CHAPTER V THEIR BROTHERS' KEEPERS

On the morning of September 2, a copper wire broke in California, between two telephone poles by the track of the Pacific branch line of Taggart Transcontinental.  A slow, thin rain had been falling since midnight, and there had been no sunrise, only a gray light seeping through a soggy sky-and the brilliant raindrops hanging on the telephone wires had been the only sparks glittering against the chalk of the clouds, the lead of the ocean and the steel of the oil derricks descending as lone bristles down a desolate hillside. The wires had been worn by more rains and years than they had been intended to carry; one of them had kept sagging, through the hours of that morning, under the fragile load of raindrops; then its one last drop had grown on the wire's curve and had hung like a crystal bead, gathering the weight of many seconds; the bead and the wire had given up together and, as soundless as the fall of tears, the wire had broken and fallen with the fall of the bead.  The men at the Division Headquarters of Taggart Transcontinental avoided looking at one another, when the break of the telephone line was discovered and reported. They made statements painfully miscalculated to seem to refer to the problem, yet to state nothing, none fooling the others. They knew that copper wire was a vanishing commodity, more precious than gold or honor; they knew that the division storekeeper had sold their stock of wire weeks ago, to unknown dealers who came by night and were not businessmen in the daytime, but only men who had friends in Sacramento and in Washington-just as the storekeeper, recently appointed to the division, had a friend in New York, named Cuffy Meigs, about whom one asked no questions. They knew that the man who would now assume the responsibility of ordering repairs and initiating the action which would lead to the discovery that the repairs could not be made, would incur retaliation from unknown enemies, that his fellow workers would become mysteriously silent and would not testify to help him, that he would prove nothing, and if he attempted to do his job, it would not be his any longer. They did not know what was safe or dangerous these days, when the guilty were not punished, but the accusers were; and, like animals, they knew that immobility was the only protection when in doubt and in danger. They remained immobile; they spoke about the appropriate procedure of sending reports to the appropriate authorities on the appropriate dates.  A young roadmaster walked out of the room and out of the headquarters building to the safety of a telephone booth in a drugstore and, at his own expense, ignoring the continent and the tiers of appropriate executives between, he telephoned Dagny Taggart in New York.  She received the call in her brother's office, interrupting an emergency conference. The young roadmaster told her only that the telephone line was broken and that there was no wire to repair it; he said nothing else and he did not explain why he had found it necessary to call her in person. She did not question him; she understood. "Thank you," was all that she answered.  An emergency file in her office kept a record of all the crucial materials still on hand, on every division of Taggart Transcontinental.  Like the file of a bankrupt, it kept registering losses, while the rare additions of new supplies seemed like the malicious chuckles of some tormentor throwing crumbs at a starving continent. She looked through the file, closed it, sighed and said, "Montana, Eddie. Phone the Montana Line to ship half their stock of wire to California. Montana might be able to last without it-for another week." And as Eddie Willers was about to protest, she added, "Oil, Eddie. California is one of the last producers of oil left in the country. We don't dare lose the Pacific Line." Then she went back to the conference in her brother's office.  "Copper wire?" said James Taggart, with an odd glance that went from her face to the city beyond the window. "In a very short while, we won't have any trouble about copper."  "Why?" she asked, but he did not answer. There was nothing special to see beyond the window, only the clear sky of a sunny day, the quiet light of early afternoon on the roofs of the city and, above them, the page of the calendar, saying: September 2.  She did not know why he had insisted on holding this conference in his own office, why he had insisted on speaking to her alone, which he had always tried to avoid, or why he kept glancing at his wrist watch.  "Things are, it seems to me, going wrong," he said. "Something has to be done. There appears to exist a state of dislocation and confusion tending toward an uncoordinated, unbalanced policy. What I mean is, there's a tremendous national demand for transportation, yet we're losing money. It seems to me-"  She sat looking at the ancestral map of Taggart Transcontinental on the wall of his office, at the red arteries winding across a yellowed continent. There had been a time when the railroad was called the blood system of the nation, and the stream of trains had been like a living circuit of blood, bringing growth and wealth to every patch of wilderness it touched. Now. it was still like a stream of blood, but like the one-way stream that runs from a wound, draining the last of a body's sustenance and life. One-way traffic-she thought indifferently-consumers' traffic.  There was Train Number 193, she thought. Six weeks ago, Train Number 193 had been sent with a load of steel, not to Faulkton, Nebraska, where the Spencer Machine Tool Company, the best machine tool concern still in existence, had been idle for two weeks, waiting for the shipment-but to Sand Creek, Illinois, where Confederated Machines had been wallowing in debt for over a year, producing unreliable goods at unpredictable times. The steel had been allocated by a directive which explained that the Spencer Machine Tool Company was a rich concern, able to wait, while Confederated Machines was bankrupt and could not be allowed to collapse, being the sole source of livelihood of the community of Sand Creek, Illinois. The Spencer Machine Tool Company had closed a month ago. Confederated Machines had closed two weeks later.  The people of Sand Creek, Illinois, had been placed on national relief, but no food could be found for them in the empty granaries of the nation at the frantic call of the moment-so the seed grain of the farmers of Nebraska had been seized by order of the Unification Board-and Train Number 194 had carried the unplanted harvest and the future of the people of Nebraska to be consumed by the people of Illinois. "In this enlightened age," Eugene Lawson had said in a radio broadcast, "we have come, at last, to realize that each one of us is his brother's keeper."  "In a precarious period of emergency, like the present," James Taggart was saying, while she looked at the map, "it is dangerous to find ourselves forced to miss pay days and accumulate wage arrears on some of our divisions, a temporary condition, of course, but-"  She chuckled. "The Railroad Unification Plan isn't working, is it, Jim?"  "I beg your pardon?"  "You're to receive a big cut of the Atlantic Southern's gross income, out of the common pool at the end of the year-only there won't be any gross income left for the pool to seize, will there?"  "That's not true! It's just that the bankers are sabotaging the Plan. Those bastards-who used to give us loans in the old days, with no security at all except our own railroad-now refuse to let me have a few measly hundred-thousands, on short term, just to take care of a few payrolls, when I have the entire plant of all the railroads of the country to offer them as security for my loan!"  She chuckled.  "We couldn't help it!" he cried. "It's not the fault of the Plan that some people refuse to carry their fair share of our burdens!"  "Jim, was this all you wanted to tell me? If it is, I'll go. I have work to do."  His eyes shot to his wrist watch. "No, no, that's not all! It's most urgent that we discuss the situation and arrive at some decision, which-"  She listened blankly to the next stream of generalities, wondering about his motive. He was marking time, yet he wasn't, not fully; she felt certain that he was holding her here for some specific purpose and, simultaneously, that he was holding her for the mere sake of her presence.  It was some new trait in him, which she had begun to notice ever since Cherryl's death. He had come running to her, rushing, unannounced, into her apartment on the evening of the day when Cherryl's body had been found and the story of her suicide had filled the newspapers, given by some social worker who had witnessed it; "an. inexplicable suicide," the newspapers had called it, unable to discover any motive. "It wasn't my fault!" he had screamed to her, as if she were the only judge whom he had to placate. "I'm not to blame for it! I'm not to blame!" He had been shaking with terror-yet she had caught a few glances thrown shrewdly at her face, which had seemed, inconceivably, to convey a touch of triumph. "Get out of here, Jim," was all she had said to him.  He had never spoken to her again about Cherryl, but he had started coming to her office more often than usual, he had stopped her in the halls for snatches of pointless discussions-and such moments had grown into a sum that gave her an incomprehensible sensation: as if, while clinging to her for support and protection against some nameless terror, his arms were sliding to embrace her and to plunge a knife into her back.  "I am eager to know your views," he was saying insistently, as she looked away. "It is most urgent that we discuss the situation and . . .  and you haven't said anything." She did not turn. "It's not as if there were no money to be had out of the railroad business, but-"  She glanced at him sharply; his eyes scurried away.  "What I mean is, some constructive policy has to be devised," he droned on hastily. "Something has to be done . . . by somebody. In times of emergency-"  She knew what thought he had scurried to avoid, what hint he had given her, yet did not want her to acknowledge or discuss. She knew that no train schedules could be maintained any longer, no promises kept, no contracts observed, that regular trains were cancelled at a moment's notice and transformed into emergency specials sent by unexplained orders to unexpected destinations-and that the orders came from Cuffy Meigs, sole judge of emergencies and of the public welfare.  She knew that factories were closing, some with their machinery stilled for lack of supplies that had not been received, others with their warehouses full of goods that could not be delivered. She knew that the old industries-the giants who had built their power by a purposeful course projected over a span of time-were left to exist at the whim of the moment, a moment they could not foresee or control. She knew that the best among them, those of the longest range and most complex function, had long since gone-and those still struggling to produce, struggling savagely to preserve the code of an age when production had been possible, were now inserting into their contracts a line shameful to a descendant of Nat Taggart: "Transportation permitting."  And yet there were men-and she knew it-who were able to obtain transportation whenever they wished, as by a mystic secret, as by the grace of some power which one was not to question or explain.  They were the men whose dealings with Cuffy Meigs were regarded by people as that unknowable of mystic creeds which smites the observer for the sin of looking, so people kept their eyes closed, dreading, not ignorance, but knowledge. She knew that deals were made whereby those men sold a commodity known as "transportation pull"-a term which all understood, but none would dare define. She knew that these were the men of the emergency specials, the men who could cancel her scheduled trains and send them to any random spot of the continent which they chose to strike with their voodoo stamp, the stamp superseding contract, property, justice, reason and lives, the stamp stating that "the public welfare" required the immediate salvation of that spot. These were the men who sent trains to the relief of the Smather Brothers and their grapefruit in Arizona-to the relief of a factory in Florida engaged in the production of pin-ball machines-to the relief of a horse farm in Kentucky-to the relief of Orren Boyle's Associated Steel. These were the men who made deals with desperate industrialists to provide transportation for the goods stalled in their warehouses-or, failing to obtain the percentage demanded, made deals to purchase the goods, when the factory closed, at the bankruptcy sale, at ten cents on the dollar, and to speed the goods away in freight cars suddenly available, away to markets where dealers of the same kind were ready for the kill. These were the men who hovered over factories, waiting for the last breath of a furnace, to pounce upon the equipment-and over desolate sidings, to pounce upon the freight cars of undelivered goods-these were a new biological species, the hit-and-run businessmen, who did not stay in any line of business longer than the span of one deal, who had no payrolls to meet, no overhead to carry, no real estate to own, no equipment to build, whose only asset and sole investment consisted of an item known as "friendship." These were the men whom official speeches described as "the progressive businessmen of our dynamic age," but whom people called "the pull peddlers"-the species included many breeds, those of "transportation pull," and of "steel pull" and "oil pull” and "wage-raise pull" and "suspended sentence pull"-men who were dynamic, who kept darting all over the country while no one else could move, men who were active and mindless, active, not like animals, but like that which breeds, feeds and moves upon the stillness of a corpse.  She knew that there was money to be had out of the railroad business and she knew who was now obtaining it. Cuffy Meigs was selling trains as he was selling the last of the railroad's supplies, whenever he could rig a setup which would not let it be discovered or proved-selling rail to roads in Guatemala or to trolley companies in Canada, selling wire to manufacturers of juke boxes, selling crossties for fuel in resort hotels.  Did it matter-she thought, looking at the map-which part of the corpse had been consumed by which type of maggot, by those who gorged themselves or by those who gave the food to other maggots? So long as living flesh was prey to be devoured, did it matter whose stomachs it had gone to fill? There was no way to tell which devastation had been accomplished by the humanitarians and which by undisguised gangsters. There was no way to tell which acts of plunder had been prompted by the charity-lust of the Lawsons and which by the gluttony of Cuffy Meigs-no way to tell which communities had been immolated to feed another community one week closer to starvation and which to provide yachts for the pull-peddlers. Did it matter? Both were alike in fact as they were alike in spirit, both were in need and need was regarded as sole title to property, both were acting in strictest accordance with the same code of morality. Both held the immolation of men as proper and both were achieving it. There wasn't even any way to tell who were the cannibals and who the victims-the communities that accepted as their rightful due the confiscated clothing or fuel of a town to the east of them, found, next week, their granaries confiscated to feed a town to the west-men had achieved the ideal of the centuries, they were practicing it in unobstructed perfection, they were serving need as their highest ruler, need as first claim upon them, need as their standard of value, as the coin of their realm, as more sacred than right and life. Men had been pushed into a pit where, shouting that man is his brother's keeper, each was devouring his neighbor and was being devoured by his neighbor's brother, each was proclaiming the righteousness of the unearned and wondering who was stripping the skin off his back, each was devouring himself, while screaming in terror that some unknowable evil was destroying the earth.  "What complaint do they now have to make?" she heard Hugh Akston's voice in her mind. "That the universe is irrational? Is it?"  She sat looking at the map, her glance dispassionately solemn, as if no emotion save respect were permissible when observing the awesome power of logic. She was seeing-in the chaos of a perishing continent -the precise, mathematical execution of all the ideas men had held. They had not wanted to know that this was what they wanted, they had not wanted to see that they had the power to wish, but not the power to fake-and they had achieved their wish to the letter, to the last bloodstained comma of it. What were they thinking now, the champions of need and the lechers of pity?-she wondered. What were they counting on? Those who had once simpered: "I don't want to destroy the rich, I only want to seize a little of their surplus to help the poor, just a little, they'll never miss it!"-then, later, had snapped: "The tycoons can stand being squeezed, they've amassed enough to last them for three generations"-then, later, had yelled: "Why should the people suffer while businessmen have reserves to last a year?"-now were screaming: "Why should we starve while some people have reserves to last a week?" What were they counting on?-she wondered.  "You must do something!" cried James Taggart.  She whirled to face him. "I?"  "It's your job, it's your province, it's your duty!"  "What is?"  "To act. To do."  "To do-what?"  "How should I know? It's your special talent. You're the doer."  She glanced at him: the statement was so oddly perceptive and so incongruously irrelevant. She rose to her feet.  "Is this all, Jim?"  "No! No! I want a discussion!"  "Go ahead."  "But you haven't said anything!"  "You haven't, either."  "But . . . What I mean is, there are practical problems to solve, which . . . For instance, what was that matter of our last allocation of new rail vanishing from the storehouse in Pittsburgh?"  "Cuffy Meigs stole it and sold it."  "Can you prove it?" he snapped defensively.  "Have your friends left any means, methods, rules or agencies of proof?"  "Then don't talk about it, don't be theoretical, we've got to deal with facts! We've got to deal with facts as they are today . . . I mean, we've got to be realistic and devise some practical means to protect our supplies under existing conditions, not under unprovable assumptions, which-"  She chuckled. There was the form of the formless, she thought, there was the method of his consciousness: he wanted her to protect him from Cuffy Meigs without acknowledging Meigs' existence, to fight it without admitting its reality, to defeat it without disturbing its game.  "What do you find so damn funny?" he snapped angrily.  "You know it."  "I don't know what's the matter with you! I don't know what's happened to you . . . in the last two months . . . ever since you came back. . . . You've never been so uncooperative!"  "Why, Jim, I haven't argued with you in the last two months."  "That's what I mean!" He caught himself hastily, but not fast enough to miss her smile. "I mean, I wanted to have a conference, I wanted to know your view of the situation-"  "You know it."  "But you haven't said a word!"  "I said everything I had to say, three years ago. I told you where your course would take you. It has."  "Now there you go again! What's the use of theorizing? We're here, we're not back three years ago. We've got to deal with the present, not the past. Maybe things would have been different, if we had followed your opinion, maybe, but the fact is that we didn't-and we've got to deal with facts. We've got to take reality as it is now, today!"  "Well, take it."  "I beg your pardon?"  "Take your reality. I'll merely take your orders."  "That's unfair! I'm asking for your opinion-"  "You're asking for reassurance, Jim. You're not going to get it."  "I beg your pardon?"  "I'm not going to help you pretend-by arguing with you-that the reality you're talking about is not what it is, that there's still a way to make it work and to save your neck. There isn't."  "Well . . ." There was no explosion, no anger-only the feebly uncertain voice of a man on the verge of abdication. "Well . . . what would you want me to do?"  "Give up." He looked at her blankly. "Give up-all of you, you and your Washington friends and your looting planners and the whole of your cannibal philosophy. Give up and get out of the way and let those of us who can, start from scratch out of the ruins."  "No!" The explosion came, oddly, now; it was the scream of a man who would die rather than betray his idea, and it came from a man who had spent his life evading the existence of ideas, acting with the expediency of a criminal. She wondered whether she had ever understood the essence of criminals. She wondered about the nature of the loyalty to the idea of denying ideas.  "No!" he cried, his voice lower, hoarser and more normal, sinking from the tone of a zealot to the tone of an overbearing executive.  "That's impossible! That's out of the question!"  "Who said so?"  "Never mind! It's so! Why do you always think of the impractical? Why don't you accept reality as it is and do something about it? You're the realist, you're the doer, the mover, the producer, the Nat Taggart, you're the person who's able to achieve any goal she chooses! You could save us now, you could find a way to make things work-if you wanted to!"  She burst out laughing.  There, she thought, was the ultimate goal of all that loose academic prattle which businessmen had ignored for years, the goal of all the slipshod definitions, the sloppy generalities, the soupy abstractions, all claiming that obedience to objective reality is the same as obedience to the State, that there is no difference between a law of nature and a bureaucrat's directive, that a hungry man is not free, that man must be released from the tyranny of food, shelter and clothing-all of it, for years, that the day might come when Nat Taggart, the realist, would be asked to consider the will of Cuffy Meigs as a fact of nature, irrevocable and absolute like steel, rails and gravitation, to accept the Meigs made world as an objective, unchangeable reality-then to continue producing abundance in that world. There was the goal of all those con men of library and classroom, who sold their revelations as reason, their "instincts" as science, their cravings as knowledge, the goal of all the savages of the non-objective, the non-absolute, the relative, the tentative, the probable-the savages who, seeing a farmer gather a harvest, can consider it only as a mystic phenomenon unbound by the law of causality and created by the farmer's omnipotent whim, who then proceed to seize the farmer, to chain him, to deprive him of tools, of seeds, of water, of soil, to push him out on a barren rock and to command: "Now grow a harvest and feed us!"  No-she thought, expecting Jim to ask it-it would be useless to try to explain what she was laughing at, he would not be able to understand it. But he did not ask it. Instead, she saw him slumping and heard him say-terrifyingly, because his words were so irrelevant, if he did not understand, and so monstrous, if he did, "Dagny, I'm your brother . . ."  She drew herself up, her muscles growing rigid, as if she were about to face a killer's gun.  "Dagny"-his voice was the soft, nasal, monotonous whine of a beggar-"I want to be president of a railroad. I want it. Why can't I have my wish as you always have yours? Why shouldn't I be given the fulfillment of my desires as you always fulfill any desire of your own? Why should you be happy while I suffer? Oh yes, the world is yours, you're the one who has the brains to run it. Then why do you permit suffering in your world? You proclaim the pursuit of happiness, but you doom me to frustration. Don't I have the right to demand any form of happiness I choose? Isn't that a debt which you owe me? Am I not your brother?"  His glance was like a prowler's flashlight searching her face for a shred of pity. It found nothing but a look of revulsion.  "It's your sin if I suffer! It's your moral failure! I'm your brother, therefore I'm your responsibility, but you've failed to supply my wants, therefore you're guilty! All of mankind's moral leaders have said so for centuries-who are you to say otherwise? You're so proud of yourself, you think that you're pure and good-but you can't be good, so long as I'm wretched. My misery is the measure of your sin. My contentment is the measure of your virtue. I want this kind of world, today's world, it gives me my share of authority, it allows me to feel important-make it work for me!-do something!-how do I know what?-it's your problem and your duty! You have the privilege of strength, but I-I have the right of weakness! That's a moral absolute! Don't you know it? Don't you? Don't you?"  His glance was now like the hands of a man hanging over an abyss, groping frantically for the slightest fissure of doubt, but slipping on the clean, polished rock of her face.  "You bastard," she said evenly, without emotion, since the words were not addressed to anything human. It seemed to her that she saw him fall into the abyss-even though there was nothing to see in his face except the look of a con man whose trick has not worked. There was no reason to feel more revulsion than usual, she thought; he had merely uttered the things which were preached, heard and accepted everywhere; but this creed was usually expounded in the third person, and Jim had had the open effrontery to expound it in the first. She wondered whether people accepted the doctrine of sacrifice provided its recipients did not identify the nature of their own claims and actions.  She turned to leave.  "No! No! Wait!" he cried, leaping to his feet, with a glance at his wrist watch. "It's time now! There's a particular news broadcast that I want you to hear!"  She stopped, held by curiosity. He pressed the switch of the radio, watching her face openly, intently, almost insolently. His eyes had a look of fear and of oddly lecherous anticipation.  "Ladies and gentlemen!" the voice of the radio speaker leaped forth abruptly; it had a tone of panic. "News of a shocking development has just reached us from Santiago, Chile!"  She saw the jerk of Taggart's head and a sudden anxiety in his bewildered frown, as if something about the words and voice were not what he had expected.  "A special session of the legislature of the People's State of Chile had been called for ten o'clock this morning, to pass an act of utmost importance to the people of Chile, Argentina and other South American People's States. In line with the enlightened policy of Senior Ramirez, the new Head of the Chilean State-who came to power on the moral slogan that man is his brother's keeper-the legislature was to nationalize the Chilean properties of d'Anconia Copper, thus opening the way for the People's State of Argentina to nationalize the rest of the d'Anconia properties the world over. This, however, was known only to a very few of the top-level leaders of both nations. The measure had been kept secret in order to avoid debate and reactionary opposition. The seizure of the multi-billion dollar d'Anconia Copper was to come as a munificent surprise to the country.  "On the stroke of ten, in the exact moment when the chairman's gavel struck the rostrum, opening the session-almost as if the gavel's blow had set it off-the sound of a tremendous explosion rocked the hall, shattering the glass of its windows. It came from the harbor, a few streets away-and when the legislators rushed to the windows, they saw a long column of flame where once there had risen the familiar silhouettes of the ore docks of d'Anconia Copper. The ore docks had been blown to bits.  "The chairman averted panic and called the session to order. The act of nationalization was read to the assembly, to the sound of fire alarm sirens and distant cries. It was a gray morning, dark with rain clouds, the explosion had broken an electric transmitter-so that the assembly voted on the measure by the light of candles, while the red glow of the fire kept sweeping over the great vaulted ceiling above their heads.  "But more terrible a shock came later, when the legislators called a hasty recess to announce to the nation the good news that the people now owned d'Anconia Copper. While they were voting, word had come from the closest and farthest points of the globe that there was no d'Anconia Copper left on earth. Ladies and gentlemen, not anywhere. In that same instant, on the stroke of ten, by an infernal marvel of synchronization, every property of d'Anconia Copper on the face of the globe, from Chile to Siam to Spain to Pottsville, Montana, had been blown up and swept away.  "The d'Anconia workers everywhere had been handed their last pay checks, in cash, at nine A.M., and by nine-thirty had been moved off the premises. The ore docks, the smelters, the laboratories, the office buildings were demolished. Nothing was left of the d'Anconia ore ships which had been in port-and only lifeboats carrying the crews were left of those ships which had been at sea. As to the d'Anconia mines, some were buried under tons of blasted rock, while others were found not to be worth the price of blasting. An astounding number of these mines, as reports pouring in seem to indicate, had continued to be run, even though exhausted years ago.  "Among the thousands of d'Anconia employees, the police have found no one with any knowledge of how this monstrous plot had been conceived, organized and carried out. But the cream of the d'Anconia staff are not here any longer. The most efficient of the executives, mineralogists, engineers, superintendents have vanished-all the men upon whom the People's State had been counting to carry on the work and cushion the process of readjustment. The most able-correction: the most selfish-of the men are gone. Reports from the various banks indicate that there are no d'Anconia accounts left anywhere; the money has been spent down to the last penny, "Ladies and gentlemen, the d'Anconia fortune-the greatest fortune on earth, the legendary fortune of the centuries-has ceased to exist. In place of the golden dawn of a new age, the People's States of Chile and Argentina are left with a pile of rubble and hordes of unemployed on their hands.  "No clue has been found to the fate or the whereabouts of Senor Francisco d'Anconia. He has vanished, leaving nothing behind him, not even a message of farewell."  Thank you, my darling-thank you in the name of the last of us, even if you will not hear it and will not care to hear. . . . It was not a sentence, but the silent emotion of a prayer in her mind, addressed to the laughing face of a boy she had known at sixteen. Then she noticed that she was clinging to the radio, as if the faint electric beat within it still held a tie to the only living force on earth, which it had transmitted for a few brief moments and which now filled the room where all else was dead.  As distant remnants of the explosion's wreckage, she noticed a sound that came from Jim, part-moan, part-scream, part-growl-then the sight of Jim's shoulders shaking over a telephone and his distorted voice screaming, "But, Rodrigo, you said it was safe! Rodrigo-oh God!-do you know how much I'd sunk into it?"-then the shriek of another phone on his desk, and his voice snarling into another receiver, his hand still clutching the first, "Shut your trap, Orren! What are you to do? What do I care, God damn you!"  There were people rushing into the office, the telephones were screaming and, alternating between pleas and curses, Jim kept yelling into one receiver, "Get me Santiago! . . . Get Washington to get me Santiago!"  Distantly, as on the margin of her mind, she could see what sort of game the men behind the shrieking phones had played and lost. They seemed far away, like tiny commas squirming on the white field under the lens of a microscope. She wondered how they could ever expect to be taken seriously when a Francisco d'Anconia was possible on earth.  She saw the glare of the explosion in every face she met through the rest of the day-and in every face she passed in the darkness of the streets, that evening. If Francisco had wanted a worthy funeral pyre for d'Anconia Copper, she thought, he -had succeeded. There it was, in the streets of New York City, the only city on earth still able to understand it-in the faces of people, in their whispers, the whispers crackling tensely like small tongues of fire, the faces lighted by a look that was both solemn and frantic, the shadings of expressions appearing to sway and weave, as if cast by a distant flame, some frightened, some angry, most of them uneasy, uncertain, expectant, but all of them acknowledging a fact much beyond an industrial catastrophe, all of them knowing what it meant, though none would name its meaning, all of them carrying a touch of laughter, a laughter of amusement and defiance, the bitter laughter of perishing victims who feel that they are avenged.  She saw it in the face of Hank Rearden, when she met him for dinner that evening. As his tall, confident figure walked toward her-the only figure that seemed at home in the costly setting of a distinguished restaurant-she saw the look of eagerness fighting the sternness of his features, the look of a young boy still open to the enchantment of the unexpected. He did not speak of this day's event, but she knew that it was the only image in his mind.  They had been meeting whenever he came to the city, spending a brief, rare evening together-with their past still alive in their silent acknowledgment-with no future in their work and in their common struggle, but with the knowledge that they were allies gaining support from the fact of each other's existence. He did not want to mention today's event, he did not want to speak of Francisco, but she noticed, as they sat at the table, that the strain of a resisted smile kept pulling at the hollows of his cheeks. She knew whom he meant, when he said suddenly, his voice soft and low with the weight of admiration, "He did keep his oath, didn't he?"  "His oath?" she asked, startled, thinking of the inscription on the temple of Atlantis.  "He said to me, 'I swear-by the woman I love-that I am your friend,' He was."  "He is."  He shook his head. "I have no right to think of him. I have no right to accept what he's done as an act in my defense. And yet . . ."  He stopped.  "But it was, Hank. In defense of all of us-and of you, most of all."  He looked away, out at the city. They sat at the side of the room, with a sheet of glass as an invisible protection against the sweep of space and streets sixty floors below. The city seemed abnormally distant: it lay flattened down to the pool of its lowest stories. A few blocks away, its tower merging into darkness, the calendar hung at the level of their faces, not as a small, disturbing rectangle, but as an enormous screen, eerily close and large, flooded by the dead, white glow of light projected through an empty film, empty but for the letters: September 2.  "Rearden Steel is now working at capacity," he was saying indifferently. "They've lifted the production quotas off my mills-for the next five minutes, I guess. I don't know how many of their own regulations they've suspended, I don't think they know it, either, they don't bother keeping track of legality any longer, I'm sure I'm a law-breaker on five or six counts, which nobody could prove or disprove-all I know is that the gangster of the moment told me to go full steam ahead." He shrugged. "When another gangster kicks him out tomorrow, I'll probably be shut down, as penalty for illegal operation. But according to the plan of the present split-second, they've begged me to keep pouring my Metal, in any amount and by any means I choose."  She noticed the occasional, surreptitious glances that people were throwing in their direction. She had noticed it before, ever since her broadcast, ever since the two of them had begun to appear in public together. Instead of the disgrace he had dreaded, there was an air of awed uncertainty in people's manner-uncertainty of their own moral precepts, awe in the presence of two persons who dared to be certain of being right. People were looking at them with anxious curiosity, with envy, with respect, with the fear of offending an unknown, proudly rigorous standard, some almost with an air of apology that seemed to say: "Please forgive us for being married." There were some who had a look of angry malice, and a few who had a look of admiration.  "Dagny," he asked suddenly, "do you suppose he's in New York?"  "No. I've called the Wayne-Falkland. They told me that the lease on his suite had expired a month ago and he did not renew it."  "They're looking for him all over the world," he said, smiling.  "They'll never find him." The smile vanished. "Neither will I." His voice slipped back to the flat, gray tone of duty: "Well, the mills are working, but I'm not. I'm doing nothing but running around the country like a scavenger, searching for illegal ways to purchase raw materials. Hiding, sneaking, lying-just to get a few tons of ore or coal or copper. They haven't lifted their regulations off my raw materials. They know that I'm pouring more Metal than the quotas they give me could produce. They don't care." He added, "They think I do."  "Tired, Hank?"  "Bored to death."  There was a time, she thought, when his mind, his energy, his inexhaustible resourcefulness had been given to the task of a producer devising better ways to deal with nature; now, they were switched to the task of a criminal outwitting men. She wondered how long a man could endure a change of that kind.  "It's becoming almost impossible to get iron ore," he said indifferently, then added, his voice suddenly alive, "Now it's going to be completely impossible to get copper." He was grinning.  She wondered how long a man could continue to work against himself, to work when his deepest desire was not to succeed, but to fail.  She understood the connection of his thoughts when he said, "I've never told you, but I've met Ragnar Danneskjold."  "He told me."  "What? Where did you ever-" He stopped. "Of course," he said, his voice tense and low. "He would be one of them. You would have met him. Dagny, what are they like, those men who . . . No. Don't answer me." In a moment he added, "So I've met one of their agents."  "You've met two of them."  His response was a span of total stillness. "Of course," he said dully.  "I knew it . . . I just wouldn't admit to myself that I knew . . . He was their recruiting agent, wasn't he?"  "One of their earliest and best."  He chuckled; it was a sound of bitterness and longing. 'That night . . . when they got Ken Danagger . . . I thought that they had not sent anyone after me. . . ."  The effort by which he made his face grow rigid, was almost like the slow, resisted turn of a key locking a sunlit room he could not permit himself to examine. After a while, he said impassively, "Dagny, that new rail we discussed last month-I don't think I'll be able to deliver it. They haven't lifted their regulations off my output, they're still controlling my sales and disposing of my Metal as they please. But the bookkeeping is in such a snarl that I'm smuggling a few thousand tons into the black market every week. I think they know it. They're pretending not to. They don't want to antagonize me, right now. But, you see, I've been shipping every ton I could snatch, to some emergency customers of mine. Dagny, I was in Minnesota last month. I've seen what's going on there. The country will starve, not next year, but this winter, unless a few of us act and act fast. There are no grain reserves left anywhere. With Nebraska gone, Oklahoma wrecked, North Dakota abandoned, Kansas barely subsisting-there isn't going to be any wheat this winter, not for the city of New York nor for any Eastern city.  ”Minnesota is our last granary. They've had two bad years in succession, but they have a bumper crop this fall-and they have to be able to harvest it. Have you had a chance to take a look at the condition of the farm-equipment industry? They're not big enough, any of them, to keep a staff of efficient gangsters in Washington or to pay percentages to pull-peddlers. So they haven't been getting many allocations of materials. Two-thirds of them have shut down and the rest are about to. And farms are perishing all over the country-for lack of tools. You should have seen those farmers in Minnesota. They've been spending more time fixing old tractors that can't be fixed than plowing their fields. I don't know how they managed to survive till last spring. I don't know how they managed to plant their wheat. But they did. They did." There was a look of intensity on his face, as if he were contemplating a rare, forgotten sight: a vision of men-and she knew what motive was still holding him to his job. "Dagny, they had to have tools for their harvest. I've been selling all the Metal I could steal out of my own mills to the manufacturers of farm equipment. On credit. They've been sending the equipment to Minnesota as fast as they could put it out. Selling it in the same way-illegally and on credit. But they will be paid, this fall, and so will I. Charity, hell! We're helping producers-and what tenacious producers!-not lousy, mooching 'consumers’. We're giving loans, not alms. We're supporting ability, not need. I'll be damned if I'll stand by and let those men be destroyed while the pull peddlers grow rich!"  He was looking at the image of a sight he had seen in Minnesota: the silhouette of an abandoned factory, with the light of the sunset streaming, unopposed, through the holes of its windows and the cracks of its roof, with the remnant of a sign: Ward Harvester Company.  "Oh, I know," he said. "We'll save them this winter, but the looters will devour them next year. Still, we'll save them this winter. . . . Well, that's why I won't be able to smuggle any rail for you. Not in the immediate future-and there's nothing left to us but the immediate future. I don't know what is the use of feeding a country, if it loses its railroads-but what is the use of railroads where there is no food?  What is the use, anyway?"  "It's all right, Hank, We'll last with such rail as we have, for-" She stopped.  "For a month?"  "For the winter-I hope."  Cutting across their silence, a shrill voice reached them from another table, and they turned to look at a man who had the jittery manner of a cornered gangster about to reach for his gun. "An act of anti-social destruction," he was snarling to a sullen companion, "at a time when there's such a desperate shortage of copper! . . . We can't permit it! We can't permit it to be true!"  Rearden turned abruptly to look off, at the city. "I'd give anything to know where he is," he said, his voice low. "Just to know where he is, right now, at this moment."  "What would you do, if you knew it?"  He dropped his hand in a gesture of futility. "[ wouldn't approach him. The only homage I can still pay him is not to cry for forgiveness where no forgiveness is possible."  They remained silent. They listened to the voices around them, to the splinters of panic trickling through the luxurious room. She had not been aware that the same presence seemed to be an invisible guest at every table, that the same subject kept breaking through the attempts at any other conversation. People sat in a manner, not quite of cringing, but as if they found the room too large and too exposed-a room of glass, blue velvet, aluminum and gentle lighting. They looked as if they had come to this room at the price of countless evasions, to let it help them pretend that theirs was still a civilized existence-but an act o￡ primeval violence had blasted the nature of their world into the open and they were no longer able not to see.  "How could he? How could he?" a woman was demanding with petulant terror. "He had no right to do it!"  "It was an accident," said a young man with a staccato voice and an odor of public payroll. "It was a chain of coincidences, as any statistical curve of probabilities can easily prove. It is unpatriotic to spread rumors exaggerating the power of the people's enemies."  "Right and wrong is all very well for academic conversations," said a woman with a schoolroom voice and a barroom mouth, "but how can anybody take his own ideas seriously enough to destroy a fortune when people need it?"  "f don't understand it," an old man was saying with quavering bitterness. "After centuries of efforts to curb man's innate brutality, after centuries of teaching, training and indoctrination with the gentle and the humane!"  A woman's bewildered voice rose uncertainly and trailed off: "I thought we were living in an age of brotherhood . . ."  "I'm scared," a young girl was repeating, "I'm scared . . . oh, I don't know! . . . I'm just scared . . ."  "He couldn't have done it!" . . . "He did!" . . . "But why?" . . ."I refuse to believe it!" . . . "It's not human!" . . . "But why?" . . ."Just a worthless playboy!" . . . "But why?"  The muffled scream of a woman across the room and some half grasped signal on the edge of Dagny's vision, came simultaneously and made her whirl to look at the city.  The calendar was run by a mechanism locked in a room behind the screen, unrolling the same film year after year, projecting the dates in steady rotation, in changeless rhythm, never moving but on the stroke of midnight. The speed of Dagny's turn gave her time to see a phenomenon as unexpected as if a planet had reversed its orbit in the sky: she saw the words "September 2" moving upward and vanishing past the edge of the screen.  Then, written across the enormous page, stopping time, as a last message to the world and to the world's motor which was New York, she saw the lines of a sharp, intransigent handwriting:  Brother, you asked for it! Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Anconia  She did not know which shock was greater: the sight of the message or the sound of Rearden's laughter-Rearden, standing on his feet, in full sight and hearing of the room behind him, laughing above their moans of panic, laughing in greeting, in salute, in acceptance of the gift he had tried to reject, in release, in triumph, in surrender.  On the evening of September 7, a copper wire broke in Montana, stopping the motor of a loading crane on a spur track of Taggart Transcontinental, at the rim of the Stanford Copper Mine.  The mine had been working on three shifts, its days and nights blending into a single stretch of struggle to lose no minute, no drop of copper it could squeeze from the shelves of a mountain into the nation's industrial desert. The crane broke down at the task of loading a train; it stopped abruptly and hung still against the evening sky, between a string of empty cars and piles of suddenly immovable ore.  The men of the railroad and of the mine stopped in dazed bewilderment: they found that in all the complexity of their equipment, among the drills, the motors, the derricks, the delicate gauges, the ponderous floodlights beating down into the pits and ridges of a mountain-there was no wire to mend the crane. They stopped, like men on an ocean liner propelled by ten-thousand-horsepower generators, but perishing for lack of a safety pin.  The station agent, a young man with a swift body and a brusque voice, stripped the wiring from the station building and set the crane in motion again-and while the ore went clattering to fill the cars, the light of candles came trembling through the dusk from the windows of the station.  "Minnesota, Eddie," said Dagny grimly, closing the drawer of her special file. "Tell the Minnesota Division to ship half their stock of wire to Montana." "But good God, Dagny!-with the peak of the harvest rush approaching-" "They'll hold through it-I think. We don't dare lose a single supplier of copper."  "But I have!" screamed James Taggart, when she reminded him once more. "I have obtained for you the top priority on copper wire, the first claim, the uppermost ration level, I've given you all the cards, certificates, documents and requisitions-what else do you want?" "The copper wire." "I've done all I could! Nobody can blame me!"  She did not argue. The afternoon newspaper was lying on his desk-and she was staring at an item on the back page: An Emergency State Tax had been passed in California for the relief of the state's unemployed, in the amount of fifty per cent of any local corporation's gross income ahead of other taxes; the California oil companies had gone out of business.  "Don't worry, Mr. Rearden," said an unctuous voice over a long distance telephone line from Washington, "I just wanted to assure you that you will not have to worry." "About what?" asked Rearden, baffled. "About that temporary bit of confusion in California. We'll straighten it out in no time, it was an act of illegal insurrection, their state government had no right to impose local taxes detrimental to national taxes, we'll negotiate an equitable arrangement immediately-but in the meantime, if you have been disturbed by any unpatriotic rumors about the California oil companies, I just wanted to tell you that Rearden Steel has been placed in the top category of essential need, with first claim upon any oil available anywhere in the nation, very top category, Mr. Rearden-so I just wanted you to know that you won't have to worry about the problem of fuel this winter!"  Rearden hung up the telephone receiver, with a frown of worry, not about the problem of fuel and the end of the California oil fields-disasters of this kind had become habitual-but about the fact that the Washington planners found it necessary to placate him. This was new; he wondered what it meant. Through the years of his struggle, he had learned that an apparently causeless antagonism was not hard to deal with, but an apparently causeless solicitude was an ugly danger. The same wonder struck him again, when, walking down an alley between the mill structures, he caught sight of a slouching figure whose posture combined an air of insolence with an air of expecting to be swatted: it was his brother Philip.  Ever since he had moved to Philadelphia, Rearden had not visited his former home and had not heard a word from his family, whose bills he went on paying. Then, inexplicably, twice in the last few weeks, he had caught Philip wandering through the mills for no apparent reason. He had been unable to tell whether Philip was sneaking to avoid him or waiting to catch his attention; it had looked like both. He had been unable to discover any clue to Philip's purpose, only some incomprehensible solicitude, of a kind Philip had never displayed before.  The first time, in answer to his startled "What are you doing here?" -Philip had said vaguely, "Well, I know that you don't like me to come to your office." "What do you want?" "Oh, nothing . . . but . . . well, Mother is worried about you." "Mother can call me any time she wishes." Philip had not answered, but had proceeded to question him, in an unconvincingly casual manner, about his work, his health, his business; the questions had kept hitting oddly beside the point, not questions about business, but more about his, Rearden's, feelings toward business. Rearden had cut him short and waved him away, but had been left with the small, nagging sense of an incident that remained inexplicable.  The second time, Philip had said, as sole explanation, "We just want to know how you feel." "Who's we?" "Why . . . Mother and I. These are difficult times and . . . well, Mother wants to know how you feel about it all." "Tell her that I don't." The words had seemed to hit Philip in some peculiar manner, almost as if this were the one answer he dreaded. "Get out of here," Rearden had ordered wearily, "and the next time you want to see me, make an appointment and come to my office. But don't come unless you have something to say. This is not a place where one discusses feelings, mine or anybody else's."  Philip had not called for an appointment-but now there he was again, slouching among the giant shapes of the furnaces, with an air of guilt and snobbishness together, as if he were both snooping and slumming.  "But I do have something to say! I do!" he cried hastily, in answer to the angry frown on Rearden's face.  "Why didn't you come to my office?"  "You don't want me in your office."  "I don't want you here, either."  "But I'm only . . . I'm only trying to be considerate and not to take your time when you're so busy and . . . you are very busy, aren't you?"  "And?"  "And . . . well, I just wanted to catch you in a spare moment . . .to talk to you."  "About what?"  "I . . . Well, I need a job."  He said it belligerently and drew back a little. Rearden stood looking at him blankly.  "Henry, I want a job. I mean, here, at the mills. I want you to give me something to do. I need a job, I need to earn my living. I'm tired of alms." He was groping for something to say, his voice both offended and pleading, as if the necessity to justify the plea were an unfair imposition upon him. "I want a livelihood of my own, I'm not asking you for charity, I'm asking you to give me a chance!"  "This is a factory, Philip, not a gambling joint."  "Uh?"  "We don't take chances or give them."  'I'm asking you to give me a job!"  "Why should I?"  "Because I need it!"  Rearden pointed to the red spurts of flame shooting from the black shape of a furnace, shooting safely into space four hundred feet of steel-clay-and-steam-embodied thought above them. "I needed that furnace, Philip. It wasn't my need that gave it to me."  Philip's face assumed a look of not having heard. "You're not officially supposed to hire anybody, bat that's just a technicality, if you'll put me on, my friends will okay it without any trouble and-" Something about Rearden's eyes made him stop abruptly, then ask in an angrily impatient voice, "Well, what's the matter? What have I said that's wrong?"  "What you haven't said."  "I beg your pardon?"  "What you're squirming to leave unmentioned."  "What?"  "That you'd be of no use to me whatever."  "Is that what you-" Philip started with automatic righteousness, but stopped and did not finish.  "Yes," said Rearden, smiling, "that's what I think of first."  Philip's eyes oozed away; when he spoke, his voice sounded as if it were darting about at random, picking stray sentences: "Everybody is entitled to a livelihood . . . How am I going to get it, if nobody gives me my chance?"  "How did I get mine?"  "I wasn't born owning a steel plant."  "Was I?"  "I can do anything you can-if you'll teach me."  "Who taught me?"  "Why do you keep saying that? I'm not talking about you!"  "I am."  In a moment, Philip muttered, "What do you have to worry about? It's not your livelihood that's in question!"  Rearden pointed to the figures of men in the steaming rays of the furnace. "Can you do what they're doing?"  "I don't see what you're-"  "What will happen if I put you there and you ruin a heat of steel for me?"  "What's more important, that your damn steel gets poured or that I eat?"  "How do you propose to eat if the steel doesn't get poured?"  Philip's face assumed a look of reproach. "I'm not in a position to argue with you right now, since you hold the upper hand."  "Then don't argue."  "Uh?"  "Keep your mouth shut and get out of here."  "But I meant-" He stopped.  Rearden chuckled. "You meant that it's I who should keep my mouth shut, because I hold the upper hand, and should give in to you, because you hold no hand at all?"  "That's a peculiarly crude way of stating a moral principle."  "But that's what your moral principle amounts to, doesn't it?"  "You can't discuss morality in materialistic terms."  "We're discussing a job in a steel plant-and, boy! is that a materialistic place!"  