CHAPTER VIII THE EGOIST

"It wasn't real, was it?" said Mr. Thompson.  They stood in front of the radio, as the last sound of Galt's voice had left them. No one had moved through the span of silence; they had stood, looking at the radio, as if waiting. But the radio was now only a wooden box with some knobs and a circle of cloth stretched over an empty loud-speaker.  "We seem to have heard it," said Tinky Holloway.  "We couldn't help it," said Chick Morrison.  Mr. Thompson was sitting on a crate. The pale, oblong smear at the level of his elbow was the face of Wesley Mouch, who was seated on the floor. Far behind them, like an island in the vast semi-darkness of the studio space, the drawing room prepared for their broadcast stood deserted and fully lighted, a semicircle of empty armchairs under a cobweb of dead microphones in the glare of the floodlights which no one had taken the initiative to turn off.  Mr. Thompson's eyes were darting over the faces around him, as if in search of some special vibrations known only to him. The rest of them were trying to do it surreptitiously, each attempting to catch a glimpse of the others without letting them catch his own glance.  "Let me out of here!" screamed a young third-rate assistant, suddenly and to no one in particular.  "Stay put!" snapped Mr. Thompson.  The sound of his own order and the hiccough-moan of the figure immobilized somewhere in the darkness, seemed to help him recapture a familiar version of reality. His head emerged an inch higher from his shoulders.  "Who permitted it to hap-" he began in a rising voice, but stopped; the vibrations he caught were the dangerous panic of the cornered.  "What do you make of it?" he asked, instead. There was no answer.  "Well?" He waited. "Well, say something, somebody!"  "We don't have to believe it, do we?" cried James Taggart, thrusting his face toward Mr. Thompson, in a manner that was almost a threat.  "Do we?" Taggart's face was distorted; his features seemed shapeless; a mustache of small beads sparkled between his nose and mouth.  "Pipe down," said Mr. Thompson uncertainly, drawing a little away from him.  "We don't have to believe it!" Taggart's voice had the flat, insistent sound of an effort to maintain a trance. "Nobody's ever said it before! It's just one man! We don't have to believe it!"  "Take it easy," said Mr. Thompson.  "Why is he so sure he's right? Who is he to go against the whole world, against everything ever said for centuries and centuries? Who is he to know? Nobody can be sure! Nobody can know what's right! There isn't any right!"  "Shut up!" yelled Mr. Thompson. "What are you trying to-"  The blast that stopped him was a military march leaping suddenly forth from the radio receiver-the military march interrupted three hours ago, played by the familiar screeches of a studio record. It took them a few stunned seconds to grasp it, while the cheerful, thumping chords went goose-stepping through the silence, sounding grotesquely irrelevant, like the mirth of a half-wit. The station's program director was blindly obeying the absolute that no radio time was ever to be left blank.  "Tell them to cut it off!" screamed Wesley Mouch, leaping to his feet. "It will make the public think that we authorized that speech!"  "You damn fool!" cried Mr. Thompson. "Would you rather have the public think that we didn't?"  Mouch stopped short and his eyes shot to Mr. Thompson with the appreciative glance of an amateur at a master.  "Broadcasts as usual!" ordered Mr. Thompson. "Tell them to go on with whatever programs they'd scheduled for this hour! No special announcements, no explanations! Tell them to go on as if nothing had happened!"  Half a dozen of Chick Morrison's morale conditioners went scurrying off toward telephones.  "Muzzle the commentators! Don't allow them to comment! Send word to every station in the country! Let the public wonder! Don't let them think that we're worried! Don't let them think that it's important!"  "No!" screamed Eugene Lawson. "No, no, no! We can't give people the impression that we're endorsing that speech! It's horrible, horrible, horrible!" Lawson was not in tears, but his voice had the undignified sound of an adult sobbing with helpless rage.  "Who's said anything about endorsing it?" snapped Mr. Thompson.  "It's horrible! It's immoral! It's selfish, heartless, ruthless! It's the most vicious speech ever made! It . . . it will make people demand to be happy!"  "It's only a speech," said Mr. Thompson, not too firmly.  "It seems to me," said Chick Morrison, his voice tentatively helpful, '"that people of nobler spiritual nature, you know what I mean, people of . . . of . . . well, of mystical insight"-he paused, as if waiting to be slapped, but no one moved, so he repeated firmly-"yes, of mystical insight, won't go for that speech. Logic isn't everything, after all."  "The workingmen won't go for it," said Tinky Holloway, a bit more helpfully. "He didn't sound like a friend of labor."  "The women of the country won't go for it," declared Ma Chalmers.  "It is, I believe, an established fact that women don't go for that stuff about the mind. Women have finer feelings. You can count on the women."  "You can count on the scientists," said Dr. Simon Pritchett. They were all pressing forward, suddenly eager to speak, as if they had found a subject they could handle with assurance. "Scientists know better than to believe in reason. He's no friend of the scientists."  "He's no friend of anybody," said Wesley Mouch, recapturing a shade of confidence at the sudden realization, "except maybe of big business."  "No!" cried Mr. Mowen in terror. "No! Don't accuse us! Don't say it! I won't have you say it!"  "What?"  "That . . . that . . . that anybody is a friend of business!"  "Don't let's make a fuss about that speech," said Dr. Floyd Ferris.  "It was too intellectual. Much too intellectual for the common man. It will have no effect. People are too dumb to understand it."  "Yeah," said Mouch hopefully, "that's so."  "In the first place," said Dr. Ferris, encouraged, "people can't think. In the second place, they don't want to."  "In the third place," said Fred Kinnan, "they don't want to starve. And what do you propose to do about that?"  It was as if he had pronounced the question which all of the preceding utterances had been intended to stave off. No one answered him, but heads drew faintly deeper into shoulders, and figures drew faintly closer to one another, like a small cluster under the weight of the studio's empty space. The military march boomed through the silence with the inflexible gaiety of a grinning skull.  "Turn it off!" yelled Mr. Thompson, waving at the radio. "Turn that damn thing off!"  Someone obeyed him. But the sudden silence was worse.  "Well?" said Mr. Thompson at last, raising his eyes reluctantly to Fred Kinnan. "What do you think we ought to do?"  "Who, me?" chuckled Kinnan. "I don't run this show."  Mr. Thompson slammed his fist down on his knee. "Say something -" he ordered, but seeing Kinnan turn away, added, "somebody!"  There were no volunteers. "What are we to do?" he yelled, knowing that the man who answered would, thereafter, be the man in power.  "What are we to do? Can't somebody tell us what to do?"  "I can!"  It was a woman's voice, but it had the quality of the voice they had heard on the radio. They whirled to Dagny before she had time to step forward from the darkness beyond the group. As she stepped forward, her face frightened them-because it was devoid of fear.  "I can," she said, addressing Mr. Thompson. "You're to give up."  "Give up?" he repeated blankly.  "You're through. Don't you see that you're through? What else do you need, after what you've heard? Give up and get out of the way. Leave men free to exist." He was looking at her, neither objecting nor moving. "You're still alive, you're using a human language, you're asking for answers, you're counting on reason-you're still counting on reason, God damn you! You're able to understand. It isn't possible that you haven't understood. There's nothing you can now pretend to hope, to want or gain or grab or reach. There's nothing but destruction ahead, the world's and your own. Give up and get out."  They were listening intently, but as if they did not hear her words, as if they were clinging blindly to a quality she was alone among them to possess: the quality of being alive. There was a sound of exultant laughter under the angry violence of her voice, her face was lifted, her eyes seemed to be greeting some spectacle at an incalculable distance, so that the glowing patch on her forehead did not look like the reflection of a studio spotlight, but of a sunrise.  "You wish to live, don't you? Get out of the way, if you want a chance. Let those who can, take over. He knows what to do. You don't. He is able to create the means of human survival. You aren't."  "Don't listen to her!"  It was so savage a cry of hatred that they drew away from Dr. Robert Stadler, as if he had given voice to the unconfessed within them. His face looked as they feared theirs would look in the privacy of darkness.  "Don't listen to her!" he cried, his eyes avoiding hers, while hers paused on him for a brief, level glance that began as a shock of astonishment and ended as an obituary. "It's your life or his!"  "Keep quiet, Professor," said Mr. Thompson, brushing him off with the jerk of one hand. Mr. Thompson's eyes were watching Dagny, as if some thought were struggling to take shape inside his skull.  "You know the truth, all of you," she said, "and so do I, and so does every man who's heard John Galt! What else are you waiting for? For proof? He's given it to you. For facts? They're all around you. How many corpses do you intend to pile up before you renounce it-your guns, your power, your controls and the whole of your miserable altruistic creed? Give it up, if you want to live. Give it up, if there's anything left in your mind that's still able to want human beings to remain alive on this earth!"  "But it's treason!" cried Eugene Lawson. "She's talking pure treason!"  "Now, now," said Mr. Thompson. "You don't have to go to extremes."  "Huh?" asked Tinky Holloway.  "But . . . but surely it's outrageous?" asked Chick Morrison.  "You're not agreeing with her, are you?" asked Wesley Mouch.  "Who's said anything about agreeing?" said Mr. Thompson, his tone surprisingly placid. "Don't be premature. Just don't you be premature, any of you. There's no harm in listening to any argument, is there?"  "That kind of argument?" asked Wesley Mouch, his finger stabbing again and again in Dagny's direction.  "Any kind," said Mr. Thompson placidly. "We mustn't be intolerant,"  "But it's treason, ruin, disloyalty, selfishness and big-business propaganda!"  "Oh, I don't know," said Mr. Thompson. "We've got to keep an open mind. We've got to give consideration to every one's viewpoint. She might have something there. He knows what to do. We've got to be flexible."  "Do you mean that you're willing to quit?" gasped Mouch.  "Now don't jump to conclusions," snapped Mr. Thompson angrily.  "If there's one thing I can't stand, it's people who jump to conclusions. And another thing is ivory-tower intellectuals who stick to some pet theory and haven't any sense of practical reality. At a time like this, we've got to be flexible above all."  He saw a look of bewilderment on all the faces around him, on Dagny's and on the others, though not for the same reasons. He smiled, rose to his feet and turned to Dagny.  "Thank you, Miss Taggart," he said. "Thank you for speaking your mind. That's what I want you to know-that you can trust me and speak to me with full frankness. We're not your enemies, Miss Taggart. Don't pay any attention to the boys-they're upset, but they'll come down to earth. We're not your enemies, nor the country's. Sure, we've made mistakes, we're only human, but we're trying to do our best for the people-that is, I mean, for everybody-in these difficult times. We can't make snap judgments and reach momentous decisions on the spur of the moment, can we? We've got to consider it, and mull it over, and weigh it carefully. I just want you to remember that we're not anybody's enemies-you realize that, don't you?"  "I've said everything I had to say," she answered, turning away from him, with no clue to the meaning of his words and no strength to attempt to find it. She turned to Eddie Willers, who had watched the men around them with a look of so great an indignation that he seemed paralyzed -as if his brain were crying, "It's evil!" and could not move to any further thought. She jerked her head, indicating the door; he followed her obediently.  Dr. Robert Stadler waited until the door had closed after them, then whirled on Mr. Thompson. "You bloody fool! Do you know what you're playing with? Don't you understand that it's life or death? That it's you or him?"  The thin tremor that ran along Mr. Thompson's lips was a smile of contempt. "It's a funny way for a professor to behave. I didn't think professors ever went to pieces."  "Don't you understand? Don't you see that it's one or the other?"  "And what is it that you want me to do?"  "You must kill him."  It was the fact that Dr. Stadler had not cried it, but had said it in a flat, cold, suddenly and fully conscious voice, that brought a chill moment of silence as the whole room's answer.  "You must find him," said Dr. Stadler, his voice cracking and rising once more. "You must leave no stone unturned till you find him and destroy him! If he lives, he'll destroy all of us! If he lives, we can't!"  "How am I to find him?" asked Mr. Thompson, speaking slowly and carefully.  "I . . . I can tell you. I can give you a lead. Watch that Taggart woman. Set your men to watch every move she makes. She'll lead you to him, sooner or later."  "How do you know that?"  "Isn't it obvious? Isn't it sheer chance that she hasn't deserted you long ago? Don't you have the wits to see that she's one of his kind?"  He did not state what kind.  "Yeah," said Mr. Thompson thoughtfully, "yeah, that's true." He jerked his head up with a smile of satisfaction. "The professor's got something there. Put a tail on Miss Taggart," he ordered, snapping his fingers at Mouch. "Have her tailed day and night. We've got to find him."  "Yes, sir," said Mouch blankly.  "And when you find him," Dr. Stadler asked tensely, "you'll kill him?"  "Kill him, you damn fool? We need him!" cried Mr. Thompson.  Mouch waited, but no one ventured the question that was on everyone's mind, so he made the effort to utter stiffly, "I don't understand you, Mr. Thompson."  "Oh, you theoretical intellectuals!" said Mr. Thompson with exasperation. "What are you all gaping at? It's simple. Whoever he is, he's a man of action. Besides, he's got a pressure group: he's cornered all the men of brains. He knows what to do. We'll find him and he'll tell us. He'll tell us what to do. He'll make things work. He'll pull us out of the hole."  "Us, Mr. Thompson?"  "Sure. Never mind your theories. We'll make a deal with him."  "With him?"  "Sure. Oh, we'll have to compromise, we'll have to make a few concessions to big business, and the welfare boys won't like it, but what the hell!-do you know any other way out?"  "But his ideas-"  "Who cares about ideas?"  "Mr. Thompson," said Mouch, choking, "I . . . I'm afraid he's a man who's not open to a deal."  "There's no such thing," said Mr. Thompson.  A cold wind rattled the broken signs over the windows of abandoned shops, in the street outside the radio station. The city seemed abnormally quiet. The distant rumble of the traffic sounded lower than usual and made the wind sound louder. Empty sidewalks stretched off into the darkness; a few lone figures stood in whispering clusters under the rare lights.  Eddie Willers did not speak until they were many blocks away from the station. He stopped abruptly, when they reached a deserted square where the public loud-speakers, which no one had thought of turning off, were now broadcasting a domestic comedy-the shrill voices of a husband and wife quarreling over Junior's dates-to an empty stretch of pavement enclosed by unlighted house fronts. Beyond the square, a few dots of light, scattered Vertically above the twenty fifth-floor limit of the city, suggested a distant, rising form, which was the Taggart Building.  Eddie stopped and pointed at the building, his finger shaking.  "Dagny!" he cried, then lowered his voice involuntarily. "Dagny," he whispered, "I know him. He . . . he works there . . . there . . ."  He kept pointing at the building with incredulous helplessness. "He works for Taggart Transcontinental . . ."  "I know," she answered; her voice was a lifeless monotone.  "As a track laborer . . . as the lowest of track laborers . . ."  "I know."  "I've talked to him . . . I've been talking to him for years . . .in the Terminal cafeteria. . . . He used to ask questions . . . all sorts of questions about the railroad, and I-God, Dagny! was I protecting the railroad or was I helping to destroy it?"  "Both. Neither. It doesn't matter now."  "I could have staked my life that he loved the railroad!"  "He does."  "But he's destroyed it."  "Yes."  She tightened the collar of her coat and walked on, against a gust of wind.  "I used to talk to him," he said, after a while. "His face . . . Dagny, it didn't look like any of the others, it . . . it showed that he understood so much. . . . I was glad, whenever I saw him there, in the cafeteria . . . I just talked . . . I don't think I knew that he was asking questions . . . but he was . . . so many questions about the railroad and . . . and about you."  "Did he ever ask you what I look like, when I'm asleep?"  "Yes . . . Yes, he did . . . I'd found you once, asleep in the office, and when I mentioned it, he-" He stopped, as a sudden connection crashed into place in his mind.  She turned to him, in the ray of a street lamp, raising and holding her face in full light for a silent, deliberate moment, as if in answer and confirmation of his thought.  He closed his eyes. "Oh God, Dagny!" he whispered.  They walked on in silence.  "He's gone by now, isn't he?" he asked. "From the Taggart Terminal, I mean."  "Eddie," she said, her voice suddenly grim, "if you value his life, don't ever ask that question. You don't want them to find him, do you? Don't give them any leads. Don't ever breathe a word to anyone about having known him. Don't try to find out whether he's still working in the Terminal."  "You don't mean that he's still there?"  "I don't know. I know only that he might be."  "Now?"  "Yes."  "Still?"  "Yes. Keep quiet about it, if you don't want to destroy him."  "I think he's gone. He won't be back. I haven't seen him since . . .since . . ."  "Since when?" she asked sharply.  "The end of May. The night when you left for Utah, remember?" He paused, as the memory of that night's encounter and the full understanding of its meaning struck him together. He said with effort, "1 saw him that night. Not since . . . I've waited for him, in the cafeteria . . . He never came back."  "I don't think he'll let you see him now, he'll keep out of your way. But don't look for him. Don't inquire."  "It's funny. I don't even know what name he used. It was Johnny something or-"  "It was John Galt," she said, with a faint, mirthless chuckle. "Don't look at the Terminal payroll. The name is still there."  "Just like that? All these years?"  "For twelve years. Just like that."  "And it's still there now?"  "Yes."  After a moment, he said, "It proves nothing, I know. The personnel office hasn't taken a single name off the payroll list since Directive 10-289. If a man quits, they give his name and job to a starving friend of their own, rather than report it to the Unification Board."  "Don't question the personnel office or anyone. Don't call attention to his name. If you or I make any inquiries about him, somebody might begin to wonder. Don't look for him. Don't make any move in his direction. And if you ever catch sight of him by chance, act as if you didn't know him."  He nodded. After a while, he said, his voice tense and low, "I wouldn't turn him over to them, not even to save the railroad."  "Eddie-"  "Yes?"  "If you ever catch sight of him, tell me."  He nodded.  Two blocks later, he asked quietly, "You're going to quit, one of these days, and vanish, aren't you?"  "Why do you say that?" It was almost a cry.  "Aren't you?"  She did not answer at once; when she did, the sound of despair was present in her voice only in the form of too tight a monotone: "Eddie, if I quit, what would happen to the Taggart trains?"  "There would be no Taggart trains within a week. Maybe less."  "There will be no looters' government within ten days. Then men like Cuffy Meigs will devour the last of our rails and engines. Should I lose the battle by failing to wait one more moment? How can I let it go-Taggart Transcontinental, Eddie-go forever, when one last effort can still keep it in existence? If I've stood things this long, I can stand them a little longer. Just a little longer. I'm not helping the looters. Nothing can help them now."  "What are they going to do?"  "I don't know. What can they do? They're finished."  "I suppose so."  "Didn't you see them? They're miserable, panic-stricken rats, running for their lives."  "Does it mean anything to them?"  "What?"  "Their lives."  "They're still struggling, aren't they? But they're through and they know it."  "Have they ever acted on what they know?"  "They'll have to. They'll give up. It won't be long. And we'll be here to save whatever's left."  "Mr. Thompson wishes it to be known," said official broadcasts on the morning of November 23, "that there is no cause for alarm. He urges the public not to draw any hasty conclusions. We must preserve our discipline, our morale, our unity and our sense of broad-minded tolerance. The unconventional speech, which some of you might have heard on the radio last night, was a thought-provoking contribution to our pool of ideas on world problems. We must consider it soberly, avoiding the extremes of total condemnation or of reckless agreement. We must regard it as one viewpoint out of many in our democratic forum of public opinion, which, as last night has proved, is open to all. The truth, says Mr. Thompson, has many facets. We must remain impartial."  "They're silent," wrote Chick Morrison, as a summary of its content, across the report from one of the field agents he had sent out on a mission entitled Public Pulse Taking. "They're silent," he wrote across the next report, then across another and another. "Silence," he wrote, with a frown of uneasiness, summing up his report to Mr. Thompson. "People seem to be silent."  The flames that went up to the sky of a winter night and devoured a home in Wyoming were not seen by the people of Kansas, who watched a trembling red glow on the prairie horizon, made by the flames that went up to devour a farm, and the glow was not reflected by the windows of a street in Pennsylvania, where the twisting red tongues were reflections of the flames that went up to devour a factory. Nobody mentioned, next morning, that those flames had not been set off by chance and that the owners of the three places had vanished. Neighbors observed it without comment-and without astonishment. A few homes were found abandoned in random corners across the nation, some left locked, shuttered and empty, others open and gutted of all movable goods-but people watched it in silence and, through the snowdrifts of untended streets in the haze of pre-morning darkness, went on trudging to their jobs, a little slower than usual.  Then, on November 27, a speaker at a political meeting in Cleveland was beaten up and had to escape by scurrying down dark alleys. His silent audience had come to sudden life when he had shouted that the cause of all their troubles was their selfish concern with their own troubles.  On the morning of November 29, the workers of a shoe factory in Massachusetts were astonished, on entering their workshop, to find that the foreman was late. But they went to their usual posts and went on with their habitual routine, pulling levers, pressing buttons, feeding leather into automatic cutters, piling boxes on a moving belt, wondering, as the hours went by, why they did not catch sight of the foreman, or the superintendent, or the general manager, or the company president. It was noon before they discovered that the front offices of the plant were empty.  "You goddamn cannibals!" screamed a woman in the midst of a crowded movie theater, breaking into sudden, hysterical sobs-and the audience showed no sign of astonishment, as if she were screaming for them all.  "There is no cause for alarm," said official broadcasts on December 5. "Mr. Thompson wishes it to be known that he is willing to negotiate with John Galt for the purpose of devising ways and means to achieve a speedy solution of our problems. Mr. Thompson urges the people to be patient. We must not worry, we must not doubt, we must not lose heart."  The attendants of a hospital in Illinois showed no astonishment when a man was brought in, beaten up by his elder brother, who had supported him all his life: the younger man had screamed at the elder, accusing him of selfishness and greed-just as the attendants of a hospital in New York City showed no astonishment at the case of a woman who came in with a fractured jaw: she had been slapped in the face by a total stranger, who had heard her ordering her five-year old son to give his best toy to the children of neighbors.  Chick Morrison attempted a whistle-stop tour to buttress the country's morale by speeches on self-sacrifice for the general welfare. He was stoned at the first of his stops and had to return to Washington.  Nobody had ever granted them the title of "the better men" or, granting it, had paused to grasp that title's meaning, but everybody knew, each in his own community, neighborhood, office or shop and in his own unidentified terms, who would be the men that would now fail to appear at their posts on some coming morning and would silently vanish in search of unknown frontiers-the men whose faces were tighter than the faces around them, whose eyes were more direct, whose energy was more conscientiously enduring-the men who were now slipping away, one by one, from every corner of the country-of the country which was now like the descendant of what had once been regal glory, prostrated by the scourge of hemophilia, losing the best of its blood from a wound not to be healed.  "But we're willing to negotiate!" yelled Mr. Thompson to his assistants, ordering the special announcement to be repeated by all radio stations three times a day. "We're willing to negotiate! He'll hear it! He'll answer!"  Special listeners were ordered to keep watch, day and night, at radio receivers tuned to every known frequency of sound, waiting for an answer from an unknown transmitter. There was no answer.  Empty, hopeless, unfocused faces were becoming more apparent in the streets of the cities, but no one could read their meaning. As some men were escaping with their bodies into the underground of uninhabited regions, so others could only save their souls and were escaping into the underground of their minds-and no power on earth could tell whether their blankly indifferent eyes were shutters protecting hidden treasures at the bottom of shafts no longer to be mined, or were merely gaping holes of the parasite's emptiness never to be filled.  "I don't know what to do," said the assistant superintendent of an oil refinery, refusing to accept the job of the superintendent who had vanished-and the agents of the Unification Board were unable to tell whether he lied or not. It was only an edge of precision in the tone of his voice, an absence of apology or shame, that made them wonder whether he was a rebel or a fool. It was dangerous to force the job on either.  "Give us men!" The plea began to hammer progressively louder upon the desk of the Unification Board, from all parts of a country ravaged by unemployment, and neither the pleaders nor the Board dared to add the dangerous words which the cry was implying: "Give us men of ability!" There were waiting lines years' long for the jobs of janitors, greasers, porters and bus boys; there was no one to apply for the jobs of executives, managers, superintendents, engineers.  The explosions of oil refineries, the crashes of defective airplanes, the break-outs of blast furnaces, the wrecks of colliding trains, and the rumors of drunken orgies in the offices of newly created executives, made the members of the Board fear the kind of men who did apply for the positions of responsibility.  "Don't despair! Don't give up!" said official broadcasts on December 15, and on every day thereafter, "We will reach an agreement with John Galt. We will get him to lead us. He will solve all our problems. He will make things work. Don't give up! We will get John Galt!"  Rewards and honors were offered to applicants for managerial jobs -then to foremen-then to skilled mechanics-then to any man who would make an effort to deserve a promotion in rank: wage raises, bonuses, tax exemptions and a medal devised by Wesley Mouch, to be known as "The Order of Public Benefactors." It brought no results. Ragged people listened to the offers of material comforts and turned away with lethargic indifference, as if they had lost the concept of "Value." These, thought the public-pulse-takers with terror, were men who did not care to live-or men who did not care to live on present terms.  "Don't despair! Don't give up! John Galt will solve our problems!" said the radio voices of official broadcasts, traveling through the silence of falling snow into the silence of unheated homes.  "Don't tell them that we haven't got him!" cried Mr. Thompson to his assistants, "But for God's sake tell them to find him!" Squads of Chick Morrison's boys were assigned to the task of manufacturing rumors: half of them went spreading the story that John Galt was in Washington and in conference with government officials-while the other half went spreading the story that the government would give five hundred thousand dollars as reward for information that would help to find John Galt.  "No, not a clue," said Wesley Mouch to Mr. Thompson, summing up the reports of the special agents who had been sent to check on every man by the name of John Galt throughout the country. "They're a shabby lot. There's a John Galt who's a professor of ornithology, eighty years old -there's a retired greengrocer with a wife and nine children-there's an unskilled railroad laborer who's held the same job for twelve years-and other such trash."  "Don't despair! We will get John Galt!" said official broadcasts in the daytime-but at night, every hour on the hour, by a secret, official order, an appeal was sent from short-wave transmitters into the empty reaches of space: "Calling John Galt! . . . Calling John Galt! . . .Are you listening, John Galt? . . . We wish to negotiate. We wish to confer with you. Give us word on where you can be reached. . . .Do you hear us, John Galt?" There was no answer.  The wads of worthless paper money were growing heavier in the pockets of the nation, but there was less and less for that money to buy. In September, a bushel of wheat had cost eleven dollars; it had cost thirty dollars in November; it had cost one hundred in December; it was now approaching the price of two hundred-while the printing presses of the government treasury were running a race with starvation, and losing.  When the workers of a factory beat up their foreman and wrecked the machinery in a fit of despair- no action could be taken against them. Arrests were futile, the jails were full, the arresting officers winked at their prisoners and let them escape on their way to prison-men were going through the motions prescribed for the moment, with no thought of the moment to follow. No action could be taken when mobs of starving people attacked warehouses on the outskirts of cities. No action could be taken when punitive squadrons joined the people they had been sent to punish.  "Are you listening, John Galt? . . . We wish to negotiate. We might meet your terms. . . . Are you listening?"  There were whispered rumors of covered wagons traveling by night through abandoned trails, and of secret settlements armed to resist the attacks of those whom they called the "Indians"-the attacks of any looting savages, be they homeless mobs or government agents. Lights were seen, once in a while, on the distant horizon of a prairie, in the hills, on the ledges of mountains, where no buildings had been known to exist. But no soldiers could be persuaded to investigate the sources of those lights.  On the doors of abandoned houses, on the gates of crumbling factories, on the walls of government buildings, there appeared, once in a while, traced in chalk, in paint, in blood, the curving mark which was the sign of the dollar.  "Can you hear us, John Galt? . . . Send us word. Name your terms. We will meet any terms you set. Can you hear us?" There was no answer.  The shaft of red smoke that shot to the sky on the night of January 22 and stood abnormally still for a while, like a solemn memorial obelisk, then wavered and swept back and forth across the sky, like a searchlight sending some undecipherable message, then went out as abruptly as it had come, marked the end of Rearden Steel-but the inhabitants of the area did not know it. They learned it only on subsequent nights, when they-who had cursed the mills for the smoke, the fumes, the soot and the noise-looked out and, instead of the glow pulsating with life on their familiar horizon, they saw a black void.  The mills had been nationalized, as the property of a deserter. The first bearer of the title of "People's Manager," appointed to run the mills, had been a man of the Orren Boyle faction, a pudgy hanger-on of the metallurgical industry, who had wanted nothing but to follow his employees while going through the motions of leading. But at the end of a month, after too many clashes with the workers, too many occasions when his only answer had been that he couldn't help it, too many undelivered orders, too many telephonic pressures from his buddies, he had begged to be transferred to some other position. The Orren Boyle faction had been falling apart, since Mr. Boyle had been confined to a rest home, where his doctor had forbidden him any contact with business and had put him to the job of weaving baskets, as a means of occupational therapy. The second "People's Manager" sent to Rearden Steel had belonged to the faction of Cuffy Meigs. He had worn leather leggings and perfumed hair lotions, he had come to work with a gun on his hip, he had kept snapping that discipline was his primary goal and that by God he'd get it or else. The only discernible rule of the discipline had been his order forbidding all questions.  After weeks of frantic activity on the part of insurance companies, of firemen, of ambulances and of first-aid units, attending to a series of inexplicable accidents-the "People's Manager" had vanished one morning, having sold and shipped to sundry racketeers of Europe and Latin America most of the cranes, the automatic conveyors, the supplies of refractory brick, the emergency power generator, and the carpet from what had once been Rearden's office.  No one had been able to untangle the issues in the violent chaos of the next few days-the issues had never been named, the sides had remained unacknowledged, but everyone had known that the bloody encounters between the older workers and the newer had not been driven to such ferocious intensity by the trivial causes that kept setting them off-neither guards nor policemen nor state troopers had been able to keep order for the length of a day-nor could any faction muster a candidate willing to accept the post of "People's Manager."  On January 22, the operations of Rearden Steel had been ordered temporarily suspended.  The shaft of red smoke, that night, had been caused by a sixty-year old worker, who had set fire to one of the structures and had been caught in the act, laughing dazedly and staring at the flames. "To avenge Hank Rearden!" he had cried defiantly, tears running down his furnace-tanned face.  