how one could pretend that one was hearing a speech; yet that was what the passengers were doing.  They were going through the performance of a child who, not yet able to read, holds a book open and spells out anything he wishes to spell, pretending that it is contained in the incomprehensible black lines. But the child, she thought, knows that he is playing a game; these people pretend to themselves that they are not pretending; they know no other state of existence.  The sense of unreality remained as her only feeling, when she landed, when she escaped a crowd of reporters without being seen-by avoiding the taxi stands and leaping into the airport bus-when she rode on the bus, then stood on a street corner, looking et New York, She felt as if she were seeing an abandoned city. She felt no sense of homecoming, when she entered her apartment; the place seemed to be a convenient machine that she could use for some purpose of no significance whatever.  But she felt a quickened touch of energy, like the first break in a fog -a touch of meaning-when she picked up the telephone receiver and called Rearden's office in Pennsylvania. "Oh, Miss Taggart . . . Miss Taggart!" said, in a joyous moan, the voice of the severe, unemotional Miss Ives.  "Hello, Miss Ives. I haven't startled you, have I? You knew that I was alive?"  "Oh yes! I heard it on the radio this morning."  "Is Mr. Rearden in his office?"  "No, Miss Taggart. He . . . he's in the Rocky Mountains, searching for . . . that is . . ."  "Yes, I know. Do you know where we can reach him?"  "I expect to hear from him at any moment. He's stopping in Los Gatos, Colorado, right now. I phoned him, the moment I heard the news, but he was out and I left a message for him to call me. You see, he's out flying, most of the day . . . but he'll call me when he comes back to the hotel."  "What hotel is it?"  "The Eldorado Hotel, in Los Gatos."  "Thank you, Miss Ives." She was about to hang up.  "Oh, Miss Taggart!"  "Yes?"  "What was it that happened to you? Where were you?"  "I . . . I'll tell you when I see you. I'm in New York now. When Mr. Rearden calls, tell him please that I'll be in my office."  "Yes, Miss Taggart."  She hung up, but her hand remained on the receiver, clinging to her first contact with a matter that had importance. She looked at her apartment and at the city in the window, feeling reluctant to sink again into the dead fog of the meaningless.  She raised the receiver and called Los Gatos.  "Eldorado Hotel," said a woman's drowsily resentful voice.  "Would you take a message for Mr. Henry Rearden? Ash him, when he comes in, to-"  "Just a minute, please," drawled the voice, in the impatient tone that resents any effort as an imposition.  She heard the clicking of switches, some buzzing, some breaks of silence and then a man's clear, firm voice answering: "Hello?" It was Hank Rearden.  She stared at the receiver as at the muzzle of a gun, feeling trapped, unable to breathe.  "Hello?" he repeated.  "Hank, is that you?"  She heard a low sound, more a sigh than a gasp, and then the long, empty crackling of the wire.  "Hank!" There was no answer. "Hank!" she screamed in terror.  She thought she heard the effort of a breath-then she heard a whisper, which was not a question, but a statement saying everything: "Dagny."  "Hank, I'm sorry-oh, darling, I'm sorry!-didn't you know?"  "Where are you, Dagny?"  "Are you all right?"  "Of course."  "Didn't you know that I was back and . . . and alive?"  "No . . . I didn't know it."  "Oh God, I'm sorry I called, I-"  "What are you talking about? Dagny, where are you?"  "In New York. Didn't you hear about it on the radio?"  "No. I've just come in."  "Didn't they give you a message to call Miss Ives?"  "No."  "Are you all right?"  "Now?" She heard his soft, low chuckle. She was hearing the sound of unreleased laughter, the sound of youth, growing in his voice with every word. "When did you come back?"  "This morning."  "Dagny, where were you?"  She did not answer at once. "My plane crashed," she said. "In the Rockies. I was picked up by some people who helped me, but I could not send word to anyone."  The laughter went out of his voice. "As bad as that?"  "Oh . . . oh, the crash? No, it wasn't bad. I wasn't hurt. Not seriously."  "Then why couldn't you send word?"  "There were no . . . no means of communication."  "Why did it take you so long to get back?"  "I . . . can't answer that now,"  "Dagny, were you in danger?"  The half-smiling, half-bitter tone of her voice was almost regret, as she answered, "No."  "Were you held prisoner?"  "No-not really."  "Then you could have returned sooner, but didn't?"  "That's true-but that's all I can tell you."  "Where were you, Dagny?"  "Do you mind if we don't talk about it now? Let's wait until I see you."  "Of course. I won't ask any questions. Just tell me: are you safe now?"  "Safe? Yes."  "I mean, have you suffered any permanent injuries or consequences?"  She answered, with the same sound of a cheerless smile, "Injuries-no, Hank. I don't know, as to the permanent consequences."  "Will you still be in New York tonight?"  "Why, yes. I'm . . . I'm back for good."  "Are you?"  "Why do you ask that?"  "I don't know. I guess I'm too used to what it's like when . . . when I can't find you."  "I'm back."  "Yes. I'll see you in a few hours." His voice broke off, as if the sentence were too enormous to believe. "In a few hours," he repeated firmly.  "I'll be here."  "Dagny-"  "Yes?"  He chuckled softly. "No, nothing. Just wanted to hear your voice awhile longer. Forgive me. I mean, not now. I mean, I don't want to say anything now."  "Hank, I-"  "When I see you, my darling. So long."  She stood looking at the silent receiver. For the first time since her return, she felt pain, a violent pain, but it made her alive, because it was worth feeling.  She telephoned her secretary at Taggart Transcontinental, to say briefly that she would be in the office in half an hour.  The statue of Nathaniel Taggart was real-when she stood facing it in the concourse of the Terminal. It seemed to her that they were alone in a vast, echoing temple, with fog coils of formless ghosts weaving and vanishing around them. She stood still, looking up at the statue, as for a brief moment of dedication. I'm back-were the only words she had to offer.  "Dagny Taggart" was still the inscription on the frosted glass panel of the door to her office. The look on the faces of her staff, as she entered the anteroom, was the look of drowning persons at the sight of a lifeline. She saw Eddie Willers standing at his desk in his glass enclosure, with some man before him. Eddie made a move in her direction, but stopped; he looked imprisoned. She let her glance greet every face in turn, smiling at them gently as at doomed children, then walked toward Eddie's desk.  Eddie was watching her approach as if he were seeing nothing else in the world, but his rigid posture seemed designed to pretend that he was listening to the man before him.  "Motive power?" the man was saying in a voice that had a brusque, staccato snap and a slurred, nasal drawl, together. "There's no problem about motive power. You just take-"  "Hello," said Eddie softly, with a muted smile, as to a distant vision.  The man turned to glance at her. He had a yellow complexion, curly hair, a hard face made of soft muscles, and the revolting handsomeness belonging to the esthetic standards of barroom corners; his blurred brown eyes had the empty flatness of glass.  "Miss Taggart," said Eddie, in a resonant tone of severity, the tone of slapping the man into the manners of a drawing room he had never entered, "may I present Mr. Meigs?"  "How d' do," said the man without interest, then turned to Eddie and proceeded, as if she were not present: "You just take the Comet off the schedule for tomorrow and Tuesday, and shoot the engines to Arizona for the grapefruit special, with the rolling stock from the Scranton coal run I mentioned. Send the orders out at once."  "You'll do nothing of the kind!" she gasped, too incredulous to be angry.  Eddie did not answer.  Meigs glanced at her with what would have been astonishment if his eyes were capable of registering a reaction. "Send the orders," he said to Eddie, with no emphasis, and walked out.  Eddie was jotting notations on a piece of paper.  "Are you crazy?" she asked.  He raised his eyes to her, as though exhausted by hours of beating.  "We'll have to, Dagny" he said, his voice dead.  "What is that?" she asked, pointing at the outer door that had closed on Mr. Meigs.  "The Director of Unification."  "What?"  "The Washington representative, in charge of the Railroad Unification Plan."  "What's that?"  "It's . . . Oh, wait, Dagny, are you all right? Were you hurt? Was it a plane crash?"  She had never imagined what the face of Eddie Willers would look like in the process of aging, but she was seeing it now-aging at thirty-five and within the span of one month. It was not a matter of texture or wrinkles, it was the same face with the same muscles, but saturated by the withering look of resignation to a pain accepted as hopeless.  She smiled, gently and confidently, in understanding, in dismissal of all problems, and said, extending her hand, "All right, Eddie. Hello."  He took her hand and pressed it to his lips, a thing he had never done before, his manner neither daring nor apologetic, but simply and openly personal.  "It was a plane crash," she said, "and, Eddie, so that you won't worry, I’ll tell you the truth: I wasn't hurt, not seriously. But that's not the story I'm going to give to the press and to all the others. So you're never to mention it."  "Of course."  "I had no way to communicate with anyone, but not because I was hurt. It's all I can tell you, Eddie. Don't ask me where I was or why it took me so long to return."  "I won't."  "Now tell me, what is the Railroad Unification Plan?"  "It's . . . Oh, do you mind?-let Jim tell you. He will, soon enough. I just don't have the stomach-unless you want me to," he added, with a conscientious effort at discipline, "No, you don't have to. Just tell me whether I understood that Unificator correctly: he wants you to cancel the Comet for two days in order to give her engines to a grapefruit special in Arizona?"  "That's right."  "And he's cancelled a coal train in order to get cars to lug grapefruit?"  "Yes."  "Grapefruit?"  "That's right."  "Why?"  "Dagny, 'why' is a word nobody uses any longer."  After a moment, she asked, "Have you any guess about the reason?"  "Guess? I don't have to guess. I know."  "All right, what is it?"  "The grapefruit special is for the Smather brothers. The Smather brothers bought a fruit ranch in Arizona a year ago, from a man who went bankrupt under the Equalization of Opportunity Bill. He had owned the ranch for thirty years. The Smather brothers were in the punchboard business the year before. They bought the ranch by means of a loan from Washington under a project for the reclamation of distressed areas, such as Arizona. The Smather brothers have friends in Washington."  "Well?"  "Dagny, everybody knows it. Everybody knows how train schedules have been run in the past three weeks, and why some districts and some shippers get transportation, while others don't. What we're not supposed to do is say that we know it. We're supposed to pretend to believe that 'public welfare is the only reason for any decision-and that the public welfare of the city of New York requires the immediate delivery of a large quantity of grapefruit." He paused, then added, "The Director of Unification is sole judge of the public welfare and has sole authority over the allocation of any motive power and rolling stock on any railroad anywhere in the United States."  There was a moment of silence. "I see," she said. In another moment, she asked, "What has been done about the Winston tunnel?"  "Oh, that was abandoned three weeks ago. They never unearthed the trains. The equipment gave out."  "What has been done about rebuilding the old line around the tunnel?"  "That was shelved."  "Then are we running any transcontinental traffic?"  He gave her an odd glance. "Oh yes," he said bitterly.  "Through the detour of the Kansas Western?"  "No."  "Eddie, what has been happening here in the past month?"  He smiled as if his words were an ugly confession. "We've been making money in the past month," he answered.  She saw the outer door open and James Taggart come in, accompanied by Mr. Meigs. "Eddie, do you want to be present at the conference?" she asked. "Or would you rather miss this one?"  "No. I want to be present."  Jim's face looked like a crumpled piece of paper, though its soft, puffed flesh had acquired no additional lines.  "Dagny, there's a lot of things to discuss, a lot of important changes which-" he said shrilly, his voice rushing in ahead of his person. "Oh, I'm glad to see you back, I'm happy that you're alive," he added impatiently, remembering. "Now there are some urgent-"  "Let's go to my office," she said.  Her office was like a historical reconstruction, restored and maintained by Eddie Willers. Her map, her calendar, the picture of Nat Taggart were on the walls, and no trace was left of the Clifton Locey era, "I understand that I am still the Operating Vice-President of this railroad?" she asked, sitting down at her desk.  "You are," said Taggart hastily, accusingly, almost defiantly. "You certainly are-and don't you forget it-you haven't quit, you're still -have you?"  "No, I haven't quit."  "Now the most urgent thing to do is to tell that to the press, tell them that you're back on the job and where you were and-and, by the way, where were you?"  "Eddie," she said, "will you make a note on this and send it to the press? My plane developed engine trouble while I was flying over the Rocky Mountains to the Taggart Tunnel. I lost my way, looking for an emergency landing, and crashed in an uninhabited mountain section-of Wyoming. I was found by an old sheepherder and his wife, who took me to their cabin, deep in the wilderness, fifty miles away from the nearest settlement. I was badly injured and remained unconscious for most of two weeks. The old couple had no telephone, no radio, no means of communication or transportation, except an old truck that broke down when they attempted to use it. I had to remain with them until I recovered sufficient strength to walk. I walked the fifty miles to the foothills, then hitchhiked my way to a Taggart station in Nebraska."  "I see," said Taggart. "Well, that's fine. Now when you give the press interview-"  "I'm not going to give any press interviews."  "What? But they've been calling me all day! They're waiting! It's essential!" He had an air of panic. "It's most crucially essential!"  "Who's been calling you all day?"  "People in Washington and . . . and others . . . They're waiting for your statement."  She pointed at Eddie's notes. "There's my statement."  "But that's not enough! You must say that you haven't quit."  "That's obvious, isn't it? I'm back."  "You must say something about it."  "Such as what?"  "Something personal."  "To whom?"  "To the country. People were worried about you. You must reassure them."  "The story will reassure them, if anyone was worried about me."  "That's not what I mean!"  "Well, what do you mean?"  "I mean-" He stopped, his eyes avoiding hers. "I mean-" He sat, searching for words, cracking his knuckles.  Jim was going to pieces, she thought; the jerky impatience, the shrillness, the aura of panic were new; crude outbreaks of a tone of ineffectual menace had replaced his pose of cautious smoothness.  "I mean-" He was searching for words to name his meaning without naming it, she thought, to make her understand that which he did not want to be understood, "I mean, the public-"  "I know what you mean," she said. "No, Jim, I'm not going to reassure the public about the state of our industry."  "Now you're-"  "The public had better be as unreassured as it has the wits to be. Now proceed to business."  "I-"  "Proceed to business, Jim."  He glanced at Mr. Meigs. Mr. Meigs sat silently, his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. He wore a jacket which was not, but looked like, a military uniform. The flesh of his neck bulged over the collar, and the flesh of his body strained against the narrow waistline intended to disguise it. He wore a ring with a large yellow diamond that flashed when he moved his stubby fingers.  "You've met Mr. Meigs," said Taggart. "I'm. so glad that the two of you will get along well together." He made an expectant half-pause, but received no answer from either. "Mr. Meigs is the representative of the Railroad Unification Plan. You'll have many opportunities to cooperate with him."  "What is the Railroad Unification Plan?"  "It is a . . . a new national setup that went into effect three weeks ago, which you will appreciate and approve of and find extremely practical." She marveled at the futility of his method: he was acting as if, by naming her opinion in advance, he would make her unable to alter it. "It is an emergency setup which has saved the country's transportation system."  "What is the plan?"  "You realize, of course, the insurmountable difficulties of any sort of construction job during this period of emergency. It is-temporarily-impossible to lay new track. Therefore, the country's top problem is to preserve the transportation industry as a whole, to preserve its existing plant and all of its existing facilities. The national survival requires-"  "What is the plan?"  "As a policy of national survival, the railroads of the country have been unified into a single team, pooling their resources. All of their gross revenue is turned over to the Railroad Pool Board in Washington, which acts as trustee for the industry as a whole, and divides the total income among the various railroads, according to a . . . a more modern principle of distribution."  "What principle?"  "Now don't worry, property rights have been fully preserved and protected, they've merely been given a new form. Every railroad retains independent responsibility for its own operations, its train schedules and the maintenance of its track and equipment. As its contribution to the national pool, every railroad permits any other, when conditions so require, to use its track and facilities without charge. At the end of the year, the Pool Board distributes the total gross income, and every individual railroad is paid, not on the haphazard, old-fashioned basis of the number of trains run or the tonnage of freight carried, but on the basis of its need-that is, the preservation of its track being its main need, every individual railroad is paid according to the mileage of the track which it owns and maintains."  She heard the words; she understood the meaning; she was unable to make it real-to grant the respect of anger, concern, opposition to a nightmare piece of insanity that rested on nothing but people's willingness to pretend to believe that it was sane. She felt a numbed emptiness -and the sense of being thrown far below the realm where moral indignation is pertinent.  "Whose track are we using for our transcontinental traffic?" she asked, her voice flat and dry.  "Why, our own, of course," said Taggart hastily, "that is, from New York to Bedford, Illinois. We run our trains out of Bedford on the track of the Atlantic Southern."  "To San Francisco?"  "Well, it's much faster than that long detour you tried to establish."  "We run our trains without charge for the use of the track?"  "Besides, your detour couldn't have lasted, the Kansas Western rail was shot, and besides-"  "Without charge for the use of the Atlantic Southern track?"  "Well, we're not charging them for the use of our Mississippi bridge, either."  