Philip's body drew a shade tighter together and his eyes became a shade more glazed, as if in fear of the place around him, in resentment of its sight, in an effort not to concede its reality. He said, in the soft, stubborn whine of a voodoo incantation, "It's a moral imperative, universally conceded in our day and age, that every man is entitled to a job." His voice rose: "I'm entitled to it!"  "You are? Go on, then, collect your claim."  "Uh?"  "Collect your job. Pick it off the bush where you think it grows."  "I mean-"  "You mean that it doesn't? You mean that you need it, but can't create it? You mean that you're entitled to a job which I must create for you?"  "Yes!"  "And if I don't?"  The silence went stretching through second after second. "I don't understand you," said Philip; his voice had the angry bewilderment of a man who recites the formulas of a well-tested role, but keeps getting the wrong cues in answer. "I don't understand why one can't talk to you any more. I don't understand what sort of theory you're propounding and-"  "Oh yes, you do."  As if refusing to believe that the formulas could fail, Philip burst out with: "Since when did you take to abstract philosophy? You're only a businessman, you're not qualified to deal with questions of principle, you ought to leave it to the experts who have conceded for centuries-"  "Cut it, Philip. What's the gimmick?"  "Gimmick?"  "Why the sudden ambition?"  "Well, at a time like this . . ."  "Like what?"  "Well, every man has the right to have some means of support and . . . and not be left to be tossed aside . . . When things are so uncertain, a man's got to have some security . . . some foothold . . . I mean, at a time like this, if anything happened to you, I'd have no-"  "What do you expect to happen to me?"  "Oh, I don't! I don't!" The cry was oddly, incomprehensibly genuine.  "I don't expect anything to happen . . . Do you?"  "Such as what?"  "How do I know? . . . But I've got nothing except the pittance you give me and . . . and you might change your mind any time."  "I might."  "And I haven't any hold on you at all."  "Why did it take you that many years to realize it and start worrying? Why now?"  "Because . . . because you've changed. You . . . you used to have a sense of duty and moral responsibility, but . . . you're losing it. You're losing it, aren't you?"  Rearden stood studying him silently; there was something peculiar in Philip's manner of sliding toward questions, as if his words were accidental, but the too casual, the faintly insistent questions were the key to his purpose.  "Well, I'll be glad to take the burden off your shoulders, if I'm a burden to you!" Philip snapped suddenly. "Just give me a job, and your conscience won't have to bother you about me any longer!"  "It doesn't."  "That's what I mean! You don't care. You don't care what becomes of any of us, do you?"  "Of whom?"  "Why . . . Mother and me and . . . and mankind in general. But I'm not going to appeal to your better self. I know that you're ready to ditch me at a moment's notice, so-"  "You're lying, Philip. That's not what you're worried about. If it were, you'd be angling for a chunk of cash, not for a job, not-"  "No! I want a job!" The cry was immediate and almost frantic. "Don't try to buy me off with cash! I want a job!"  "Pull yourself together, you poor louse. Do you hear what you're saying?"  Philip spit out his answer with impotent hatred: "You can't talk to me that way!"  "Can you?"  "I only-"  "To buy you off? Why should I try to buy you off-instead of kicking you out, as I should have, years ago?"  "Well, after all, I'm your brother!"  "What is that supposed to mean?"  "One's supposed to have some sort of feeling for one's brother."  "Do you?"  Philip's mouth swelled petulantly; he did not answer; he waited; Rearden let him wait. Philip muttered, "You're supposed . . . at least . . . to have some consideration for my feelings . . . but you haven't."  "Have you for mine?"  "Yours? Your feelings?" It was not malice in Philip's voice, but worse: it was a genuine, indignant astonishment. "You haven't any feelings. You've never felt anything at all. You've never suffered!"  It was as if a sum of years hit Rearden in the face, by means of a sensation and a sight: the exact sensation of what he had felt in the cab of the first train's engine on the John Galt Line-and the sight of Philip's eyes, the pale, half-liquid eyes presenting the uttermost of human degradation: an uncontested pain, and, with the obscene insolence of a skeleton toward a living being, demanding that this pain be held as the highest of values. You've never suffered, the eyes were saying to him accusingly-while he was seeing the night in his office when his ore mines were taken away from him-the moment when he had signed the Gift Certificate surrendering Rearden Metal-the month of days inside a plane that searched for the remains of Dagny's body. You've never suffered, the eyes were saying with self-righteous scorn-while he remembered the sensation of proud chastity with which he had fought through those moments, refusing to surrender to pain, a sensation made of his love, of his loyalty, of his knowledge that joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture. You've never suffered, the dead stare of the eyes was saying, you've never felt anything, because only to suffer is to feel-there's no such thing as joy, there's only pain and the absence of pain, only pain and the zero, when one feels nothing-I suffer, I'm twisted by suffering, I'm made of undiluted suffering, that's my purity, that's my virtue-and yours, you the untwisted one, you the uncomplaining, yours is to relieve me of my pain-cut your unsuffering body to patch up mine, cut your unfeeling soul to stop mine from feeling-and we'll achieve the ultimate ideal, the triumph over life, the zero! He was seeing the nature of those who, for centuries, had not recoiled from the preachers of annihilation-he was seeing the nature of the enemies he had been fighting all his life.  "Philip," he said, "get out of here." His voice was like a ray of sunlight in a morgue, it was the plain, dry, daily voice of a businessman, the sound of health, addressed to an enemy one could not honor by anger, nor even by horror. "And don't ever try to enter these mills again, because there will be orders at every gate to throw you out, if you try it.”  "Well, after all," said Philip, in the angry and cautious tone of a tentative threat, "I could have my friends assign me to a job here and compel you to accept it!"  Rearden had started to go, but he stopped and turned to look at his brother. Philip's moment of grasping a sudden revelation was not accomplished by means of thought, but by means of that dark sensation which was his only mode of consciousness: he felt a sensation of terror, squeezing his throat, shivering down into his stomach-he was seeing the spread of the mills, with the roving streamers of flame, with the ladles of molten metal sailing through space on delicate cables, with open pits the color of glowing coal, with cranes coming at his head, pounding past, holding tons of steel by the invisible power of magnets-and he knew that he was afraid of this place, afraid to the death, that he dared not move without the protection and guidance of the man before him-then he looked at the tall, straight figure standing casually still, the figure with the unflinching eyes whose sight had cut through rock and flame to build this place-and then he knew how easily the man he was proposing to compel could let a single bucket of metal tilt over a second ahead of its time or let a single crane drop its load a foot short of its goal, and there would be nothing left of him, of Philip the claimant-and his only protection lay in the fact that his mind would think of such actions, but the mind of Hank Rearden would not.  "But we'd better keep it on a friendly basis," said Philip.  "You'd better," said Rearden and walked away.  Men who worship pain-thought Rearden, staring at the image of the enemies he had never been able to understand-they're men who worship pain. It seemed monstrous, yet peculiarly devoid of importance. He felt nothing. It was like trying to summon emotion toward inanimate objects, toward  refuse sliding down a mountainside to crush him. One could flee from the slide or build retaining walls against it or be crushed -but one could not grant any anger, indignation or moral concern to the senseless motions of the un-living; no, worse, he thought-the antiliving.  The same sense of detached unconcern remained with him while he sat in a Philadelphia courtroom and watched men perform the motions which were to grant him his divorce. He watched them utter mechanical generalities, recite vague phrases of fraudulent evidence, play an intricate game of stretching words to convey no facts and no meaning. He had paid them to do it-he whom the law permitted no other way to gain his freedom, no right to state the facts and plead the truth-the law which delivered his fate, not to objective rules objectively defined, but to the arbitrary mercy of a judge with a wizened face and a look of empty cunning.  Lillian was not present in the courtroom; her attorney made gestures once in a while, with the energy of letting water run through his fingers. They all knew the verdict in advance and they knew its reason; no other reason had existed for years, where no standards, save whim, had existed. They seemed to regard it as their rightful prerogative; they acted as if the purpose of the procedure were not to try a case, but to give them jobs, as if their jobs were to recite the appropriate formulas with no responsibility to know what the formulas accomplished, as if a courtroom were the one place where questions of right and wrong were irrelevant and they, the men in charge of dispensing justice, were safely wise enough to know that no justice existed. They acted like savages performing a ritual devised to set them free of objective reality.  But the ten years of his marriage had been real, he thought-and these were the men who assumed the power to dispose of it, to decide whether he would have a chance of contentment on earth or be condemned to torture for the rest of his lifetime. He remembered the austerely pitiless respect he had felt for his contract of marriage, for all his contracts and all his legal obligations-and he saw what sort of legality his scrupulous observance was expected to serve.  He noticed that the puppets of the courtroom had started by glancing at him in the sly, wise manner of fellow conspirators sharing a common guilt, mutually safe from moral condemnation. Then, when they observed that he was the only man in the room who looked steadily straight at anyone's face, he saw resentment growing in their eyes. Incredulously, he realized what it was that had been expected of him: he, the victim, chained, bound, gagged and left with no recourse save to bribery, had been expected to believe that the farce he had purchased was a process of law, that the edicts enslaving him had moral validity, that he was guilty of corrupting the integrity of the guardians of justice, and that the blame was his, not theirs. It was like blaming the victim of a holdup for corrupting the integrity of the thug. And yet-he thought -through all the generations of political extortion, it was not the looting bureaucrats who had taken the blame, but the chained industrialists, not the men who peddled legal favors, but the men who were forced to buy them; and through all those generations of crusades against corruption, the remedy had always been, not the liberating of the victims, but the granting of wider powers for extortion to the extortionists. The only guilt of the victims, he thought, had been that they accepted it as guilt.  When he walked out of the courtroom into the chilly drizzle of a gray afternoon, he felt as if he had been divorced, not only from Lillian, but from the whole of the human society that supported the procedure he had witnessed. The face of his attorney, an elderly man of the old-fashioned school, wore an expression that made it look as if he longed to take a bath.  "Say, Hank," he asked as sole comment, "is there something the looters are anxious to get from you right now?" "Not that I know of. Why?"  "The thing went too smoothly. There were a few points at which I expected pressure and hints for some extras, but the boys sailed past and took no advantage of it. Looks to me as if orders had come from on high to treat you gently and let you have your way. Are they planning something new against your mills?" "Not that I know of," said Rearden -and was astonished to hear in his mind: Not that I care.  It was on the same afternoon, at the mills, that he saw the Wet Nurse hurrying toward him-a gangling, coltish figure with a peculiar mixture of brusqueness, awkwardness and decisiveness.  "Mr. Rearden, I would like to speak to you." His voice was diffident, yet oddly firm.  "Go ahead."  "There's something I want to ask you." The boy's face was solemn and taut. "I want you to know that I know you should refuse me, but I want to ask it just the same . . . and . . . and if it's presumptuous, then just tell me to go to hell."  "Okay. Try it."  "Mr. Rearden, would you give me a job?" It was the effort to sound normal that betrayed the days of struggle behind the question. "I want to quit what I'm doing and go to work. I mean, real work-in steel making, like I thought I'd started to, once. I want to earn my keep. I'm tired of being a bedbug."  Rearden could not resist smiling and reminding him, in the tone of a quotation, "Now why use such words, Non-Absolute? If we don't use ugly words, we won't have any ugliness and-" But he saw the desperate earnestness of the boy's face and stopped, his smile vanishing.  "I mean it, Mr. Rearden. And I know what the word means and it's the right word. I'm tired of being paid, with your money, to do nothing except make it impossible for you to make any money at all. I know that anyone who works today is only a sucker for bastards like me, but . . .well, God damn it, I'd rather be a sucker, if that's all there's left to be!"  His voice had risen to a cry. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Rearden," he said stiffly, looking away. In a moment, he went on in his woodenly unemotional tone. "I want to get out of the Deputy-Director-of-Distribution racket. I don't know that I'd be of much use to you, I've got a college diploma in metallurgy, but that's not worth the paper it's printed on. But I think I've learned a little about the work in the two years I've been here-and if you could use me at all, as sweeper or scrap man or whatever you'd trust me with, I'd tell them where to put the deputy directorship and I'd go to work for you tomorrow, next week, this minute or whenever you say." He avoided looking at Rearden, not in a manner of evasion, but as if he had no right to do it.  "Why were you afraid to ask me?" said Rearden gently.  The boy glanced at him with indignant astonishment, as if the answer were self-evident. "Because after the way I started here and the way I acted and what I'm deputy of, if I come asking you for favors, you ought to kick me in the teeth!"  "You have learned a great deal in the two years you've been here."  "No, I-" He glanced at Rearden, understood, looked away and said woodenly, "Yeah . . . if that's what you mean."  "Listen, kid, I'd give you a job this minute and I'd trust you with more than a sweeper's job, if it were up to me. But have you forgotten the Unification Board? I'm not allowed to hire you and you're not allowed to quit. Sure, men are quitting all the time, and we're hiring others under phony names and fancy papers proving that they've worked here for years. You know it, and thanks for keeping your mouth shut. But do you think that if I hired you that way, your friends in Washington would miss it?"  The boy shook his head slowly.  "Do you think that if you quit their service to become a sweeper, they wouldn't understand your reason?"  The boy nodded.  "Would they let you go?"  The boy shook his head. After a moment, he said in a tone of forlorn astonishment, "I hadn't thought of that at all, Mr. Rearden. I forgot them. I kept thinking of whether you'd want me or not and that the only thing that counted was your decision."  "I know."  "And . . . it is the only thing that counts, in fact."  "Yes, Non-Absolute, in fact."  The boy's mouth jerked suddenly into the brief, mirthless twist of a smile. "I guess I'm tied worse than any sucker . . ."  "Yes. There's nothing you can do now, except apply to the Unification Board for permission to change your job. I'll support your application, if you want to try-only I don't think they'll grant it. I don't think they'll let you work for me."  "No. They won't."  "If you maneuver enough and lie enough, they might permit you to transfer to a private job-with some other steel company."  "No! I don't want to go anywhere else! I don't want to leave this place!" He stood looking off at the invisible vapor of rain over the flame of the furnaces. After a while, he said quietly, "I'd better stay put, I guess. I'd better go on being a deputy looter. Besides, if I left, God only knows what sort of bastard they'd saddle you with in my place!"  He turned. "They're up to something, Mr. Rearden. I don't know what it is, but they're getting ready to spring something on you."  "What?"  "I don't know. But they've been watching every opening here, in the last few weeks, every desertion, and slipping their own gang in. A queer sort of gang, too-real goons, some of them, that I'd swear never stepped inside a steel plant before. I've had orders to get as many of 'our boys' in as possible. They wouldn't tell me why. I don't know what it is they're planning. I've tried to pump them, but they're acting pretty cagey about it. I don't think they trust me any more. I'm losing the right touch, I guess. All I know is they're getting set to pull something here."  "Thanks for warning me."  "I'll try to get the dope on it. I'll try my damndest to get it in time." He turned brusquely and started off, but stopped. "Mr. Rearden, if it were up to you, you would have hired me?"  "I would have, gladly and at once."  "Thank you, Mr. Rearden," he said, his voice solemn and low, then walked away.  Rearden stood looking after him, seeing, with a tearing smile of pity, what it was that the ex-relativist, the ex-pragmatist, the ex-amoralist was carrying away with him for consolation.  On the afternoon of September 11, a copper wire broke in Minnesota, stopping the belts of a grain elevator at a small country station of Taggart Transcontinental.  