Don't let it hurt you like this-thought Dagny, slumped across her desk, over the page of the newspaper where a single brief paragraph announced the "temporary" end of Rearden Steel-don't let it hurt you so much. . . . She kept seeing the face of Hank Rearden, as he had stood at the window of his office, watching a crane move against the sky with a load of green-blue rail. . . . Don't let it hurt him like this -was the plea in her mind, addressed to no one-don't let him hear of it, don't let him know. . . . Then she saw another face, a face with unflinching green eyes, saying to her, in a voice made implacable by the quality of respect for facts: "You'll have to hear about it. . . . You'll hear about every wreck. You'll hear about every discontinued train. . . . Nobody stays in this valley by faking reality in any manner whatever. . . ." Then she sat still, with no sight and no sound in her mind, with nothing but that enormous presence which was pain -until she heard the familiar cry that had become a drug killing all sensations except the capacity to act: "Miss Taggart, we don't know what to do!"-and she shot to her feet to answer.  "The People's State of Guatemala," said the newspapers on January 26, "declines the request of the United States for the loan of a thousand tons of steel."  On the night of February 3, a young pilot was flying his usual route, a weekly-flight from Dallas to New York City. When he reached the empty darkness beyond Philadelphia-in the place where the flames of Rearden Steel had for years been his favorite landmark, his greeting in the loneliness of night, the beacon of a living earth-he saw a snow-covered spread, dead-white and phosphorescent in the starlight, a spread of peaks and craters that looked like the surface of the moon. He quit his job, next morning.  Through the frozen nights, over dying cities, knocking in vain at unanswering windows, beating on unechoing walls, rising above the roofs of lightless buildings and the skeletal girders of ruins, the plea went on crying through space, crying to the stationary motion of the stars, to the heatless fire of their twinkling: "Can you hear us, John Galt? Can you hear us?"  "Miss Taggart, we don't know what to do," said Mr. Thompson; he had summoned her to a personal conference on one of his scurrying trips to New York. "We're ready to give in, to meet his terms, to let him take over-but where is he?"  "For the third time," she said, her face and voice shut tight against any fissure of emotion, "I do not know where he is. What made you think I did?"  "Well, I didn't know, I had to try . . . I thought, just in case . . .I thought, maybe if you had a way to reach him-"  "I haven't."  "You see, we can't announce, not even by short-wave radio, that we're willing to surrender altogether. People might hear it. But if you had some way to reach him, to let him know that we're ready to give in, to scrap our policies, to do anything he tells us to-"  "I said I haven't."  "If he'd only agree to a conference, just a conference, it wouldn't commit him to anything, would it? We're willing to turn the whole economy over to him-if he'd only tell us when, where, how. If he'd give us some word or sign . . . if he'd answer us . . . Why doesn't he answer?"  "You've heard his speech."  "But what are we to do? We can't just quit and leave the country without any government at all. I shudder to think what would happen. With the kind of social elements now on the loose-why, Miss Taggart, it's all I can do to keep them in line or we'd have plunder and bloody murder in broad daylight. I don't know what's got into people, but they just don't seem to be civilized any more. We can't quit at a time like this. We can neither quit nor run things any longer. What are we to do, Miss Taggart?"  "Start decontrolling."  "Huh?"  "Start lifting taxes and removing controls."  "Oh, no, no, no! That's out of the question!"  "Out of whose question?"  "I mean, not at this time, Miss Taggart, not at this time. The country isn't ready for it. Personally, I'd agree with you, I'm a freedom loving man, Miss Taggart, I'm not after power-but this is an emergency. People aren't ready for freedom. We've got to keep a strong hand. We can't adopt an idealistic theory, which-"  "Then don't ask me what to do," she said, and rose to her feet.  "But, Miss Taggart-"  "I didn't come here to argue."  She was at the door when he sighed and said, "I hope he's still alive." She stopped. "I hope they haven't done anything rash."  A moment passed before she was able to ask, "Who?" and to make it a word, not a scream.  He shrugged, spreading his arms and letting them drop helplessly. "I can't hold my own boys in line any longer. I can't tell what they might attempt to do. There's one clique-the Ferris-Lawson-Meigs faction-that's been after me for over a year to adopt stronger measures. A tougher policy, they mean. Frankly, what they mean is: to resort to terror. Introduce the death penalty for civilian crimes, for critics, dissenters and the like. Their argument is that since people won't co-operate, won't act for the public interest voluntarily, we've got to force them to. Nothing will make our system work, they say, but terror. And they may be right, from the look of things nowadays. But Wesley won't go for strong-arm methods; Wesley is a peaceful man, a liberal, and so am I. We're trying to keep the Ferris boys in check, but . . .You see, they're set against any surrender to John Galt. They don't want us to deal with him. They don't want us to find him. I wouldn't put anything past them. If they found him first, they'd-there's no telling what they might do. . . . That's what worries me. Why doesn't he answer? Why hasn't he answered us at all? What if they've found him and killed him? I wouldn't know. . . . So I hoped that perhaps you had some way . . . some means of knowing that he's still alive . . ." His voice trailed off into a question mark.  The whole of her resistance against a rush of liquefying terror went into the effort to keep her voice as stiff as her knees, long enough to say, "I do not know," and her knees stiff enough to carry her out of the room.  From behind the rotted posts of what had once been a corner vegetable stand, Dagny glanced furtively back at the street: the rare lamp posts broke the street into separate islands, she could see a pawnshop in the first patch of light, a saloon in the next, a church in the farthest, and black gaps between them; the sidewalks were deserted; it was hard to tell, but the street seemed empty.  She turned the corner, with deliberately resonant steps, then stopped abruptly to listen: it was hard to tell whether the abnormal tightness inside her chest was the sound of her own heartbeats, and hard to distinguish it from the sound of distant wheels and from the glassy rustle which was the East River somewhere close by; but she heard no sound of human steps behind her. She jerked her shoulders, it was part-shrug, part-shudder, and she walked faster. A rusty clock in some unlighted cavern coughed out the hour of four A.M.  The fear of being followed did not seem fully real, as no fear could be real to her now. She wondered whether the unnatural lightness of her body was a state of tension or relaxation; her body seemed drawn so tightly that she felt as if it were reduced to a single attribute: to the power of motion; her mind seemed inaccessibly relaxed, like a motor set to the automatic control of an absolute no longer to be questioned.  If a naked bullet could feel in mid-flight, this is what it would feel, she thought; just the motion and the goal, nothing else. She thought it vaguely, distantly, as if her own person were unreal; only the word "naked" seemed to reach her: naked . . . stripped of all concern but for the target . . . for the number "367," the number of a house on the East River, which her mind kept repeating, the number it had so long been forbidden to consider.  Three-sixty-seven-she thought, looking for an invisible shape ahead, among the angular forms of tenements-three-sixty-seven . . .that is where he lives . . . if he lives at all. . . . Her calm, her detachment and the confidence of her steps came from the certainty that this was an if with which she could not exist any longer.  She had existed with it for ten days-and the nights behind her were a single progression that had brought her to this night, as if the momentum now driving her steps were the sound of her own steps still ringing, unanswered, in the tunnels of the Terminal. She had searched for him through the tunnels, she had walked for hours, night after night-the hours of the shift he had once worked-through the underground passages and platforms and shops and every twist of abandoned tracks, asking no questions of anyone, offering no explanations of her presence. She had walked, with no sense of fear or hope, moved by a feeling of desperate loyalty that was almost a feeling of pride.  The root of that feeling was the moments when she had stopped in sudden astonishment in some dark subterranean corner and had heard the words half-stated in her mind: This is my railroad-as she looked at a vault vibrating to the sound of distant wheels; this is my life-as she felt the clot of tension, which was the stopped and the suspended within herself; this is my love-as she thought of the man who, perhaps, was somewhere in those tunnels. There can be no conflict among these three . . . what am I doubting? . . . what can keep us apart, here, where only he and I belong? . . . Then, recapturing the context of the present, she had walked steadily on, with the sense of the same unbroken loyalty, but the sound of different words: You have forbidden me to look for you, you may damn me, you may choose to discard me . . . but by the right of the fact that I am alive, I must know that you are . . . I must see you this once . . . not to stop, not to speak, not to touch you, only to see. . . . She had not seen him. She had abandoned her search, when she had noticed the curious, wondering glances of the underground workers, following her steps.  She had called a meeting of the Terminal track laborers for the alleged purpose of boosting their morale, she had held the meeting twice, to face all the men in turn-she had repeated the same unintelligible speech, feeling a stab of shame at the empty generalities she uttered and, together, a stab of pride that it did not matter to her any longer-she had looked at the exhausted, brutalized faces of men who did not care whether they were ordered to work or to listen to meaningless sounds. She had not seen his face among them. "Was everyone present?" she had asked the foreman. "Yeah, I guess so," he had answered indifferently.  She had loitered at the Terminal entrances, watching the men as they came to work. But there were too many entrances to cover and no place where she could watch while remaining unseen-she had stood in the soggy twilight on a sidewalk glittering with rain, pressed to the wall of a warehouse, her coat collar raised to her cheekbones, raindrops falling off the brim of her hat-she had stood exposed to the sight of the street, knowing that the glances of the men who passed her were glances of recognition and astonishment, knowing that her vigil was too dangerously obvious. If there was a John Galt among them, someone could guess the nature of her quest . . . if there was no John Galt among them . . . if there was no John Galt in the world, she thought, then no danger existed-and no world.  No danger and no world, she thought-as she walked through the streets of the slums toward a house with the number "367," which was or was not his home. She wondered whether this was what one felt while awaiting a verdict of death: no fear, no anger, no concern, nothing but the icy detachment of light without heat or of cognition without values.  A tin can clattered from under her toes, and the sound went beating too loudly and too long, as if against the walls of an abandoned city. The streets seemed razed by exhaustion, not by rest, as if the men inside the walls were not asleep, but had collapsed. He would be home from work at this hour, she thought . . . if he worked . . . if he still had a home. . . . She looked at the shapes of the slums, at the crumbling plaster, the peeling paint, the fading signboards of failing shops with unwanted goods in unwashed windows, the sagging steps unsafe to climb, the clotheslines of garments unfit to wear, the undone, the unattended, the given up, the incomplete, all the twisted monuments of a losing race against two enemies: "no time" and "no strength" -and she thought that this was the place where he had lived for twelve years, he who possessed such extravagant power to lighten the job of human existence.  Some memory kept struggling to reach her, then came back: its name was Starnesville. She felt the sensation of a shudder. But this is New York City!-she cried to herself in defense of the greatness she had loved; then she faced with unmoving austerity the verdict pronounced by her mind: a city that had left him in these slums for twelve years was damned and doomed to the future of Starnesville.  Then, abruptly, it ceased to matter; she felt a peculiar shock, like the shock of sudden silence, a sense of stillness within her, which she took for a sense of calm: she saw the number "367" above the door of an ancient tenement.  She was calm, she thought, it was only time that had suddenly lost its continuity and had broken her perception into separate snatches: she knew the moment when she saw the number-then the moment when she looked at a list on a board in the moldy half-light of a doorway and saw the words "John Galt, 5th, rear" scrawled in pencil by some illiterate hand-then the moment when she stopped at the foot of a stairway, glanced up at the vanishing angles of the railing and suddenly leaned against the wall, trembling with terror, preferring not to know-then the moment when she felt the movement of her foot coming to rest on the first of the steps-then a single, unbroken progression of lightness, of rising without effort or doubt or fear, of feeling the twisting installments of stairway dropping down beneath her unhesitant feet, as if the momentum of her irresistible rise were coming from the straightness of her body, the poise of her shoulders, the lift of her head and the solemnly exultant certainty that in the moment of ultimate decision, it was not disaster she expected of her life, at the end of a rising stairway she had needed thirty-seven years to climb.  At the top, she saw a narrow hallway, its walls converging to an unlighted door. She heard the floorboards creaking in the silence, under her steps. She felt the pressure of her finger on a doorbell and heard the sound of ringing in the unknown space beyond. She waited. She heard the brief crack of a board, but it came from the floor below. She heard the sliding wail of a tugboat somewhere on the river. Then she knew that she had missed some span of time, because her next awareness was not like a moment of awakening, but like a moment of birth: as if two sounds were pulling her out of a void, the sound of a step behind the door and the sound of a lock being turned-but she was not present until the moment when suddenly there was no door before her and the figure standing on the threshold was John Galt, standing casually in his own doorway, dressed in slacks and shirt, the angle of his waistline slanting faintly against the light behind him.  She knew that his eyes were grasping this moment, then sweeping over its past and its future, that a lightning process of calculation was bringing it into his conscious control-and by the time a fold of his shirt moved with the motion of his breath, he knew the sum-and the sum was a smile of radiant greeting.  She was now unable to move. He seized her arm, he jerked her inside the room, she felt the clinging pressure of his mouth, she felt the slenderness of his body through the suddenly alien stiffness of her coat. She saw the laughter in his eyes, she felt the touch of his mouth again and again, she was sagging in his arms, she was breathing in gasps, as if she had not breathed for five flights of stairs, her face was pressed to the angle between his neck and shoulder, to hold him, to hold him with her arms, her hands and the skin of her cheek.  "John . . . you're alive . . ." was all she could say.  He nodded, as if he knew what the words were intended to explain.  Then he picked up her hat that had fallen to the floor, he took off her coat and put it aside, he looked at her slender, trembling figure, a sparkle of approval in his eyes, his hand moving over the tight, high collared, dark blue sweater that gave to her body the fragility of a schoolgirl and the tension of a fighter.  "The next time I see you," he said, "wear a white one. It will look wonderful, too."  She realized that she was dressed as she never appeared in public as she had been dressed at home through the sleepless hours of that night. She laughed, rediscovering the ability to laugh: she had expected his first words to be anything but that.  "If there is a next time," he added calmly.  "What . . . do you mean?"  He went to the door and locked it. "Sit down," he said.  She remained standing, but she took the time to glance at the room she had not noticed: a long, bare garret with a bed in one corner and a gas stove in another, a few pieces of wooden furniture, naked boards stressing the length of the floor, a single lamp burning on a desk, a closed door in the shadows beyond the lamp's circle-and New York City beyond an enormous window, the spread of angular structures and scattered lights, and the shaft of the Taggart Building far in the distance.  "Now listen carefully," he said. "We have about half an hour, I think. I know why you came here. I told you that it would be hard to stand and that you would be likely to break. Don't regret it. You see?-I can't regret it, either. But now, we have to know how to act, from here on. In about half an hour, the looters' agents, who followed you, will be here to arrest me."  "Oh no!" she gasped.  "Dagny, whoever among them had any remnant of human perceptiveness would know that you're not one of them, that you're their last link to me, and would not let you out of his sight-or the sight of his spies."  "I wasn't followed! I watched, I-"  "You wouldn't know how to notice it. Sneaking is one art they're expert at. Whoever followed you is reporting to his bosses right now. Your presence in this district, at this hour, my name on the board downstairs, the fact that I work for your railroad-it's enough even for them to connect."  "Then let's get out of here!"  He shook his head. "They've surrounded the block by now. Your follower would have every policeman in the district at his immediate call. Now I want you to know what you'll have to do when they come here. Dagny, you have only one chance to save me. If you did not quite understand what I said on the radio about the man in the middle, you'll understand it now. There is no middle for you to take. And you cannot take my side, not so long as we're in their hands. Now you must take their side."  "What?"  "You must take their side, as fully, consistently and loudly as your capacity for deception will permit. You must act as one of them. You must act as my worst enemy. If you do, I'll have a chance to come out of it alive. They need me too much, they'll go to any extreme before they bring themselves to kill me. Whatever they extort from people, they can extort it only through their victims' values - and they have no value of mine to hold over my head, nothing to threaten me with. But if they get the slightest suspicion of what we are to each other, they will have you on a torture rack - I mean, physical torture - before my eyes, in less than a week. I am not going to wait for that. At the first mention of a threat to you, I will kill myself and stop them right there."  He said it without emphasis, in the same impersonal tone of practical calculation as the rest. She knew that he meant it and that he was right to mean it: she saw in what manner she alone had the power to succeed at destroying him, where all the power of his enemies would fail. He saw the look of stillness in her eyes, a look of understanding and of horror. He nodded, with a faint smile.  "I don't have to tell you," he said, "that if I do it, it won't be an act of self-sacrifice. I do not care to live on their terms, I do not care to obey them and I do not care to see you enduring a drawn-out murder. There will be no values for me to seek after that - and I do not care to exist without values. I don't have to tell you that we owe no morality to those who hold us under a gun. So use every power of deceit you can command, but convince them that you hate me. Then we'll have a chance to remain alive and to escape - I don't know when or how, but I'll know that I'm free to act. Is this understood?"  She forced herself to lift her head, to look straight at him and to nod.  "When they come," he said, "tell them that you had been trying to find me for them, that you became suspicious when you saw my name on your payroll list and that you came here to investigate."  She nodded.  "I will stall about admitting my identity - they might recognize my voice, but I'll attempt to deny it - so that it will be you who'll tell them that I am the John Galt they're seeking."  It took her a few seconds longer, but she nodded, "Afterwards, you'll claim - and accept - that five-hundred-thousand dollar reward they've offered for my capture."  She closed her eyes, then nodded.  "Dagny," he said slowly, "there is no way to serve your own values under their system. Sooner or later, whether you intended it or not, they had to bring you to the point where the only thing you can do for me is to turn against me. Gather your strength and do it - then we'll earn this one half-hour and, perhaps, the future."  I'll do it," she said firmly, and added, "if that is what happens, if ...”  "It will happen. Don't regret it. I won't. You haven't seen the nature of our enemies. You'll see it now. If I have to be the pawn in the demonstration that will convince you, I'm willing to be-and to win you from them, once and for all. You didn't want to wait any longer? Oh, Dagny, Dagny, neither did I!"  It was the way he held her, the way he kissed her mouth that made her feel as if every step she had taken, every danger, every doubt, even her treason against him, if it was treason, all of it were giving her an exultant right to this moment. He saw the struggle in her face, the tension of an incredulous protest against herself-and she heard the sound of his voice through the strands of her hair pressed to his lips: "Don't think of them now. Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them. You're here. It's our time and our life, not theirs. Don't struggle not to be happy. You are."  "At the risk of destroying you?" she whispered.  "You won't. But-yes, even that. You don't think it's indifference, do you? Was it indifference that broke you and brought you here?"  "I-" And then the violence of the truth made her pull his mouth down to hers, then throw the words at his face: "I didn't care whether either one of us lived afterwards, just to see you this once!"  "I would have been disappointed if you hadn't come."  "Do you know what it was like, waiting, fighting it, delaying it one more day, then one more, then-"  He chuckled. "Do I?" he said softly.  Her hand dropped in a helpless gesture: she thought of his ten years. "When I heard your voice on the radio," she said, "when I heard the greatest statement I ever . . . No, I have no right to tell you what I thought of it."  "Why not?"  "You think that I haven't accepted it."  "You will."  "Were you speaking from here?"  "No, from the valley."  "And then you returned to New York?"  "The next morning."  "And you've been here ever since?"  "Yes."  "Have you heard the kind of appeals they're sending out to you every night?"  "Sure."  She glanced slowly about the room, her eyes moving from the towers of the city in the window to the wooden rafters of his ceiling, to the cracked plaster of his walls, to the iron posts of his bed. "You've been here all that time," she said. "You've lived here for twelve years . . .here . . . like this . . ."  "Like this," he said, throwing open the door at the end of the room.  She gasped: the long, light-flooded, windowless space beyond the threshold, enclosed in a shell of softly lustrous metal, like a small ballroom aboard a submarine, was the most efficiently modern laboratory she had ever seen.  "Come in," he said, grinning. "I don't have to keep secrets from you any longer."  It was like crossing the border into a different universe. She looked at the complex equipment sparkling in a bright, diffused glow, at the mesh of glittering wires, at the blackboard chalked with mathematical formulas, at the long counters of objects shaped by the ruthless discipline of a purpose-then at the sagging boards and crumbling plaster of the garret. Either-or, she thought; this was the choice confronting the world: a human soul in the image of one or of the other.  "You wanted to know where I worked for eleven months out of the year," he said.  "All this," she asked, pointing at the laboratory, "on the salary of”-she pointed at the garret-"of an unskilled laborer?"  "Oh, no! On the royalties Midas Mulligan pays me for his powerhouse, for the ray screen, for the radio transmitter and a few other jobs of that kind."  "Then . . . then why did you have to work as a track laborer?"  "Because no money earned in the valley is ever to be spent outside."  "Where did you get this equipment?"  "I designed it. Andrew Stockton's foundry made it." He pointed to an unobtrusive object the size of a radio cabinet in a corner of the room: "There's the motor you wanted," and chuckled at her gasp, at the involuntary jolt that threw her forward, "Don't bother studying it, you won't give it away to them now."  She was staring at the shining metal cylinders and the glistening coils of wire that suggested the rusted shape resting, like a sacred relic, in a glass coffin in a vault of the Taggart Terminal.  "It supplies my own electric power for the laboratory," he said. "No one has had to wonder why a track laborer is using such exorbitant amounts of electricity."  "But if they ever found this place-"  He gave an odd, brief chuckle. "They won't."  "How long have you been-?"  She stopped; this time, she did not gasp; the sight confronting her could not be greeted by anything except a moment of total inner stillness: on the wall, behind a row of machinery, she saw a picture cut out of a newspaper-a picture of her, in slacks and shirt, standing by the side of the engine at the opening of the John Galt Line, her head lifted, her smile holding the context, the meaning and the sunlight of that day. A moan was her only answer, as she turned to him, but the look on his face matched hers in the picture.  "I was the symbol of what you wanted to destroy in the world," he said, "But you were my symbol of what I wanted to achieve." He pointed at the picture. "This is how men expect to feel about their life once or twice, as an exception, in the course of their lifetime. But I-this is what I chose as the constant and normal."  The look on his face, the serene intensity of his eyes and of his mind made it real to her, now, in this moment, in this moment's full context, in this city. When he kissed her, she knew that their arms, holding each other, were holding their greatest triumph, that this was the reality untouched by pain or fear, the reality of Halley's Fifth Concerto, this was the reward they had wanted, fought for and won.  The doorbell rang.  Her first reaction was to draw back, his-to hold her closer and longer.  When he raised his head, he was smiling. He said only, "Now is the time not to be afraid."  She followed him back to the garret. She heard the door of the laboratory clicking locked behind them.  He held her coat for her silently, he waited until she had tied its belt and had put on her hat-then he walked to the entrance door and opened it.  Three of the four men who entered were muscular figures in military uniforms, each with two guns on his hips, with broad faces devoid of shape and eyes untouched by perception. The fourth, their leader, was a frail civilian with an expensive overcoat, a neat mustache, pale blue eyes and the manner of an intellectual of the public-relations species.  He blinked at Galt, at the room, made a step forward, stopped, made another step and stopped.  "Yes?" said Galt.  "Are . . . are you John Galt?" he asked too loudly.  "That's my name."  "Are you the John Galt?"  "Which one?"  "Did you speak on the radio?"  "When?"  "Don't let him fool you." The metallic voice was Dagny's and it was addressed to the leader. "He-is-John-Galt. I shall report the proof to headquarters. You may proceed."  Galt turned to her as to a stranger. "Will you tell me now just who you are and what it was that you wanted here?"  Her face was as blank as the faces of the soldiers. "My name is Dagny Taggart. I wanted to convince myself that you are the man whom the country is seeking."  He turned to the leader. "All right," he said. "I am John Galt-but if you want me to answer you at all, keep your stool pigeon"-he pointed at Dagny-"away from me."  "Mr. Galt!" cried the leader with the sound of an enormous joviality.  "It is an honor to meet you, an honor and a privilege! Please, Mr. Galt, don't misunderstand us-we're ready to grant you your wishes-no, of course, you don't have to deal with Miss Taggart, if you prefer not to -Miss Taggart was only trying to do her patriotic duty, but-"  "I said keep her away from me."  "We're not your enemies, Mr. Galt, I assure you we're not your enemies." He turned to Dagny. "Miss Taggart, you have performed an invaluable service to the people. You have earned the highest form of public gratitude. Permit us to take over from here on." The soothing motions of his hands were urging her to stand back, to keep out of Galt's sight.  "Now what do you want?" asked Galt.  "The nation is waiting for you, Mr. Galt. All we want is a chance to dispel misapprehensions. Just a chance to co-operate with you." His gloved hand was waving a signal to his three men; the floorboards creaked, as the men proceeded silently to the task of opening drawers and closets; they were searching the room. "The spirit of the nation will revive tomorrow morning, Mr. Galt, when they hear that you have been found."  "What do you want?"  "Just to greet you in the name of the people."  "Am I under arrest?"  "Why think in such old-fashioned terms? Our job is only to escort you safely to the top councils of the national leadership, where your presence is urgently needed." He paused, but got no answer. "The country's top leaders desire to confer with you-just to confer and to reach a friendly understanding."  The soldiers were finding nothing but garments and kitchen utensils; there were no letters, no books, not even a newspaper, as if the room were the habitation of an illiterate.  "Our objective is only to assist you to assume your rightful place in society, Mr. Galt. You do not seem to realize your own public value."  "I do."  "We are here only to protect you."  "Locked!" declared a soldier, banging his fist against the laboratory door.  The leader assumed an ingratiating smile. "What is behind that door, Mr. Galt?"  "Private property."  "Would you open it, please?"  "No."  The leader spread his hands out in a gesture of pained helplessness.  "Unfortunately, my hands are tied. Orders, you know. We have to enter that room."  "Enter it."  "It's only a formality, a mere formality. There's no reason why things should not be handled amicably. Won't you please co-operate?"  "I said, no."  "I'm sure you wouldn't want us to resort to any . . . unnecessary means." He got no answer. "We have the authority to break that door down, you know-but, of course, we wouldn't want to do it." He waited, but got no answer. "Force that lock!" he snapped to the soldier.  Dagny glanced at Galt's face. He stood impassively, his head held level, she saw the undisturbed lines of his profile, his eyes directed at the door. The lock was a small, square plate of polished copper, without keyhole or fixtures.  The silence and the sudden immobility of the three brutes were involuntary, while the burglar's tools in the hands of the fourth went grating cautiously against the wood of the door.  The wood gave way easily, and small chips fell down, their thuds magnified by the silence into the rattle of a distant gun. When the burglar's jimmy attacked the copper plate, they heard a faint rustle behind the door, no louder than the sigh of a weary mind. In another minute, the lock fell out and the door shuddered forward the width of an inch.  The soldier jumped back. The leader approached, his steps irregular like hiccoughs, and threw the door open. They faced a black hole of unknown content and unrelieved darkness.  They glanced at one another and at Galt; he did not move; he stood looking at the darkness.  Dagny followed them, when they stepped over the threshold, preceded by the beams of their flashlights. The space beyond was a long shell of metal, empty but for heavy drifts of dust on the floor, an odd, grayish-white dust that seemed to belong among ruins undisturbed for centuries. The room looked dead like an empty skull.  She turned away, not to let them see in her face the scream of the knowledge of what that dust had been a few minutes ago. Don't try to open that door, he had said to her at the entrance to the powerhouse of Atlantis . . . if you tried to break it down, the machinery inside would collapse into rubble long before the door would give way. . . . Don't try to open that door-she was thinking, but knew that what she was now seeing was the visual form of the statement: Don't try to force a mind.  The men backed out in silence and went on backing toward the exit door, then stopped uncertainly, one after another, at random points of the garret, as if abandoned by a receding tide.  "Well," said Galt, reaching for his overcoat and turning to the leader, "let's go."  Three floors of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel had been evacuated and transformed into an armed camp. Guards with machine guns stood at every turn of the long, velvet-carpeted corridors. Sentinels with bayonets stood on the landings of the fire-stairways. The elevator doors of the fifty-ninth, sixtieth and sixty-first floors were padlocked; a single door and one elevator were left as sole means of access, guarded by soldiers in full battle regalia. Peculiar-looking men loitered in the lobbies, restaurants and shops of the ground floor: their clothes were too new and too expensive, in unsuccessful imitation of the hotel's usual patrons, a camouflage impaired by the fact that the clothes were badly fitted to their wearers' husky figures and were further distorted by bulges in places where the garments of businessmen have no cause to bulge, but the garments of gunmen have. Groups of guards with Tommy guns were posted at every entrance and exit of the hotel, as well as at strategic windows of the adjoining streets.  In the center of this camp, on the sixtieth floor, in what was known as the royal suite of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, amidst satin drapes, crystal candelabra and sculptured garlands of flowers, John Galt, dressed in slacks and shirt, sat in a brocaded armchair, one leg stretched out on a velvet hassock, his hands crossed behind his head, looking at the ceiling.  This was the posture in which Mr. Thompson found him, when the four guards, who had stood outside the door of the royal suite since five A.M., opened it at eleven A.M. to admit Mr. Thompson, and locked it again.  Mr. Thompson experienced a brief flash of uneasiness when the click of the lock cut off his escape and left him alone with the prisoner. But he remembered the newspaper headlines and the radio voices, which had been announcing to the country since dawn: "John Galt is found!-John Galt is in New York!-John Galt has joined the people's cause!-John Galt is in conference with the country's leaders, working for a speedy solution of all our problems!"-and he made himself feel that he believed it.  "Well, well, well!" he said brightly, marching up to the armchair.  "So you're the young fellow who's started all the trouble-Oh," he said suddenly, as he got a closer look at the dark green eyes watching him. "Well, I . . . I'm tickled pink to meet you, Mr. Galt, just tickled pink." He added, "I'm Mr. Thompson, you know."  "How do you do," said Galt.  