After a moment, she asked, "Have you looked at a map?"  "Sure," said Meigs unexpectedly. "You own the largest track mileage of any railroad in the country. So you've got nothing to worry about."  Eddie Willers burst out laughing.  Meigs glanced at him blankly, "What's the matter with you?" he asked.  "Nothing," said Eddie wearily, "nothing."  "Mr. Meigs," she said, "if you look at a map, you will see that two thirds of the cost of maintaining a track for our transcontinental traffic is given to us free and is paid by our competitor."  "Why, sure," he said, but his eyes narrowed, watching her suspiciously, as if he were wondering what motive prompted her to so explicit a statement.  "While we're paid for owning miles of useless track which carries no traffic," she said.  Meigs understood-and leaned back as if he had lost all further interest in the discussion.  "That's not true!" snapped Taggart. "We're running a great number of local trains to serve the region of our former transcontinental line-through Iowa, Nebraska and Colorado-and, on the other side of the tunnel, through California, Nevada and Utah."  "We're running two locals a day," said Eddie Willers, in the dry, blankly innocent tone of a business report. "Fewer, some places."  "What determines the number of trains which any given railroad is obligated to run?" she asked.  "The public welfare," said Taggart "The Pool Board," said Eddie.  "How many trains have been discontinued in the country in the past three weeks?"  "As a matter of fact," said Taggart eagerly, "the plan has helped to harmonize the industry and to eliminate cutthroat competition."  "It has eliminated thirty per cent of the trains run in-the country," said Eddie. "The only competition left is in the applications to the Board for permission to cancel trains. The railroad to survive will be the one that manages to run no trains at all."  "Has anybody calculated how long the Atlantic Southern is expected to be able to remain in business?"  "That's no skin off your-" started Meigs.  "Please, Cuffy!" cried Taggart.  "The president of the Atlantic Southern," said Eddie impassively, "has committed suicide."  "That had nothing to do with this!" yelled Taggart. "It was over a personal matter!"  She remained silent. She sat, looking at their faces. There was still an element of wonder in the numbed indifference of her mind: Jim had always managed to switch the weight of his failures upon the strongest plants around him and to survive by destroying them to pay for his errors, as he had done with Dan Conway, as he had done with the industries of Colorado; but this did not have even the rationality of a looter-this pouncing upon the drained carcass of a weaker, a half bankrupt competitor for a moment's delay, with nothing but a cracking bone between the pouncer and the abyss.  The impulse of the habit of reason almost pushed her to speak, to argue, to demonstrate the self-evident-but she looked at their faces and she saw that they knew it. In some terms different from hers, in some inconceivable manner of consciousness, they knew all that she could tell them, it was useless to prove to them the irrational horror of their course and of its consequences, both Meigs and Taggart knew it-and the secret of their consciousness was the means by which they escaped the finality of their knowledge, "I see," she said quietly.  "Well, what would you rather have had me do?" screamed Taggart. "Give up our transcontinental traffic? Go bankrupt? Turn the railroad into a miserable East Coast local?" Her two words seemed to have hit him worse than any indignant objection; he seemed to be shaking with terror at that which the quiet "I see" had acknowledged seeing. "I couldn't help it! We had to have a transcontinental track! There was no way to get around the tunnel! We had no money to pay for any extra costs! Something had to be done! We had to have a track!"  Meigs was looking at him with a glance of part-astonishment, part disgust, "I am not arguing, Jim," she said dryly.  "We couldn't permit a railroad like Taggart Transcontinental to crash! It would have been a national catastrophe! We had to think of all the cities and industries and shippers and passengers and employees and stockholders whose lives depend on us! It wasn't just for ourselves, it was for the public welfare! Everybody agrees that the Railroad Unification Plan is practical! The best-informed-"  "Jim," she said, "if you have any further business to discuss with me -discuss it."  "You've never considered the social angle of anything," he said, in a sullen, retreating voice.  She noticed that this form of pretense was as unreal to Mr. Meigs as it was to her, though for an antipodal reason. He was looking at Jim with bored contempt. Jim appeared to her suddenly as a man who had tried to find a middle course between two poles-Meigs and herself -and who was now seeing that his course was narrowing and that he was to be ground between two straight walls.  "Mr. Meigs," she asked, prompted by a touch of bitterly amused curiosity, "what is your economic plan for day after tomorrow?"  She saw his bleary brown eyes focus upon her without expression.  "You're impractical," he said.  "It's perfectly useless to theorize about the future," snapped Taggart, "when we have to take care of the emergency of the moment. In the long run-"  "In the long run, we'll all be dead," said Meigs.  Then, abruptly, he shot to his feet. "I'll run along, Jim," he said. "I've got no time to waste on conversations." He added, "You talk to her about that matter of doing something to stop all those train wrecks-if she's the little girl who's such a wizard at railroading." It was said inoffensively; he was a man who would not know when he was giving offense or taking it.  "I'll see you later, Cuffy," said Taggart, as Meigs walked out with no parting glance at any of them.  Taggart looked at her, expectantly and fearfully, as if dreading her comment, yet desperately hoping to hear some word, any word.  "Well?" she asked.  "What do you mean?"  "Have you anything else to discuss?"  "Well, I . . . " He sounded disappointed. "Yes!" he cried, in the tone of a desperate plunge. "I have another matter to discuss, the most important one of all, the-"  "Your growing number of train wrecks?"  "No! Not that."  "What, then?"  "It's . . . that you're going to appear on Bertram Scudder's radio program tonight."  She leaned back. "Am I?"  "Dagny, it's imperative, it's crucial, there's nothing to be done about it, to refuse is out of the question, in times like these one has no choice, and-"  She glanced at her watch. "I'll give you three minutes to explain-if you want to be heard at all. And you'd better speak straight."  "All right!" he said desperately. "It's considered most important-on the highest levels, I mean Chick Morrison and Wesley Mouch and Mr. Thompson, as high as that-that you should make a speech to the nation, a morale-building speech, you know, saying that you haven't quit."  "Why?"  "Because everybody thought you had! . . . You don't know what's been going on lately, but . . . but it's sort of uncanny. The country is full of rumors, all sorts of rumors, about everything, all of them dangerous. Disruptive, I mean. People seem to do nothing but whisper. They don't believe the newspapers, they don't believe the best speakers, they believe every vicious, scare-mongering piece of gossip that comes floating around. There's no confidence left, no faith, no order, no . . . no respect for authority. People . . . people seem to be on the verge of panic."  "Well?"  "Well, for one thing, it's that damnable business of all those big industrialists who've vanished into thin air! Nobody's been able to explain it and it's giving them the jitters. There's all sorts of hysterical stuff being whispered about it, but what they whisper mostly is that 'no decent man will work for those people.' They mean the people in Washington. Now do you see? You wouldn't suspect that you were so famous, but you are, or you've become, ever since your plane crash. Nobody believed the plane crash. They all thought you had broken the law, that is, Directive 10-289, and deserted. There's a lot of popular . . . misunderstanding of Directive 10-289, a lot of . . . well, unrest. Now you see how important it is that you go on the air and tell people that it isn't true that Directive 10-289 is destroying industry, that it's a sound piece of legislation devised for everybody's good, and that if they'll just be patient a little longer, things will improve and prosperity will return. They don't believe any public official any more. You . . .you're an industrialist, one of the few left of the old school, and the only one who's ever come back after they thought you'd gone. You're known as . . . as a reactionary who's opposed to Washington policies. So the people will believe you. It would have a great influence on them, it would buttress their confidence, it would help their morale. Now do you see?"  He had rushed on, encouraged by the odd look of her face, a look of contemplation that was almost a faint half-smile.  She had listened, hearing, through his words, the sound of Rearden's voice saying to her on a spring evening over a year ago: "They need some sort of sanction from us. I don't know the nature of that sanction --but, Dagny, I know that if we value our lives, we must not give it to them. If they put you on a torture rack, don't give it to them. Let them destroy your railroad and my mills, but don't give it to them."  "Now do you see?"  "Oh yes, Jim, I see!"  