A flood of wheat was moving down the highways, the roads, the abandoned trails of the countryside, emptying thousands of acres of farmland upon the fragile dams of the railroad's stations. It was moving day and night, the first trickles growing into streams, then rivers, then torrents-moving on palsied trucks with coughing, tubercular motors-on wagons pulled by the rusty skeletons of starving horses-on carts pulled by oxen-on the nerves and last energy of men who had lived through two years of disaster for the triumphant reward of this autumn's giant harvest, men who had patched their trucks and carts with wire, blankets, ropes and sleepless nights, to make them hold together for this one more journey, to carry the grain and collapse at destination, but to give their owners a chance at survival.  Every year, at this season, another movement had gone clicking across the country, drawing freight cars from all corners of the continent to the Minnesota Division of Taggart Transcontinental, the beat of train wheels preceding the creak of the wagons, like an advance echo rigorously planned, ordered and timed to meet the flood. The Minnesota Division drowsed through the year, to come to violent life for the weeks of the harvest; fourteen thousand freight cars had jammed its yards each year; fifteen thousand were expected this time. The first of the wheat trains had started to channel the flood into the hungry flour mills, then bakeries, then stomachs of the nation-but every train, car and storage elevator counted, and there was no minute or inch of space to spare.  Eddie Willers watched Dagny's face as she went through the cards of her emergency file; he could tell the content of the cards by her expression. "The Terminal," she said quietly, closing the file. "Phone the Terminal downstairs and have them ship half their stock of wire to Minnesota." Eddie said nothing and obeyed.  He said nothing, the morning when he put on her desk a telegram from the Taggart office in Washington, informing them of the directive which, due to the critical shortage of copper, ordered government agents to seize all copper mines and operate them as a public utility.  "Well," she said, dropping the telegram into the wastebasket, "that's the end of Montana."  She said nothing when James Taggart announced to her that he was issuing an order to discontinue all dining cars on Taggart trains. "We can't afford it any longer," he explained, "we've always lost money on those goddamn diners, and when there's no food to get, when restaurants are closing because they can't grab hold of a pound of horse meat anywhere, how can railroads be expected to do it? Why in hell should we have to feed the passengers, anyway? They're lucky if we give them transportation, they'd travel in cattle cars if necessary, let 'em pack their own box lunches, what do we care?-they've got no other trains to take!"  The telephone on her desk had become, not a voice of business, but an alarm siren for the desperate appeals of disaster. "Miss Taggart, we have no copper wire!" "Nails, Miss Taggart, plain nails, could you tell somebody to send us a keg of nails?" "Can you find any paint, Miss Taggart, any sort of waterproof paint anywhere?"  But thirty million dollars of subsidy money from Washington had been plowed into Project Soybean-an enormous acreage in Louisiana, where a harvest of soybeans was ripening, as advocated and organized by Emma Chalmers, for the purpose of reconditioning the dietary habits of the nation. Emma Chalmers, better known as Kip's Ma, was an old sociologist who had hung about Washington for years, as other women of her age and type hang about barrooms. For some reason which nobody could define, the death of her son in the tunnel catastrophe had given her in Washington an aura of martyrdom, heightened by her recent conversion to Buddhism. "The soybean is a much more sturdy, nutritious and economical plant than all the extravagant foods which our wasteful, self-indulgent diet has conditioned us to expect," Kip's Ma had said over the radio; her voice always sounded as if it were falling in drops, not of water, but of mayonnaise.  "Soybeans make an excellent substitute for bread, meat, cereals and coffee-and if all of us were compelled to adopt soybeans as our staple diet, it would solve the national food crisis and make it possible to feed more people. The greatest food for the greatest number-that's my slogan. At a time of desperate public need, it's our duty to sacrifice our luxurious tastes and eat our way back to prosperity by adapting ourselves to the simple, wholesome foodstuff on which the peoples of the Orient have so nobly subsisted for centuries. There's a great deal that we could learn from the peoples of the Orient."  "Copper tubing, Miss Taggart, could you get some copper tubing for us somewhere?" the voices were pleading over her telephone. "Rail spikes, Miss Taggart!" "Screwdrivers, Miss Taggart!" "Light bulbs, Miss Taggart, there's no electric light bulbs to be had anywhere within two hundred miles of us!"  But five million dollars was being spent by the office of Morale Conditioning on the People's Opera Company, which traveled through the country, giving free performances to people who, on one meal a day, could not afford the energy to walk to the opera house. Seven million dollars had been granted to a psychologist in charge of a project to solve the world crisis by research into the nature of brother-love. Ten million dollars had been granted to the manufacturer of a new electronic cigarette lighter-but there were no cigarettes in the shops of the country. There were flashlights on the market, but no batteries; there were radios, but no tubes; there were cameras, but no film. The production of airplanes had been declared "temporarily suspended." Air travel for private purposes had been forbidden, and reserved exclusively for missions of "public need." An industrialist traveling to save his factory was not considered as publicly needed and could not get aboard a plane; an official traveling to collect taxes was and could.  "People are stealing nuts and bolts out of rail plates, Miss Taggart, stealing them at night, and our stock is running out, the division storehouse is bare, what are we to do, Miss Taggart?"  But a super-color-four-foot-screen television set was being erected for tourists in a People's Park in Washington-and a super-cyclotron for the study of cosmic rays was being erected at the State Science Institute, to be completed in ten years.  "The trouble with our modern world," Dr. Robert Stadler said over the radio, at the ceremonies launching the construction of the cyclotron, "is that too many people think too much. It is the cause of all our current fears and doubts. An enlightened citizenry should abandon the superstitious worship of logic and the outmoded reliance on reason. Just as laymen leave medicine to doctors and electronics to engineers, so people who are not qualified to think should leave all thinking to the experts and have faith in the experts' higher authority. Only experts are able to understand the discoveries of modern science, which have proved that thought is an illusion and that the mind is a myth."  "This age of misery is God's punishment to man for the sin of relying on his mind!" snarled the triumphant voices of mystics of every sect and sort, on street corners, in rain-soaked tents, in crumbling temples. "This world ordeal is the result of man's attempt to live by reason! This is where thinking, logic and science have brought you! And there's to be no salvation until men realize that their mortal mind is impotent to solve their problems and go back to faith, faith in God, faith in a higher authority!"  And confronting her daily there was the final product of it all, the heir and collector-Cuffy Meigs, the man impervious to thought. Cuffy Meigs strode through the offices of Taggart Transcontinental, wearing a semi-military tunic and slapping a shiny leather briefcase against his shiny leather leggings. He carried an automatic pistol in one pocket and a rabbit's foot in the other.  Cuffy Meigs tried to avoid her; his manner was part scorn, as if he considered her an impractical idealist, part superstitious awe, as if she possessed some incomprehensible power with which he preferred not to tangle. He acted as if her presence did not belong to his view of a railroad, yet as if hers were the one presence he dared not challenge.  There was a touch of impatient resentment in his manner toward Jim, as if it were Jim's duty to deal with her and to protect him; just as he expected Jim to keep the railroad in running order and leave him free for activities of more practical a nature, so he expected Jim to keep her in line, as part of the equipment.  Beyond the window of her office, like a patch of adhesive plaster stuck over a wound on the sky, the page of the calendar hung blank in the distance. The calendar had never been repaired since the night of Francisco's farewell. The officials who had rushed to the tower, that night, had knocked the calendar's motor to a stop, while tearing the film out of the projector. They had found the small square of Francisco's message, pasted into the strip of numbered days, but who had pasted it there, who had entered the locked room and when and how, was never discovered by the three commissions still investigating the case. Pending the outcome of their efforts, the page hung blank and still above the city.  It was blank on the afternoon of September 14, when the telephone rang in her office. "A man from Minnesota," said the voice of her secretary.  She had told her secretary that she would accept all calls of this kind. They were the appeals for help and her only source of information. At a time when the voices of railroad officials uttered nothing but sounds designed to avoid communication, the voices of nameless men were her last link to the system, the last sparks of reason and tortured honesty flashing briefly through the miles of Taggart track.  "Miss Taggart, it is not my place to call you, but nobody else will," said the voice that came on the wire, this time; the voice sounded young and too calm. "In another day or two, a disaster's going to happen here the like of which they've never seen, and they won't be able to hide it any longer, only it will be too late by then, and maybe it's too late already."  "What is it? Who are you?"  "One of your employees of the Minnesota Division, Miss Taggart. In another day or two, the trains will stop running out of here-and you know what that means, at the height of the harvest. At the height of the biggest harvest we've ever had. They'll stop, because we have no cars. The harvest freight cars have not been sent to us this year."  "What did you say?" She felt as if minutes went by between the words of the unnatural voice that did not sound like her own.  "The cars have not been sent. Fifteen thousand should have been here by now. As far as I could learn, about eight thousand cars is all we got. I've been calling Division Headquarters for a week. They've been telling me not to worry. Last time, they told me to mind my own damn business. Every shed, silo, elevator, warehouse, garage and dance hall along the track is filled with wheat. At the Sherman elevators, there's a line of farmers' trucks and wagons two miles long, waiting on the road. At Lakewood Station, the square is packed solid and has been for three nights. They keep telling us it's only temporary, the cars are coming and we'll catch up. We won't. There aren't any cars coming. I've called everyone I could. I know, by the way they answer. They know, and not one of them wants to admit it. They're scared, scared to move or speak or ask or answer. All they're thinking of is who will be blamed when that harvest rots here around the stations-and not of who's going to move it. Maybe nobody can, now. Maybe there's nothing you can do about it, either. But I thought you're the only person left who'd want to know and that somebody had to tell you."  "I . . ." She made an effort to breathe. "I see . . . Who are you?"  "The name wouldn't matter. When I hang up, I will have become a deserter. I don't want to stay here to see it when it happens. I don't want any part of it any more. Good luck to you, Miss Taggart."  She heard the click. "Thank you," she said over a dead wire.  The next time she noticed the office around her and permitted herself to feel, it was noon of the following day. She stood in the middle of the office, running stiff, spread fingers through a strand of hair, brushing it back off her face-and for an instant, she wondered where she was and what was the unbelievable thing that had happened in the last twenty hours. What she felt was horror, and she knew that she had felt it from the first words of the man on the wire, only there had been no time to know it.  There was not much that remained in her mind of the last twenty hours, only disconnected bits, held together by the single constant that had made them possible-by the soft, loose faces of men who fought to hide from themselves that they knew the answers to the questions she asked.  From the moment when she was told that the manager of the Car Service Department had been out of town for a week and had left no address where one could reach him-she knew that the report of the man from Minnesota was true. Then came the faces of the assistants in the Car Service Department, who would neither confirm the report nor deny it, but kept showing her papers, orders, forms, file cards that bore words in the English language, but no connection to intelligible facts. "Were the freight cars sent to Minnesota?" "Form 357W is filled out in every particular, as required by the office of the Co-ordinator in conformance with the instructions of the comptroller and by Directive 11-493."  "Were the freight cars sent to Minnesota?" "The entries for the months of August and September have been processed by-" "Were the freight cars sent to Minnesota?" "My files indicate the locations of freight cars by state, date, classification and-" "Do you know whether the cars were sent to Minnesota?" "As to the interstate motion of freight cars, I would have to refer you to the files of Mr. Benson and of-"  There was nothing to learn from the files. There were careful entries, each conveying four possible meanings, with references which led to references which led to a final reference which was missing from the files. It did not take her long to discover that the cars had not been sent to Minnesota and that the order had come from Cuffy Meigs-but who had carried it out, who had tangled the trail, what steps had been taken by what compliant men to preserve the appearance of a safely normal operation, without a single cry of protest to arouse some braver man's attention, who had falsified the reports, and where the cars had gone-seemed, at first, impossible to learn.  Through the hours of that night-while a small, desperate crew under the command of Eddie Willers kept calling every division point, every yard, depot, station, spur and siding of Taggart Transcontinental for every freight car in sight or reach, ordering them to unload, drop, dump, scuttle anything and proceed to Minnesota at once, while they kept calling the yards, stations and presidents of every railroad still half in existence anywhere across the map, begging for cars for Minnesota-she went through the task of tracing from face to coward's face the destination of the freight cars that had vanished.  She went from railroad executives to wealthy shippers to Washington officials and back to the railroad-by cab, by phone, by wire-pursuing a trail of half-uttered hints. The trail approached its end when she heard the pinch-lipped voice of a public relations, woman in a Washington office, saying resentfully over the telephone wire, "Well, after all, it is a matter of opinion whether wheat is essential to a nation's welfare-there are those of more progressive views who feel that the soybean is, perhaps, of far greater value"-and then, by noon, she stood in the middle of her office, knowing that the freight cars intended for the wheat of Minnesota had been sent, instead, to carry the soybeans from the Louisiana swamps of Kip's Ma's project.  The first story of the Minnesota disaster appeared in the newspapers three days later. It reported that the farmers who had waited in. the streets of Lakewood for six days, with no place to store their wheat and no trains to carry it, had demolished the local courthouse, the mayor's home and the railroad station. Then the stories vanished abruptly and the newspapers kept silent, then began to print admonitions urging people not to believe unpatriotic rumors.  While the flour mills and grain markets of the country were screaming over the phones and the telegraph wires, sending pleas to New York and delegations to Washington, while strings of freight cars from random corners of the continent were crawling like rusty caterpillars across the map in the direction of Minnesota-the wheat and hope of the country were waiting to perish along an empty track, under the unchanging green lights of signals that called for motion to trains that were not there.  At the communication desks of Taggart Transcontinental, a small crew kept calling for freight cars, repeating, like the crew of a sinking ship, an S.O.S, that remained unheard. There were freight cars held loaded for months in the yards of the companies owned by the friends of pull-peddlers, who ignored the frantic demands to unload the cars and release them. "You can tell that railroad to-" followed by untransmissible words, was the message of the Smather Brothers of Arizona in answer to the S.O.S. of New York.  In Minnesota, they were seizing cars from every siding, from the Mesabi Range, from the ore mines of Paul Larkin where the cars had stood waiting for a dribble of iron. They were pouring wheat into ore cars, into coal cars, into boarded stock cars that went spilling thin gold trickles along the track as they clattered off. They were pouring wheat into passenger coaches, over seats, racks and fixtures, to send it off, to get it moving, even if it went moving into track-side ditches in the sudden crash of breaking springs, in the explosions set off by burning journal boxes.  They fought for movement, for movement with no thought of destination, for movement as such, like a paralytic under a stroke, struggling in wild, stiff, incredulous jerks against the realization that movement was suddenly impossible. There were no other railroads: James Taggart had killed them; there were no boats on the Lakes: Paul Larkin had destroyed them. There was only the single line of rail and a net of neglected highways.  