Mr. Thompson thudded down on a chair, the brusqueness of the movement suggesting a cheerily businesslike attitude. "Now don't go imagining that you're under arrest or some such nonsense." He pointed at the room. "This is no jail, as you can see. You can see that we'll treat you right. You're a big person, a very big person-and we know it. Just make yourself at home. Ask for anything you please. Fire any flunky that doesn't obey you. And if you take a dislike to any of the army boys outside, just breathe the word-and we'll send another one to replace him."  He paused expectantly. He received no answer.  "The only reason we brought you here is just that we wanted to talk to you. We wouldn't have done it this way, but you left us no choice. You kept hiding. And all we wanted was a chance to tell you that you got us all wrong."  He spread his hands out, palms up, with a disarming smile. Galt's eyes were watching him, without answer.  "That was some speech you made. Boy, are you an orator! You've done something to the country-I don't know what or why, but you have. People seem to want something you've got. But you thought we'd be dead set against it? That's where you're wrong. We're not. Personally, I think there was plenty in that speech that made sense. Yes, sir, I do. Of course, I don't agree with every word you said-but what the hell, you don't expect us to agree with everything, do you? Differences of opinion-that's what makes horse racing. Me, I'm always willing to change my mind. I'm open to any argument."  He leaned forward invitingly. He obtained no answer.  "The world is in a hell of a mess. Just as you said. There, I agree with you. We have a point in common. We can start from that. Something's got to be done about it. All I wanted was-Look," he cried suddenly, "why don't you let me talk to you?"  "You are talking to me."  "I . . . well, that is . . . well, you know what I mean."  "Fully."  "Well? . . . Well, what have you got to say?"  "Nothing."  "Huh?!"  "Nothing."  "Oh, come now!"  "I didn't seek to talk to you."  "But . . . but look! . . . we have things to discuss!"  "I haven't."  "Look," said Mr. Thompson, after a pause, "you're a man of action. A practical man. Boy, are you a practical man! Whatever else I don't quite get about you, I'm sure of that. Now aren't you?"  "Practical? Yes."  "Well, so am I. We can talk straight We can put our cards on the table. Whatever it is you're after, I'm offering you a deal."  "I'm always open to a deal."  "I knew it!" cried Mr. Thompson triumphantly, slamming his fist down on his own knee. "I told them so-all those fool intellectual theorizers, like Wesley!"  "I'm always open to a deal-with anyone who has a value to offer me."  Mr. Thompson could not tell what made him miss a beat before he answered, "Well, write your own ticket, brother! Write your own ticket!"  "What have you got to offer me?"  "Why-anything."  "Such as?"  "Anything you name. Have you heard our short-wave broadcasts to you?"  "Yes."  "We said we'll meet your terms, any terms. We meant it."  "Have you heard me say on the radio that I have no terms to bargain about? I meant it."  "Oh, but look, you misunderstood us! You thought we'd fight you. But we won't. We're not that rigid. We're willing to consider any idea. Why didn't you answer our calls and come to a conference?"  "Why should I?"  "Because . . . because we wanted to speak to you in the name of the country."  "I don't recognize your right to speak in the name of the country."  "Now look here, I'm not used to . . . Well, okay, won't you just give me a hearing? Won't you listen?"  "I'm listening."  "The country is in a terrible state. People are starving and giving up, the economy is falling to pieces, nobody is producing any longer. We don't know what to do about it. You do. You know how to make things work. Okay, we're ready to give in. We want you to tell us what to do."  "I told you what to do."  "What?"  "Get out of the way."  "That's impossible! That's fantastic! That's out of the question!"  "You see? I told you we had nothing to discuss."  "Now, wait! Wait! Don't go to extremes! There's always a middle ground. You can't have everything. We aren't . . . people aren't ready for it. You can't expect us to ditch the machinery of State. We've got to preserve the system. But we're willing to amend it. We'll modify it any way you wish. We're not stubborn, theoretical dogmatists-we're flexible. We'll do anything you say. We'll give you a free hand. We'll co-operate. We'll compromise. We'll split fifty-fifty. We'll keep the sphere of politics and give you total power over the sphere of economics. We'll turn the production, of the country over to you, we'll make you a present of the entire economy. You'll run it any way you wish, you'll give the orders, you'll issue the directives-and you'll have the organized power of the State at your command to enforce your decisions. We'll stand ready to obey you, all of us, from me on down. In the field of production, we'll do whatever you say. You'll be-you'll be the Economic Dictator of the nation!"  Galt burst out laughing.  It was the simple amusement of the laughter that shocked Mr. Thompson. "What's the matter with you?"  "So that's your idea of a compromise, is it?"  "What's the . . . ? Don't sit there grinning like that! . . . I don't think you understood me. I'm offering you Wesley Mouch's job-and there's nothing bigger that anyone could offer you! . . . You'll be free to do anything you wish. If you don't like controls-repeal them. If you want higher profits and lower wages-decree them. If you want special privileges for the big tycoons-grant them. If you don't like labor unions-dissolve them. If you want a free economy-order people to be free! Play it any way you please. But get things going. Get the country organized. Make people work again. Make them produce. Bring back your own men-the men of brains. Lead us to a peaceful, scientific, industrial age and to prosperity."  "At the point of a gun?"  "Now look, I . . . Now what's so damn funny about it?"  "Will you tell me just one thing: if you're able to pretend that you haven't heard a word I said on the radio, what makes you think I'd be willing to pretend that I haven't said it?"  "I don't know what you mean! I-"  "Skip it. It was just a rhetorical question. The first part of it answers the second."  "Huh?"  "I don't play your kind of games, brother-if you want a translation."  "Do you mean that you're refusing my offer?"  "I am."  "But why?"  "It took me three hours on the radio to tell you why."  "Oh, that's just theory! I'm talking business. I'm offering you the greatest job in the world. Will you tell me what's wrong with it?"  "What I told you, in three hours, was that it won't work."  "You can make it work."  "How?"  Mr. Thompson spread his hands out. "I don't know. If I did, I wouldn't come to you. It's for you to figure out. You're the industrial genius. You can solve anything."  "I said it can't be done."  "You could do it."  "How?"  "Somehow." He heard Galt's chuckle, and added, "Why not? Just tell me why not?"  "Okay, I'll tell you. You want me to be the Economic Dictator?"  "Yes!"  "And you'd obey any order I give?"  "Implicitly!"  "Then start by abolishing all income taxes."  "Oh, no!" screamed Mr. Thompson, leaping to his feet. "We couldn't do that! That's . . . that's not the field of production. That's the field of distribution. How would we pay government employees?"  "Fire your government employees."  "Oh, no! That's politics! That's not economics! You can't interfere with politics! You can't have everything!"  Galt crossed his legs on the hassock, stretching himself more comfortably in the brocaded armchair. "Want to continue the discussion? Or do you get the point?"  "I only-" He stopped.  "Are you satisfied that I got the point?"  "Look," said Mr. Thompson placatingly, resuming the edge of his seat. "I don't want to argue. I'm no good at debates. I'm a man of action. Time is short. All I know is that you've got a mind. Just the sort of mind we need. You can do anything. You could make things work if you wanted to."  "All right, put it your own way: I don't want to. I don't want to be an Economic Dictator, not even long enough to issue that order for people to be free-which any rational human being would throw back in my face, because he'd know that his rights are not to be held, given or received by your permission or mine."  "Tell me," said Mr. Thompson, looking at him reflectively, "what is it you're after?"  "I told you on the radio."  "I don't get it. You said that you're out for your own selfish interest -and that, I can understand. But what can you possibly want in the future that you couldn't get right now, from us, handed down to you on a platter? I thought you were an egoist-and a practical man. I offer you a blank check on anything you wish-and you tell me that you don't want it. Why?"  "Because there are no funds behind your blank check."  "What?"  "Because you have no value to offer me."  "I can offer you anything you can ask. Just name it."  "You name it."  "Well, you talked a lot about wealth. If it's money that you want-you couldn't make in three lifetimes what I can hand over to you in a minute, this minute, cash on the barrel. Want a billion dollars-a cool, neat billion dollars?"  "Which I'll have to produce, for you to give me?"  "No, I mean straight out of the public treasury, in fresh, new bills . . . or . . . or even in gold, if you prefer."  "What will it buy me?"  "Oh, look, when the country gets back on its feet-"  "When I put it back on its feet?"  "Well, if what you want is to run things your own way, if it's power that you're after, I'll guarantee you that every man, woman and child in this country will obey your orders and do whatever you wish."  "After I teach them to do it?"  "If you want anything for your own gang-for all those men who've disappeared-jobs, positions, authority, tax exemptions, any special favor at all-just name it and they'll get it."  "After I bring them back?"  "Well, what on earth do you want?"  "What on earth do I need you for?"  "Huh?"  "What have you got to offer me that I couldn't get without you?"  There was a different look in Mr. Thompson's eyes when he drew back, as if cornered, yet looked straight at Galt for the first time and said slowly, "Without me, you couldn't get out of this room, right now."  Galt smiled. "True."  "You wouldn't be able to produce anything. You could be left here to starve."  "True."  "Well, don't you see?" The loudness of homey joviality came back into Mr. Thompson's voice, as if the hint given and received were now to be safely evaded by means of humor. "What I've got to offer you is your life."  "It's not yours to offer, Mr. Thompson," said Galt softly.  Something about his voice made Mr. Thompson jerk to glance at him, then jerk faster to look away: Galt's smile seemed almost gentle.  "Now," said Galt, "do you see what I meant when I said that a zero can't hold a mortgage over life? It's I who'd have to grant you that kind of mortgage-and I don't. The removal of a threat is not a payment, the negation of a negative is not a reward, the withdrawal of your armed hoodlums is not an incentive, the offer not to murder me is not a value."  "Who . . . who's said anything about murdering you?"  "Who's said anything about anything else? If you weren't holding me here at the point of a gun, under threat of death, you wouldn't have a chance to speak to me at all. And that is as much as your guns can accomplish. I don't pay for the removal of threats. I don't buy my life from anyone."  "That's not true," said Mr. Thompson brightly. "If you had a broken leg, you'd pay a doctor to set it."  "Not if he was the one who broke it." He smiled at Mr. Thompson's silence. "I'm a practical man, Mr. Thompson. I don't think it's practical to establish a person whose sole means of livelihood is the breaking of my bones. I don't think it's practical to support a protection racket."  Mr. Thompson looked thoughtful, then shook his head. "I don't think you're practical," he said. "A practical man doesn't ignore the facts of reality. He doesn't waste his time wishing things to be different or trying to change them. He takes things as they are. We're holding you. It's a fact. Whether you like it or not, it's a fact. You should act accordingly."  "I am."  "What I mean is, you should co-operate. You should recognize an existing situation, accept it and adjust to it."  "If you had blood poisoning, would you adjust to it or act to change it?"  "Oh, that's different! That's physical!"  "You mean, physical facts are open to correction, but your whims are not?"  "Huh?"  "You mean, physical nature can be adjusted to men, but your whims are above the laws of nature, and men must adjust to you?"  "I mean that I hold the upper hand!"  "With a gun in it?"  "Oh, forget about guns! I-"  "I can't forget a fact of reality, Mr. Thompson. That would be impractical."  "All right, then: I hold a gun. What are you going to do about it?"  "I'll act accordingly. I'll obey you."  "What?"  "I'll do whatever you tell me to."  "Do you mean it?"  "I mean it. Literally." He saw the eagerness of Mr. Thompson's face ebb slowly under a look of bewilderment. "I will perform any motion you order me to perform. If you order me to move into the office of an Economic Dictator, I'll move into it. If you order me to sit at a desk, I will sit at it. If you order me to issue a directive, I will issue the directive you order me to issue."  "Oh, but I don't know what directives to issue!"  "I don't, either."  There was a long pause.  "Well?" said Galt. "What are your orders?"  "I want you to save the economy of the country!"  "I don't know how to save it."  "I want you to find a way!"  "I don't know how to find it."  "I want you to think!"  "How will your gun make me do that, Mr. Thompson?"  Mr. Thompson looked at him silently-and Galt saw, in the tightened lips, in the jutting chin, in the narrowed eyes, the look of an adolescent bully about to utter that philosophical argument which is expressed by the sentence: I'll bash your teeth in. Galt smiled, looking straight at him, as if hearing the unspoken sentence and underscoring it. Mr. Thompson looked away.  "No," said Galt, "you don't want me to think. When you force a man to act against his own choice and judgment, it's his thinking that you want him to suspend. You want him to become a robot. I shall comply."  Mr. Thompson sighed. "I don't get it," he said in a tone of genuine helplessness. "Something's off and I can't figure it out. Why should you ask for trouble? With a brain like yours-you can beat anybody. I'm no match for you, and you know it. Why don't you pretend to join us, then gain control and outsmart me?"  "For the same reason that makes you offer it: because you'd win."  "Huh?"  "Because it's the attempt of your betters to beat you on your terms that has allowed your kind to get away with it for centuries. Which one of us would succeed, if I were to compete with you for control over your musclemen? Sure, I could pretend-and I wouldn't save your economy or your system, nothing will save them now-but I'd perish and what you'd win would be what you've always won in the past: a postponement, one more stay of execution, for another year-or month-bought at the price of whatever hope and effort might still be squeezed out of the best of the human remnants left around you, including me. That's all you're after and that is the length of your range. A month? You'd settle for a week-on the unchallenged absolute that there will always be another victim to find. But you've found your last victim-the one who refuses to play his historical part. The game is up, brother."  "Oh, that's just theory!" snapped Mr. Thompson, a little too sharply; his eyes were roving about the room, in the manner of a substitute for pacing; he glanced at the door, as if longing to escape. "You say that if we don't give up the system, we'll perish?" he asked.  "Yes."  "Then, since we're holding you, you will perish with us?"  "Possibly."  "Don't you want to live?"  "Passionately." He saw the snap of a spark in Mr. Thompson's eyes and smiled. "I'll tell you more: I know that I want to live much more intensely than you do. I know that that's what you're counting on. I know that you, in fact, do not want to live at all. I want it. And because I want it so much, I will accept no substitute."  Mr. Thompson jumped to his feet. "That's not true!" he cried. "My not wanting to live-it's not true! Why do you talk like that?" He stood, his limbs drawn faintly together, as if against a sudden chill. "Why do you say such things? I don't know what you mean." He backed a few steps away. "And it's not true that I'm a gunman. I'm not. I don't intend to harm you. I never intended to harm anybody. I want people to like me. I want to be your friend . . . I want to be your friend!" he cried to the space at large.  Galt's eyes were watching him, without expression, giving him no clue to what they were seeing, except that they were seeing it.  Mr. Thompson jerked suddenly into bustling, unnecessary motions, as if he were in a hurry, "I've got to run along," he said. "I . . . I have so many appointments. We'll talk about it some more. Think it over. Take your time. I'm not trying to high-pressure you. Just relax, take it easy and make yourself at home. Ask for anything you like-food, drinks, cigarettes, the best of anything." He waved his hand at Galt's garments. "I'm going to order the most expensive tailor in the city to make some decent clothes for you. I want you to get used to the best. I want you to be comfortable and . . . Say," he asked, a little too casually, "have you got any family? Any relatives you'd like to see?"  "No."  "Any friends?"  "No."  "Have you got a sweetheart?"  "No."  "It's just that I wouldn't want you to get lonesome. We can let you have visitors, any visitor you name, if there's anyone you care for."  "There isn't"  Mr. Thompson paused at the door, turned to look at Galt for a moment and shook his head. "I can't figure you out," he said. "I just can't figure you out."  Galt smiled, shrugged and answered, "Who is John Galt?"  A whirling mesh of sleet hung over the entrance of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, and the armed guards looked oddly, desolately helpless in the circle of light: they stood hunched, heads down, hugging their guns for warmth-as if, were they to release all the spitting violence of their bullets at the storm, it would not bring comfort to their bodies.  From across the street, Chick Morrison, the Morale Conditioner-on his way to a conference on the fifty-ninth floor-noted that the rare, lethargic passers-by were not taking the trouble to glance at the guards, as they did not take the trouble to glance at the soggy headlines of a pile of unsold newspapers on the stand of a ragged, shivering vendor: "John Galt Promises Prosperity."  Chick Morrison shook his head uneasily: six days of front-page stories-about the united efforts of the country's leaders working with John Galt to shape new policies-had brought no results. People were moving, he observed, as if they did not care to see anything around them. No one took any notice of his existence, except a ragged old woman who stretched out her hand to him silently, as he approached the lights of the entrance; he hurried past, and only drops of sleet fell on the gnarled, naked palm.  It was his memory of the streets that gave a jagged sound to Chick Morrison's voice, when he spoke to a circle of faces in Mr. Thompson's room on the fifty-ninth floor. The look of the faces matched the sound of his voice.  "It doesn't seem to work," he said, pointing to a pile of reports from his public-pulse-takers. "All the press releases about our collaborating with John Galt don't seem to make any difference. People don't care. They don't believe a word of it. Some of them say that he'll never collaborate with us. Most of them don't even believe that we've got him. I don't know what's happened to people. They don't believe anything any more." He sighed. "Three factories went out of business in Cleveland, day before yesterday. Five factories closed in Chicago yesterday. In San Francisco-"  "I know, I know," snapped Mr. Thompson, tightening the muffler around his throat: the building's furnace had gone out of order.  "There's no choice about it: he's got to give in and take over. He's got to!"  Wesley Mouch glanced at the ceiling. "Don't ask me to talk to him again," he said, and shuddered. "I've tried. One can't talk to that man."  "I . . . I can't, Mr. Thompson!" cried Chick Morrison, in answer to the stop of Mr. Thompson's roving glance. "I'll resign, if you want me to! I can't talk to him again! Don't make me!"  "Nobody can talk to him," said Dr. Floyd Ferris. "It's a waste of time. He doesn't hear a word you say."  Fred Kinnan chuckled. "You mean, he hears too much, don't you? And what's worse, he answers it."  "Well, why don't you try it again?" snapped Mouch. "You seem to have enjoyed it. Why don't you try to persuade him?"  "I know better," said Kinnan. "Don't fool yourself, brother. Nobody's going to persuade him. I won't try it twice. . . . Enjoyed it?" he added, with a look of astonishment. "Yeah . . . yeah, I guess I did."  "What's the matter with you? Are you falling for him? Are you letting him win you over?"  "Me?" Kinnan chuckled mirthlessly. "What use would he have for me? I'll be the first one to go down the drain when he wins. . . . It's only"-he glanced wistfully up at the ceiling-"it's only that he's a man who talks straight."  "He won't win!" snapped Mr. Thompson. "It's out of the question!"  There was a long pause.  "There are hunger riots in West Virginia," said Wesley Mouch. "And the farmers in Texas have-"  "Mr. Thompson!" said Chick Morrison desperately. "Maybe . . .maybe we could let the public see him . . . at a mass rally . . . or maybe on TV . . . just see him, just so they'd believe that we've really got him. . . . It would give people hope, for a while . . . it would give us a little time. . . ."  "Too dangerous," snapped Dr. Ferris. "Don't let him come anywhere near the public. There's no limit to what he'll permit himself to do."  "He's got to give in," said Mr. Thompson stubbornly. "He's got to join us. One of you must-"  "No!" screamed Eugene Lawson. "Not me! I don't want to see him at all! Not once! I don't want to have to believe it!"  "What?" asked James Taggart; his voice had a note of dangerously reckless mockery; Lawson did not answer. "What are you scared of?" The contempt in Taggart's voice sounded abnormally stressed, as if the sight of someone's greater fear were tempting him to defy his own. "What is it you're scared to believe, Gene?"  "I won't believe it! I won't!" Lawson's voice was half-snarl, half whimper. "You can't make me lose my faith in humanity! You shouldn't permit such a man to be possible! A ruthless egoist who-"  "You're a fine bunch of intellectuals, you are," said Mr. Thompson scornfully. "I thought you could talk to him in his own lingo-but he's scared the lot of you. Ideas? Where are your ideas now? Do something! Make him join us! Win him over!"  "Trouble is, he doesn't want anything," said Mouch. "What can we offer a man who doesn't want anything?"  "You mean," said Kinnan, "what can we offer a man who wants to live?"  "Shut up!" screamed James Taggart. "Why did you say that? What made you say it?"  "What made you scream?" asked Kinnan.  "Keep quiet, all of you!" ordered Mr. Thompson. "You're fine at fighting one another, but when it comes to fighting a real man-"  "So he's got you, too?" yelled Lawson.  "Aw, pipe down," said Mr. Thompson wearily. "He's the toughest bastard I've ever been up against. You wouldn't understand that. He's as hard as they come . . ." The faintest tinge of admiration crept into his voice. "As hard as they come . . ."  "There are ways to persuade tough bastards," drawled Dr. Ferris casually, "as I've explained to you."  "No!" cried Mr. Thompson. "No! Shut up! I won't listen to you! I won't hear of it!" His hands moved frantically, as if struggling to dispel something he would not name. "I told him . . . that that's not true . . . that we're not . . . that I'm not a . . . " He shook his head violently, as if his own words were some unprecedented form of danger. "No, look, boys, what I mean is, we've got to be practical . . . and cautious. Damn cautious. We've got to handle it peacefully. We can't afford to antagonize him or . . . or harm him. We don't dare take any chances on . . . anything happening to him. Because . . . because, if he goes, we go. He's our last hope. Make no mistake about it. If he goes, we perish. You all know it." His eyes swept over the faces around him: they knew it.  The sleet of the following morning fell down on front-page stories announcing that a constructive, harmonious conference between John Galt and the country's leaders, on the previous afternoon, had produced "The John Galt Plan," soon to be announced. The snowflakes of the evening fell down upon the furniture of an apartment house whose front wall had collapsed-and upon a crowd of men waiting silently at the closed cashier's window of a plant whose owner had vanished.  "The farmers of South Dakota," Wesley Mouch reported to Mr. Thompson, next morning, "are marching on the state capital, burning every government building on their way, and every home worth more than ten thousand dollars."  "California's blown to pieces," he reported in the evening. "There's a civil war going on there-if that's what it is, which nobody seems to be sure of. They've declared that they're seceding from the union, but nobody knows who's now in power. There's armed fighting all over the state, between a 'People's Party,' led by Ma Chalmers and her soybean cult of Orient-admirers-and something called 'Back to God,' led by some former oil-field owners."  "Miss Taggart!" moaned Mr. Thompson, when she entered his hotel room next morning, in answer to his summons. "What are we going to do?"  He wondered why he had once felt that she possessed some reassuring kind of energy. He was looking at a blank face that seemed composed, but the composure became disquieting when one noticed that it lasted for minute after minute, with no change of expression, no sign of feeling. Her face had the same look as all the others, he thought, except for something in the set of the mouth that suggested endurance.  "I trust you, Miss Taggart. You've got more brains than all my boys," he pleaded. "You've done more for the country than any of them-it's you who found him for us. What are we to do? With everything falling to pieces, he's the only one who can lead us out of this mess-but he won't. He refuses. He simply refuses to lead. I've never seen anything like it: a man who has no desire to command. We beg him to give orders-and he answers that he wants to obey them! It's preposterous!"  "It is."  "What do you make of it? Can you figure him out?"  "He's an arrogant egoist," she said. "He's an ambitious adventurer. He's a man of unlimited audacity who's playing for the biggest stakes in the world."  It was easy, she thought. It would have been difficult in that distant time when she had regarded language as a tool of honor, always to be used as if one were under oath-an oath of allegiance to reality and to respect for human beings. Now it was only a matter of making sounds, inarticulate sounds addressed to inanimate objects unrelated to such concepts as reality, human or honor. It had been easy, that first morning, to report to Mr. Thompson how she had traced John Galt to his home. It had been easy to watch Mr. Thompson's gulping smiles and his repeated cries of "That's my girl!" uttered with glances of triumph at his assistants, the triumph of a man whose judgment in trusting her had been vindicated. It had been easy to express an angry hatred for Galt-"I used to agree with his ideas, but I won't let him destroy my railroad!"-and to hear Mr. Thompson say, "Don't you worry, Miss Taggart! We'll protect you from him!"  It had been easy to assume a look of cold shrewdness and to remind Mr. Thompson of the five-hundred-thousand-dollar reward, her voice clear and cutting, like the sound of an adding machine punching out the sum of a bill. She had seen an instant's pause in Mr. Thompson's facial muscles, then a brighter, broader smile-like a silent speech declaring that he had not expected it, but was delighted to know what made her tick and that it was the kind of ticking he understood.  "Of course, Miss Taggart! Certainly! That reward is yours-all yours! The check will be sent to you, in full!"  It had been easy, because she had felt as if she were in some dreary non-world, where her words and actions were not facts any longer-not reflections of reality, but only distorted postures in one of those side-show mirrors that project deformity for the perception of beings whose consciousness is not to be treated as consciousness. Thin, single and hot, like the burning pressure of a wire within her, like a needle selecting her course, was her only concern: the thought of his safety. The rest was a blur of shapeless dissolution, half-acid, half fog.  But this-she thought with a shudder-was the state in which they lived, all those people whom she had never understood, this was the state they desired, this rubber reality, this task of pretending, distorting, deceiving, with the credulous stare of some Mr. Thompson's panic-bleary eyes as one's only purpose and reward. Those who desired this state-she wondered-did they want to live?  "The biggest stakes in the world, Miss Taggart?" Mr. Thompson was asking her anxiously. "What is it? What does he want?"  "Reality. This earth."  "I don't know quite what you mean, but . . . Look, Miss Taggart, if you think you can understand him, would you . . . would you try to speak to him once more?"  She felt as if she heard her own voice, many light-years away, crying that she would give her life to see him-but in this room, she heard the voice of a meaningless stranger saying coldly, "No, Mr. Thompson, I wouldn't. I hope I'll never have to see him again."  "I know that you can't stand him, and I can't say I blame you, but couldn't you just try to-"  "I tried to reason with him, the night I found him. I heard nothing but insults in return. I think he resents me more than he'd resent anyone else. He won't forgive me the fact that it was I who trapped him. I'd be the last person to whom he would surrender."  "Yeah . . . yeah, that's true. . . . Do you think he will ever surrender?"  The needle within her wavered for a moment, burning its oscillating way between two courses: should she say that he would not, and see them kill him?-should she say that he would, and see them hold onto their power till they destroyed the world?  "He will," she said firmly. "He'll give in, if you treat him right. He's too ambitious to refuse power. Don't let him escape, but don't threaten him-or harm him. Fear won't work. He's impervious to fear."  "But what if . . . I mean, with the way things are collapsing . . .what if he holds out too long?"  "He won't. He's too practical for that. By the way, are you letting him hear any news about the state of the country?"  "Why . . . no."  "I would suggest that you let him have copies of your confidential reports. He'll see that it won't be long now."  "That's a good idea! A very good idea! . . . You know, Miss Taggart," he said suddenly, with the sound of some desperate clinging hi his voice, "I feel better whenever I talk to you. It's because I trust you. I don't trust anybody around me. But you-you're different. You're solid."  She was looking unflinchingly straight at him. "Thank you, Mr. Thompson," she said.  It had been easy, she thought-until she walked out into the street and noticed that under her coat, her blouse was sticking damply to her shoulder blades. Were she able to feel-she thought as she walked through the concourse of the Terminal-she would know that the heavy indifference she now felt for her railroad was hatred. She could not get rid of the feeling that she was running nothing but freight trains: the passengers, to her, were not living or human. It seemed senseless to waste such enormous effort on preventing catastrophes, on protecting the mi safety of trains carrying nothing but inanimate objects. She looked at the faces in the Terminal: if he were to die, she thought, to be murdered by the rulers of their system, that these might continue to eat, sleep and travel-would she work to provide them with trains? If she were to scream for their help, would one of them rise to his defense? Did they want him to live, they who had heard him?  The check for five hundred thousand dollars was delivered to her office, that afternoon; it was delivered with a bouquet of flowers from Mr. Thompson. She looked at the check and let it flutter down to her desk: it meant nothing and made her feel nothing, not even a suggestion of guilt. It was a scrap of paper, of no greater significance than the ones in the office wastebasket. Whether it could buy a diamond necklace or the city dump or the last of her food, made no difference. It would never be spent. It was not a token of value and nothing it purchased could be a value. But this-she thought-this inanimate indifference was the permanent state of the people around her, of men who had no purpose and no passion. This was the state of a non-valuing soul; those who chose it-she wondered-did they want to live?  The lights were out of order in the hall of the apartment house, when she came home that evening, numb with exhaustion-and she did not notice the envelope at her feet until she switched on the light in her foyer. It was a blank, sealed envelope that had been slipped under her door. She picked it up-and then, within a moment, she was laughing soundlessly, half-kneeling, half-sitting on the floor, not to move off that spot, not to do anything but stare at the note written by a hand she knew, the hand that had written its last message on the calendar above the city.  The note said: Dagny: Sit tight. Watch them. When he'll need our help, call me at OR 6-5693. F.  The newspapers of the following morning admonished the public not to believe the rumors that there was any trouble in the Southern states. The confidential reports, sent to Mr. Thompson, stated that armed fighting had broken out between Georgia and Alabama, for the possession of a factory manufacturing electrical equipment-a factory cut off by the fighting and by blasted railroad tracks from any source of raw materials.  "Have you read the confidential reports I sent you?" moaned Mr. Thompson, that evening, facing Galt once more. He was accompanied by James Taggart, who had volunteered to meet the prisoner for the first time.  Galt sat on a straight-backed chair, his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. He seemed erect and relaxed, together. They could not decipher the expression on his face, except that it showed no sign of apprehension.  "I have," he answered.  "There's not much time left," said Mr. Thompson.  "There isn't."  "Are you going to let such things go on?"  "Are you?"  "How can you be so sure you're right?" cried James Taggart; his voice was not loud, but it had the intensity of a cry. "How can you take it upon yourself, at a terrible time like this, to stick to your own ideas at the risk of destroying the whole world?"  "Whose ideas should I consider safer to follow?"  "How can you be sure you're right? How can you know? Nobody can be sure of his knowledge! Nobody! You're no better than anyone else!"  "Then why do you want me?"  "How can you gamble with other people's lives? How can you permit yourself such a selfish luxury as to hold out, when people need you?"  "You mean: when they need my ideas?"  "Nobody is fully right or wrong! There isn't any black or white! You don't have a monopoly on truth!"  There was something wrong in Taggart's manner-thought Mr. Thompson, frowning-some odd, too personal resentment, as if it were not a political issue that he had come here to solve.  "If you had any sense of responsibility," Taggart was saying, "you wouldn't dare take such a chance on nothing but your own judgment! You would join us and consider some ideas other than your own and admit that we might be right, too! You would help us with our plans! You would-"  Taggart went on speaking with feverish insistence, but Mr. Thompson could not tell whether Galt was listening: Galt had risen and was pacing the room, not in a manner of restlessness, but in the casual manner of a man enjoying the motion of his own body. Mr. Thompson noted the lightness of the steps, the straight spine, the flat stomach, the relaxed shoulders. Galt walked as if he were both unconscious of his body and tremendously conscious of his pride in it. Mr. Thompson glanced at James Taggart, at the sloppy posture of a tall figure slumped in ungainly self-distortion, and caught him watching Galt's movements with such hatred that Mr. Thompson sat up, fearing it would become audible in the room. But Galt was not looking at Taggart.  ". . . your conscience!" Taggart was saying. "I came here to appeal to your conscience! How can you value your mind above thousands of human lives? People are perishing and-Oh, for Christ's sake," he snapped, "stop pacing!"  Galt stopped. "Is this an order?"  "No, no!" said Mr. Thompson hastily. "It's not an order. We don't want to give you orders. . . . Take it easy, Jim."  Galt resumed his pacing. "The world is collapsing," said Taggart, his eyes following Galt irresistibly. "People are perishing-and it's you who could save them! Does it matter who's right or wrong? You should join us, even if you think we're wrong, you should sacrifice your mind to save them!"  "By what means will I then save them?"  "Who do you think you are?" cried Taggart.  Galt stopped. "You know it."  "You're an egoist!"  "I am."  "Do you realize what sort of egoist you are?"  "Do you?" asked Galt, looking straight at him.  It was the slow withdrawal of Taggart's body into the depth of his armchair, while his eyes were holding Galt's, that made Mr. Thompson unaccountably afraid of the next moment.  "Say," Mr. Thompson interrupted in a brightly casual voice, "what sort of cigarette are you smoking?"  Galt turned to him and smiled. "I don't know."  "Where did you get it?"  "One of your guards brought me a package of them. He said some man asked him to give it to me as a present. . . . Don't worry," he added, "your boys have put it through every kind of test. There were no hidden messages. It was just a present from an anonymous admirer."  The cigarette between Galt's fingers bore the sign of the dollar.  James Taggart was no good at the job of persuasion, Mr. Thompson concluded. But Chick Morrison, whom he brought the next day, did no better.  "I . . . I'll just throw myself on your mercy, Mr. Galt," said Chick Morrison with a frantic smile. "You're right. I'll concede that you're right-and all I can appeal to is your pity. Deep down in my heart, I can't believe that you're a total egoist who feels no pity for the people." He pointed to a pile of papers he had spread on a table.  "Here's a plea signed by ten thousand schoolchildren, begging you to join us and save them. Here's a plea from a home for the crippled.  Here's a petition sent by the ministers of two hundred different faiths-Here's an appeal from the mothers of the country. Read them."  "Is this an order?"  "No!" cried Mr. Thompson. "It's not an order!"  Galt remained motionless, not extending his hand for the papers.  "These are just plain, ordinary people, Mr. Galt," said Chick Morrison in a tone intended to project their abject humility. "They can't tell you what to do. They wouldn't know. They're merely begging you. They may be weak, helpless, blind, ignorant. But you, who are so intelligent and strong, can't you take pity on them? Can't you help them?"  "By dropping my intelligence and following their blindness?"  "They may be wrong, but they don't know any better!"  "But I, who do, should obey them?"  "I can't argue, Mr. Galt. I'm just begging for your pity. They're suffering. I'm begging you to pity those who suffer. I'm . . . Mr. Galt," he asked, noticing that Galt was looking off at the distance beyond the window and that his eyes were suddenly implacable, "what's the matter? What are you thinking of?"  "Hank Rearden."  "Uh . . . why?"  "Did they feel any pity for Hank Rearden?"  "Oh, but that's different! He-"  "Shut up," said Galt evenly.  "I only-"  "Shut up!" snapped Mr. Thompson. "Don't mind him, Mr. Galt. He hasn't slept for two nights. He's scared out of his wits."  Dr. Floyd Ferris, next day, did not seem to be scared-but it was worse, thought Mr. Thompson. He observed that Galt remained silent and would not answer Ferris at all.  "It's the question of moral responsibility that you might not have studied sufficiently, Mr. Galt," Dr. Ferris was drawling in too airy, too forced a tone of casual informality. "You seem to have talked on the radio about nothing but sins of commission. But there are also the sins of omission to consider. To fail to save a life is as immoral as to murder. The consequences are the same-and since we must judge actions by their consequences, the moral responsibility is the same. . . . For instance, in view of the desperate shortage of food, it has been suggested that it might become necessary to issue a directive ordering that every third one of all children under the age of ten and of all adults over the age of sixty be put to death, to secure the survival of the rest. You wouldn't want this to happen, would you? You can prevent it. One word from you would prevent it. If you refuse and all those people are executed-it will be your fault and your moral responsibility!"  "You're crazy!" screamed Mr. Thompson, recovering from shock and leaping to his feet. "Nobody's ever suggested any such thing! Nobody's ever considered it! Please, Mr. Galt! Don't believe him! He doesn't mean it!"  "Oh yes, he does," said Galt. "Tell the bastard to look at me, then look in the mirror, then ask himself whether I would ever think that my moral stature is at the mercy of his actions."  "Get out of here!" cried Mr. Thompson, yanking Ferris to his feet.  "Get out! Don't let me hear another squeak out of you!" He flung the door open and pushed Ferris at the startled face of a guard outside.  Turning to Galt, he spread his arms and let them drop with a gesture of drained helplessness. Galt's face was expressionless.  "Look," said- Mr. Thompson pleadingly, "isn't there anybody who can talk to you?"  "There's nothing to talk about."  "We've got to. We've got to convince you. Is there anyone you'd want to talk to?"  "No."  "I thought maybe . . . it's because she talks-used to talk-like you, at times . . . maybe if I sent Miss Dagny Taggart to tell you-"  "That one? Sure, she used to talk like me. She's my only failure. I thought she was the kind who belonged on my side. But she double crossed me, to keep her railroad. She'd sell her soul for her railroad. Send her in, if you want me to slap her face."  "No, no, no! You don't have to see her, if that's how you feel. I don't want to waste more time on people who rub you the wrong way. . . .Only . . . only if it's not Miss Taggart, I don't know whom to pick. . . . If . . . if I could find somebody you'd be willing to consider or . . ."  "I've changed my mind," said Galt. "There is somebody I'd like to speak to."  "Who?" cried Mr. Thompson eagerly.  "Dr. Robert Stadler."  Mr. Thompson emitted a long whistle and shook his head apprehensively. "That one is no friend of yours," he said in a tone of honest warning.  "He's the one I want to see."  "Okay, if you wish. If you say so. Anything you wish. I'll have him here tomorrow morning."  That evening, dining with Wesley Mouch in his own suite, Mr. Thompson glared angrily at a glass of tomato juice placed before him. "What? No grapefruit juice?" he snapped; his doctor had prescribed grapefruit juice as protection against an epidemic of colds.  "No grapefruit juice," said the waiter, with an odd kind of emphasis.  "Fact is," said Mouch bleakly, "that a gang of raiders attacked a train at the Taggart Bridge on the Mississippi. They blew up the track and damaged the bridge. Nothing serious. It's being repaired-but all traffic is held up and the trains from Arizona can't get through."  "That's ridiculous! Aren't there any other-?" Mr. Thompson stopped; he knew that there were no other railroad bridges across the Mississippi.  After a moment, he spoke up in a staccato voice. "Order army detachments to guard the bridge. Day and night. Tell them to pick their best men for it. If anything happened to that bridge-"  He did not finish; he sat hunched, staring down at the costly china plates and the delicate hors d'oeuvres before him. The absence of so prosaic a commodity as grapefruit juice had suddenly made real to him, for the first time, what it was that would happen to the city of New York if anything happened to the Taggart Bridge.  "Dagny," said Eddie Willers, that evening, "the bridge is not the only problem." He snapped on her desk lamp which, in forced concentration on her work, she had neglected to turn on at the approach of dusk. "No transcontinental trains can leave San Francisco. One of the fighting factions out there-I don't know which one-has seized our terminal and imposed a 'departure tax' on trains. Meaning that they're holding trains for ransom. Our terminal manager has quit. Nobody knows what to do there now."  "I can't leave New York," she answered stonily.  "I know," he said softly. "That's why it's I who'll go there to straighten things out. At least, to find a man to put in charge."  "No! I don't want you to. It's too dangerous. And what for? It doesn't matter now. There's nothing to save."  "It's still Taggart Transcontinental. I'll stand by it, Dagny, wherever you go, you'll always be able to build a railroad. I couldn't. I don't even want to make a new start. Not any more. Not after what I've seen. You should. I can't. Let me do what I can."  "Eddie! Don't you want-" She stopped, knowing that it was useless.  "All right, Eddie. If you wish."  "I'm flying to California tonight. I've arranged for space on an army plane. . . . I know that you will quit as soon as . . . as soon as you can leave New York. You might be gone by the time I return. When you're ready, just go. Don't worry about me. Don't wait to tell me. Go as fast as you can. I . . . I'll say good-bye to you, now."  She rose to her feet. They stood facing each other; in the dim half light of the office, the picture of Nathaniel Taggart hung on the wall between them. They were both seeing the years since- that distant day when they had first learned to walk down the track of a railroad. He inclined his head and held it lowered for a long moment.  She extended her hand. "Good-bye, Eddie."  He clasped her hand firmly, not looking down at his fingers; he was looking at her face.  He started to go, but stopped, turned to her and asked, his voice low, but steady, neither as plea nor as despair, but as a last gesture of conscientious clarity to close a long ledger, "Dagny . . . did you know . . .how I felt about you?"  "Yes," she said softly, realizing in this moment that she had known it wordlessly for years, "I knew it."  "Good-bye, Dagny."  The faint rumble of an underground train went through the walls of the building and swallowed the sound of the door closing after him.  It was snowing, next morning, and melting drops were like an icy, cutting touch on the temples of Dr. Robert Stadler, as he walked down the long corridor of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, toward the door of the royal suite. Two husky men walked by his sides; they were from the department of Morale Conditioning, but did not trouble to hide what method of conditioning they would welcome a chance to employ, "Just remember Mr. Thompson's orders," one of them told him contemptuously. "One wrong squawk out of you-and you'll regret it, brother."  It was not the snow on his temples-thought Dr. Stadler-it was a burning pressure, it had been there since that scene, last night, when he had screamed to Mr. Thompson that he could not see John Galt. He had screamed in blind terror, begging a circle of impassive faces not to make him do it, sobbing that he would do anything but that. The faces had not condescended to argue or even to threaten him; they had merely given him orders. He had spent a sleepless night, telling himself that he would not obey; but he was walking toward that door. The burning pressure on his temples and the faint, dizzying nausea of unreality came from the fact that he could not recapture the sense of being Dr. Robert Stadler. He noticed the metallic gleam of the bayonets held by the guards at the door, and the sound of a key being turned in a lock. He found himself walking forward and heard the door being locked behind him.  Across the long room, he saw John Galt sitting on the window sill, a tall, slender figure in slacks and shirt, one leg slanting down to the floor, the other bent, his hands clasping his knee, his head of sun-streaked hair raised against a spread of gray sky-and suddenly Dr. Stadler saw the figure of a young boy sitting on the porch-railing of his home, near the campus of the Patrick Henry University, with the sun on the chestnut hair of a head lifted against a spread of summer blue, and he heard the passionate intensity of his own voice saying twenty-two years ago: "The only sacred value in the world, John, is the human mind, the inviolate human mind . . ." -and he cried to that boy's figure, across the room and across the years: "I couldn't help it, John! I couldn't help it!"  He gripped the edge of a table between them, for support and as a protective barrier, even though the figure on the window sill had not moved. "I didn't bring you to this!" he cried. "I didn't mean to! I couldn't help it! It's not what I intended! . . . John! I'm not to blame for it! I'm not! I never had a chance against them! They own the world! They left me no place in it! . . . What's reason to them? What's science? You don't know how deadly they are! You don't understand them! They don't think! They're mindless animals moved by irrational feelings-by their greedy, grasping, blind, unaccountable feelings! They seize whatever they want, that's all they know: that they want it, regardless of cause, effect or logic-they want it, the bloody, grubbing pigs! . . . The mind? Don't you know how futile it is, the mind, against those mindless hordes? Our weapons are so helplessly, laughably childish: truth, knowledge, reason, values, rights! Force is all they know, force, fraud and plunder! . , , John! Don't look at me like that! What could I do against their fists? I had to live, didn't I? It wasn't for myself-it was for the future of science! I had to be left alone, I had to be protected, I had to make terms with them-there's no way to live except on their terms-there isn't!-do you hear me?-there isn't! . . . What did you want me to do? Spend my life begging for jobs? Begging my inferiors for funds and endowments? Did you want my work to depend on the mercy of the ruffians who have a knack for making money? I had no time to compete with them for money or markets or any of their miserable material pursuit! Was that your idea of justice-that they should spend their money on liquor, yachts and women, while the priceless hours of my life were wasted for lack of scientific equipment? Persuasion? How could I persuade them? What language could I speak to men who don't think? . . . You don't know how lonely I was, how starved for some spark of intelligence! How lonely and tired and helpless! Why should a mind like mine have to bargain with ignorant fools? They'd never contribute a penny to science! Why shouldn't they be forced? It wasn't you that I wanted to force! That gun was not aimed at the intellect! It wasn't aimed at men like you and me, only at mindless materialists! . . . Why do you look at me that way? I had no choice! There isn't any choice except to beat them at their own game! Oh yes, it is their game, they set the rules! What do we count, the few who can think? We can only hope to get by, unnoticed-and to trick them into serving our aims! . . . Don't you know how noble a purpose it was-my vision of the future of science? Human knowledge set free of material bonds! An unlimited end unrestricted by means! I am not a traitor, John! I'm not! I was serving the cause of the mind! What I saw ahead, what I wanted, what I felt, was not to be measured in their miserable dollars! I wanted a laboratory! I needed it! What do I care where it came from or how? I could do so much! I could reach such heights!  “Don't you have any pity? I wanted it! . . . What if they had to be forced? Who are they to think, anyway? Why did you teach them to rebel? It would have worked, if you hadn't withdrawn them! It would have worked, I tell you! It wouldn't be-like this! . . . Don't accuse me! We can't be guilty . . . all of us . . . for centuries. . . . We can't be so totally wrong! . . . We're not to be damned! We had no choice! There is no other way to live on earth! . . . Why don't you answer me? What are you seeing? Are you thinking of that speech you made? I don't want to think of it! It was only logic! One can't live by logic! Do you hear me? . . . Don't look at me! You're asking the impossible! Men can't exist your way! You permit no moments of weakness, you don't allow for human frailties or human feelings! What do you want of us? Rationality twenty-four hours a day, with no loophole, no rest, no escape? . . . Don't look at me, God damn you! I'm not afraid of you any longer! Do you hear me? I am not afraid! Who are you to blame me, you miserable failure? Here's where your road has brought you! Here you are, caught, helpless, under guard, to be killed by those brutes at any moment-and you dare to accuse me of being impractical! Oh yes, you're going to be killed! You won't win! You can't be allowed to win! You are the man who has to be destroyed!"  Dr, Stadler's gasp was a muffled scream, as if the immobility of the figure on the window sill had served as a silent reflector and had suddenly made him see the full meaning of his own words.  "No!" moaned Dr. Stadler, moving his head from side to side, to escape the unmoving green eyes. "No! . . . No! . . . No!"  Galt's voice had the same unbending austerity as his eyes: "You have said everything I wanted to say to you."  Dr. Stadler banged his fists against the door; when it was opened, he ran out of the room.  * * *  For three days, no one entered Galt's suite except the guards who brought his meals. Early on the evening of the fourth day, the door opened to admit Chick Morrison with two companions. Chick Morrison was dressed in dinner clothes, and his smile was nervous, but a shade more confident than usual. One of his companions was a valet. The other was a muscular man whose face seemed to clash with his tuxedo: it was a stony face with sleepy eyelids, pale, darting eyes and a prizefighter's broken nose; his skull was shaved except for a patch of faded blond curls on top; he kept his right hand in the pocket of his trousers.  "You will please dress, Mr. Galt," said Chick Morrison persuasively, pointing to the door of the bedroom, where a closet had been filled with expensive garments which Galt had not chosen to wear. "You will please put on your dinner clothes." He added, "This is an order, Mr. Galt."  Galt walked silently into the bedroom. The three men followed. Chick Morrison sat on the edge of a chair, starting and discarding one cigarette after another. The valet went through too many too courteous motions, helping Galt to dress, handing him his shirt studs, holding his coat. The muscular man stood in a corner, his hand in his pocket. No one said a word.  "You will please co-operate, Mr. Galt," said Chick Morrison, when Galt was ready, and indicated the door with a courtly gesture of invitation to proceed.  So swiftly that no one could catch the motion of his hand, the muscular man was holding Galt's arm and pressing an invisible gun against his ribs. "Don't make any false moves," he said in an expressionless voice.  "I never do," said Galt.  Chick Morrison opened the door. The valet stayed behind. The three figures in dinner clothes walked silently down the hall to the elevator.  They remained silent in the elevator, the clicks of the flashing numbers above the door marking their downward progress.  The elevator stopped on the mezzanine floor. Two armed soldiers preceded them and two others followed, as they walked through the long, dim corridors. The corridors were deserted except for armed sentinels posted at the turns. The muscular man's right arm was linked to Galt's left; the gun remained invisible to any possible observer. Galt felt the small pressure of the muzzle against his side; the pressure was expertly maintained: not to be felt as an impediment and not to be forgotten for a moment.  The corridor led to a wide, closed doorway. The soldiers seemed to melt away into the shadows, when Chick Morrison's hand touched the doorknob. It was his hand that opened the door, but the sudden contrast of light and sound made it seem as if the door were flung open by an explosion: the light came from three hundred bulbs in the blazing chandeliers of the grand ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel; the sound was the applause of five hundred people.  Chick Morrison led the way to the speakers' table raised on a platform above the tables filling the room. The people seemed to know, without announcement, that of the two figures following him, it was the tall, slender man with the gold-copper hair that they were applauding. His face had the same quality as the voice they had heard on the radio : calm, confident-and out of reach.  The seat reserved for Galt was the place of honor in the center of the long table, with Mr. Thompson waiting for him at his right and the muscular man slipping skillfully into the seat at his left, not relinquishing his arm or the pressure of the muzzle. The jewels on the naked shoulders of women carried the glitter of the chandeliers to the shadows of the tables crowded against the distant walls; the severe black-and white of the men's figures rescued the room's style of solemnly regal luxury from the discordant slashes made by news cameras, microphones and a dormant array of television equipment. The crowd was on its feet, applauding. Mr. Thompson was smiling and watching Galt's face, with the eager, anxious look of an adult waiting for a child's reaction to a spectacularly generous gift. Galt sat facing the ovation, neither ignoring it nor responding.  "The applause you are hearing," a radio announcer was yelling into a microphone in a corner of the room, "is in greeting to John Galt, who has just taken his place at the speakers' table! Yes, my friends, John Galt in person-as those of you who can find a television set will have a chance to see for yourself in a short while!"  I must remember where I am-thought Dagny, clenching her fists under the tablecloth, in the obscurity of a side table. It was hard to maintain a sense of double reality in the presence of Galt, thirty feet away from her. She felt that no danger or pain could exist in the world so long as she could see his face-and, simultaneously, an icy terror, when she looked at those who held him in their power, when she remembered the blind irrationality of the event they were staging. She fought to keep her facial muscles rigid, not to betray herself by a smile of happiness or by a scream of panic.  She wondered how his eyes had been able to find her in that crowd. She had seen the brief pause of his glance, which no one else could notice; the glance had been more than a kiss, it had been a handshake of approval and support.  He did not glance again in her direction. She could not force herself to look away. It was startling to see him in evening clothes and more startling still that he wore them so naturally; he made them look like a work uniform of honor; his figure suggested the kind of banquet, in the days of a distant past, where he would have been receiving an industrial award. Celebrations-she remembered her own words, with a stab of longing-should be only for those who have something to celebrate.  She turned away. She struggled not to look at him too often, not to attract the attention of her companions. She had been placed at a table prominent enough to display her to the assembly, but obscure enough to keep her out of the line of Galt's sight, along with those who had incurred Galt's disfavor: with Dr. Ferris and Eugene Lawson.  Her brother Jim, she noted, had been placed closer to the platform; she could see his sullen face among the nervous figures of Tinky Holloway, Fred Kinnan, Dr. Simon Pritchett. The tortured faces strung out above the speakers' table were not succeeding in their efforts to hide that they looked like men enduring an ordeal; the calm of Galt's face seemed radiant among them; she wondered who was prisoner here and who was master. Her glance moved slowly down the line-up of his table: Mr. Thompson, Wesley Mouch, Chick Morrison, some generals, some members of the Legislature and, preposterously, Mr. Mowen chosen as a bribe to Galt, as a symbol of big business. She glanced about the room, looking for the face of Dr. Stadler; he was not present.  The voices filling the room were like a fever chart, she thought; they kept darting too high and collapsing into patches of silence; the occasional spurts of someone's laughter broke off, incompleted, and attracted the shuddering turn of the heads at the neighboring tables. The faces were drawn and twisted by the most obvious and least dignified form of tension: by forced smiles. These people-she thought-knew, not by means of their reason, but by means of their panic, that this banquet was the ultimate climax and the naked essence of their world. They knew that neither their God nor their guns could make this celebration mean what they were struggling to pretend it meant.  She could not swallow the food that was placed before her; her throat seemed closed by a rigid convulsion. She noticed that the others at her table were also merely pretending to eat. Dr. Ferris was the only one whose appetite seemed unaffected.  When she saw a slush of ice cream in a crystal bowl before her, she noticed the sudden silence of the room and heard the screeching of the television machinery being dragged forward for action. Now-she thought, with a sinking sense of expectation, and knew that the same question mark was on every mind in the room. They were all staring at Galt. His face did not move or change.  No one had to call for silence, when Mr. Thompson waved to an announcer: the room did not seem to breathe.  "Fellow citizens," the announcer cried into a microphone, "of this country and of any other that's able to listen-from the grand ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel in New York City, we are bringing you the inauguration of the John Galt Plan!"  A rectangle of tensely bluish light appeared on the wall behind the speakers' table-a television screen to project for the guests the images which the country was now to see.  "The John Galt Plan for Peace, Prosperity and Profit!" cried the announcer, while a shivering picture of the ballroom sprang into view on the screen. "The dawn of a new age! The product of a harmonious collaboration between the humanitarian spirit of our leaders and the scientific genius of John Galt! If your faith in the future has been undermined by vicious rumors, you may now see for yourself our happily united family of leadership! . . . Ladies and gentlemen"-as the television camera swooped down to the speakers' table, and the stupefied face of Mr. Mowen filled the screen-"Mr. Horace Bussby Mowen, the American Industrialist!" The camera moved to an aged collection of facial muscles shaped in imitation of a smile. "General of the Array Whittington S. Thorpe!" The camera, like an eye at a police line-up, moved from face to scarred face-scarred by the ravages of fear, of evasion, of despair, of uncertainty, of self-loathing, of guilt. "Majority Leader of the National Legislature, Mr. Lucian Phelps! . . . Mr. Wesley Mouch! . . . Mr. Thompson!" The camera paused on Mr. Thompson; he gave a big grin to the nation, then turned and looked off screen, to his left, with an air of triumphant expectancy. "Ladies and gentlemen," the announcer said solemnly, "John Galt!"  Good God!-thought Dagny-what are they doing? From the screen, the face of John Galt was looking at the nation, the face without pain or fear or guilt, implacable by virtue of serenity, invulnerable by virtue of self-esteem. This face-she thought-among those others?  Whatever it is that they're planning, she thought, it's undone-nothing more can or has to be said-there's the product of one code and of the other, there's the choice, and whoever is human will know it.  "Mr. Galt's personal secretary," said the announcer, while the camera blurred hastily past the next face and went on. "Mr. Clarence 'Chick' Morrison . . . Admiral Homer Dawley . . . Mr.-"  She looked at the faces around her, wondering: Did they see the contrast? Did they know it? Did they see him? Did they want him to be real?  "This banquet," said Chick Morrison, who had taken over as master of ceremonies, "is in honor of the greatest figure of our time, the ablest producer, the man of the 'know-how,' the new leader of our economy-John Galt! If you have heard his extraordinary radio speech, you can have no doubt that he can make things work. Now he is here to tell you that he will make them work for you. If you have been misled by those old-fashioned extremists who claimed that he would never join us, that no merger is possible between his way of life and ours, that it's either one or the other-tonight's event will prove to you that anything can be reconciled and united!"  Once they have seen him-thought Dagny-can they wish to look at anybody else? Once they know that he is possible, that this is what man can be, what else can they want to seek? Can they now feel any desire except to achieve in their souls what he has achieved in his? Or are they going to be stopped by the fact that the Mouches, the Morrisons, the Thompsons of the world had not chosen to achieve it? Are they going to regard the Mouches as the human and him as the impossible?  The camera was roving over the ballroom, flashing to the screen and to the country the faces of the prominent guests, the faces of the tensely watchful leaders and-once in a while-the face of John Galt. He looked as if his perceptive eyes were studying the men outside this room, the men who were seeing him across the country; one could not tell whether he was listening: no reaction altered the composure of his face.  "I am proud to pay tribute tonight," said the leader of the Legislature, the next speaker, "to the greatest economic organizer the world has ever discovered, the most gifted administrator, the most brilliant planner-John Galt, the man who will save us! I am here to thank him in the name of the people!"  This-thought Dagny, with a sickened amusement-was the spectacle of the sincerity of the dishonest. The most fraudulent part of the fraud was that they meant it. They were offering Galt the best that their view of existence could offer, they were trying to tempt him with that which was their dream of life's highest fulfillment: this spread of mindless adulation, the unreality of this enormous pretense-approval without standards, tribute without content, honor without causes, admiration without reasons, love without a code of values.  "We have discarded all our petty differences," Wesley Mouch was now saying into the microphone, "all partisan opinions, all personal interests and selfish views-in order to serve under the selfless leadership of John Galt!"  Why are they listening?-thought Dagny. Don't they see the hallmark of death in those faces, and the hallmark of life in his? Which state do they wish to choose? Which state do they seek for mankind? . . . She looked at the faces in the ballroom. They were nervously blank; they showed nothing but the sagging weight of lethargy and the staleness of a chronic fear. They were looking at Galt and at Mouch, as if unable to perceive any difference between them or to feel concern if a difference existed, their empty, uncritical, unvaluing stare declaring: "Who am I to know?" She shuddered, remembering his sentence: "The man who declares, ‘Who am I to know?' is declaring, 'Who am I to live?' " Did they care to live?-she thought. They did not seem to care even for the effort of raising that question. . . . She saw a few faces who seemed to care. They were looking at Galt with a desperate plea, with a wistfully tragic admiration-and with hands lying limply on the tables before them. These were the men who saw what he was, who lived in frustrated longing for his world-but tomorrow, if they saw him being murdered before them, their hands would hang as limply and their eyes would look away, saying, "Who am I to act?"  "Unity of action and purpose," said Mouch, "will bring us to a happier world. . . ."  Mr. Thompson leaned toward Galt and whispered with an amiable smile, "You'll have to say a few words to the country, later on, after me. No, no, not a long speech, just a sentence or two, no more. Just 'hello, folks' or something like that, so they'll recognize your voice." The faintly stressed pressure of the "secretary's" muzzle against Galt's side added a silent paragraph. Galt did not answer.  "The John Galt Plan," Wesley Mouch was saying, "will reconcile all conflicts. It will protect the property of the rich and give a greater share to the poor. It will cut down the burden of your taxes and provide you with more government benefits. It will lower prices and raise wages. It will give more freedom to the individual and strengthen the bonds of collective obligations. It will combine the efficiency of free enterprise with the generosity of a planned economy."  Dagny observed some faces-it took her an effort fully to believe it-who were looking at Galt with hatred. Jim was one of them, she noted. When the image of Mouch held the screen, these faces were relaxed in bored contentment, which was not pleasure, but the comfort of license, of knowing that nothing was demanded of them and nothing was firm or certain. When the camera flashed the image of Galt, their lips grew tight and their features were sharpened by a look of peculiar caution. She felt with sudden certainty that they feared the precision of his face, the unyielding clarity of his features, the look of being an entity, a look of asserting existence. They hate him for being himself-she thought, feeling a touch of cold horror, as the nature of their souls became real to her-they hate him for his capacity to live. Do they want to live?-she thought in self-mockery. Through the stunned numbness of her mind, she remembered the sound of his sentence: "The desire not to be anything, is the desire not to be."  It was now Mr. Thompson who was yelling into the microphone in his briskest and folksiest manner: "And I say to you: kick them in the teeth, all those doubters who're spreading disunity and fear! They told you that John Galt would never join us, didn't they? Well, here he is, in person, of his own free choice, at this table and at the head of our State! Ready, willing and able to serve the people's cause! Don't you ever again, any of you, start doubting or running or giving up! Tomorrow is here today-and what a tomorrow! With three meals a day for everyone on earth, with a car in every garage, and with electric power given free, produced by some sort of a motor the like of which we've never seen! And all you have to do is just be patient a little while longer! Patience, faith and unity-that's the recipe for progress! We must stand united among ourselves and united with the rest of the world, as a great big happy family, all working for the good of all! We have found a leader who will beat the record of our richest and busiest past! It's his love for mankind that has made him come here-to serve you, protect you and take care of you! He has heard your pleas and has answered the call of our common human duty! Every man is his brother's keeper! No man is an island unto himself! And now you will hear his voice-now you will hear his own message! . . . 'Ladies and gentlemen," he said solemnly, "John Galt-to the collective family of mankind!"  The camera moved to Galt. He remained still for a moment. Then, with so swift and expert a movement that his secretary's hand was unable to match it, he rose to his feet, leaning sidewise, leaving the pointed gun momentarily exposed to the sight of the world-then, standing straight, facing the cameras, looking at all his invisible viewers, he said: "Get the hell out of my way!"