He could not interpret the sound of her voice, it was low, it was part-moan, part-chuckle, part-triumph-but it was the first sound of emotion to come from her, and he plunged on, with no choice but to hope. "I promised them in Washington that you'd speak! We can't fail them-not in an issue of this kind! We can't afford to be suspected of disloyalty. It's all arranged. You'll be the guest speaker on Bertram Scudder's program, tonight, at ten-thirty. He's got a radio program where he interviews prominent public figures, it's a national hookup, he has a large following, he reaches over twenty million people. The office of the Morale Conditioner has-"  "The what?"  "The Morale Conditioner-that's Chick Morrison-has called me three times, to make sure that nothing would go wrong. They've issued orders to all the news broadcasters, who've been announcing it all day, all over the country, telling people to listen to you tonight on Bertram Scudder's hour."  He looked at her as if he were demanding both an answer and the recognition that her answer was the element of least importance in these circumstances. She said, "You know what I think of the Washington policies and of Directive 10-289."  "At a time like this, we can't afford the luxury of thinking!"  She laughed aloud.  "But don't you see that you can't refuse them now?" he yelled. "If you don't appear after all those announcements, it will support the rumors, it will amount to an open declaration of disloyalty!"  "The trap won't work, Jim."  "What trap?"  "The one you're always setting up."  "I don't know what you mean!"  "Yes, you do. You knew-all of you knew it-that I would refuse. So you pushed me into a public trap, where my refusal would become an embarrassing scandal for you, more embarrassing than you thought I'd dare to cause. You were counting on me to save your faces and the necks you stuck out. I won't save them."  "But I promised it!"  "I didn't."  "But we can't refuse them! Don't you see that they've got us hogtied? That they're holding us by the throat? Don't you know what they can do to us through this Railroad Pool, or through the Unification Board, or through the moratorium on our bonds?"  "I knew that two years ago."  He was shaking; there was some formless, desperate, almost superstitious quality in his terror, out of proportion to the dangers he named. She felt suddenly certain that it came from something deeper than his fear of bureaucratic reprisal, that the reprisal was the only identification of it which he would permit himself to know, a reassuring identification which had a semblance of rationality and hid his true motive. She felt certain that it was not the country's panic he wanted to stave off, but his own-that he, and Chick Morrison and Wesley Mouch and all the rest of the looting crew needed her sanction, not to reassure their victims, but to reassure themselves, though the allegedly crafty, the allegedly practical idea of deluding their victims was the only identification they gave to their own motive and their hysterical insistence. With an awed contempt-awed by the enormity of the sight-she wondered what inner degradation those men had to reach in order to arrive at a level of self-deception where they would seek the extorted approval of an unwilling victim as the moral sanction they needed, they who thought that they were merely deceiving the world.  "We have no choice!" he cried. "Nobody has any choice!"  "Get out of here," she said, her voice very quiet and low.  Some tonal quality in the sound of her voice struck the note of the unconfessed within him, as if, never allowing it into words, he knew from what knowledge that sound had come. He got out.  She glanced at Eddie; he looked like a man worn by fighting one more of the attacks of disgust which he was learning to endure as a chronic condition.  After a moment, he asked, "Dagny, what became of Quentin Daniels?  You were flying after him, weren't you?"  "Yes," she said. "He's gone."  'To the destroyer?"  The word hit her like a physical blow. It was the first touch of the outer world upon that radiant presence which she had kept within her all day, as a silent, changeless vision, a private vision, not to be affected by any of the things around her, not to be thought about, only to be felt as the source of her strength. The destroyer, she realized, was the name of that vision, here, in their world.  "Yes," she said dully, with effort, "to the destroyer."  Then she closed her hands over the edge of the desk, to steady her purpose and her posture, and said, with the bitter hint of a smile, "Well, Eddie, let's see what two impractical persons, like you and me, can do about preventing the train wrecks."  It was two hours later-when she was alone at her desk, bent over sheets of paper that bore nothing but figures, yet were like a motion picture film unrolling to tell her the whole story of the railroad in the past four weeks-that the buzzer rang and her secretary's voice said, "Mrs. Rearden to see you, Miss Taggart."  "Mr. Rearden?" she asked incredulously, unable to believe either.  "No. Mrs. Rearden."  She let a moment pass, then said, "Please ask her to come in."  There was some peculiar touch of emphasis in Lillian Rearden's bearing when she entered and walked toward the desk. She wore a tailored suit, with a loose, bright bow hanging casually sidewise for a note of elegant incongruity, and a small hat tilted at an angle considered smart by virtue of being considered amusing; her face was a shade too smooth, her steps a shade too slow, and she walked almost as if she were swinging her hips.  "How do you do, Miss Taggart," she said in a lazily gracious voice, a drawing-room voice which seemed to strike, in that office, the same style of incongruity as her suit and her bow.  Dagny inclined her head gravely.  Lillian glanced about the office; her glance had the same style of amusement as her hat: an amusement purporting to express maturity by the conviction that life could be nothing but ridiculous.  "Please sit down," said Dagny.  Lillian sat down, relaxing into a confident, gracefully casual posture.  When she turned her face to Dagny, the amusement was still there, but its shading was now different: it seemed to suggest that they shared a secret, which would make her presence here seem preposterous to the world, but self-evidently logical to the two of them. She stressed it by remaining silent.  "What can I do for you?"  "I came to tell you," said Lillian pleasantly, "that you will appear on Bertram Scudder's broadcast tonight."  She detected no astonishment in Dagny's face, no shock, only the glance of an engineer studying a motor that makes an irregular sound.  "I assume," said Dagny, "that you are fully aware of the form of your sentence."  "Oh yes!" said Lillian.  "Then proceed to support it."  "I beg your pardon?"  "Proceed to tell me."  Lillian gave a brief little laugh, its forced brevity betraying that this was not quite the attitude she had expected. "I am sure that no lengthy explanations will be necessary," she said. "You know why your appearance on that broadcast is important to those in power. I know why you have refused to appear. I know your convictions on the subject. You may have attached no importance to it, but you do know that my sympathy has always been on the side of the system now in power. Therefore, you will understand my interest in the issue and my place in it. When your brother told me that you had refused, I decided to take a hand in the matter-because, you see, I am one of the very few who know that you are not in a position to refuse."  "I am not one of those few, as yet," said Dagny.  Lillian smiled. "Well, yes, I must explain a little further. You realize that your radio appearance will have the same value for those in power as-as the action of my husband when he signed the Gift Certificate that turned Rearden Metal over to them. You know how frequently and how usefully they have been mentioning it in all of their propaganda."  "I didn't know that," said Dagny sharply.  "Oh, of course, you have been away for most of the last two months, so you might have missed the constant reminders-in the press, on the radio, in public speeches-that even Hank Rearden approves of and supports Directive 10-289, since he has voluntarily signed his Metal over to the nation. Even Hank Rearden. That discourages a great many recalcitrants and helps to keep them in line." She leaned back and asked in the tone of a casual aside, "Have you ever asked him why he signed?"  Dagny did not answer; she did not seem to hear that it was a question; she sat still and her face was expressionless, but her eyes seemed too large and they were fixed on Lillian's, as if she were now intent upon nothing but hearing Lillian to the end.  "No, I didn't think you knew it. I didn't think that he would ever tell you," said Lillian, her voice smoother, as if recognizing the signposts and sliding comfortably down the anticipated course. "Yet you must learn the reason that made him sign-because it is the same reason that will make you appear on Bertram Scudder's broadcast tonight."  She paused, wishing to be urged; Dagny waited.  "It is a reason," said Lillian, "which should please you-as far as my husband's action is concerned. Consider what that signature meant to him. Rearden Metal was his greatest achievement, the summation of the best in his life, the final symbol of his pride-and my husband, as you have reason to know, is an extremely passionate man, his pride in himself being, perhaps, his greatest passion. Rearden Metal was more than an achievement to him, it was the symbol of his ability to achieve, of his independence, of his struggle, of his rise. It was his property, his by right-and you know what rights mean to a man as strict as he, and what property means to a man as possessive. He would have gladly died to defend it, rather than surrender it to the men he despised. This is what it meant to him-and this is what he gave up. You will be glad to know that he gave it up for your sake, Miss Taggart. For the sake of your reputation and your honor. He signed the Gift Certificate surrendering Rearden Metal-under the threat that the adultery he was carrying on with you would be exposed to the eyes of the world. Oh yes, we had full proof of it, in every intimate detail. I believe that you hold a philosophy which disapproves of sacrifice-but in this case, you are most certainly a woman, so I'm sure that you will feel gratification at the magnitude of the sacrifice a man has made for the privilege of using your body. You have undoubtedly taken great pleasure in the nights which he spent in your bed. You may now take pleasure in the knowledge of what those nights have cost him. And since-you like bluntness, don't you, Miss Taggart?