The trucks and wagons of waiting farmers started trickling blindly down the roads, with no maps, no gas, no feed for horses-moving south, south toward the vision of flour mills awaiting them somewhere, with no knowledge of the distances ahead, but with the knowledge of death behind them-moving, to collapse on the roads, in the gullies, in the breaks of rotted bridges. One farmer was found, half a mile south of the wreck of his truck, lying dead in a ditch, face down, still clutching a sack of wheat on his shoulders. Then rain clouds burst over the prairies of Minnesota; the rain went eating the wheat into rot at the waiting railroad stations; it went hammering the piles spilled along the roads, washing gold kernels into the soil.  The men in Washington were last to be reached by the panic. They watched, not the news from Minnesota, but the precarious balance of their friendships and commitments; they weighed, not the fate of the harvest, but the unknowable result of unpredictable emotions in unthinking men of unlimited power. They waited, they evaded all pleas, they declared, "Oh, ridiculous, there's nothing to worry about! Those Taggart people have always moved that wheat on schedule, they'll find some way to move it!"  Then, when the State Chief Executive of Minnesota sent a request to Washington for the assistance of the Army against the riots he was unable to control-three directives burst forth within two hours, stopping all trains in the country, commandeering all cars to speed to Minnesota.  An order signed by Wesley Mouch demanded the immediate release of the freight cars held in the service of Kip's Ma. But by that time, it was too late. Ma's freight cars were in California, where the soybeans had been sent to a progressive concern made up of sociologists preaching the cult of Oriental austerity, and of businessmen formerly in the numbers racket.  In Minnesota, farmers were setting fire to their own farms, they were demolishing grain elevators and the homes of county officials, they were fighting along the track of the railroad, some to tear it up, some to defend it with their lives-and, with no goal to reach save violence, they were dying in the streets of gutted towns and in the silent gullies of a roadless night.  Then there was only the acrid stench of grain rotting in half-smouldering piles-a few columns of smoke rising from the plains, standing still in the air over blackened ruins-and, in an office in Pennsylvania, Hank Rearden sitting at his desk, looking at a list of men who had gone bankrupt: they were the manufacturers of farm equipment, who could not be paid and would not be able to pay him. The harvest of soybeans did not reach the markets of the country: it had been reaped prematurely, it was moldy and unfit for consumption.  On the night of October 15, a copper wire broke in New York City, in an underground control tower of the Taggart Terminal, extinguishing the lights of the signals. It was only the breach of one wire, but it produced a short circuit in the interlocking traffic system, and the signals of motion or danger disappeared from the panels of the control towers and from among the strands of rail. The red and green lenses remained red and green, not with the living radiance of sight, but with the dead stare of glass eyes. On the edge of the city, a cluster of trains gathered at the entrance to the Terminal tunnels and grew through the minutes of stillness, like blood dammed by a clot inside a vein, unable to rush into the chambers of the heart.  Dagny, that night, was sitting at a table in a private dining room of the Wayne-Falkland. The wax of candles was dripping down on the white camellias and laurel leaves at the base of the silver candlesticks, arithmetical calculations were penciled on the damask linen tablecloth, and a cigar butt was swimming in a finger bowl. The six men in formal dinner jackets, facing her about the table, were Wesley Mouch, Eugene Lawson, Dr. Floyd Ferris, Clem Weatherby, James Taggart and Cuffy Meigs.  "Why?" she had asked, when Jim had told her that she had to attend that dinner. "Well . . . because our Board of Directors is to meet next week." "And?" "You're interested in what's going to be decided about our Minnesota Line, aren't you?" "Is that going to be decided at the Board meeting?” "Well, not exactly." "Is it going to be decided at this dinner?" "Not exactly, but . . . oh, why do you always have to be so definite? Nothing's ever definite. Besides, they insisted that they wanted you to come." "Why?" "Isn't that sufficient?"  She did not ask why those men chose to make all their crucial decisions at parties of this kind; she knew that they did. She knew that behind the clattering, lumbering pretense of their council sessions, committee meetings and mass debates, the decisions were made in advance, in furtive informality, at luncheons, dinners and bars, the graver the issue, the more casual the method of settling it. It was the first time that they had asked her, the outsider, the enemy, to one of those secret sessions; it was, she thought, an acknowledgment of the fact that they needed her and, perhaps, the first step of their surrender; it was a chance she could not leave untaken.  But as she sat in the candlelight of the dining room, she felt certain that she had no chance; she felt restlessly unable to accept that certainty, since she could not grasp its reason, yet lethargically reluctant to pursue any inquiry.  "As, I think, you will concede, Miss Taggart, there now seems to be no economic justification for the continued existence of a railroad line in Minnesota, which . . ." "And even Miss Taggart will, I'm sure, agree that certain temporary retrenchments seem to be indicated, until . . ." "Nobody, not even Miss Taggart, will deny that there are times when it is necessary to sacrifice the parts for the sake of the whole . . ." As she listened to the mentions of her name tossed into the conversation at half-hour intervals, tossed perfunctorily, with the speaker's eyes never glancing in her direction, she wondered what motive had made them want her to be present. It was not an attempt to delude her into believing that they were consulting her, but worse: an attempt to delude themselves into believing that she had agreed. They asked her questions at times and interrupted her before she had completed the first sentence of the answer. They seemed to want her approval, without having to know whether she approved or not.  Some crudely childish form of self-deception had made them choose to give to this occasion the decorous setting of a formal dinner. They acted as if they hoped to gain, from the objects of gracious luxury, the power and the honor of which those objects had once been the product and symbol-they acted, she thought, like those savages who devour the corpse of an adversary in the hope of acquiring his strength and his virtue.  She regretted that she was dressed as she was. "It's formal," Jim had told her, "but don't overdo it . . . what I mean is, don't look too rich . . . business people should avoid any appearance of arrogance these days . . . not that you should look shabby, but if you could just seem to suggest . . . well, humility . . . it would please them, you know, it would make them feel big." "Really?" she had said, turning away.  She wore a black dress that looked as if it were no more than a piece of cloth crossed over her breasts and falling to her feet in the soft folds of a Grecian tunic; it was made of satin, a satin so light and thin that it could have served as the stuff of a nightgown. The luster of the cloth, streaming and shifting with her movements, made it look as if the light of the room she entered were her personal property, sensitively obedient to-the motions of her body, wrapping her in a sheet of radiance more luxurious than the texture of brocade, underscoring the pliant fragility of her figure, giving her an air of so natural an elegance that it could afford to be scornfully casual. She wore a single piece of jewelry, a diamond clip at the edge of the black neckline, that kept flashing with the imperceptible motion of her breath, like a transformer converting a flicker into fire, making one conscious, not of the gems, but of the living beat behind them; it flashed like a military decoration, like wealth worn as a badge of honor. She wore no other ornament, only the sweep of a black velvet cape, more arrogantly, ostentatiously patrician than any spread of sables.  She regretted it now, as she looked at the men before her; she felt the embarrassing guilt of pointlessness, as if she had tried to defy the figures in a waxworks. She saw a mindless resentment in their eyes and a sneaking trace of the lifeless, sexless, smutty leer with which men look at a poster advertising burlesque.  "It's a great responsibility," said Eugene Lawson, "to hold the decision of life or death over thousands of people and to sacrifice them when necessary, but we mast have the courage to do it." His soft lips seemed to twist into a smile.  "The only factors to consider are land acreage and population figures," said Dr. Ferris in a statistical voice, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling. "Since it is no longer possible to maintain both the Minnesota Line and the transcontinental traffic of this railroad, the choice is between Minnesota and those states west of the Rockies which were cut off by the failure of the Taggart Tunnel, as well as the neighboring states of Montana, Idaho, Oregon, which means, practically speaking, the whole of the Northwest. When you compute the acreage and the number of heads in both areas, it's obvious that we should scuttle Minnesota rather than give up our lines of communication over a third of a continent."  "I won't give up the continent," said Wesley Mouch, staring down at his dish of ice cream, his voice hurt and stubborn.  She was thinking of the Mesabi Range, the last of the major sources of iron ore, she was thinking of the Minnesota farmers, such as were left of them, the best producers of wheat in the country-she was thinking that the end of Minnesota would end Wisconsin, then Michigan, then Illinois-she was seeing the red breath of the factories dying out over the industrial East-as against the empty miles of western sands, of scraggly pastures and abandoned ranches.  "The figures indicate," said Mr. Weatherby primly, "that the continued maintenance of both areas seems to be impossible. The railway track and equipment of one has to be dismantled to provide the material for the maintenance of the other."  She noticed that Clem Weatherby, their technical expert on railroads, was the man of least influence among them, and Cuffy Meigs-of most.  Cuffy Meigs sat sprawled in his chair, with a look of patronizing tolerance for their game of wasting time on discussions. He spoke little, but when he did, it was to snap decisively, with a contemptuous grin, "Pipe down, Jimmy!" or, "Nuts, Wes, you're talking through your hat!" She noticed that neither Jim nor Mouch resented it. They seemed to welcome the authority of his assurance; they were accepting him as their master.  "We have to be practical," Dr. Ferris kept saying. "We have to be scientific."  "I need the economy of the country as a whole," Wesley Mouch kept repeating. "I need the production of a nation."  "Is it economics that you're talking about? Is it production?" she said, whenever her cold, measured voice was able to seize a brief stretch of their tune. "If it is, then give us leeway to save the Eastern states. That's all that's left of the country-and of the world. If you let us save that, we'll have a chance to rebuild the rest. If not, it's the end. Let the Atlantic Southern take care of such transcontinental traffic as still exists. Let the local railroads take care of the Northwest. But let Taggart Transcontinental drop everything else-yes, everything-and devote all our resources, equipment and rail to the traffic of the Eastern states. Let us shrink back to the start of this country, but let us hold that start. We'll run no trains west of the Missouri. We'll become a local railroad-the local of the industrial East. Let us save our industries. There's nothing left to save in the West. You can run agriculture for centuries by manual labor and oxcarts. But destroy the last of this country's industrial plant-and centuries of effort won't be able to rebuild it or to gather the economic strength to make a start. How do you expect our industries-or railroads-to survive without steel? How do you expect any steel to be produced if you cut off the supply of iron ore? Save Minnesota, whatever's left of it. The country? You have no country to save, if its industries perish. You can sacrifice a leg or an arm. You can't save a body by sacrificing its heart and brain. Save our industries. Save Minnesota. Save the Eastern Seaboard."  It was no use. She said it as many times, with as many details, statistics, figures, proofs, as she could force out of her weary mind into their evasive hearing. It was no use. They neither refuted nor agreed; they merely looked as if her arguments were beside the point. There was a sound of hidden emphasis in their answers, as if they were giving her an explanation, but in a code to which she had no key.  "There's trouble in California," said Wesley Mouch sullenly. "Their state legislature's been acting pretty huffy. There's talk of seceding from the union."  "Oregon is overrun by gangs of deserters," said Clem Weatherby cautiously. "They murdered two tax collectors within the last three months."  "The importance of industry to a civilization has been grossly overemphasized," said Dr. Ferris dreamily. "What is now known as the People's State of India has existed for centuries without any industrial development whatever."  "People could do with fewer material gadgets and a sterner discipline of privations," said Eugene Lawson eagerly. "It would be good for them."  "Oh hell, are you going to let that dame talk you into letting the richest country on earth slip through your fingers?" said Cuffy Meigs, leaping to his feet. "It's a fine time to give up a whole continent-and in exchange for what? For a dinky little state that's milked dry, anyway! I say ditch Minnesota, but hold onto your transcontinental dragnet. With trouble and riots everywhere, you won't be able to keep people in line unless you have transportation-troop transportation-unless you hold your soldiers within a few days' journey of any point on the continent. This is no time to retrench. Don't get yellow, listening to all that talk. You've got the country in your pocket. Just keep it there."  "In the long run-" Mouch started uncertainly.  "In the long run, we'll all be dead," snapped Cuffy Meigs. He was pacing restlessly. "Retrenching, hell! There's plenty of pickings left in California and Oregon and all those places. What I've been thinking is, we ought to think of expanding-the way things are, there's nobody to stop us, it's there for the taking-Mexico, and Canada maybe-it ought to be a cinch."  Then she saw the answer; she saw the secret premise behind their words. With all of their noisy devotion to the age of science, their hysterically technological jargon, their cyclotrons, their sound rays, these men were moved forward, not by the image of an industrial skyline, but by the vision of that  form of existence which the industrialists had swept away-the vision of a fat, unhygienic rajah of India, with vacant eyes staring in indolent stupor out of stagnant layers of flesh, with nothing to do but run precious gems through his fingers and, once in a while, stick a knife into the body of a starved, toil-dazed, germ-eaten creature, as a claim to a few grains of the creature's rice, then claim it from hundreds of millions of such creatures and thus let the rice grains gather into gems.  She had thought that industrial production was a value not to be questioned by anyone; she had thought that these men's urge to expropriate the factories of others was their acknowledgment of the factories value. She, born of the industrial revolution, had not held as conceivable, had forgotten along with the tales of astrology and alchemy, what these men knew in their secret, furtive souls, knew not by means of thought, but by means of that nameless muck which they called their instincts and emotions: that so long as men struggle to stay alive, they'll never produce so little but that the man with the club won't be able to seize it and leave them still less, provided millions of them are willing to submit-that the harder their work and the less their gain, the more submissive the fiber of their spirit-that men who live by pulling levers at an electric switchboard, are not easily ruled, but men who live by digging the soil with their naked fingers, are-that the feudal baron did not need electronic factories in order to drink his brains away out of jeweled goblets, and neither did the rajahs of the People's State of India.  She saw what they wanted and to what goal their "instincts," which they called unaccountable, were leading them. She saw that Eugene Lawson, the humanitarian, took pleasure at the prospect of human starvation-and Dr. Ferris, the scientist, was dreaming of the day when men would return to the hand-plow. Incredulity and indifference were her only reaction: incredulity, because she could not conceive of what would bring human beings to such a state-indifference, because she could not regard those who reached it, as human any longer. They went on talking, but she was unable to speak or to listen. She caught herself feeling that her only desire was now to get home and fall asleep.  "Miss Taggart," said a politely rational, faintly anxious voice-and jerking her head up, she saw the courteous figure of a waiter, "the assistant manager of the Taggart Terminal is on the telephone, requesting permission to speak to you at once. He says it's an emergency."  It was a relief to leap to her feet and get out of that room, even if in answer to the call of some new disaster. It was a relief to hear the assistant manager's voice, even though it was saying, "The interlocker system is out, Miss Taggart. The signals are dead. There are eight incoming trains held up and six outgoing. We can't move them in or out of the tunnels, we can't find the chief engineer, we can't locate the breach of the circuit, we have no copper wire for repairs, we don't know what to do, we-" "I’ll be right down," she said, dropping the receiver.  Hurrying to the elevator, then half-running through the stately lobby of the Wayne-Falkland, she felt herself returning to life at the summons of the possibility of action. Taxicabs were rare, these days, and none came in answer to the doorman's whistle. She started rapidly down the street, forgetting what she wore, wondering why the touch of the wind seemed too cold and too ultimately close.  Her mind on the Terminal ahead, she was startled by the loveliness of a sudden sight: she saw the slender figure of a woman hurrying toward her, the ray of a lamppost sweeping over lustrous hair, naked arms, the swirl of a black cape and the flame of a diamond on her breast, with the long, empty corridor of a city street behind her and skyscrapers drawn by lonely dots of light. The knowledge that she was seeing her own reflection in the side mirror of a florist's window, came an instant too late: she had felt the enchantment of the full context to which that image and city belonged. Then she felt a stab of desolate loneliness, much wider a loneliness than the span of an empty street-and a stab of anger at herself, at the preposterous contrast between her appearance and the context of this night and age.  She saw a taxi turn a corner, she waved to it and leaped in, slamming the door against a feeling which she hoped to leave behind her, on the empty pavement by a florist's window. But she knew-in self mockery, in bitterness, in longing-that this feeling was the sense of expectation she had felt at her first ball and at those rare times when she had wanted the outward beauty of existence to match its inner splendor. What a time to think of it! she told herself in mockery-not now! she cried to herself in anger-but a desolate voice kept asking her quietly to the rattle of the taxi's wheels: You who believed you must live for your happiness, what do you now have left of it?-what are you gaining from your struggle?-yes! say it honestly: what's in it for you?-or are you becoming one of those abject altruists who has no answer to that question any longer? . . . Not now!-she ordered, as the glowing entrance to the Taggart Terminal flared up in the rectangle of the taxi's windshield.  The men in the Terminal manager's office were like extinguished signals, as if here, too, a circuit were broken and there were no living current to make them move. They looked at her with a kind of inanimate passivity, as if it made no difference whether she let them stay still or threw a switch to set them in motion.  The Terminal manager was absent. The chief engineer could not be found; he had been seen at the Terminal two hours ago, not since. The assistant manager had exhausted his power of initiative by volunteering to call her. The others volunteered nothing. The signal engineer was a college-boyish man in his thirties, who kept saying aggressively, "But this has never happened before, Miss Taggart! The interlocker has never failed. It's not supposed to fail. We know our jobs, we can take care of it as well as anybody can-but not if it breaks down when it's not supposed to!" She could not tell whether the dispatcher, an elderly man with years of railroad work behind him, still retained his intelligence but chose to hide it, or whether months of suppressing it had choked it for good, granting him the safety of stagnation, "We don't know what to do, Miss Taggart." "We don't know whom to call for what sort of permission." "There are no rules to cover an emergency of this kind." "There aren't even any rules about who's to lay down the rules for it!"  She listened, she reached for the telephone without a word of explanation, she ordered the operator to get her the operating vice-president of the Atlantic Southern in Chicago, to get him at his home and out of bed, if necessary.  "George? Dagny Taggart," she said, when the voice of her competitor came on the wire. "Will you lend me the signal engineer of your Chicago terminal, Charles Murray, for twenty-four hours? . . .  Yes. . . . Right. . . . Put him aboard a plane and get him here as fast as you can. Tell him we'll pay three thousand dollars. . . . Yes, for the one day. . . . Yes, as bad as that. . . . Yes, I'll pay him in cash, out of my own pocket, if necessary. I'll pay whatever it takes to bribe his way aboard a plane, but get him on the first plane out of Chicago. . . . No, George, not one-not a single mind left on Taggart Transcontinental. . . . Yes, I'll get all the papers, exemptions, exceptions and emergency permissions. . . . Thanks, George. So long."  She hung up and spoke rapidly to the men before her, not to hear the stillness of the room and of the Terminal, where no sound of wheels was beating any longer, not to hear the bitter words which the stillness seemed to repeat: Not a single mind left on Taggart Transcontinental. . . .  "Get a wrecking train and crew ready at once,'1 she said. "Send them out on the Hudson Line, with orders to tear down every foot of copper wire, any copper wire, lights, signals, telephone, everything that's company property. Have it here by morning." "But, Miss Taggart! Our service on the Hudson Line is only temporarily suspended and the Unification Board has refused us permission to dismantle the line!" "I'll be responsible." "But how are we going to get the wrecking train out of here, when there aren't any signals?" "There will be signals in half an hour." "How?" "Come on," she said, rising to her feet.  They followed her as she hurried down the passenger platforms, past the huddling, shifting groups of travelers by the motionless trains. She hurried down a narrow catwalk, through a maze of rail, past blinded signals and frozen switches, with nothing but the beat of her satin sandals to fill the great vaults of the underground tunnels of Taggart Transcontinental, with the hollow creaking of planks under the slower steps of men trailing her like a reluctant echo-she hurried to the lighted glass cube of Tower A, that hung in the darkness like a crown without a body, the crown of a deposed ruler above a realm of empty tracks.  The tower director was too expert a man at too exacting a job to be able wholly to conceal the dangerous burden of intelligence. He understood what she wanted him to do from her first few words and answered only with an abrupt "Yes, ma'am," but he was bent over his charts by the time the others came following her up the iron stairway, he was grimly at work on the most humiliating job of calculation he had ever had to perform in his long career. She knew how fully he understood it, from a single glance he threw at her, a glance of indignation and endurance that matched some emotion he had caught in her face, "We'll do it first and feel about it afterwards," she said, even though he had made no comment. "Yes, ma'am," he answered woodenly.  His room, on the top of an underground tower, was like a glass verandah overlooking what had once been the swiftest, richest and most orderly stream in the world. He had been trained to chart the course of over ninety trains an hour and to watch them roll safely through a maze of tracks and switches in and out of the Terminal, under his glass walls and his fingertips. Now, for the first time, he was looking out at the empty darkness of a dried channel.  Through the open door of the relay room, she saw the tower men standing grimly idle-the men whose jobs had never permitted a moment's relaxation-standing by the long rows that looked like vertical copper pleats, like shelves of books and as much of a monument to human intelligence. The pull of one of the small levers, which protruded like bookmarks from the shelves, threw thousands of electric circuits into motion, made thousands of contacts and broke as many others, set dozens of switches to clear a chosen course and dozens of signals to light it, with no error left possible, no chance, no contradiction -an enormous complexity of thought condensed into one movement of a human hand to set and insure the course of a train, that hundreds of trains might safely rush by, that thousands of tons of metal and lives might pass in speeding streaks a breath away from one another, protected by nothing but a thought, the thought of the man who devised the levers. But they-she looked at the face of her signal engineer -they believed that that muscular contraction of a hand was the only thing required to move the traffic-and now the tower men stood idle-and on the great panels in front of the tower director, the red and green lights, which had flashed announcing the progress of trains at a distance of miles, were now so many glass beads-like the glass beads for which another breed of savages had once sold the Island of Manhattan.  "Call all of your unskilled laborers," she said to the assistant manager, "the section hands, trackwalkers, engine wipers, whoever's in the Terminal right now, and have them come here at once."  "Here?"  "Here," she said, pointing at the tracks outside the tower. "Call all your switchmen, too. Phone your storehouse and have them bring here every lantern they can lay their hands on, any sort of lantern, conductors' lanterns, storm lanterns, anything."  "Lanterns, Miss Taggart?"  "Get going."  "Yes, ma'am."  "What is it we're doing, Miss Taggart?" asked the dispatcher.  "We're going to move trains and we're going to move them manually."  "Manually?" said the signal engineer.  "Yes, brother! Now why should you be shocked?" She could not resist it. "Man is only muscles, isn't he? We're going back-back to where there were no interlocking systems, no semaphores, no electricity -back to the time when train signals were not steel and wire, but men holding lanterns. Physical men, serving as lampposts. You've advocated it long enough-you got what you wanted. Oh, you thought that your tools would determine your ideas? But it happens to be the other way around-and now you're going to see the kind of tools your ideas have determined!"  But even to go back took an act of intelligence-she thought, feeling the paradox of her own position, as she looked at the lethargy of the faces around her.  "How will we work the switches, Miss Taggart?"  "By hand."  "And the signals?"  "By hand."  "How?"  "By placing a man with a lantern at every signal post."  "How? There's not enough clearance."  "We'll use alternate tracks."  "How will the men know which way to throw the switches?"  "By written orders."  "Uh?"  "By written orders-just as in the old days." She pointed to the tower director. "He's working out a schedule of how to move the trains and which tracks to use. He'll write out an. order for every signal and switch, he'll pick some men as runners and they'll keep delivering the orders to every post-and it will take hours to do what used to take minutes, but we'll get those waiting trains into the Terminal and out on the road-"  "We're to work it that way all night?"  "And all day tomorrow-until the engineer who's got the brains for it, shows you how to repair the interlocker."  "There's nothing in the union contracts about men standing with lanterns. There's going to be trouble. The union will object."  "Let them come to me."  "The Unification Board will object."  "I'll be responsible."  "Well, I wouldn't want to be held for giving the orders-"  "I'll give the orders."  She stepped out on the landing of the iron stairway that hung on the side of the tower; she was fighting for self-control. It seemed to her for a moment as if she, too, were a precision instrument of high technology, left without electric current, trying to run a transcontinental railroad by means of her two hands. She looked out at the great, silent darkness of the Taggart underground-and she felt a stab of burning humiliation that she should now see it brought down to the level where human lampposts would stand in its tunnels as its last memorial statues.  She could barely distinguish the faces of the men when they gathered at the foot of the tower. They came streaming silently through the darkness and stood without moving in the bluish murk, with blue bulbs on the walls behind them and patches of light falling on their shoulders from the tower's windows. She could see the greasy garments, the slack, muscular bodies, the limply hanging arms of men drained by the unrewarding exhaustion of a labor that required no thought. These were the dregs of the railroad, the younger men who could now seek no chance to rise and the older men who had never wanted to seek it. They stood in silence, not with the apprehensive curiosity of workmen, but with the heavy indifference of convicts.  "The orders which you are about to receive have come from me," she said, standing above them on the iron stairs, speaking with resonant clarity. "The men who'll issue them are acting under my instructions. The interlocking control system has broken down. It will now be replaced by human labor. Train service will be resumed at once."  She noticed some faces in the crowd staring at her with a peculiar look: with a veiled resentment and the kind of insolent curiosity that made her suddenly conscious of being a woman. Then she remembered what she wore, and thought that it did look preposterous-and then, at the sudden stab of some violent impulse that felt like defiance and like loyalty to the full, real meaning of the moment, she threw her cape back and stood in the raw glare of light, under the sooted columns, like a figure at a formal reception, sternly erect, flaunting the luxury of naked arms, of glowing black satin, of a diamond flashing like a military cross.  "The tower director will assign switchmen to their posts. He will select men for the job of signaling trains by means of lanterns and for the task of transmitting his orders. Trains will-" She was fighting to drown a bitter voice that seemed to be saying: That's all they're fit for, these men, if even that . . . there's not a single mind left anywhere on Taggart Transcontinental. . . . "Trains will continue to be moved in and out of the Terminal. You will remain at your posts until-"  Then she stopped. It was his eyes and hair that she saw first-the ruthlessly perceptive eyes, the streaks of hair shaded from gold to copper that seemed to reflect the glow of sunlight in the murk of the underground-she saw John Galt among the chain gang of the mindless, John Galt in greasy overalls and rolled shirt sleeves, she saw his weightless way of standing, his face held lifted, his eyes looking at her as if he had seen this moment many moments ago.  "What's the matter, Miss Taggart?"  It was the soft voice of the tower director, who stood by her side, with some sort of paper in his hand-and she thought it was strange to emerge from a span of unconsciousness which had been the span of the sharpest awareness she had ever experienced, only she did not know how long it had lasted or where she was or why. She had been aware of Galt's face, she had been seeing, in the shape of his mouth, in the planes of his cheeks, the crackup of that implacable serenity which had always been his, but he still retained it in his look of acknowledging the breach, of admitting that this moment was too much even for him.  She knew that she went on speaking, because those around her looked as if they were listening, though she could not hear a sound, she went on speaking as if carrying out a hypnotic order given to herself some endless time ago, knowing only that the completion of that order was a form of defiance against him, neither knowing nor hearing her own words.  She felt as if she were standing in a radiant silence where sight was her only capacity and his face was its only object, and the sight of his face was like a speech in the form of a pressure at the base of her throat. It seemed so natural that he should be here, it seemed so unendurably simple-she felt as if the shock were not his presence, but the presence of others on the tracks of her railroad, where he belonged and they did not. She was seeing those moments aboard a train when, at its plunge into the tunnels, she had felt a sudden, solemn tension, as if this place were showing her in naked simplicity the essence of her railroad and of her life, the union of consciousness and matter, the frozen form of a mind's ingenuity giving physical existence to its purpose; she had felt a sense of sudden hope, as if this place held the meaning of all of her values, and a sense of secret excitement, as if a nameless promise were awaiting her under the ground-it was right that she should now meet him here, he had been the meaning and the promise-she was not seeing his clothing any longer, nor to what level her railroad had reduced him-she was seeing only the vanishing torture of the months when he had been outside her  reach-she was seeing in his face the confession of what those months had cost him -the only speech she heard was as if she were saying to him: This is the reward for all my days-and as if he were answering: For all of mine.  She knew that she had finished speaking to the strangers when she saw that the tower director had stepped forward and was saying something to them, glancing at a list in his hand. Then, drawn by a sense of irresistible certainty, she found herself descending the stairs, slipping away from the crowd, not toward the platforms and the exit, but into the darkness of the abandoned tunnels. You will follow me, she thought -and felt as if the thought were not in words, but in the tension of her muscles, the tension of her will to accomplish a thing she knew to be outside her power, yet she knew with certainty that it would be accomplished and by her wish . . . no, she thought, not by her wish, but by its total rightness. You will follow me-it was neither plea nor prayer nor demand., but the quiet statement of a fact, it contained the whole of her power of knowledge and the whole of the knowledge she had earned through the years. You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can't let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached. You will follow me-she felt an exultant assurance, which was neither hope nor faith, but an act of worship for the logic of existence.  She was hurrying down the remnants of abandoned rails, down the long, dark corridors twisting through granite. She lost the sound of the director's voice behind her. Then she felt the beat of her arteries and heard, in answering rhythm, the beat of the city above her head, but she felt as if she heard the motion of her blood as a sound filling the silence, and the motion of the city as the beat inside her body-and, far behind her, she heard the sound of steps. She did not glance back.  She went faster. She went past the locked iron door where the remnant of his motor was still hidden, she did not stop, but a faint shudder was her answer to the sudden glimpse of the unity and logic in the events of the last two years. A string of blue lights went on into the darkness, over patches of glistening granite, over broken sandbags spilling drifts on the rails, over rusty piles of scrap metal. When she heard the steps coming closer, she stopped and turned to look back.  She saw a sweep of blue light flash briefly on the shining strands of Galt's hair, she caught the pale outline of his face and the dark hollows of his eyes. The face disappeared, but the sound of his steps served as the link to the next blue light that swept across the line of his eyes, the eyes that remained held level, directed ahead-and she felt certain that she had stayed in his sight from the moment he had seen her at the tower.  She heard the beat of the city above them-these tunnels, she had once thought, were the roots of the city and of all the motion reaching to the sky-but they, she thought, John Galt and she, were the living power within these roots, they were the start and aim and meaning-he, too, she thought, heard the beat of the city as the beat of his body.  She threw her cape back, she stood defiantly straight, as he had seen her stand on the steps of the tower-as he had seen her for the first time, ten years ago, here, under the ground-she was hearing the words of his confession, not as words, but by means of that beating which made it so difficult to breathe: You looked like a symbol of luxury and you belonged in the place that was its source . . . you seemed to bring the enjoyment of life back to its rightful owners . . .you had a look of energy and of its reward, together . . . and I was the first man who had ever stated in what manner these two were inseparable. . . .  The next span of moments was like flashes of light in stretches of blinded unconsciousness-the moment when she saw his face, as he stopped beside her, when she saw the unastonished calm, the leashed intensity, the laughter of understanding in the dark green eyes-the moment when she knew what he saw in her face, by the tight, drawn harshness of his lips-the moment when she felt his mouth on hers, when she felt the shape of his mouth both as an absolute shape and as a liquid filling her body-then the motion of his lips down the line of her throat, a drinking motion that left a trail of bruises-then the sparkle of her diamond clip against the trembling copper of his hair.  Then she was conscious of nothing but the sensations of her body, because her body acquired the sudden power to let her know her most complex values by direct perception. Just as her eyes had the power to translate wave lengths of energy into sight, just as her ears had the power to translate vibrations into sound, so her body now had the power to translate the energy that had moved all the choices of her life, into immediate sensory perception. It was not the pressure of a hand that made her tremble, but the instantaneous sum of its meaning, the knowledge that it was his hand, that it moved as if her flesh were his possession, that its movement was his signature of acceptance under the whole of that achievement which was herself-it was only a sensation of physical pleasure, but it contained her worship of him, of everything that was his person and his life-from the night of the mass meeting in a factory in Wisconsin, to the Atlantis of a valley hidden in the Rocky Mountains, to the triumphant mockery of the green eyes of the superlative intelligence above a worker's figure at the foot of the tower-it contained her pride in herself and that it should be she whom he had chosen as his mirror, that it should be her body which was now giving him the sum of his existence, as his body was giving her the sum of hers. These were the things it contained-but what she knew was only the sensation of the movement of his hand on her breasts.  He tore off her cape and she felt the slenderness of her own body by means of the circle of his arms, as if his person were only a tool for her triumphant awareness of herself, but that self were only a tool for her awareness of him. It was as if she were reaching the limit of her capacity to feel, yet what she felt was like a cry of impatient demand, which she was now incapable of naming, except that it had the same quality of ambition as the course of her life, the same inexhaustible quality of radiant greed.  He pulled her head back for a moment, to look straight into her eyes, to let her see his, to let her know the full meaning of their actions, as if throwing the spotlight of consciousness upon them for the meeting of their eyes in a moment of intimacy greater than the one to come.  Then she felt the mesh of burlap striking the skin of her shoulders, she found herself lying on the broken sandbags, she saw the long, tight gleam of her stockings, she felt his mouth pressed to her ankle, then rising in a tortured motion up the line of her leg, as if he wished to own its shape by means of his lips, then she felt her teeth sinking into the flesh of his arm, she felt the sweep of his elbow knocking her head aside and his mouth seizing her lips with a pressure more viciously painful than hers-then she felt, when it hit her throat, that which she knew only as an upward streak of motion that released and united her body into a single shock of pleasure-then she knew nothing but the motion of his body and the driving greed that went reaching on and on, as if she were not a person any longer, only a sensation of endless reaching for the impossible-then she knew that it was possible, and she gasped and lay still, knowing that nothing more could be desired, ever.  He lay beside her, on his back, looking up at the darkness of the granite vault above them, she saw him stretched on the jagged slant of sandbags as if his body were fluid in relaxation, she saw the black wedge of her cape flung across the rails at their feet, there were beads of moisture twinkling on the vault, shifting slowly, running into invisible cracks, like the lights of a distant traffic. When he spoke, his voice sounded as if he were quietly continuing a sentence in answer to the questions in her mind, as if he had nothing to hide from her any longer and what he owed her now was only the act of undressing his soul, as simply as he would have undressed his body: ". . . this is how I've watched you for ten years . . . from here, from under the ground under your feet . . . knowing every move you made in your office at the top of the building, but never seeing you, never enough . . . ten years of nights, spent waiting to catch a glimpse of you, here, on the platforms, when you boarded a train. . . . Whenever the order came down to couple your car, I'd know of it and wait and see you come down the ramp, and wish you didn't walk so fast . . . it was so much like you, that walk, I'd know it anywhere . . .  your walk and those legs of yours . . . it was always your legs that I'd see first, hurrying down the ramp, going past me as I looked up at you from a dark side track below. . . . I think I could have molded a sculpture of your legs, I knew them, not with my eyes, but with the palms of my hands when I watched you go by . . . when I turned back to my work . . . when I went home just before sunrise for the three hours of sleep which I didn't get . . ."  "I love you," she said, her voice quiet and almost toneless except for a fragile sound of youth.  He closed his eyes, as if letting the sound travel through the years behind them. "Ten years, Dagny . . ., except that once there were a few weeks when I had you before me, in plain sight, within reach, not hurrying away, but held still, as on a lighted stage, a private stage for me to watch . . . and I watched you for hours through many evenings . . . in the lighted window of an office that was called the John Galt Line. . . . And one night-"  Her breath was a faint gasp. "Was it you, that night?"  "Did you see me?"  "I saw your shadow . . . on the pavement . . . pacing back and forth . . . it looked like a struggle . . . it looked like-" She stopped; she did not want to say "torture."  "It was," he said quietly. "That night, I wanted to walk in, to face you, to speak, to . . . That was the night I came closest to breaking my oath, when I saw you slumped across your desk, when I saw you broken by the burden you were carrying-"  "John, that night, it was you that I was thinking of . . . only I didn't know it . . ."  "But, you see, I knew it."  ". . . it was you, all my life, through everything I did and everything I wanted . . . "  "I know it."  "John, the hardest was not when I left you in the valley . . . it was-"  "Your radio speech, the day you returned?"  "Yes! Were you listening?"  "Of course. I'm glad you did it. It was a magnificent thing to do. And I-I knew it, anyway."  "You knew . . . about Hank Rearden?"  "Before I saw you in the valley."  "Was it . . . when you learned about him, had you expected it?"  "No."  "Was it . . . ?" she stopped.  "Hard? Yes. But only for the first few days. That next night . . . Do you want me to tell you what I did the night after I learned it?"  "Yes."  "I had never seen Hank Rearden, only pictures of him in the newspapers. I knew that he was in New York, that night, at some conference of big industrialists. I wanted to have just one look at him. I went to wait at the entrance of the hotel where that conference was held. There were bright lights under the marquee of the entrance, but it was dark beyond, on the pavement, so I could see without being seen, there were a few loafers and vagrants hanging around, there was a drizzle of rain and we clung to the walls of the building. One could tell the members of the conference when they began filing out, by their clothes and their manner-ostentatiously prosperous clothes and a manner of overbearing timidity, as if they were guiltily trying to pretend that they were what they appeared to be for that moment. There were chauffeurs driving up their cars, there were a few reporters delaying them for questions and hangers-on trying to catch a word from them. They were worn men, those industrialists, aging, flabby, frantic with the effort to disguise uncertainty. And then I saw him. He wore an expensive trenchcoat and a hat slanting across his eyes. He walked swiftly, with the kind of assurance that has to be earned, as he'd earned it. Some of his fellow industrialists pounced on him with questions, and those tycoons were acting like hangers-on around him. I caught a glimpse of him as he stood with his hand on the door of his car, his head lifted, I saw the brief flare of a smile under the slanting brim, a confident smile, impatient and a little amused. And then, for one instant, I did what I had never done before, what most men wreck their lives on doing-I saw that moment out of context, I saw the world as he made it look, as if it matched him, as if he were its symbol-I saw a world of achievement, of unenslaved energy, of unobstructed drive through purposeful years to the enjoyment of one's reward-I saw, as I stood in the rain in a crowd of vagrants, what my years would have brought me, if that world had existed, and I felt a desperate longing-he was the image of everything I should have been . . . and he had everything that should have been mine. . . . But it was only a moment. Then I saw the scene in full context again and in all of its actual meaning-I saw what price he was paying for his brilliant ability, what torture he was enduring in silent bewilderment, struggling to understand what I had understood-I saw that the world he suggested, did not exist and was yet to be made, I saw him again for what he was, the symbol of my battle, the unrewarded hero whom I was to avenge and to release-and then . . . then I accepted what I had learned about you and him. I saw that it changed nothing, that I should have expected it-that it was right."  He heard the faint sound of her moan and he chuckled softly.  "Dagny, it's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence. Don't feel sorry for me. It was gone right then."  She turned her head to look at him in silence, and he smiled, lifting himself on an elbow to look down at her face as she lay helplessly still.  She whispered, "You've been a track laborer, here-here!-for twelve years . . ."  "Yes."  "Ever since-"  "Ever since I quit the Twentieth Century."  "The night when you saw me for the first time . . . you were working here, then?"  "Yes. And the morning when you offered to work for me as my cook, I was only your track laborer on leave of absence. Do you see why I laughed as I did?"  She was looking up at his face; hers was a smile of pain, his-of pure gaiety, "John . . ."  "Say it. But say it all."  "You were here . . . all those years . . ."  "Yes."  ". . . all those years . . . while the railroad was perishing . . .while I was searching for men of intelligence . . . while I was struggling to hold onto any scrap of it I could find . . ."  ". . . while you were combing the country for the inventor of my motor, while you were feeding James Taggart and Wesley Mouch, while you were naming your best achievement after the enemy whom you wanted to destroy."  She closed her eyes.  "I was here all those years," he said, "within your reach, inside your own realm, watching your struggle, your loneliness, your longing, watching you in a battle you thought you were fighting for me, a battle in which you were supporting my enemies and taking an endless defeat -I was here, hidden by nothing but an error of your sight, as Atlantis is hidden from men by nothing but an optical illusion-I was here, waiting for the day when you would see, when you would know that by the code of the world you were supporting, it's to the darkest bottom of the underground that all the things you valued would have to be consigned and that it's there that you would have to look. I was here. I was waiting for you. I love you, Dagny. I love you more than my life, I who have taught men how life is to be loved. I've taught them also never to expect the unpaid for-and what I did tonight, I did it with full knowledge that I would pay for it and that my life might have to be the price."  "No!"  He smiled, nodding. "Oh yes. You know that you've broken me for once, that I broke the decision I had set for myself-but I did it consciously, knowing what it meant, I did it, not in blind surrender to the moment, but with full sight of the consequences and full willingness to bear them. I could not let this kind of moment pass us by, it was ours, my love, we had earned it. But you're not ready to quit and join me-you don't have to tell me, I know-and since I chose to take what I wanted before it was fully mine, I'll have to pay for it, I have no way of knowing how or when, I know only that if I give in to an enemy, I'll take the consequences." He smiled in answer to the look on her face.  "No, Dagny, you're not my enemy in mind-and that is what brought me to this-but you are in fact, in the course you're pursuing, though you don't see it yet, but I do. My actual enemies are of no danger to me. You are. You're the only one who can lead them to find me. They would never have the capacity to know what I am, but with your help -they will."  "No!"  "No, not by your intention. And you're free to change your course, but so long as you follow it, you're not free to escape its logic. Don't frown, the choice was mine and it's a danger I chose to accept. I am a trader, Dagny, in all things. I wanted you, I had no power to change your decision, I had only the power to consider the price and decide whether I could afford it. I could. My life is mine to spend or to invest -and you, you're"-as if his gesture were continuing his sentence, he raised her across his arm and kissed her mouth, while her body hung limply in surrender, her hair streaming down, her head falling back, held only by the pressure of his lips-"you're the one reward I had to have and chose to buy. I wanted you, and if my life is the price, I'll give it. My life-but not my mind."  There was a sudden glint of hardness in his eyes, as he sat up and smiled and asked, "Would you want me to join you and go to work? Would you like me to repair that interlocking signal system of yours within an hour?"  "No!" The cry was immediate-in answer to the flash of a sudden image, the image of the men in the private dining room of the Wayne Falkland.  He laughed. "Why not?"  "I don't want to see you working as their serf!"  "And yourself?"  "I think that they're crumbling and that I'll win. I can stand it just a little longer."  "True, it's just a little longer-not till you win, but till you learn."  "I can't let it go!" It was a cry of despair.  "Not yet," he said quietly.  He got up, and she rose obediently, unable to speak.  "I will remain here, on my job," he said. "But don't try to see me. You'll have to endure what I've endured and wanted to spare you-you'll have to go on, knowing where I am, wanting me as I'll want you, but never permitting yourself to approach me. Don't seek me here. Don't come to my home. Don't ever let them see us together. And when you reach the end, when you're ready to quit, don't tell them, just chalk a dollar sign on the pedestal of Nat Taggart's statue-where it belongs -then go home and wait. I'll come for you in twenty-four hours."  She inclined her head in silent promise.  But when he turned to go, a sudden shudder ran through her body, like a first jolt of awakening or a last convulsion of life, and it ended in an involuntary cry: "Where are you going?"  "To be a lamppost and stand holding a lantern till dawn-which is the only work your world relegates me to and the only work it's going to get."  She seized his arm, to hold him, to follow, to follow him blindly, abandoning everything but the sight of his face. "John!"  He gripped her wrist, twisted her hand and threw it off. "No," he said.  Then he took her hand and raised it to his lips and the pressure of his mouth was more passionate a statement than any he had chosen to confess. Then he walked away, down the vanishing line of rail, and it seemed to her that both the rail and the figure were abandoning her at the same time.  When she staggered out into the concourse of the Terminal, the first blast of rolling wheels went shuddering through the walls of the building, like the sudden beat of a heart that had stopped. The temple of Nathaniel Taggart was silent and empty, its changeless light beating down on a deserted stretch of marble. Some shabby figures shuffled across it, as if lost in its shining expanse. On the steps of the pedestal, under the statue of the austere, exultant figure, a ragged bum sat slumped in passive resignation, like a wing-plucked bird with no place to go, resting on any chance cornice.  She fell down on the steps of the pedestal, like another derelict, her dust-smeared cape wrapped tightly about her, she sat still, her head on her arm, past crying or reeling or moving. It seemed to her only that she kept seeing a figure with a raised arm holding a light, and it looked at times like the Statue of Liberty and then it looked like a man with sun-streaked hair, holding a lantern against a midnight sky, a red lantern that stopped the movement of the world.  "Don't take it to heart, lady, whatever it is," said the bum, in a tone of exhausted compassion. "Nothing's to be done about it, anyway. . . .What's the use, lady? Who is John Galt?"