CHAPTER VI THE CONCERTO OF DELIVERANCE

On October 20, the steel workers' union of Rearden Steel demanded a raise in wages. Hank Rearden learned it from the newspaper; no demand had been presented to him and it had not been considered necessary to inform him. The demand was made to the Unification Board; it was not explained why no other steel company was presented with a similar claim. He was unable to tell whether the demanders did or did not represent his workers, the Board's rules on union elections having made it a matter impossible to define. He learned only that the group consisted of those newcomers whom the Board had slipped into his mills in the past few months.  On October 23, the Unification Board rejected the union's petition, refusing to grant the raise. If any hearings had been held on the matter, Rearden had not known about it. He had not been consulted, informed or notified. He had waited, volunteering no questions.  On October 25, the newspapers of the country, controlled by the same men who controlled the Board, began a campaign of commiseration with the workers of Rearden Steel. They printed stories about the refusal of the wage raise, omitting any mention of who had refused it or who held the exclusive legal power to refuse, as if counting on the public to forget legal technicalities under a barrage of stories implying that an employer was the natural cause of all miseries suffered by employees. They printed a story describing the hardships of the workers of Rearden Steel under the present rise in the cost of their living-next to a story describing Hank Rearden's profits, of five years ago. They printed a story on the plight of a Rearden worker's wife trudging from store to store in a hopeless quest for food-next to a story about a champagne bottle broken over somebody's head at a drunken party given by an unnamed steel tycoon at a fashionable hotel; the steel tycoon had been Orren Boyle, but the story mentioned no names. "Inequalities still exist among us," the newspapers were saying, "and cheat us of the benefits of our enlightened age." "Privations have worn the nerves and temper of the people. The situation is reaching the danger point. We fear an outbreak of violence." "We fear an outbreak of violence," the newspapers kept repeating,  On October 28, a group of the new workers at Rearden Steel attacked a foreman and knocked the tuyeres off a blast furnace. Two days later, a similar group broke the ground-floor windows of the administration building. A new worker smashed the gears of a crane, upsetting a ladle of molten metal within a yard of five bystanders. "Guess I went nuts, worrying about my hungry kids," he said, when arrested. "This is no time to theorize about who's right or wrong," the newspapers commented. "Our sole concern is the fact that an inflammatory situation is endangering the steel output of the country."  Rearden watched, asking no questions. He waited, as if some final knowledge were in the process of unraveling before him, a process not to be hastened or stopped. No-he thought through the early dusk of autumn evenings, looking out the window of his office-no, he was not indifferent to his mills, but the feeling which had once been passion for a living entity was now like the wistful tenderness one feels for the memory of the loved and dead. The special quality of what one feels for the dead, he thought, is that no action is possible any longer.  On the morning of October 31, he received a notice informing him that all of his property, including his bank accounts and safety deposit boxes, had been attached to satisfy a delinquent judgment obtained against him in a trial involving a deficiency in his personal income tax of three years ago. It was a formal notice, complying with every requirement of the law-except that no such deficiency had ever existed and no such trial had ever taken place.  "No," he said to his indignation-choked attorney, "don't question them, don't answer, don't object." "But this is fantastic!" "Any more fantastic than the rest?" "Hank, do you want me to do nothing? To take it lying down?" "No, standing up. And I mean, standing. Don't move. Don't act." "But they've left you helpless." "Have they?" he asked softly, smiling.  He had a few hundred dollars in cash, left in his wallet, nothing else. But the odd, glowing warmth in his mind, like the feel of a distant handshake, was the thought that in a secret safe of his bedroom there lay a bar of solid gold, given to him by a gold-haired pirate.  Next day, on November 1, he received a telephone call from Washington, from a bureaucrat whose voice seemed to come sliding down the wire on its knees in protestations of apology. "A mistake, Mr. Rearden! It was nothing but an unfortunate mistake! That attachment was not intended for you. You know how it is nowadays, with the inefficiency of all office help and with the amount of red tape we're tangled in, some bungling fool mixed the records and processed the attachment order against you-when it wasn't your case at all, it was, in fact, the case of a soap manufacturer! Please accept our apologies, Mr. Rearden, our deepest personal apologies at the top level." The voice slid to a slight, expectant pause. "Mr. Rearden . . . ?" "I'm listening." "I can't tell you how sorry we are to have caused you any embarrassment or inconvenience. And with all those damn formalities that we have to go through-you know how it is, red tape!-it will take a few days, perhaps a week, to de-process that order and to lift the attachment.. . . Mr. Rearden?" "I heard you." "We're desperately sorry and ready to make any amends within our power. You will, of course, be entitled to claim damages for any inconvenience this might cause you, and we are prepared to pay. We won't contest it. You will, of course, file such a claim and-" "I have not said that." "Uh? No, you haven't . . . that is . . . well, what have you said, Mr. Rearden?" "I have said nothing."  Late on the next afternoon, another voice came pleading from Washington. This one did not seem to slide, but to bounce on the telephone wire with the gay virtuosity of a tight-rope walker. It introduced itself as Tinky Holloway and pleaded that Rearden attend a conference, "an informal little conference, just a few of us, the top-level few," to be held in New York, at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, day after next.  "There have been so many misunderstandings in the past few weeks!" said Tinky Holloway. "Such unfortunate misunderstandings-and so unnecessary! We could straighten everything out in a jiffy, Mr. Rearden, if we had a chance to have a little talk with you. We're extremely anxious to see you."  "You can issue a subpoena for me any time you wish."  "Oh, no! no! no!" The voice sounded frightened. "No, Mr. Rearden -why think of such things? You don't understand us, we're anxious to meet you on a friendly basis, we're seeking nothing but your voluntary co-operation." Holloway paused tensely, wondering whether he had heard the faint sound of a distant chuckle; he waited, but heard nothing else.  "Mr. Rearden?"  "Yes?"  "Surely, Mr. Rearden, at a time like this, a conference with us could be to your great advantage."  "A conference-about what?"  "You've encountered so many difficulties-and we're anxious to help you in any way we can."  "I have not asked for help."  "These are precarious times, Mr. Rearden, the public mood is so uncertain and inflammatory, so . . . so dangerous . . . and we want to be able to protect you."  "I have not asked for protection."  "But surely you realize that we're in a position to be of value to you, and if there's anything you want from us, any . . ."  "There isn't."  "But you must have problems you'd like to discuss with us."  "I haven't."  "Then . . . well, then" -giving up the attempt at the play of granting a favor, Holloway switched to an open plea-"then won't you just give us a hearing?"  "If you have anything to say to me."  "We have, Mr. Rearden, we certainly have! That's all we're asking for-a hearing. Just give us a chance. Just come to this conference. You wouldn't be committing yourself to anything-" He said it involuntarily, and stopped, hearing a bright, mocking stab of life in Rearden's voice, an unpromising-sound, as Rearden answered: "I know it."  "Well, I mean . . . that is . . . well, then, will you come?"  "All right," said Rearden. "I'll come."  He did not listen to Holloway's assurances of gratitude, he noted only that Holloway kept repeating, "At seven P.M., November fourth, Mr. Rearden . . . November fourth . . ." as if the date had some special significance.  Rearden dropped the receiver and lay back in his chair, looking at the glow of furnace flames on the ceiling of his office. He knew that the conference was a trap; he knew also that he was walking into it with nothing for any trappers to gain.  Tinky Holloway dropped the receiver, in his Washington office, and sat up tensely, frowning. Claude Slagenhop, president of Friends of Global Progress, who had sat in an armchair, nervously chewing a matchstick, glanced up at him and asked, "Not so good?"  Holloway shook his head. "He'll come, but . . . no, not so good."  He added, "I don't think he'll take it."  "That's what my punk told me."  "I know."  "The punk said we'd better not try it."  "God damn your punk! We've got to! We'll have to risk it!"  The punk was Philip Rearden who, weeks ago, had reported to Claude Slagenhop: "No, he won't let me in, he won't give me a job, I've tried, as you wanted me to, I've tried my best, but it's no use, he won't let me set foot inside his mills. And as to his frame of mind-listen, it's bad. It's worse than anything I expected. I know him and I can tell you that you won't have a chance. He's pretty much at the end of his rope. One more squeeze will snap it. You said the big boys wanted to know. Tell them not to do it. Tell them he . . . Claude, God help us, if they do it, they'll lose him!" "Well, you're not of much help," Slagenhop had said dryly, turning away. Philip had seized his sleeve and asked, his voice shrinking suddenly into open anxiety, "Say, Claude - . . according to . . . to Directive 10-289 . . . if he goes, there's . . . there's to be no heirs?" "That's right." "They'd seize the mills and . . . and everything?" 'That's the law." "But . . . Claude, they wouldn't do that to me, would they?" "They don't want him to go. You know that. Hold him, if you can." "But I can't! You know I can't! Because of my political ideas and . . . and everything I've done for you, you know what he thinks of me! I have no hold on him at all!" "Well, that's your tough luck." "Claude!" Philip had cried in panic. "Claude, they won't leave me out in the cold, will they? I belong, don't I? They've always said I belonged, they've always said they needed me . . . they said they needed men like me, not like him, men with my . . . my sort of spirit, remember? And after all I've done for them, after all my faith and service and loyalty to the cause-" "You damn fool," Slagenhop had snapped, "of what use are you to us without him?"  On the morning of November 4, Hank Rearden was awakened by the ringing of the telephone. He opened his eyes to the sight of a clear, pale sky, the sky of early dawn, in the window of his bedroom, a sky the delicate color of aquamarine, with the first rays of an invisible sun giving a shade of porcelain pink to Philadelphia's ancient roof tops.  For a moment, while his consciousness had a purity to equal the sky's, while he was aware of nothing but himself and had not yet reharnessed his soul to the burden of alien memories, he lay still, held by the sight and by the enchantment of a world to match it, a world where the style of existence would be a continuous morning.  The telephone threw him back into exile: it was screaming at spaced intervals, like a nagging, chronic cry for help, the kind of cry that did not belong in his world. He lifted the receiver, frowning. "Hello?"  "Good morning, Henry," said a quavering voice; it was his mother.  "Mother-at this hour?" he asked dryly.  "Oh, you're always up at dawn, and I wanted to catch you before you went to the office."  "Yes? What is it?"  "I've got to see you, Henry. I've got to speak to you. Today. Sometime today. It's important."  "Has anything happened?"  "No . . . yes . . . that is . . . I've got to have a talk with you in person. Will you come?"  "I'm sorry, I can't. I have an appointment in New York tonight. If you want me to come tomorrow-"  "No! No, not tomorrow. It's got to be today. It's got to." There was a dim tone of panic in her voice, but it was the stale panic of chronic helplessness, not the sound of an emergency-except for an odd echo of fear in her mechanical insistence.  "What is it, Mother?"  "I can't talk about it over the telephone, I've got to see you."  "Then if you wish to come to the office-"  "No! Not at the office! I've got to sec you alone, where we can talk. Can't you come here today, as a favor? It's your mother who's asking you a favor. You've never come to see us at all. And maybe you're not the one to blame for it, either. But can't you do it for me this once, if I beg you to?"  "All right, Mother. I'll be there at four o'clock this afternoon."  "That will be fine, Henry. Thank you, Henry. That will be fine."  It seemed to him that there was a touch of tension in the air of the mills, that day. It was a touch too slight to define-but the mills, to him, were like the face of a loved wife where he could catch shades of feeling almost ahead of expression. He noticed small clusters of the new workers, just three or four of them huddling together in conversation -once or twice too often. He noticed their manner, a manner suggesting a poolroom corner, not a factory. He noticed a few glances thrown at him as he went by, glances a shade too pointed and lingering. He dismissed it; it was not quite enough to wonder about-and he had no time to wonder.  When he drove up to his former home, that afternoon, he stopped his car abruptly at the foot of the hill. He had not seen the house since that May 15, six months ago, when he had walked out of it-and the sight brought back to him the sum of all he had felt in ten years of daily home-coming: the strain, the bewilderment, the gray weight of unconfessed unhappiness, the stern endurance that forbade him to confess it, the desperate innocence of the effort to understand his family . . . the effort to be just.  He walked slowly up the path toward the door. He felt no emotion, only the sense of a great, solemn clarity. He knew that this house was a monument of guilt-of his guilt toward himself.  He had expected to see his mother and Philip; he had not expected the third person who rose, as they did, at his entrance into the living room: it was Lillian.  He stopped on the threshold. They stood looking at his face and at the open door behind him. Their faces had a look of fear and cunning, the look of that blackmail-through-virtue which he had learned to understand, as if they hoped to get away with it by means of nothing but his pity, to hold him trapped, when a single step back could take him out of their reach.  They had counted on his pity and dreaded his anger; they had not dared consider the third alternative; his indifference.  "What is she doing here?" he asked, turning to his mother, his voice dispassionately flat.  "Lillian's been living here ever since your divorce," she answered defensively. "I couldn't let her starve on the city pavements, could I?"  The look in his mother's eyes was half-plea, as if she were begging him not to slap her face, half-triumph, as if she had slapped his. He knew her motive: it was not compassion, there had never been much love between Lillian and her, it was their common revenge against him, it was the secret satisfaction of spending his money on the ex-wife he had refused to support.  Lillian's head was poised to bow in greeting, with the tentative hint of a smile on her lips, half-timid, half-brash. He did not pretend to ignore her; he looked at her, as if he were seeing her fully, yet as if no presence were being registered in his mind. He said nothing, closed the door and stepped into the room.  His mother gave a small sigh of uneasy relief and dropped hastily into the nearest chair, watching him, nervously uncertain of whether he would follow her example.  "What was it you wanted?" he asked, sitting down.  His mother sat erect and oddly hunched, her shoulders raised, her head half-lowered. "Mercy, Henry," she whispered.  "What do you mean?"  "Don't you understand me?"  "No."  "Well"-she spread her hands in an untidily fluttering gesture of helplessness-"well . . . " Her eyes darted about, struggling to escape his attentive glance. "Well, there are so many things to say and . . .and I don't know how to say them, but . . . well, there's one practical matter, but it's not important by itself . . . it's not why I called you here . . . "  "What is it?"  "The practical matter? Our allowance checks-Philip's and mine. It's the first of the month, but on account of that attachment order, the checks couldn't come through. You know that, don't you?"  "I know it."  "Well, what are we going to do?"  "I don't know."  "I mean, what are you going to do about it?"  "Nothing,"  His mother sat staring at him, as if counting the seconds of silence.  "Nothing, Henry?"  "I have no power to do anything."  They were watching his face with a kind of searching intensity; he felt certain that his mother had told him the truth, that immediate financial worry was not their purpose, that it was only the symbol of a much wider issue.  "But, Henry, we're caught short."  "So was I."  "But can't you send us some cash or something?"  "They gave me no warning, no time to get any cash."  "Then . . . Look, Henry, the thing was so unexpected, it scared people, I guess-the grocery store refuses to give us credit, unless you ask for it. I think they want you to sign a credit card or something. So will you speak to them and arrange it?"  "I will not."  "You won't?" She choked on a small gasp. "Why?"  "I will not assume obligations that I can't fulfill."  "What do you mean?"  "I will not assume debts I have no way of repaying."  "What do you mean, no way? That attachment is only some sort of technicality, it's only temporary, everybody knows that!"  "Do they? I don't."  "But, Henry-a grocery bill! You're not sure you'll be able to pay a grocery bill, you, with all the millions you own?"  "I'm not going to defraud the grocer by pretending that I own those millions."  "What are you talking about? Who owns them?"  "Nobody."  "What do you mean?"  "Mother, I think you understand me fully. I think you understood it before I did. There isn't any ownership left in existence or any property. It's what you've approved of and believed in for years. You wanted me tied. I'm tied. Now it's too late to play any games about it."  "Are you going to let some political ideas of yours-" She saw the look on his face and stopped abruptly.  Lillian sat looking down at the floor, as if afraid to glance up at this moment. Philip sat cracking his knuckles.  His mother dragged her eyes into focus again and whispered, "Don't abandon us, Henry." Some faint stab of life in her voice told him that the lid of her real purpose was cracking open. "These are terrible times, and we're scared. That's the truth of it, Henry, we're scared, because you're turning away from us. Oh, I don't mean just that grocery bill, but that's a sign-a year ago you wouldn't have let that happen to us. Now . . . now you don't care." She made an expectant pause. "Do you?"  "No."  "Well . . . well, I guess the blame is ours. That's what I wanted to tell you-that we know we're to blame. We haven't treated you right, all these years. We've been unfair to you, we've made you suffer, we've used you and given you no thanks in return. We're guilty, Henry, we've sinned against you, and we confess it. What more can we say to you now? Will you find it in your heart to forgive us?"  "What is it you want me to do?" he asked, in the clear, flat tone of a business conference.  "I don't know! Who am I to know? But that's not what I'm talking of right now. Not of doing, only of feeling. It's your feeling that I'm begging you for, Henry-just your feeling-even if we don't deserve it. You're generous and strong. Will you cancel the past, Henry? Will you forgive us?"  The look of terror in her eyes was real. A year ago, he would have told himself that this was her way of making amends; he would have choked his revulsion against her words, words which conveyed nothing to him but the fog of the meaningless; he would have violated his mind to give them meaning, even if he did not understand; he would have ascribed to her the virtue of sincerity in her own terms, even if they were not his. But he was through with granting respect to any terms other than his own.  "Will you forgive us?"  "Mother, it would be best not to speak of that. Don't press me to tell you why. I think you know it as well as I do. If there's anything you want done, tell me what it is. There's nothing else to discuss.”  "But I don't understand you! I don't! That's what I called you here for-to ask your forgiveness! Are you going to refuse to answer me?"  "Very well. What would it mean, my forgiveness?"  "Uh?"  "I said, what would it mean?"  She spread her hands out in an astonished gesture to indicate the self-evident. "Why, it . . . it would make us feel better."  "Will it change the past?"  "It would make us feel better to know that you've forgiven it."  "Do you wish me to pretend that the past has not existed?"  "Oh God, Henry, can't you see? All we want is only to know that you . . . that you feel some concern for us."  "I don't feel it. Do you wish me to fake it?"  "But that's what I'm begging you for-to feel it!"  "On what ground?"  "Ground?"  "In exchange for what?"  "Henry, Henry, it's not business we're talking about, not steel tonnages and bank balances, it's feelings-and you talk like a trader!"  "I am one."  What he saw in her eyes was terror-not the helpless terror of struggling and failing to understand, but the terror of being pushed toward the edge where to avoid understanding would no longer be possible.  "Look, Henry," said Philip hastily, "Mother can't understand those things. We don't know how to approach you. We can't speak your language."  "I don't speak yours."  "What she's trying to say is that we're sorry. We're terribly sorry that we've hurt you. You think we're not paying for it, but we are. We're suffering remorse."  The pain in Philip's face was real. A year ago, Rearden would have felt pity. Now, he knew that they had held him through nothing but his reluctance to hurt them, his fear of their pain. He was not afraid of it any longer, "We're sorry, Henry. We know we've harmed you. We wish we could atone for it. But what can we do? The past is past. We can't undo it."  "Neither can I."  "You can accept our repentance," said Lillian, in a voice glassy with caution. "I have nothing to gain from you now. I only want you to know that whatever I've done, I've done it because I loved you."  He turned away, without answering.  "Henry!" cried his mother. "What's happened to you? What's changed you like that? You don't seem to be human any more! You keep pressing us for answers, when we haven't any answers to give. You keep beating us with logic-what's logic at a time like this?-what's logic when people are suffering?"  "We can't help it!" cried Philip.  "We're at your mercy," said Lillian.  They were throwing their pleas at a face that could not be reached.  They did not know-and their panic was the last of their struggle to escape the knowledge-that his merciless sense of justice, which had been their only hold on him, which had made him take any punishment and give them the benefit of every doubt, was now turned against them-that the same force that had made him tolerant, was now the force that made him ruthless-that the justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil.  "Henry, don't you understand us?" his mother was pleading.  "I do," he said quietly.  She looked away, avoiding the clarity of his eyes. "Don't you care what becomes of us?"  "I don't."  "Aren't you human?" Her voice grew shrill with anger. "Aren't you capable of any love at all? It's your heart I'm trying to reach, not your mind! Love is not something to argue and reason and bargain about! It's something to give! To feel! Oh God, Henry, can't you feel without thinking?"  "I never have."  In a moment, her voice came back, low and droning: "We're not as smart as you are, not as strong. If we've sinned and blundered, it's because we're helpless. We need you, you're all we've got-and we're losing you-and we're afraid. These are terrible times, and getting worse, people are scared to death, scared and blind and not knowing what to do. How are we to cope with it, if you leave us? We're small and weak and we'll be swept like driftwood in that terror that's running loose in the world. Maybe we had our share of guilt for it, maybe we helped to bring it about, not knowing any better, but what's done is done-and we can't stop it now. If you abandon us, we're lost. If you give up and vanish, like all those men who-"  It was not a sound that stopped her, it was only a movement of his eyebrows, the brief, swift movement of a check mark. Then they saw him smile; the nature of the smile was the most terrifying of answers.  "So that's what you're afraid of," he said slowly.  "You can't quit!" his mother screamed in blind panic. "You can't quit now! You could have, last year, but not now! Not today! You can't turn deserter, because now they take it out on your family! They'll leave us penniless, they'll seize everything, they'll leave us to starve, they'll-"  "Keep still!" cried Lillian, more adept than the others at reading danger signs in Rearden's face.  His face held the remnant of a smile, and they knew that he was not seeing them any longer, but it was not in their power to know why his smile now seemed to hold pain and an almost wistful longing, or why he was looking across the room, at the niche of the farthest window.  He was seeing a finely sculptured face held composed under the lashing of his insults, he was hearing a voice that had said to him quietly, here, in this room: "It is against the sin of forgiveness that I wanted to warn you." You who had known it then, he thought . . . but he did not finish the sentence in his mind, he let it end in the bitter twist of his smile, because he knew what he had been about to think: You who had known it then-forgive me.  There it was-he thought, looking at his family-the nature of their pleas for mercy, the logic of those feelings they so righteously proclaimed as non-logical-there was the simple, brutal essence of all men who speak of being able to feel without thought and of placing mercy over justice.  They had known what to fear; they had grasped and named, before he had, the only way of deliverance left open to him; they had understood the hopelessness of his industrial position, the futility of his struggle, the impossible burdens descending to crush him; they had known that in reason, in justice, in self-preservation, his only course was to drop it all and run-yet they wanted to hold him, to keep him in the sacrificial furnace, to make him let them devour the last of him in the name of mercy, forgiveness and brother-cannibal love.  "If you still want me to explain it, Mother," he said very quietly, "if you're still hoping that I won't be cruel enough to name what you're pretending not to know, then here's what's wrong with your idea of forgiveness: You regret that you've hurt me and, as your atonement for it, you ask that I offer myself to total immolation."  "Logic!" she screamed. "There you go again with your damn logic! It's pity that we need, pity, not logic!"  He rose to his feet.  "Wait! Don't go! Henry, don't abandon us! Don't sentence us to perish! Whatever we are, we're human! We want to live!"  "Why, no-" he started in quiet astonishment and ended in quiet horror, as the thought struck him fully, "I don't think you do. If you did, you would have known how to value me."  As if in silent proof and answer, Philip's face went slowly into an expression intended as a smile of amusement, yet holding nothing but fear and malice. "You won't be able to quit and run away," said Philip. "You can't run away without money."  It seemed to strike its goal; Rearden stopped short, then chuckled, "Thanks, Philip," he said.  "Uh?" Philip gave a nervous jerk of bewilderment.  "So that's the purpose of the attachment order. That's what your friends are afraid of. I knew they were getting set to spring something on me today. I didn't know that the attachment was their idea of cutting off escape." He turned incredulously to look at his mother. "And that's why you had to see me today, before the conference in New York."  "Mother didn't know it!" cried Philip, then caught himself and cried louder, "I don't know what you're talking about! I haven't said anything! I haven't said it!" His fear now seemed to have some much less mystic and much more practical quality.  "Don't worry, you poor little louse, I won't tell them that you've told me anything. And if you were trying-" He did not finish; he looked at the three faces before him, and a sudden smile ended his sentence, a smile of weariness, of pity, of incredulous revulsion. He was seeing the final contradiction, the grotesque absurdity at the end of the irrationalists' game: the men in Washington had hoped to hold him by prompting these three to try for the role of hostages.  "You think you're so good, don't you?" It was a sudden cry and it came from Lillian; she had leaped to her feet to bar his exit; her face was distorted, as he had seen it once before, on that morning when she had learned the name of his mistress. "You're so good! You're so proud of yourself! Well, I have something to tell you!"  She looked as if she had not believed until this moment that her game was lost. The sight of her face struck him like a last shred completing a circuit, and in sudden clarity he knew what her game had been and why she had married him. If to choose a person as the constant center of one's concern, as the focus of one's view of life, was to love-he thought-then it was true that she loved him; but if, to him, love was a celebration of one's self and of existence-then, to the self-haters and life-haters, the pursuit of destruction was the only form and equivalent of love. It was for the best of his virtues that Lillian had chosen him, for his strength, his confidence, his pride-she had chosen him as one chooses an object of love, as the symbol of man's living power, but the destruction of that power had been her goal.  He saw them as they had been at their first meeting: he, the man of violent energy and passionate ambition, the man of achievement, lighted by the flame of his success and flung into the midst of those pretentious ashes who called themselves an intellectual elite, the burned out remnants of undigested culture, feeding on the afterglow of the minds of others, offering their denial of the mind as their only claim to distinction, and a craving to control the world as their only lust-she, the woman hanger-on of that elite, wearing their shopworn sneer as her answer to the universe, holding impotence as superiority and emptiness as virtue-he, unaware of their hatred, innocently scornful of their posturing fraud-she, seeing him as the danger to their world, as a threat, as a challenge, as a reproach.  The lust that drives others to enslave an empire, had become, in her limits, a passion for power over him. She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if-he thought with a shudder-as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it birth.  He remembered her hammering derision of his work, his mills, his Metal, his success, he remembered her desire to see him drunk, just once, her attempts to push him into infidelity, her pleasure at the thought that he had fallen to the level of some sordid romance, her terror on discovering that that romance had been an attainment, not a degradation. Her line of attack, which he had found so baffling, had been constant and clear-it was his self-esteem she had sought to destroy, knowing that a man who surrenders his value is at the mercy of anyone's will; it was his moral purity she had struggled to breach, it was his confident rectitude she had wanted to shatter by means of the poison of guilt-as if, were he to collapse, his depravity would give her a right to hers.  For the same purpose and motive, for the same satisfaction, as others weave complex systems of philosophy to destroy generations, of establish dictatorships to destroy a country, so she, possessing no weapons except femininity, had made it her goal to destroy one man. Yours was the code of life-he remembered the voice of his lost young teacher-what, then, is theirs?  "I have something to tell you!" cried Lillian, with the sound of that impotent rage which wishes that words were brass knuckles. "You're so proud of yourself, aren't you? You're so proud of your name! Rearden Steel, Rearden Metal, Rearden Wife! That's what I was, wasn't I? Mrs. Rearden! Mrs. Henry Rearden!" The sounds she was making were now a string of cackling gasps, an unrecognizable corruption of laughter. "Well, I think you'd like to know that your wife's been laid by another man! I've been unfaithful to you, do you hear me? I've been unfaithful, not with some great, noble lover, but with the scummiest louse, with Jim Taggart! Three months ago! Before your divorce! While I was your wife! While I was still your wife!"  He stood listening like a scientist studying a subject of no personal relevance whatever. There, he thought, was the final abortion of the creed of collective interdependence, the creed of non-identity, nonproperty, non-fact: the belief that the moral stature of one is at the mercy of the action of another.  "I've been unfaithful to you! Don't you hear me, you stainless Puritan? I've slept with Jim Taggart, you incorruptible hero! Don't you hear me? . . . Don't you hear me? . . . Don't you . . . ?"  He was looking at her as he would have looked if a strange woman had approached him on the street with a personal confession-a look like the equivalent of the words: Why tell it to me?  Her voice trailed off. He had not known what the destruction of a person would be like; but he knew that he was seeing the destruction of Lillian. He saw it in the collapse of her face, in the sudden slackening of features, as if there were nothing to hold them together, in the eyes, blind, yet staring, staring inward, filled with that terror which no outer threat can equal. It was not the look of a person losing her mind, but the look of a mind seeing total defeat and, in the same instant, seeing, her own nature for the first time-the look of a person seeing that after years of preaching non-existence, she had achieved it.  He turned to go. His mother stopped him at the door, seizing his arm. With a look of stubborn bewilderment, with the last of her effort at self-deceit, she moaned in a voice of tearfully petulant reproach, "Are you really incapable of forgiveness?"  "No, Mother," he answered, "I'm not. I would have forgiven the past-if, today, you had urged me to quit and disappear."  There was a cold wind outside, tightening his overcoat about him like an embrace, there was the great, fresh sweep of country stretching at the foot of the hill, and the clear, receding sky of twilight. Like two sunsets ending the day, the red glow of the sun was a straight, still band in the west, and the breathing red band in the east was the glow of his mills.  The feel of the steering wheel under his hands and of the smooth highway streaming past, as he sped to New York, had an oddly bracing quality. It was a sense of extreme precision and of relaxation, together, a sense of action without strain, which seemed inexplicably youthful-until he realized that this was the way he had acted and had expected always to act, in his youth-and what he now felt was like the simple, astonished question: Why should one ever have to act in any other manner?  It seemed to him that the skyline of New York, when it rose before him, had a strangely luminous clarity, though its shapes were veiled by distance, a clarity that did not seem to rest in the object, but felt as if the illumination came from him. He looked at the great city, with no tie to any view or usage others had made of it, it was not a city of gangsters or panhandlers or derelicts or whores, it was the greatest industrial achievement in the history of man, its only meaning was that which it meant to him, there was a personal quality in his sight of it, a quality of possessiveness and of unhesitant perception, as if he were seeing it for the first time-or the last.  He paused in the silent corridor of the Wayne-Falkland, at the door of the suite he was to enter; it took him a long moment's effort to lift his hand and knock; it was the suite that had belonged to Francisco d'Anconia. There were coils of cigarette smoke weaving through the air of the drawing room, among the velvet drapes and bare, polished tables. With its costly furniture and the absence of all personal belongings, the room had that air of dreary luxury which pertains to transient occupancy, as dismal as the air of a flophouse. Five figures rose in. the fog at his entrance: Wesley Mouch, Eugene Lawson, James Taggart, Dr. Floyd Ferris and a slim, slouching man who looked like a rat-faced tennis player and was introduced to him as Tinky Holloway.  "All right," said Rearden, cutting off the greetings, the smiles, the offers of drinks and the comments on the national emergency, "what did you want?"  "We're here as your friends, Mr. Rearden," said Tinky Holloway, "purely as your friends, for an informal conversation with a view to closer mutual teamwork."  "We're anxious to avail ourselves of your outstanding ability," said Lawson, "and your expert advice on the country's industrial problems."  "It's men like you that we need in Washington," said Dr. Ferris.  "There's no reason why you should have remained an outsider for so long, when your voice is needed at the top level of national leadership."  The sickening thing about it, thought Rearden, was that the speeches were only half-lies; the other half, in their tone of hysterical urgency, was the unstated wish to have it somehow be true. "What did you want?" he asked.  "Why . . . to listen to you, Mr. Rearden," said Wesley Mouch, the jerk of his features imitating a frightened smile; the smile was faked, the fear was real. "We . . . we want the benefit of your opinion on the nation's industrial crisis."  "I have nothing to say."  "But, Mr. Rearden," said Dr. Ferris, "all we want is a chance to co-operate with you."  "I've told you once, publicly, that I don't co-operate at the point of a gun."  "Can't we bury the hatchet at a time like this?" said Lawson beseechingly.  "The gun? Go ahead."  "Uh?"  "It's you who're holding it. Bury it, if you think you can."  "That . . . that was just a figure of speech," Lawson explained, blinking, "I was speaking metaphorically."  "I wasn't."  "Can't we all stand together for the sake of the country in this hour of emergency?" said Dr. Ferris. "Can't we disregard our differences of opinion? We're willing to meet you halfway. If there's any aspect of our policy which you oppose, just tell us and we'll issue a directive to-"  "Cut it, boys. I didn't come here to help you pretend that I'm not in the position I'm in and that any halfway is possible between us. Now come to the point. You've prepared some new gimmick to spring on the steel industry. What is it?"  "As a matter of fact," said Mouch, "we do have a vital question to discuss in regard to the steel industry, but . . . but your language, Mr. Rearden!"  "We don't want to spring anything on you," said Holloway. "We asked you here to discuss it with you."  "I came here to take orders. Give them."  "But, Mr. Rearden, we don't want to look at it that way. We don't want to give you orders. We want your voluntary consent."  Rearden smiled. "I know it."  "You do?" Holloway started eagerly, but something about Rearden's smile made him slide into uncertainty. "Well, then-"  "And you, brother," said Rearden, "know that that is the flaw in your game, the fatal flaw that will blast it sky-high. Now do you tell me what clout on my head you're working so hard not to let me notice-or do I go home?"  "Oh no, Mr. Rearden!" cried Lawson, with a sudden dart of his eyes to his wrist watch. "You can't go now!-That is, I mean, you wouldn't want to go without hearing what we have to say."  "Then let me hear it."  He saw them glancing at one another. Wesley Mouch seemed afraid to address him; Mouch's face assumed an expression of petulant stubbornness, like a signal of command pushing the others forward; whatever their qualifications to dispose of the fate of the steel industry, they had been brought here to act as Mouch's conversational bodyguards.  Rearden wondered about the reason for the presence of James Taggart; Taggart sat in gloomy silence, sullenly sipping a drink, never glancing in his direction.  "We have worked out a plan," said Dr. Ferris too cheerfully, "which will solve the problems of the steel industry and which will meet with your full approval, as a measure providing for the general welfare, while protecting your interests and insuring your safety in a-"  "Don't try to tell me what I'm going to think. Give me the facts."  "It is a plan which is fair, sound, equitable and-"  "Don't tell me your evaluation. Give me the facts."  "It is a plan which-" Dr. Ferris stopped; he had lost the habit of naming facts.  "Under this plan," said Wesley Mouch, "we will grant the industry a five per cent increase in the price of steel." He paused triumphantly.  Rearden said nothing.  "Of course, some minor adjustments will be necessary," said Holloway airily, leaping into the silence as onto a vacant tennis court. "A certain increase in prices will have to be granted to the producers of iron ore-oh, three per cent at most-in view of the added hardships which some of them, Mr. Larkin of Minnesota, for instance, will now encounter, inasmuch as they'll have to ship their ore by the costly means of trucks, since Mr. James Taggart has had to sacrifice his Minnesota branch line to the public welfare. And, of course, an increase in freight rates will have to be granted to the country's railroads-let's say, seven per cent, roughly speaking-in view of the absolutely essential need for-" Holloway stopped, like a player emerging from a whirlwind activity to notice suddenly that no opponent was answering his shots.  "But there will be no increase in wages," said Dr. Ferris hastily. "An essential point of the plan is that we will grant no increase in wages to the steel workers, in spite of their insistent demands. We do wish to be fair to you, Mr. Rearden, and to protect your interests-even at the risk of popular resentment and indignation."  "Of course, if we expect labor to make a sacrifice," said Lawson, "we must show them that management, too, is making certain sacrifices for the sake of the country. The mood of labor in the steel industry is extremely tense at present, Mr. Rearden, it is dangerously explosive and . . . and in order to protect you from . . . from . . . " He stopped.  "Yes?" said Rearden. "From?"  "From possible . . . violence, certain measures are necessary, which . . . Look, Jim"-he turned suddenly to James Taggart-"why don't you explain it to Mr. Rearden, as a fellow industrialist?"  "Well, somebody's got to support the railroads," said Taggart sullenly, not looking at him. "The country needs railroads and somebody's got to help us carry the load, and if we don't get an increase in freight rates-"  "No, no, no!" snapped Wesley Mouch. "Tell Mr. Rearden about the working of the Railroad Unification Plan."  "Well, the Plan is a full success," said Taggart lethargically, "except for the not fully controllable element of time. It is only a question of time before our unified teamwork puts every railroad in the country back on its feet. The Plan, I'm in a position to assure you, would work as successfully for any other industry."  "No doubt about that," said Rearden, and turned to Mouch. "Why do you ask the stooge to waste my time? What has the Railroad Unification Plan to do with me?"  "But, Mr. Rearden," cried Mouch with desperate cheerfulness, "that's the pattern we're to follow! That's what we called you here to discuss!"  "What?"  "The Steel Unification Plan!"  There was an instant of silence, as of breaths drawn after a plunge.  Rearden sat looking at them with a glance that seemed to be a glance of interest.  "In view of the critical plight of the steel industry," said Mouch with a sudden rush, as if not to give himself time to know what made him uneasy about the nature of Rearden's glance, "and since steel is the most vitally, crucially basic commodity, the foundation of our entire industrial structure, drastic measures must be taken to preserve the country's steel-making facilities, equipment and plant." The tone and impetus of public speaking carried him that far and no farther. "With this objective in view, our Plan is . . . our Plan is . . ."  "Our Plan Is really very simple," said Tinky Holloway, striving to prove it by the gaily bouncing simplicity of his voice. "We'll lift all restrictions from the production of steel and every company will produce all it can, according to its ability. But to avoid the waste and danger of dog-eat-dog competition, all the companies will deposit their gross earnings into a common pool, to be known as the Steel Unification Pool, in charge of a special Board. At the end of the year, the Board will distribute these earnings by totaling the nation's steel output and dividing it by the number of open-hearth furnaces in existence, thus arriving at an average which will be fair to all-and every company will be paid according to its need. The preservation of its furnaces being its basic need, every company will be paid according to the number of furnaces it owns."  He stopped, waited, then added, "That's it, Mr. Rearden," and getting no answer, said, "Oh, there's a lot of wrinkles to be ironed out, but . . . but that's it."  Whatever reaction they had expected, it was not the one they saw. Rearden leaned back in his chair, his eyes attentive, but fixed on space, as if looking at a not too distant distance, then he asked, with an odd note of quietly impersonal amusement, "Will you tell me just one thing, boys: what is it you're counting on?"  He knew that they understood. He saw, on their faces, that stubbornly evasive look which he had once thought to be the look of a liar cheating a victim, but which he now knew to be worse: the look of a man cheating himself of his own consciousness. They did not answer. They remained silent, as if struggling, not to make him forget his question, but to make themselves forget that they had heard it.  "It's a sound, practical Plan!" snapped James Taggart unexpectedly, with an angry edge of sudden animation in his voice. "It will work! It has to work! We want it to work!"  No one answered him.  "Mr. Rearden . . . ?" said Holloway timidly.  "Well, let me see," said Rearden. "Orren Boyle's Associated Steel owns 60 open-hearth furnaces, one-third of them standing idle and the rest producing an average of 300 tons of steel per furnace per day. I own 20 open-hearth furnaces, working at capacity, producing tons of Rearden Metal per furnace  per day. So we own 80 'pooled' furnaces with a 'pooled' output of 27,000 tons, which makes an average of 337.5 tons per furnace. Each day of the year, I, producing 15,000 tons, will be paid for 6,750 tons. Boyle, producing 12,000 tons, will be paid for 20,250 tons. Never mind the other members of the pool, they won't change the scale, except to bring the average still lower, most of them doing worse than Boyle, none of them producing as much as I. Now how long do you expect me to last under your Plan?"  There was no answer, then Lawson cried suddenly, blindly, righteously, "In time of national peril, it is your duty to serve, suffer and work for the salvation of the country!"  "I don't see why pumping my earnings into Orren Boyle's pocket is going to save the country."  "You have to make certain sacrifices to the public welfare!"  "I don't see why Orren Boyle is more 'the public' than I am."  "Oh, it's not a question of Mr. Boyle at all! It's much wider than any one person. It's a matter of preserving the country's natural resources-such as factories-and saving the whole of the nation's industrial plant. We cannot permit the ruin of an establishment as vast as Mr. Boyle's. The country needs it."  "I think," said Rearden slowly, "that the country needs me much more than it needs Orren Boyle."  "But of course!" cried Lawson with startled enthusiasm. "The country needs you, Mr. Rearden! You do realize that, don't you?"  But Lawson's avid pleasure at the familiar formula of self-immolation, vanished abruptly at the sound of Rearden's voice, a cold, trader's voice answering: "I do."  "It's not Boyle alone who's involved," said Holloway pleadingly.  "The country's economy would not be able to stand a major dislocation at the present moment. There are thousands of Boyle's workers, suppliers and customers. What would happen to them if Associated Steel went bankrupt?"  "What will happen to the thousands of my workers, suppliers and customers when I go bankrupt?"  "You, Mr. Rearden?" said Holloway incredulously. "But you're the richest, safest and strongest industrialist in the country at this moment!"  "What about the moment after next?"  "Uh?"  "How long do you expect me to be able to produce at a loss?"  "Oh, Mr. Rearden, I have complete faith in you!"  "To hell with your faith! How do you expect me to do it?"  "You'll manage!"  "How?"  There was no answer.  "We can't theorize about the future," cried Wesley Mouch, "when here's an immediate national collapse to avoid! We've got to save the country's economy! We've got to do something!" Rearden's imperturbible glance of curiosity drove him to heedlessness. "If you don't like it, do you have a better solution to offer?"  "Sure," said Rearden easily. "If it's production that you want, then get out of the way, junk all of your damn regulations, let Orren Boyle go broke, let me buy the plant of Associated Steel-and it will be pouring a thousand tons a day from every one of its sixty furnaces."  "Oh, but . . . but we couldn't!" gasped Mouch. "That would be monopoly!"  Rearden chuckled. "Okay," he said indifferently, "then let my mills superintendent buy it. Hell do a better job than Boyle."  "Oh, but that would be letting the strong have an advantage over the weak! We couldn't do that!"  "Then don't talk about saving the country's economy."  "All we want is-" He stopped.  "All you want is production without men who're able to produce, isn't it?"  "That . . . that's theory. That's just a theoretical extreme. All we want is a temporary adjustment."  "You've been making those temporary adjustments for years. Don't you see that you've run out of time?"  "That's just theo . . ." His voice trailed off and stopped.  "Well, now, look here," said Holloway cautiously, "it's not as if Mr. Boyle were actually . . . weak. Mr. Boyle is an extremely able man. It's just that he's suffered some unfortunate reverses, quite beyond his control. He had invested large sums in a public-spirited project to assist the undeveloped peoples of South America, and that copper crash of theirs has dealt him a severe financial blow. So it's only a matter of giving him a chance to recover, a helping hand to bridge the gap, a bit of temporary assistance, nothing more. All we have to do is just equalize the sacrifice-then everybody will recover and prosper."  "You've been equalizing sacrifice for over a hundred"-he stopped -"for thousands of years," said Rearden slowly. "Don't you see that you're at the end of the road?"  "That's just theory!" snapped Wesley Mouch.  Rearden smiled. "I know your practice," he said softly. "It's your theory that I'm trying to understand."  He knew that the specific reason behind the Plan was Orren Boyle; he knew that the working of an intricate mechanism, operated by pull, threat, pressure, blackmail-a mechanism like an irrational adding machine run amuck and throwing up any chance sum at the whim of any moment-had happened to add up to Boyle's pressure upon these men to extort for him this last piece of plunder. He knew also that Boyle was not the cause of it or the essential to consider, that Boyle was only a chance rider, not the builder, of the infernal machine that had destroyed the world, that it was not Boyle who had made it possible, nor any of the men in this room. They, too, were only riders on a machine without a driver, they were trembling hitchhikers who knew that their vehicle was about to crash into its final abyss-and it was not love or fear of Boyle that made them cling to their course and press on toward their end, it was something else, it was some one nameless element which they knew and evaded knowing, something which was neither thought nor hope, something he identified only as a certain look in their faces, a furtive look saying: I can get away with it. Why? -he thought. Why do they think they can?  "We can't afford any theories!" cried Wesley Mouch. "We've got to act!"  "Well, then, I'll offer you another solution. Why don't you take over my mills and be done with it?"  The jolt that shook them was genuine terror.  "Oh no!" gasped Mouch.  "We wouldn't think of it!" cried Holloway.  "We stand for free enterprise!" cried Dr. Ferris.  "We don't want to harm you!" cried Lawson. "We're your friends, Mr. Rearden. Can't we all work together? We're your friends."  There, across the room, stood a table with a telephone, the same table, most likely, and the same instrument-and suddenly Rearden felt as if he were seeing the convulsed figure of a man bent over that telephone, a man who had then known what he, Rearden, was now beginning to learn, a man fighting to refuse him the same request which he was now refusing to the present tenants of this room-he saw the finish of that fight, a man's tortured face lifted to confront him and a desperate voice saying steadily: "Mr. Rearden, I swear to you . . . by the woman I love . . . that I am your friend."  This was the act he had then called treason, and this was the man he had rejected in order to go on serving the men confronting him now. Who, then, had been the traitor?-he thought; he thought it almost without feeling, without right to feel, conscious of nothing but a solemnly reverent clarity. Who had chosen to give its present tenants the means to acquire this room? Whom had he sacrificed and to whose profit?  "Mr. Rearden!" moaned Lawson. "What's the matter?"  He turned his head, saw Lawson's eyes watching him fearfully and guessed what look Lawson had caught in his face.  "We don't want to seize your mills!" cried Mouch.  "We don't want to deprive you of your property!" cried Dr. Ferris.  "You don't understand us!"  "I'm beginning to."  A year ago, he thought, they would have shot him; two years ago, they would have confiscated his property; generations ago, men of their kind had been able to afford the luxury of murder and expropriation, the safety of pretending to themselves and their victims that material loot was their only objective. But their time was running out and his fellow victims had gone, gone sooner than any historical schedule had promised, and they, the looters, were now left to face the undisguised reality of their own goal.  "Look, boys," he said wearily. "I know what you want. You want to eat my mills and have them, too. And all I want to know is this: what makes you think it's possible?"  "I don't know what you mean," said Mouch in an injured tone of voice. "We said we didn't want your mills."  "All right, I'll say it more precisely: You want to eat me and have me, too. How do you propose to do it?"  "I don't know how you can say that, after we've given you every assurance that we consider you of invaluable importance to the country, to the steel industry, to-"  "I believe you. That's what makes the riddle Harder. You consider me of invaluable importance to the country? Hell, you consider me of invaluable importance even to your own necks. You sit there trembling, because you know that I'm the last one left to save your lives-and you know that time is as short as that. Yet you propose a plan to destroy me, a plan which demands, with an idiot's crudeness, without loopholes, detours or escape, that I work at a loss-that I work, with every ton I pour costing me more than I'll get for it-that I feed the last of my wealth away until we all starve together. That much irrationality is not possible to any man or any looter. For your own sake-never mind the country's or mine-you must be counting on something. What?"  He saw the getting-away-with-it look on their faces, a peculiar look that seemed secretive, yet resentful, as if, incredibly, it were he who was hiding some secret from them.  "I don't see why you should choose to take such a defeatist view of the situation," said Mouch sullenly.  "Defeatist? Do you really expect me to be able to remain in business under your Plan?"  "But it's only temporary!"  "There's no such thing as a temporary suicide."  "But it's only for the duration of the emergency! Only until the country recovers!"  "How do you expect it to recover?"  There was no answer.  "How do you expect me to produce after I go bankrupt?"  "You won't go bankrupt. You'll always produce," said Dr. Ferris indifferently, neither in praise nor in blame, merely in the tone of stating a fact of nature, as he would have said to another man: You'll always be a bum, "You can't help it. It's in your blood. Or, to be more scientific: you're conditioned that way."  Rearden sat up: it was as if he had been struggling to find the secret combination of a lock and felt, at those words, a faint click within, as of the first tumbrel falling into place.  "It's only a matter of weathering this crisis," said Mouch, "of giving people a reprieve, a chance to catch up."  "And then?"  "Then things will improve."  "How?"  There was no answer.  "What will improve them?"  There was no answer.  "Who will improve them?"  "Christ, Mr. Rearden, people don't just stand still!" cried Holloway, "They do things, they grow, they move forward!"  "What people?"  Holloway waved his hand vaguely. "People," he said.  "What people? The people to whom you're going to feed the last of Rearden Steel, without getting anything in return? The people who'll go on consuming more than they produce?"  "Conditions will change."  "Who'll change them?"  There was no answer.  "Have you anything left to loot? If you didn't see the nature of your policy before-it's not possible that you don't see it now. Look around you. All those damned People's States all over the earth have been existing only on the handouts which you squeezed for them out of this country. But you-you have no place left to sponge on or mooch from. No country on the face of the globe. This was the greatest and last. You've drained it. You've milked it dry. Of all that irretrievable splendor, I'm only one remnant, the last, What will you do, you and your People's Globe, after you've finished me? What are you hoping for? What do you see ahead-except plain, stark, animal starvation?"  They did not answer. They did not look at him. Their faces wore expressions of stubborn resentment, as if his were the plea of a liar.  Then Lawson said softly, half in reproach, half in scorn, "Well, after all, you businessmen have kept predicting disasters for years, you've cried catastrophe at every progressive measure and told us that we'll perish-but we haven't." He started a smile, but drew back from the sudden intensity of Rearden's eyes.  Rearden had felt another click in his mind, the sharper click of the second tumbrel connecting the circuits of the lock. He leaned forward.  "What are you counting on?" he asked; his tone had changed, it was low, it had the steady, pressing, droning sound of a drill.  "It's only a matter of gaining time!" cried Mouch.  "There isn't any time left to gain."  "All we need is a chance!" cried Lawson.  "There are no chances left."  "It's only until we recover!" cried Holloway.  "There is no way to recover."  "Only until our policies begin to work!" cried Dr. Ferris.  "There's no way to make the irrational work.” There was no answer.  "What can save you now?"  "Oh, you'll do something!" cried James Taggart.  Then-even though it was only a sentence he had heard all his life-he felt a deafening crash within him, as of a steel door dropping open at the touch of the final tumbrel, the one small number completing the sum and releasing the intricate lock, the answer uniting all the pieces, the questions and the unsolved wounds of his life.  In the moment of silence after the crash, it seemed to him that he heard Francisco's voice, asking him quietly in the ballroom of this building, yet asking it also here and now: "Who is the guiltiest man in this room?" He heard his own answer of the past: "I suppose-James Taggart?" and Francisco's voice saying without reproach: "No, Mr. Rearden, it's not James Taggart,"-but here, in this room and this moment, his mind answered: "I am."  He had cursed these looters for their stubborn blindness? It was he who had made it possible. From the first extortion he had accepted, from the first directive he had obeyed, he had given them cause to believe that reality was a thing to be cheated, that one could demand the irrational and someone somehow would provide it. If he had accepted the Equalization of Opportunity Bill, if he had accepted Directive 10-289, if he had accepted the law that those who could not equal his ability had the right to dispose of it, that those who had not earned were to profit, but he who had was to lose, that those who could not think were to command, but he who could was to obey them-then were they illogical in believing that they existed in an irrational universe? He had made it for them, he had provided it.  Were they illogical in believing that theirs was only to wish, to wish with no concern for the possible-and that his was to fulfill their wishes, by means they did not have to know or name? They, the impotent mystics, struggling to escape the responsibility of reason, had known that he, the rationalist, had undertaken to serve their whims.  They had known that he had given them a blank check on reality-his was not to ask why?-theirs was not to ask how?-let them demand that he give them a share of his wealth, then all that he owns, then more than he owns-impossible?-no, he'll do something!  He did not know that he had leaped to his feet, that he stood staring down at James Taggart, seeing in the unbridled shapelessness of Taggart's features the answer to all the devastation he had witnessed through the years of his life.  "What's the matter, Mr. Rearden? What have I said?" Taggart was asking with rising anxiety-but he was out of the reach of Taggart's voice.  He was seeing the progression of the years, the monstrous extortions, the impossible demands, the inexplicable victories of evil, the preposterous plans and unintelligible goals proclaimed in volumes of muddy philosophy, the desperate wonder of the victims who thought that some complex, malevolent wisdom was moving the powers destroying the world-and all of it had rested on one tenet behind the shifty eyes of the victors: he'll do something! . . . We'll get away with it-he'll let us-he'll do something! . . .You businessmen kept predicting that we'd perish, but we haven't.. . . It was true, he thought. They had not been blind to reality, he had-blind to the reality he himself had created. No, they had not perished, but who had? Who had perished to pay for their manner of survival? Ellis Wyatt . . . Ken Danagger . . . Francisco d'Anconia.  He was reaching for his hat and coat, when he noticed that the men in the room were trying to stop him, that their faces had a look of panic and their voices were crying in bewilderment: "What's the matter, Mr.  Rearden? . . . Why? . . . But why? . . . What have we said? . . .  You're not going! . . . You can't go! . . . It's too early! . . . Not yet! Oh, not yet!"  He felt as if he were seeing them from the rear window of a speeding express, as if they stood on the track behind him, waving their arms in futile gestures and screaming indistinguishable sounds, their figures growing smaller in the distance, their voices fading.  One of them tried to stop him as he turned to the door. He pushed him out of his way, not roughly, but with a simple, smooth sweep of his arm, as one brushes aside an obstructing curtain, then walked out.  Silence was his only sensation, as he sat at the wheel of his car, speeding back down the road to Philadelphia. It was the silence of immobility within him, as if, possessing knowledge, he could now afford to rest, with no further activity of soul. He felt nothing, neither anguish nor elation. It was as if, by an effort of years, he had climbed a mountain to gain a distant view and, having reached the top, had fallen to lie still, to rest before he looked, free to spare himself for the first time.  He was aware of the long, empty road streaming, then curving, then streaming straight before him, of the effortless pressure of his hands on the wheel and the screech of the tires on the curves. But he felt as if he were speeding down a skyway suspended and coiling in empty space. The passers-by at the factories, the bridges, the power plants along his road saw a sight that had once been natural among them: a trim, expensively powerful car driven by a confident man, with the concept of success proclaimed more loudly than by any electric sign, proclaimed by the driver's garments, by his expert steering, by his purposeful speed. They watched him go past and vanish into the haze equating earth with night.  He saw his mills rising in the darkness, as a black silhouette against a breathing glow. The glow was the color of burning gold, and "Rearden Steel" stood written across the sky in the cool, white fire of crystal. He looked at the long silhouette, the curves of blast furnaces standing like triumphal arches, the smokestacks rising like a solemn colonnade along an avenue of honor in an imperial city, the bridges hanging like garlands, the cranes saluting like lances, the smoke waving slowly like flags. The sight broke the stillness within him and he smiled in greeting. It was a smile of happiness, of love, of dedication. He had never loved his mills as he did in that moment, for-seeing them by an act of his own vision, cleared of all but his own code of values, in a luminous reality that held no contradictions-he was seeing the reason of his love: the mills were an achievement of his mind, devoted to his enjoyment of existence, erected in a rational world to deal with rational men. If those men had vanished, if that world was gone, if his mills had ceased to serve his values-then the mills were only a pile of dead scrap, to be left to crumble, the sooner the better-to be left, not as an act of treason, but as an act of loyalty to their actual meaning.  The mills were still a mile ahead when a small spurt of flame caught his sudden attention. Among all the shades of fire in the vast spread of structures, he could tell the abnormal and the out-of-place: this one was too raw a shade of yellow and it was darting from a spot where no fire had reason to be, from a structure by the gate of the main entrance. In the next instant, he heard the dry crack of a gunshot, then three answering cracks in swift succession, like an angry hand slapping a sudden assailant. Then the black mass barring the road in the distance took shape, it was not mere darkness and it did not recede as he came closer-it was a mob squirming at the main gate, trying to storm the mills. He had time to distinguish waving arms, some with clubs, some with crowbars, some with rifles-the yellow flames of burning wood gushing from the window of the gatekeeper's office-the blue cracks of gunfire darting out of the mob and the answers spitting from the roofs of the structures-he had time to see a human figure twisting backward and falling from the top of a car-then he sent his wheels into a shrieking curve, turning into the darkness of a side road.  He was going at the rate of sixty miles an hour down the ruts of an unpaved soil, toward the eastern gate of the mills-and the gate was in sight when the impact of tires on a gully threw the car off the road, to the edge of a ravine where an ancient slag heap lay at the bottom. With the weight of his chest and elbow on the wheel, pitted against two tons of speeding metal, the curve of his body forced the curve of the car to complete its screaming half-circle, sweeping it back onto the road and into the control of his hands. It had taken one instant, but in the next his foot went down on the brake, tearing the engine to a stop: for in the moment when his headlights had swept the ravine, he had glimpsed an oblong shape, darker than the gray of the weeds on the slope, and it had seemed to him that a brief white blur had been a human hand waving for help.  Throwing off his overcoat, he went hurrying down the side of the ravine, lumps of earth giving way under his feet, he went catching at the dried coils of brush, half-running, half-sliding toward the long black form which he could now distinguish to be a human body. A scum of cotton was swimming against the moon, he could see the white of a hand and the shape of an arm lying stretched in the weeds, but the body lay still, with no sign of motion.  "Mr. Rearden . . ." It was a whisper struggling to be a cry, it was the terrible sound of eagerness fighting against a voice that could be nothing but a moan of pain.  He did not know which came first, it felt like a single shock: his thought that the voice was familiar, a ray of moonlight breaking through the cotton, the movement of falling down on his knees by the white oval of a face, and the recognition. It was the Wet Nurse.  He felt the boy's hand clutching his with the abnormal strength of agony, while he was noticing the tortured lines of the face, the drained lips, the glazing eyes and the thin, dark trickle from a small, black hole in too wrong, too close a spot on the left side of the boy's chest.  "Mr. Rearden . . . I wanted to stop them . . . I wanted to save you . . ."  "What happened to you, kid?"  "They shot me, so I wouldn't talk . . . I wanted to prevent"-his hand fumbled toward the red glare in the sky-"what they're doing . . .I was too late, but I've tried to . . . I've tried . . . And . . . and I'm still able . . . to talk . . . Listen, they-"  "You need help. Let's get you to a hospital and-"  "No! Wait! I . . . I don't think I have much time left to me and . . . and I've got to tell you . . . Listen, that riot . . . it's staged . . . on orders from Washington . . . It's not workers . . . not your workers . . . it's those new boys of theirs and . . . and a lot of goons hired on the outside . . . Don't believe a word they'll tell you about it . . . It's a frame-up . . . it's their rotten kind of frame-up . . ."  There was a desperate intensity in the boy's face, the intensity of a crusader's battle, his voice seemed to gain a sound of life from some fuel burning in broken spurts within him--and Rearden knew that the greatest assistance he could now render was to listen.  "They . . . they've got a Steel Unification Plan ready . . . and they need an excuse for it . . . because they know that the country won't take it . . . and you won't stand for it . . . They're afraid this one's going to be too much for everybody . . . it's just a plan to skin you alive, that's all . . . So they want to make it look like you're starving your workers . . . and the workers are running amuck and you're unable to control them . . . and the government's got to step in for your own protection and for public safety . . . That's going to be their pitch, Mr. Rearden . . ."  Rearden was noticing the torn flesh of the boy's hands, the drying mud of blood and dust on his palms and his clothing, gray patches of dust on knees and stomach, scrambled with the needles of burs. In the intermittent fits of moonlight, he could see the trail of flattened weeds and glistening smears going off into the darkness below. He dreaded to think how far the boy had crawled and for how long.  "They didn't want you to be here tonight, Mr. Rearden . . . They didn't want you to see their 'People's rebellion' . . . Afterwards . . .you know how they screw up the evidence . . . there won't be a straight story to get anywhere . . . and they hope to fool the country . . . and you . . . that they're acting to protect you from violence . . .Don't let them get away with it, Mr. Rearden! . . . Tell the country . . . tell the people . . . tell the newspapers . . . Tell them that I told you . . . it's under oath . . . I swear it . . . that makes it legal, doesn't it? . . . doesn't it? . . . that gives you a chance?"  Rearden pressed the boy's hand in his. "Thank you, kid."  "I . . . I'm sorry I'm late, Mr. Rearden, but . . . but they didn't let me in on it till the last minute . . . till just before it started . . .They called me in on a . . . a strategy conference . . . there was a man there by the name of Peters . . . from the Unification Board . . . he's a stooge of Tinky Holloway . . . who's a stooge of Orren Boyle . . . What they wanted from me was . . . they wanted me to sign a lot of passes . . . to let some of the goons in . . . so they'd start trouble from the inside and the outside together . . . to make it look like they really were your workers . . . I refused to sign the passes."  "You did? After they'd let you in on their game?"  "But . . . but, of course, Mr. Rearden . . . Did you think I'd play that kind of game?"  "No, kid, no, I guess not. Only-"  "What?"  "Only that's when you stuck your neck out."  "But I had to! . . . I couldn't help them wreck the mills, could I?. . . How long was I to keep from sticking my neck out? Till they broke yours? . . . And what would I do with my neck, if that's how I had to keep it? . . . You . . . you understand it, don't you, Mr. Rearden?"  "Yes. I do."  "I refused them . . . I ran out of the office . . . I ran to look for the superintendent . . . to tell him everything . . . but I couldn't find him . . . and then I heard shots at the main gate and I knew it had started . . . I tried to phone your home . . . the phone wires were cut . . . I ran to get my car, I wanted to reach you or a policeman or a newspaper or somebody . . . but they must have been following me . . . that's when they shot me . . . in the parking lot . . . from behind . . . all I remember is falling and . . . and then, when I opened my eyes, they had dumped me here . . . on the slag heap . . . "  "On the slag heap?" said Rearden slowly, knowing that the heap was a hundred feet below.  The boy nodded, pointing vaguely down into the darkness. "Yeah . . . down there . . . And then I . . . I started crawling . . . crawling up . . . I wanted . . . I wanted to last till I told somebody who'd tell you." The pain-twisted lines of his face smoothed suddenly into a smile; his voice had the sound of a lifetime's triumph as he added, "I have." Then he jerked his head up and asked, in the tone of a child's astonishment at a sudden discovery, "Mr. Rearden, is this how it feels to . . . to want something very much . . . very desperately much . . . and to make it?"  "Yes, kid, that's how it feels." The boy's head dropped back against Rearden's arm, the eyes closing, the mouth relaxing, as if to hold a moment's profound contentment. "But you can't stop there. You're not through. You've got to hang on tilll I get you to a doctor and-" He was lifting the boy cautiously, but a convulsion of pain ran through the boy's face, his mouth twisting to stop a cry-and Rearden had to lower him gently back to the ground.  The boy shook his head with a glance that was almost apology. "I won't make it, Mr. Rearden . . . No use fooling myself . . . I know I'm through."  Then, as if by some dim recoil against self-pity, he added, reciting a memorized lesson, his voice a desperate attempt at his old, cynical, intellectual tone, "What does it matter, Mr. Rearden? . . . Man is only a collection of . . . conditioned chemicals . . . and a man's dying doesn't make . . . any more difference than an animal's."  "You know better than that."  "Yes," he whispered. "Yes, I guess I do."  His eyes wandered over the vast darkness, then rose to Rearden's face; the eyes were helpless, longing, childishly bewildered. "I know . . . it's crap, all those things they taught us . . . all of it, everything they said . . . about living or . . . or dying . . . Dying . . . it wouldn't make any difference to chemicals, but-" he stopped, and all of his desperate protest was only in the intensity of his voice dropping lower to say, "-but it does, to me . . . And . . . and, I guess, it makes a difference to an animal, too . . . But they said there are no values . . . only social customs . . . No values!" His hand clutched blindly at the hole in his chest, as if trying to hold that which he was losing. "No . . . values . . ."  Then his eyes opened wider, with the sudden calm of full frankness.  "I'd like to live, Mr. Rearden. God, how I'd like to!" His voice was passionately quiet. "Not because I'm dying . . . but because I've just discovered it tonight, what it means, really to be alive . . . And . . . it's funny . . . do you know when I discovered it? . . . In the office . . .when I stuck my neck out . . . when I told the bastards to go to hell . . . There's . . . there's so many things I wish I'd known sooner . . . But . . . well, it's no use crying over spilled milk." He saw Rearden's involuntary glance at the flattened trail below and added, "Over spilled anything, Mr. Rearden."  "Listen, kid," said Rearden sternly, "I want you to do me a favor."  "Now, Mr. Rearden?"  "Yes. Now."  "Why, of course, Mr. Rearden . . . if I can."  "You've done me a big favor tonight, but I want you to do a still bigger one. You've done a great job, climbing out of that slag heap. Now will you try for something still harder? You were willing to die to save my mills. Will you try to live for me?"  "For you, Mr. Rearden?"  "For me. Because I'm asking you to. Because I want you to. Because we still have a great distance to climb together, you and I."  "Does it . . . does it make a difference to you, Mr. Rearden?"  "It does. Will you make up your mind that you want to live-just as you did down there on the slag heap? That you want to last and live? Will you fight for it? You wanted to fight my battle. Will you fight this one with me, as our first?"  He felt the clutching of the boy's hand; it conveyed the violent eagerness of the answer; the voice was only a whisper: "I'll try, Mr. Rearden."  "Now help me to get you to a doctor. Just relax, take it easy and let me lift you."  "Yes, Mr. Rearden." With the jerk of a sudden effort, the boy pulled himself up to lean on an elbow.  "Take it easy, Tony."  He saw a sudden flicker in the boy's face, an attempt at his old, bright, impudent grin. "Not 'Non-Absolute' any more?"  "No, not any more. You're a full absolute now, and you know it."  "Yes. I know several of them, now. There's one"-he pointed at the wound in his chest-"that's an absolute, isn't it? And"-he went on speaking while Rearden was lifting him from the ground by imperceptible seconds and inches, speaking as if the trembling intensity of his words were serving as an anesthetic against the pain-"and men can't live . . . if rotten bastards . . . like the ones in Washington . . . get away with things like . . . like the one they're doing tonight . . . if everything becomes a stinking fake . . . and nothing is real . . . and nobody is anybody . . . men can't live that way . . .that's an absolute, isn't it?"  "Yes, Tony, that's an absolute."  Rearden rose to his feet by a long, cautious effort; he saw the tortured spasm of the boy's features, as he settled him slowly against his chest, like a baby held tight in his arms-but the spasm twisted into another echo of the impudent grin, and the boy asked, "Who's the Wet Nurse now?"  "I guess I am."  He took the first steps up the slant of crumbling soil, his body tensed to the task of shock absorber for his fragile burden, to the task of maintaining a steady progression where there was no foothold to find. The boy's head dropped on Rearden's shoulder, hesitantly, almost as if this were a presumption. Rearden bent down and pressed his lips to the dust-streaked forehead.  The boy jerked back, raising his head with a shock of incredulous, indignant astonishment. "Do you know what you did?" he whispered, as if unable to believe that it was meant for him.  "Put your head down," said Rearden, "and I'll do it again."  The boy's head dropped and Rearden kissed his forehead; it was like a father's recognition granted to a son's battle. The boy lay still, his face hidden, his hands clutching Rearden's shoulders. Then, with no hint of sound, with only the sudden beat of faint, spaced, rhythmic shudders to show it, Rearden knew that the boy was crying-crying in surrender, in admission of all the things which he could not put into the words he had never found.  Rearden went on moving slowly upward, step by groping step, fighting for firmness of motion against the weeds, the drifts of dust, the chunks of scrap metal, the refuse of a distant age. He went on, toward the line where the red glow of his mills marked the edge of the pit above him, his movement a fierce struggle that had to take the form of a gentle, unhurried flow.  He heard no sobs, but he felt the rhythmic shudders, and, through the cloth of his shirt, in place of tears, he felt the small, warm, liquid spurts flung from the wound by the shudders. He knew that the tight pressure of his arms was the only answer which the boy was now able to hear and understand-and he held the trembling body as if the strength of his arms could transfuse some part of his living power into the arteries beating ever fainter against him.  Then the sobbing stopped and the boy raised his head. His face seemed thinner and paler, but the eyes were lustrous, and he looked up at Rearden, straining for the strength to speak.  "Mr. Rearden . . . I . . . I liked you very much."  "I know it."  The boy's features had no power to form a smile, but it was a smile that spoke in his glance, as he looked at Rearden's face-as he looked at that which he had not known he had been seeking through the brief span of his life, seeking as the image of that which he had not known to be his values.  Then his head fell back, and there was no convulsion in his face, only his mouth relaxing to a shape of serenity-but there was a brief stab of convulsion in his body, like a last cry of protest-and Rearden went on slowly, not altering his pace, even though he knew that no caution was necessary any longer because what he was carrying in his arms was now that which had been the boy's teachers' idea of man-a collection of chemicals.  He walked, as if this were his form of last tribute and funeral procession for the young life that had ended in his arms. He felt an anger too intense to identify except as a pressure within him: it was a desire to kill.  The desire was not directed at the unknown thug who had sent a bullet through the boy's body, or at the looting bureaucrats who had hired the thug to do it, but at the boy's teachers who had delivered him, disarmed, to the thug's gun-at the soft, safe assassins of college classrooms who, incompetent to answer the queries of a quest for reason, took pleasure in crippling the young minds entrusted to their care.  Somewhere, he thought, there was this boy's mother, who had trembled with protective concern over his groping steps, while teaching him to walk, who had measured his baby formulas with a jeweler's caution, who had obeyed with a zealot's fervor the latest words of science on his diet and hygiene, protecting his unhardened body from germs-then had sent him to be turned into a tortured neurotic by the men who taught him that he had no mind and must never attempt to think. Had she fed him tainted refuse, he thought, had she mixed poison into his food, it would have been more kind and less fatal.  He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly-yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child's education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.  From the first catch-phrases flung at a child to the last, it is like a series of shocks to freeze his motor, to undercut the power of his consciousness. "Don't ask so many questions, children should be seen and not heard!"-"Who are you to think? It's so, because I say so!"-"Don't argue, obey!"-"Don't try to understand, believe!"--"Don't rebel, adjust!"-"Don't stand out, belong!"-"Don't struggle, compromise!" -"Your heart is more important than your mind!"-"Who are you to know? Your parents know best!"-"Who are you to know? Society knows best!"-"Who are you to know? The bureaucrats know best!"-"Who are you to object? All values are relative!"-"Who are you to want to escape a thug's bullet? That's only a personal prejudice!"  Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival-yet that was what they did to their children. Armed with nothing but meaningless phrases, this boy had been thrown to fight for existence, he had hobbled and groped through a brief, doomed effort, he had screamed his indignant, bewildered protest -and had perished in his first attempt to soar on his mangled wings. But a different breed of teachers had once existed, he thought, and had reared the men who created this country; he thought that mothers should set out on their knees to look for men like Hugh Akston, to find them and beg them to return.  He went through the gate of the mills, barely noticing the guards who let him enter, who stared at his face and his burden; he did not pause to listen to their words, as they pointed to the fighting in the distance; he went on walking slowly toward the wedge of light which was the open door of the hospital building. He stepped into a lighted room full of men, bloody bandages and the odor of antiseptics; he deposited his burden on a bench, with no word of explanation to anyone, and walked out, not glancing behind him.  He walked in the direction of the front gate, toward the glare of fire and the bursts of guns. He saw, once in a while, a few figures running through the cracks between structures or darting behind black corners, pursued by groups of guards and workers; he was astonished to notice that his workers were well armed. They seemed to have subdued the hoodlums inside the mills, and only the siege at the front gate remained to be beaten. He saw a lout scurrying across a patch of lamplight, swinging a length of pipe at a wall of glass panes, battering them down with an animal relish, dancing like a gorilla to the sound of crashing glass, until three husky human figures descended upon him, carrying him writhing to the ground.  The siege of the gate appeared to be ebbing, as if the spine of the mob had been broken. He heard the distant screeches of their cries-but the shots from the road were growing rarer, the fire set to the gatekeeper's office was put out, there were armed men on the ledges and at windows, posted in well-planned defense.  On the roof of a structure above the gate, he saw, as he came closer, the slim silhouette of a man who held a gun in each hand and, from behind the protection of a chimney, kept firing at intervals down into the mob, firing swiftly and, it seemed, in two directions at once, like a sentinel protecting the approaches to the gate. The confident skill of his movements, his manner of firing, with no time wasted to take aim, but with the kind of casual abruptness that never misses a target, made him look like a hero of Western legend-and Rearden watched him with detached, impersonal pleasure, as if the battle of the mills were not his any longer, but he could still enjoy the sight of the competence and certainty with which men of that distant age had once combatted evil.  The beam of a roving searchlight struck Rearden's face, and when the light swept past he saw the man on the roof leaning down, as if peering in his direction. The man waved to someone to replace him, then vanished abruptly from his post.  Rearden hurried on through the short stretch of darkness ahead -but then, from the side, from the crack of an alley, he heard a drunken voice yell, "There he is!" and whirled to see two beefy figures advancing upon him. He saw a leering, mindless face with a mouth hung loose in a joyless chuckle, and a club in a rising fist-he heard the sound of running steps approaching from another direction, he attempted to turn his head, then the club crashed down on his skull from behind-and in the moment of splitting darkness, when he wavered, refusing to believe it, then felt himself going down, he felt a strong, protective arm seizing him and breaking his fall, he heard a gun exploding an inch above his ear, then another explosion from the same gun in the same second, but it seemed faint and distant, as if he had fallen down a shaft.  His first awareness, when he opened his eyes, was a sense of profound serenity. Then he saw that he was lying on a couch in a modern, sternly gracious room-then, he realized that it was his office and that the two men standing beside him were the mills' doctor and the superintendent. He felt a distant pain in his head, which would have been violent had he cared to notice it, and he felt a strip of tape across his hair, on the side of his head. The sense of serenity was the knowledge that he was free.  The meaning of his bandage and the meaning of his office were not to be accepted or to exist, together-it was not a combination for men to live with-this was not his battle any longer, nor his job, nor his business.  "I think I'll be all right, Doctor," he said, raising his head.  "Yes, Mr. Rearden, fortunately." The doctor was looking at him as if still unable to believe that this had happened to Hank Rearden inside his own mills; the doctor's voice was tense with angry loyalty and indignation. "Nothing serious, just a scalp wound and a slight concussion. But you must take it easy and allow yourself to rest."  "I will," said Rearden firmly.  "It's all over," said the superintendent, waving at the mills beyond the window. "We've got the bastards beaten and on the run. You don't have to worry, Mr. Rearden. It's all over."  "It is," said Rearden. "There must be a lot of work left for you to do, Doctor."  "Oh yes! I never thought I'd live to see the day when-"  "I know. Go ahead, take care of it. I'll be all right."  "Yes, Mr. Rearden."  "I'll take care of the place," said the superintendent, as the doctor hurried out. "Everything's under control, Mr. Rearden. But it was the dirtiest-"  "I know," said Rearden. "Who was it that saved my life? Somebody grabbed me as I fell, and fired at the thugs."  "Did he! Straight at their faces. Blew their heads off. That was that new furnace foreman of ours. Been here two months. Best man I've ever had. He's the one who got wise to what the gravy boys were planning and warned me, this afternoon. Told me to arm our men, as many as we could. We got no help from the police or the state troopers, they dodged all over the place with the fanciest delays and excuses I ever heard of, it was all fixed in advance, the goons weren't expecting any armed resistance. It was that furnace foreman-Frank Adams is his name-who organized our defense, ran the whole battle, and stood on a roof, picking off the scum that came too close to the gate. Boy, what a marksman! I shudder to think how many of our lives he saved tonight. Those bastards were out for blood, Mr. Rearden."  "I'd like to see him."  "He's waiting somewhere outside. It's he who brought you here, and he asked permission to speak to you, when possible."  "Send him in. Then go back out there, take charge, finish the job."  "Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Rearden?"  "No, nothing else."  He lay still, alone in the silence of his office. He knew that the meaning of his mills had ceased to exist, and the fullness of the knowledge left no room for the pain of regretting an illusion. He had seen, in a final image, the soul and essence of his enemies: the mindless face of the thug with the club. It was not the face itself that made him draw back in horror, but the professors, the philosophers, the moralists, the mystics who had released that face upon the world.  He felt a peculiar cleanliness. It was made of pride and of love for this earth, this earth which was his, not theirs. It was the feeling which had moved him through his life, the feeling which some among men know in their youth, then betray, but which he had never betrayed and had carried within him as a battered, attacked, unidentified, but living motor-the feeling which he could now experience in its full, uncontested purity: the sense of his own superlative value and the superlative value of his life. It was the final certainty that his life was his, to be lived with no bondage to evil, and that that bondage had never been necessary. It was the radiant serenity of knowing that he was free of fear, of pain, of guilt.  If it's true, he thought, that there are avengers who are working for the deliverance of men like me, let them see me now, let them tell me their secret, let them claim me, let them-"Come in!" he said aloud, in answer to the knock on his door.  The door opened and he lay still. The man standing on the threshold, with disheveled hair, a soot-streaked face and furnace-smudged arms, dressed in scorched overalls and bloodstained shirt, standing as if he wore a cape waving behind him in the wind, was Francisco d'Anconia.  It seemed to Rearden that his consciousness shot forward ahead of his body, it was his body that refused to move, stunned by shock, while his mind was laughing, telling him that this was the most natural, the most-to-have-been-expected event in the world. Francisco smiled, a smile of greeting to a childhood friend on a summer morning, as if nothing else had ever been possible between them-and Rearden found himself smiling in answer, some part of him feeling an incredulous wonder, yet knowing that it was irresistibly right.  "You've been torturing yourself for months," said Francisco, approaching him, "wondering what words you'd use to ask my forgiveness and whether you had the right to ask it, if you ever saw me again -but now you see that it isn't necessary, that there's nothing to ask or to forgive."  "Yes," said Rearden, the word coming as an astonished whisper, but by the time he finished his sentence he knew that this was the greatest tribute he could offer, "yes, I know it."  Francisco sat down on the couch beside him, and slowly moved his hand over Rearden's forehead. It was like a healing touch that closed the past.  "There's only one thing I want to tell you," said Rearden. "I want you to hear it from me: you kept your oath, you were my friend."  "I knew that you knew it. You knew it from the first. You knew it, no matter what you thought of my actions. You slapped me because you could not force yourself to doubt it."  "That . . ." whispered Rearden, staring at him, "that was the thing I had no right to tell you . . . no right to claim as my excuse . . ."  "Didn't you suppose I'd understand it?"  "I wanted to find you . . . I had no right to look for you . . . And all that time, you were-" He pointed at Francisco's clothes, then his hand dropped helplessly and he closed his eyes.  "I was your furnace foreman," said Francisco, grinning. "I didn't think you'd mind that. You offered me the job yourself."  "You've been here, as my bodyguard, for two months?"  "Yes."  "You've been here, ever since-" He stopped.  "That's right. On the morning of the day when you were reading my farewell message over the roofs of New York, I was reporting here for my first shift as your furnace foreman."  "Tell me," said Rearden slowly, "that night, at James Taggart's wedding, when you said that you were after your greatest conquest . . .you meant me, didn't you?"  "Of course."  Francisco drew himself up a little, as if for a solemn task, his face earnest, the smile remaining only in his eyes. "I have a great deal to tell you," he said, "But first, will you repeat a word you once offered me and I . . . I had to reject, because I knew that I was not free to accept it?"  Rearden smiled. "What word, Francisco?"  Francisco inclined his head in acceptance, and answered, "Thank you, Hank." Then he raised his head. "Now I'll tell you the things I had come to say, but did not finish, that night when I came here for the first time. I think you're ready to hear it."  "I am."  The glare of steel being poured from a furnace shot to the sky beyond the window. A red glow went sweeping slowly over the walls of the office, over the empty desk, over Rearden's face, as if in salute and farewell.