-since your chosen status is that of a whore, I take my hat off to you in regard to the price you exacted, which none of your sisters could ever have hoped to match."  Lillian's voice had kept growing reluctantly sharper, like a drill head that kept breaking by being unable to find the line of the fault in the stone. Dagny was still looking at her, but the intensity had vanished from Dagny's eyes and posture. Lillian wondered why she felt as if Dagny's face were hit by a spotlight. She could detect no particular expression, it was simply a face in natural repose-and the clarity seemed to come from its structure, from the precision of its sharp planes, the firmness of the mouth, the steadiness of the eyes. She could not decipher the expression of the eyes, it seemed incongruous, it resembled the calm, not of a woman, but of a scholar, it had that peculiar, luminous quality which is the fearlessness of satisfied knowledge.  "It was I," said Lillian softly, "who informed the bureaucrats about my husband's adultery."  Dagny noticed the first flicker of feeling in Lillian's lifeless eyes: it resembled pleasure, but so distantly that it looked like sunlight reflected from the dead surface of the moon to the stagnant water of a swamp; it flickered for an instant and went.  "It was I," said Lillian, "who took Rearden Metal away from him."  It sounded almost like a plea.  It was not within the power of Dagny's consciousness ever to understand that plea or to know what response Lillian had hoped to find; she knew only that she had not found it, when she heard the sudden shrillness of Lillian's voice: "Have you understood me?"  "Yes."  "Then you know what I demand and why you'll obey me. You thought you were invincible, you and he, didn't you?" The voice was attempting smoothness, but it was jerking unevenly. "You have always acted on no will but your own-a luxury I have not been able to afford. For once and in compensation, I will see you acting on mine. You can't fight me. You can't buy your way out of it, with those dollars which you're able to make and I'm not. There's no profit you can offer me-I'm devoid of greed. I'm not paid by the bureaucrats for doing this-I am doing it without gain. Without gain. Do you understand me?"  "Yes."  "Then no further explanations are necessary, only the reminder that all the factual evidence-hotel registers, jewelry bills and stuff like that-is still in the possession of the right persons and will be broadcast on every radio program tomorrow, unless you appear on one radio program tonight. Is this clear?"  "Yes."  "Now what is your answer?" She saw the luminous scholar-eyes looking at her, and suddenly she felt as if too much of her were seen and as if she were not seen at all.  "I am glad that you have told me," said Dagny. "I will appear on Bertram Scudder's broadcast tonight."  There was a beam of white light beating down upon the glittering metal of a microphone-in the center of a glass cage imprisoning her with Bertram Scudder. The spark of glitter were greenish-blue; the microphone was made of Rearden Metal.  Above them, beyond a sheet of glass, she could distinguish a booth with two rows of faces looking down at her: the lax, anxious face of James Taggart, with Lillian Rearden beside him, her hand resting reassuringly on his arm-a man who had arrived by plane from Washington and had been introduced to her as Chick Morrison-and a group of young men from his staff, who talked about percentage curves of intellectual influence and acted like motorcycle cops.  Bertram Scudder seemed to be afraid of her. He clung to the microphone, spitting words into its delicate mesh, into the ears of the country, introducing the subject of his program. He was laboring to sound cynical, skeptical, superior and hysterical together, to sound like a man who sneers at the vanity of all human beliefs and thereby demands an instantaneous belief from his listeners. A small patch of moisture glistened on the back of his neck. He was describing in over colored detail her month of convalescence in the lonely cabin of a sheepherder, then her heroic trudging down fifty miles of mountain trails for the sake of resuming her duties to the people in this grave hour of national emergency. ". . . And if any of you have been deceived by vicious rumors aimed to undermine your faith in the great social program of our leaders-you may trust the word of Miss Taggart, who-"  She stood, looking up at the white beam. Specks of dust were whirling in the beam and she noticed that one of them was alive: it was a gnat with a tiny sparkle in place of its beating wings, it was struggling for some frantic purpose of its own, and she watched it, feeling as distant from its purpose as from that of the world.  ". . . Miss Taggart is an impartial observer, a brilliant businesswoman who has often been critical of the government in the past and who may be said to represent the extreme, conservative viewpoint held by such giants of industry as Hank Rearden. Yet even she-"  She wondered at how easy it felt, when one did not have to feel; she seemed to be standing naked on public display, and a beam of light was enough to support her, because there was no weight of pain in her, no hope, no regret, no concern, no future.  ". . . And now, ladies and gentlemen, I will present to you the heroine of this night, our most uncommon guest, the-"  Pain came back to her in a sudden, piercing stab, like a long splinter from the glass of a protective wall shattered by the knowledge that the next words would be hers; it came back for the brief length of a name in her mind, the name of the man she had called the destroyer: she did not want him to hear what she would now have to say. If you hear it-the pain was like a voice crying it to him-you won't believe the things I have said to you-no, worse, the things which I have not said, but which you knew and believed and accepted -you will think that I was not free to offer them and that my days with you were a lie-this will destroy my one month and ten of your years-this was not the way I wanted you to learn it, not like this, not tonight -but you will, you who've watched and known my every movement, you who're watching me now, wherever you are-you will hear it-but it has to be said.  "-the last descendant of an illustrious name in our industrial history, the woman executive possible only in America, the Operating Vice-President of a great railroad-Miss Dagny Taggart!"  Then she felt the touch of Rearden Metal, as her hand closed over the stem of the microphone, and it was suddenly easy, not with the drugged ease of indifference, but with the bright, clear, living ease of action.  "I came here to tell you about the social program, the political system and the moral philosophy under which you are now living."  There was so calm, so natural, so total a certainty in the sound of her voice that the mere sound seemed to carry an immense persuasiveness.  "You have heard it said that I believe that this system has depravity as its motive, plunder as its goal, lies, fraud and force as its method, and destruction as its only result. You have also heard it said that, like Hank Rearden, I am a loyal supporter of this system and that I give my voluntary co-operation to present policies, such as Directive 10-289.1 have come here to tell you the truth about it.  "It is true that I share the stand of Hank Rearden. His political convictions are mine. You have heard him denounced in the past as a reactionary who opposed every step, measure, slogan and premise of the present system. Now you hear him praised as our greatest industrialist, whose judgment on the value of economic policies may safely be trusted. It is true. You may trust his judgment. If you are now beginning to fear that you are in the power of an irresponsible evil, that the country is collapsing and that you will soon be left to starve-consider the views of our ablest industrialist, who knows what conditions are necessary to make production possible and to permit a country to survive.  ”Consider all that you know about his views. At such times as he was able to speak, you have heard him tell you that this government's policies were leading you to enslavement and destruction. Yet he did not denounce the final climax of these policies-Directive 10-289. You have heard him fighting for his rights-his and yours-for his independence, for his property. Yet he did not fight Directive 10-289. He signed voluntarily, so you have been told, the Gift Certificate that surrendered Rearden Metal to his enemies. He signed the one paper which, by all of his previous record, you had expected him to fight to the death. What could this mean-you have constantly been told-unless it meant that even he recognized the necessity of Directive 10-289 and sacrificed his personal interests for the sake of the country? Judge his views by the motive of that action, you have constantly been told. And with this I agree unreservedly: judge his views by the motive of that action. And-for whatever value you attach to my opinion and to any warning I may give you-judge my views also by the motive of that action, because his convictions are mine.  "For two years, I had been Hank Rearden's mistress. Let there be no misunderstanding about it: I am saying this, not as a shameful confession, but with the highest sense of pride. I had been his mistress. I had slept with him, in his bed, in his arms. There is nothing anyone might now say to you about me, which I will not tell you first. It will be useless to defame me-I know the nature of the accusations and I will state them to you myself. Did I feel a physical desire for him? I did. Was I moved by a passion of my body? I was. Have I experienced the most violent form of sensual pleasure? I have. If this now makes me a disgraced woman in your eyes-let your estimate be your own concern. I will stand on mine."  Bertram Scudder was staring at her; this was not the speech he had expected and he felt, in dim panic, that it was not proper to let it continue, but she was the special guest whom the Washington rulers had ordered him to treat cautiously; he could not be certain whether he was now supposed to interrupt her or not; besides, he enjoyed hearing this sort of story. In the audience booth, James Taggart and Lillian Rearden sat frozen, like animals paralyzed by the headlight of a train rushing down upon them; they were the only ones present who knew the connection between the words they were hearing and the theme of the broadcast; it was too late for them to move; they dared not assume the responsibility of a movement or of whatever was to follow.  In the control room, a young intellectual of Chick Morrison's staff stood ready to cut the broadcast off the air in case of trouble, but he saw no political significance in the speech he was hearing, no element he could construe as dangerous to his masters. He was accustomed to hearing speeches extorted by unknown pressure from unwilling victims, and he concluded that this was the case of a reactionary forced to confess a scandal and that, therefore, the speech had, perhaps, some political value; besides, he was curious to hear it "I am proud that he had chosen me to give him pleasure and that it was he who had been my choice. It was not-as it is for most of you-an act of casual indulgence and mutual contempt. It was the ultimate form of our admiration for each other, with full knowledge of the values by which we made our choice. We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies, those who do not leave their values to empty dreams, but bring them into existence, those who give material form to thoughts, and reality to values-those who make steel, railroads and happiness. And to such among you who hate the thought of human joy, who wish to see men's life as chronic suffering and failure, who wish men to apologize for happiness-or for success, or ability, or achievement, or wealth-to such among you, I am now saying: I wanted him, I had him, I was happy, I had known joy, a pure, full, guiltless joy, the joy you dread to hear confessed by any human being, the joy of which your only knowledge is in your hatred for those who are worthy of reaching it. Well, hate me, then-because I reached it!"  "Miss Taggart," said Bertram Scudder nervously, "aren't we departing from the subject of . . . After all, your personal relationship with Mr. Rearden has no political significance which-"  "[ didn't think it had, either. And, of course, I came here to tell you about the political and moral system under which you are now living. Well, I thought that I knew everything about Hank Rearden, but there was one thing which I did not learn until today. It was the blackmail threat that our relationship would be made public that forced Hank Rearden to sign the Gift Certificate surrendering Rearden Metal. It was blackmail-blackmail by your government officials, by your rulers, by your-"  In the instant when Scudder's hand swept out to knock the microphone over, a faint click came from its throat as it crashed to the floor, signifying that the intellectual cop had cut the broadcast off the air.  She laughed-but there was no one to see her and to hear the nature of her laughter. The figures rushing into the glass enclosure were screaming at one another. Chick Morrison was yelling unprintable curses at Bertram Scudder-Bertram Scudder was shouting that he had been opposed to the whole idea, but had been ordered to do it-James Taggart looked like an animal baring its teeth, while he snarled at two of Morrison's youngest assistants and avoided the snarls of an older third. The muscles of Lillian Rearden's face had an odd slackness, like the limbs of an animal lying in the road, intact but dead. The morale conditioners were shrieking what they guessed they thought Mr. Mouch would think. "What am I to say to them?" the program announcer was crying, pointing at the microphone. "Mr. Morrison, there's an audience waiting, what am I to say?" Nobody answered him. They were not fighting over what to do, but over whom to blame.  Nobody said a word to Dagny or glanced in her direction. Nobody stopped her, when she walked out.  She stepped into the first taxicab in sight, giving the address of her apartment. As the cab started, she noticed that the dial of the radio on the driver's panel was lighted and silent, crackling with the brief, tense coughs of static: it was tuned to Bertram Scudder's program.  She lay back against the seat, feeling nothing but the desolation of the knowledge that the sweep of her action had, perhaps, swept away the man who might never wish to see her again. She felt, for the first time, the immensity of the hopelessness of finding him-if he did not choose to be found-in the streets of the city, in the towns of a continent, in the canyons of the Rocky Mountains where the goal was closed by a screen of rays. But one thing remained to her, like a log floating on a void, the log to which she had clung through the broadcast-and she knew that this was the thing she could not abandon, even were she to lose all the rest; it was the sound of his voice saying to her: "Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever."  "Ladies and gentlemen,” the voice of Bertram Scudder's announcer crackled suddenly out of the static, "due to technical difficulties over which we have no control, this station will remain off the air, pending the necessary readjustments." The taxi driver gave a brief, contemptuous chuckle-and snapped the radio off.  When she stepped out and handed him a bill, he extended the change to her and, suddenly, leaned forward for a closer look at her face.  She felt certain that he recognized her and she held his glance austerely for an instant. His bitter face and his over patched shirt were worn out by a hopeless, losing struggle. As she handed him. a tip, he said quietly, with too earnest, too solemn an emphasis for a mere acknowledgment of the corns, "Thank you, ma'am."  She turned swiftly and hurried into the building, not to let him see the emotion which was suddenly more than she could bear.  Her head was drooping, as she unlocked the door of her apartment, and the light struck her from below, from the carpet, before she jerked her head up in astonishment at finding the apartment lighted. She took a step forward-and saw Hank Rearden standing across the room.  She was held still by two shocks: one was the sight of his presence, she had not expected him to be back so soon; the other was the sight of his face. His face had so firm, so confident, so mature a look of calm, in the faint half-smile, in the clarity of the eyes, that she felt as if he had aged decades within one month, but aged in the proper sense of human growth, aged in vision, in stature, in power. She felt that he who had lived through a month of agony, he whom she had hurt so deeply and was about to hurt more deeply still, he would now be the one to give her support and consolation, his would be the strength to protect them both. She stood motionless for only an instant, but she saw his smile deepening as if he were reading her thoughts and telling her that she had nothing to fear. She heard a slight, crackling sound and saw, on a table beside him, the lighted dial of a silent radio. Her eyes moved to his as a question and he answered by the faintest nod, barely more than a lowering of his eyelids; he had heard her broadcast.  They moved toward each other in the same moment. He seized her shoulders to support her, her face was raised to his, but he did not touch her lips, he took her hand and kissed her wrist, her fingers, her palm, as the sole form of the greeting which so much of his suffering had gone to await. And suddenly, broken by the whole of this day and of that month, she was sobbing in his arms, slumped against him, sobbing as she had never done in her life, as a woman, in surrender to pain and in a last, futile protest against it.  Holding her so that she stood and moved only by means of his body, not hers, he led her to the couch and tried to make her sit down beside him, but she slipped to the floor, to sit at his feet and bury her face in his knees and sob without defense or disguise.  He did not lift her, he let her cry, with his arm tight about her. She felt his hand on her head, on. her shoulder, she felt the protection of his firmness, a firmness which seemed to tell her that as her tears were for both of them, so was his knowledge, that he knew her pain and felt it and understood, yet was able to witness it calmly-and his calm seemed to lift her burden, by granting her the right to break, here, at his feet, by telling her that he was able to carry what she could not carry any longer. She knew dimly that this was the real Hank Rearden, and no matter what form of insulting cruelty he had once given to their first nights together, no matter how often she had seemed as the stronger of the two, this had always been within him and at the root of their bond-this strength of his which would protect her if ever hers were gone.  When she raised her head, he was smiling down at her.  "Hank . . ." she whispered guiltily, in desperate astonishment at her own break.  "Quiet, darling."  She let her face drop back on his knees; she lay still, fighting for rest, fighting against the pressure of a wordless thought: he had been able to bear and to accept her broadcast only as a confession of her love; it made the truth she now had to tell him more inhuman a blow than anyone had the right to deliver. She felt terror at the thought that she would not have the strength to do it, and terror at the thought that she would.  When she looked up at him again, he ran his hand over her forehead, brushing the hair off her face.  "It's over, darling," he said. "The worst of it is over, for both of us."  "No, Hank, it isn't."  He smiled.  He drew her to sit beside him, with her head on his shoulder. "Don't say anything now," he said. "You know that we both understand all that has to be said, and we'll speak of it, but not until it has ceased to hurt you quite so much."  His hand moved down the line of her sleeve, down a fold of her skirt, with so light a pressure that it seemed as if the hand did not feel the body inside the clothes, as if he were regaining possession, not of her body, but only of its vision.  "You've taken too much," he said. "So have I. Let them batter us. There's no reason why we should add to it. No matter what we have to face, there can be no suffering between the two of us. No added pain. Let that come from their world. It won't come from us. Don't be afraid. We won't hurt each other. Not now."  She raised her head, shaking it with a bitter smile-there was a desperate violence in her movement, but the smile was a sign of recovery: of the determination to face the despair.  "Hank, the kind of hell I let you go through in the last month-"  Her voice was trembling.  "It's nothing, compared to the kind of hell I let you go through in the last hour." His voice was steady.  She got up, to pace the room, to prove her strength-her steps like words telling him that she was not to be spared any longer. When she stopped and turned to face him, he rose, as if he understood her motive.  "I know that I've made it worse for you," she said, pointing at the radio.  He shook his head. "No."  "Hank, there's something I have to tell you."  "So have I. Will you let me speak first? You see, it's something I should have said to you long ago. Will you let me speak and not answer me until I finish?"  She nodded.  He took a moment to look at her as she stood before him, as if to hold the full sight of her figure, of this moment and of everything that had led them to it.  "I love you, Dagny," he said quietly, with the simplicity of an unclouded, yet unsmiling happiness.  She was about to speak, but knew that she couldn't, even if he had permitted it, she caught her unuttered words, the movement of her lips was her only answer, then she inclined her head in acceptance.  "I love you. As the same value, as the same expression, with the same pride and the same meaning as I love my work, my mills, my Metal, my hours at a desk, at a furnace, in a laboratory, in an ore mine, as I love my ability to work, as I love the act of sight and knowledge, as I love the action of my mind when it solves a chemical equation or grasps a sunrise, as I love the things I've made and the things I've felt, as my product, as my choice, as a shape of my world, as my best mirror, as the wife I've never had, as that which makes all the rest of it possible: as my power to live."  She did not drop her face, but kept it level and open, to hear and accept, as he wanted her to and as he deserved.  "I loved you from the first day I saw you, on a flatcar on a siding of Milford Station. I loved you when we rode in the cab of the first engine on the John Galt Line. I loved you on the gallery of Ellis Wyatt's house. I loved you on that next morning. You knew it. But it's I who must say it to you, as I'm saying it now-if I am to redeem all those days and to let them be fully what they were for both of us, I loved you. You knew it. I didn't. And because I didn't, I had to learn it when I sat at my desk and looked at the Gift Certificate for Rearden Metal."  She closed her eyes. But there was no suffering in his face, nothing but the immense and quiet happiness of clarity.  " 'We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies.' You said it in your broadcast tonight. But you knew it, then, on that morning in Ellis Wyatt's house. You knew that all those insults I was throwing at you were the fullest confession of love a man could make. You knew that the physical desire I was damning as our mutual shame, is neither physical nor an expression of one's body, but the expression of one's mind's deepest values, whether one has the courage to know it or not. That was why you laughed at me as you did, wasn't it?"  "Yes," she whispered.  "You said, 'I do not want your mind, your will, your being or your soul-so long as it's to me that you will come for that lowest one of your desires.' You knew, when you said it, that it was my mind, my will, my being and my soul that I was giving you by means of that desire. And I want to say it now, to let that morning mean what it meant: my mind, my will, my being and my soul, Dagny-yours, for as long as I shall live."  He was looking straight at her and she saw a brief sparkle in his eyes, which was not a smile, but almost as if he had heard the cry she had not uttered.  "Let me finish, dearest. I want you to know how fully I know what I am saying. I, who thought that I was fighting them, I had accepted the worst of our enemies' creed-and that is what I've paid for ever since, as I am paying now and as I must. I had accepted the one tenet by which they destroy a man before he's started, the killer-tenet: the breach between his mind and body. I had accepted it, like most of their victims, not knowing it, not knowing even that the issue existed. I rebelled against their creed of human impotence and I took pride in my ability to think, to act, to work for the satisfaction of my desires. But I did not know that this was virtue, I never identified it as a moral value, as the highest of moral values, to be defended above one's life, because it's that which makes life possible. And I accepted punishment for it, punishment for virtue at the hands of an arrogant evil, made arrogant solely by my ignorance and my submission.  "I accepted their insults, their frauds, their extortions. I thought I could afford to ignore them-all those impotent mystics who prattle about their souls and are unable to build a roof over their heads. I thought that the world was mine, and that those jabbering incompetents were no threat to my strength. I could not understand why I kept losing every battle. I did not know that the force unleashed against me was my own. While I was busy conquering matter, I had surrendered to them the realm of the mind, of thought, of principle, of law, of values, of morality. I had accepted, unwittingly and by default, the tenet that ideas were of no consequence to one's existence, to one's work, to reality, to this earth-as if ideas were not the province of reason, but of that mystic faith which I despised. This was all they wanted me to concede. It was enough. I had surrendered that which all of their claptrap is designed to subvert and to destroy: man's reason. No, they were not able to deal with matter, to produce abundance, to control this earth. They did not have to. They controlled me.  "I, who knew that wealth is only a means to an end, created the means and let them prescribe my ends. I, who took pride in my ability to achieve the satisfaction of my desires, let them prescribe the code of values by which I judged my desires. I, who shaped matter to serve my purpose, was left with a pile of steel and gold, but with my every purpose defeated, my every desire betrayed, my every attempt at happiness frustrated.  "I had cut myself in two, as the mystics preached, and I ran my business by one code of rules, but my own life by another. I rebelled against the looters' attempt to set the price and value of my steel-but I let them set the moral values of my life. I rebelled against demands for an unearned wealth-but I thought it was my duty to grant an unearned love to a wife I despised, an unearned respect to a mother who hated me, an unearned support to a brother who plotted for my destruction. I rebelled against undeserved financial injury-but I accepted a life of undeserved pain. I rebelled against the doctrine that my productive ability was guilt-but I accepted, as guilt, my capacity for happiness. I rebelled against the creed that virtue is some disembodied unknowable of the spirit-but I damned you, you, my dearest one, for the desire of your body and mine. But if the body is evil; then so are those who provide the means of its survival, so is material wealth and those who produce it-and if moral values are set in contradiction to our physical existence, then it's right that rewards should be unearned, that virtue should consist of the undone, that there should be no tie between achievement and profit, that the inferior animals who're able to produce should serve those superior beings whose superiority in spirit consists of incompetence in the flesh.  "If some man like Hugh Akston had told me, when I started, that by accepting the mystics' theory of sex I was accepting the looters' theory of economics, I would have laughed in his face. I would not laugh at him now. Now I see Rearden Steel being ruled by human scum-I see the achievement of my life serving to enrich the worst of my enemies-and as to the only two persons I ever loved, I've brought a deadly insult to one and public disgrace to the other. I slapped the face of the man who was my friend, my defender, my teacher, the man who set me free by helping me to learn what I've learned, I loved him, Dagny, he was the brother, the son, the comrade I never had-but I knocked him out of my life, because he would not help me to produce for the looters. I'd give anything now to have him back, but I own nothing to offer in such repayment, and I'll never see him again, because it's I who'll know that there is no way to deserve even the right to ask forgiveness.  "But what I've done to you, my dearest, is still worse. Your speech and that you had to make it-that's what I've brought upon the only woman I loved, in payment for the only happiness I've known. Don't tell me that it was your choice from the first and that you accepted all consequences, including tonight-it does not redeem the fact that it was I who had no better choice to offer you. And that the looters forced you to speak, that you spoke to avenge me and set me free-does not redeem the fact that it was I who made their tactics possible. It was not then own convictions of sin and dishonor that they could use to disgrace you-it was mine. They merely carried out the things I believed and said in Ellis Wyatt's house. It was I who kept our love hidden as a guilty secret-they merely treated it for what it was by my own appraisal. It was I who was willing to counterfeit reality for the sake of appearance in their eyes-they merely cashed in on the right I had given them.  "People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked. And if one gains the immediate purpose of the lie-the price one pays is the destruction of that which the gain was intended to serve. The man who lies to the world, is the world's slave from then on- When I chose to hide my love for you, to disavow it in public and live it as a lie, I made it public property-and the public has claimed it in a fitting sort of manner. I had no way to avert it and no power to save you. When I gave in to the looters, when I signed their Gift Certificate, to protect you-I was still faking reality, there was nothing else left open to me-and, Dagny, I'd rather have seen us both dead than permit them to do what they threatened. But there are no white lies, there is only the blackness of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all. I was still faking reality, and it had the inexorable result: instead of protection, it brought you a more terrible kind of ordeal, instead of saving your name, it forced you to offer yourself for a public stoning and to throw the stones by your own hand. I know that you were proud of the things you said, and I was proud to hear you-but that was the pride we should have claimed two years ago.  "No, you did not make it worse for me, you set me free, you saved us both, you redeemed our past. I can't ask you to forgive me, we're far beyond such terms-and the only atonement I can offer you is the fact that I am happy. That I am happy, my darling, not that I suffer. I am happy that I have seen the truth-even if my power of sight is all that's left to me now. Were I to surrender to pain and give up in futile regret that my own error has wrecked my past-that would be the act of final treason, the ultimate failure toward that truth I regret having failed. But if my love of truth is left as my only possession, then the greater the loss behind me, the greater the pride I may take in the price I have paid for that love. Then the wreckage will not become a funereal mount above me, but will serve as a height I have climbed to attain a wider field of vision. My pride and my power of vision were all that I owned when I started-and whatever I achieved, was achieved by means of them. Both are greater now. Now I have the knowledge of the superlative value I had missed: of my right to be proud of my vision. The rest is mine to reach.  "And, Dagny, the one thing I wanted, as the first step of my future, was to say that I love you-as I'm saying it now. I love you, my dearest, with that blindest passion of my body which comes from the clearest perception of my mind-and my love for you is the only attainment of my past that will be left to me, unchanged, through all the years ahead. I wanted to say it to you while I still had the right to say it. And because I had not said it at our beginning, this is the way I have to say it-at the end. Now I'll tell you what it was that you wanted to tell me-because, you see, I know it and I accept: somewhere within the past month, you have met the man you love, and if love means one's final, irreplaceable choice, then he is the only man you've ever loved."  "Yes!" Her voice was half-gasp, half-scream, as under a physical blow, with shock as her only awareness. "Hank!-how did you know it?"  He smiled and pointed at the radio. "My darling, you used nothing but the past tense."  "Oh . . . !" Her voice was now half-gasp, half-moan, and she closed her eyes.  "You never pronounced the one word you would have rightfully thrown at them, were it otherwise. You said, 'I wanted him,' not, 'I love him.' You told me on the phone today that you could have returned sooner. No other reason would have made you leave me as you did. Only that one reason was valid and right."  She was leaning back a little, as if fighting for balance to stand, yet she was looking straight at him, with a smile that did not part her lips, but softened her eyes to a glance of admiration and her mouth to a shape of pain.  "It's true. I've met the man I love and will always love, I've seen him, I've spoken to him-but he's a man whom I can't have, whom I may never have and, perhaps, may never see again."  "I think I've always known that you would find him. I knew what you felt for me, I knew how much it was, but I knew that I was not your final choice. What you'll give him is not taken away from me, it's what I've never had. I can't rebel against it. What I've had means too much to me-and that I've had it, can never be changed."  "Do you want me to say it, Hank? Will you understand it, if I say that I'll always love you?"  "I think I've understood it before you did."  "I've always seen you as you are now. That greatness of yours which you are just beginning to allow yourself to know-I've always known it and I've watched your struggle to discover it. Don't speak of atonement, you have not hurt me, your mistakes came from your magnificent integrity under the torture of an impossible code-and your fight against it did not bring me suffering, it brought me the feeling I've found too seldom: admiration. If you will accept it, it will always be yours. What you meant to me can never be changed. But the man I met-he is the love I had wanted to reach long before I knew that he existed, and I think he will remain beyond my reach, but that I love him will be enough to keep me living."  He took her hand and pressed it to his lips. "Then you know what I feel," he said, "and why I am still happy."  Looking up at his face, she realized that for the first time he was what she had always thought him intended to be: a man with an immense capacity for the enjoyment of existence. The taut look of endurance, of fiercely unadmitted pain, was gone; now, in the midst of the wreckage and of his hardest hour, his face had the serenity of pure strength; it had the look she had seen in the faces of the men in the valley.  "Hank," she whispered, "I don't think I can explain it, but I feel that I have committed no treason, either to you or to him."  "You haven't."  Her eyes seemed abnormally alive in a face drained of color, as if her consciousness remained untouched in a body broken by exhaustion. He made her sit down and slipped his arm along the back of the couch, not touching her, yet holding her in a protective embrace.  "Now tell me," he asked, "where were you?"  "I can't tell you that. I've given my word never to reveal anything about it. I can say only that it's a place I found by accident, when I crashed, and I left it blindfolded-and I wouldn't be able to find it again."  "Couldn't you trace your way back to it?"  "I won't try."  "And the man?"  "I won't look for him."  "He remained there?"  "I don't know."  "Why did you leave him?"  "I can't tell you."  "Who is he?"  Her chuckle of desperate amusement was involuntary. "Who is John Galt?"  He glanced at her, astonished-but realized that she was not joking.  "So there is a John Galt?" he asked slowly, "Yes."  "That slang phrase refers to him?"  "Yes."  "And it has some special meaning?"  "Oh yes! . . . There's one thing I can tell you about him, because I discovered it earlier, without promise of secrecy: he is the man who invented the motor we found."  "Oh!" He smiled, as if he should have known it. Then he said softly, with a glance that was almost compassion, "He's the destroyer, isn't he?" He saw her look of shock, and added, "No, don't answer me, if you can't. I think I know where you were. It was Quentin Daniels that you wanted to save from the destroyer, and you were following Daniels when you crashed, weren't you?"  "Yes."  "Good God, Dagny!-does such a place really exist? Are they all alive? Is there . . . ? I'm sorry. Don't answer."  She smiled. "It does exist."  He remained silent for a long time.  "Hank, could you give up Rearden Steel?"  "No!" The answer was fiercely immediate, but he added, with the first sound of hopelessness in his voice, "Not yet."  Then he looked at her, as if, in the transition of his three words, he had lived the course of her agony of the past month. "I see," he said. He ran his hand over her forehead, with a gesture of understanding, of compassion, of an almost incredulous wonder. "What hell you've now undertaken to endure!" he said, his voice low.  She nodded.  She slipped down, to lie stretched, her face on his knees. He stroked her hair; he said, "We'll fight the looters as long as we can. I don't know what future is possible to us, but we'll win or we'll learn that it's hopeless. Until we do, we'll fight for our world. We're all that's left of it."  She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek.