CHAPTER IX THE GENERATOR

"Get the hell out of my way!"  Dr. Robert Stadler heard it on the radio in his car. He did not know whether the next sound, part-gasp, part-scream, part-laughter, started rising from him or from the radio-but he heard the click that cut them both off. The radio went dead. No further sounds came from the Wayne-Falkland Hotel.  He jerked his hand from knob to knob under the lighted dial. Nothing came through, no explanations, no pleas of technical trouble, no silence-hiding music. All stations were off the air.  He shuddered, he gripped the wheel, leaning forward across it, like a jockey at the close of a race, and his foot pressed down on the accelerator. The small stretch of highway before him bounced with the leaping of his headlights. There was nothing beyond the lighted strip but the emptiness of the prairies of Iowa.  He did not know why he had been listening to the broadcast; he did not know what made him tremble now. He chuckled abruptly-it sounded like a malevolent growl-either at the radio, or at those in the city, or at the sky.  He was watching the rare posts of highway numbers. He did not need to consult a map: for four days, that map had been printed on his brain, like a net of lines traced in acid. They could not take it away from him, he thought; they could not stop him. He felt as if he were being pursued; but there was nothing for miles behind him, except the two red lights on the rear of his car-like two small signals of danger, fleeing through the darkness of the Iowa plains.  The motive directing his hands and feet was four days behind him. It was the face of the man on the window sill, and the faces he had confronted when he had escaped from that room. He had cried to them that he could not deal with Galt and neither could they, that Galt would destroy them all, unless they destroyed him first. "Don't get smart, Professor," Mr. Thompson had answered coldly. "You've done an awful lot of yelling about hating his guts, but when it comes to action, you haven't helped us at all. I don't know which side you're on. If he doesn't give in to us peaceably, we might have to resort to pressure-such as hostages whom he wouldn't want to see hurt-and you're first on the list, Professor." "I?" he had screamed, shaking with terror and with bitterly desperate laughter. "I? But he damns me more than anyone on earth!" "How do I know?" Mr. Thompson had answered. "I hear that you used to be his teacher. Arid, don't forget, you're the only one he asked for."  His mind liquid with terror, he had felt as if he were about to be crushed between two walls advancing upon him: he had no chance, if Galt refused to surrender-and less chance, if Galt joined these men.  It was then that a distant shape had come swimming forward in his mind: the image of a mushroom-domed structure in the middle of an Iowa plain. All images had begun to fuse in his mind thereafter. Project X-he had thought, not knowing whether it was the vision of that structure or of a feudal castle commanding the countryside, that gave him the sense of an age and a world to which he belonged. . . . I'm Robert Stadler -he had thought-it's my property, it came from my discoveries, they said it was I who invented it. . . . I'll show them!-he had thought, not knowing whether he meant the man on the window sill or the others or the whole of mankind. . . . His thoughts had become like chips floating in a liquid, without connections: To seize control . . .I'll show them! . . . To seize control, to rule . . . There is no other way to live on earth. . . .These had been the only words that named the plan in his mind. He had felt that the rest was clear to him-clear in the form of a savage emotion crying defiantly that he did not have to make it clear. He would seize control of Project X and he would rule a part of the country as his private feudal domain. The means? His emotion had answered: Somehow. The motive? His mind had repeated insistently that his motive was terror of Mr. Thompson's gang, that he was not safe among them any longer, that his plan was a practical necessity. In the depth of his liquid brain, his emotion had held another kind of terror, drowned along with the connections between his broken chips of words.  These chips had been the only compass directing his course through four days and nights-while he drove down deserted highways, across a country collapsing into chaos, while he developed a monomaniac's cunning for obtaining illegal purchases of gas, while he snatched random hours of restless sleep, in obscure motels, under assumed names. . . .I'm Robert Stadler-he had thought, his mind repeating it as a formula of omnipotence. . . . To seize control-he had thought, speeding against the futile traffic lights of half-abandoned towns-speeding on the vibrating steel of the Taggart Bridge across the Mississippi-speeding past the occasional ruins of farms in the empty stretches of Iowa. . . . I'll show them-he had thought-let them pursue, they won't stop me this time. . . . He had thought it, even though no one had pursued him-as no one was pursuing him now, but the taillights of his own car and the motive drowned in his mind.  He looked at his silent radio and chuckled; the chuckle had the emotional quality of a fist being shaken at space. It's I who am practical-he thought-I have no choice . . . I have no other way . . . I'll show all those insolent gangsters, who forget that I am Robert Stadler . . . They will all collapse, but I won't! . . . I'll survive! . . . I'll win! . . . I'll show them!  The words were like chunks of solid ground in his mind, in the midst of a fiercely silent swamp; the connections lay submerged at the bottom. If connected, his words would have formed the sentence: I'll show him that there is no other way to live on earth! . . .  The scattered lights in the distance ahead were the barracks erected on the site of Project X, now known as Harmony City. He observed, as he came closer, that something out of the ordinary was going on at Project X, The barbed-wire fence was broken, and no sentinels met him at the gate. But some sort of abnormal activity was churning in the patches of darkness and in the glare of some wavering spotlights: there were armored trucks and running figures and shouted orders and the gleam of bayonets. No one stopped his car. At the corner of a shanty, he saw the motionless body of a soldier sprawled on the ground.  Drunk-he thought, preferring to think it, wondering why he felt unsure of it.  The mushroom structure crouched on a knoll before him; there were lights in the narrow slits of its windows-and the shapeless funnels protruded from under its dome, aimed at the darkness of the country. A soldier barred his way, when he alighted from his car at the entrance.  The soldier was properly armed, but hatless, and his uniform seemed too sloppy. "Where are you going, bud?" he asked.  "Let me in!" Dr. Stadler ordered contemptuously.  "What's your business here?"  "I'm Dr. Robert Stadler."  "I'm Joe Blow. I said, What's your business? Are you one of the new or one of the old?"  "Let me in, you idiot! I'm Dr. Robert Stadler!"  It was not the name, but the tone of voice and the form of address that seemed to convince the soldier. "One of the new," he said and, opening the door, shouted to somebody inside, "Hey, Mac, take care of Grandpaw here, see what he wants!"  In the bare, dim hall of reinforced concrete, he was met by a man who might have been an officer, except that his tunic was open at the throat and a cigarette hung insolently in the corner of his mouth.  "Who are you?" he snapped, his hand jerking too swiftly to the holster on his hip.  "I'm Dr. Robert Stadler."  The name had no effect. "Who gave you permission to come here?"  "I need no permission."  This seemed to have an effect; the man removed the cigarette from his mouth. "Who sent for you?" he asked, a shade uncertainly.  "Will you please let me speak to the commandant?" Dr. Stadler demanded impatiently.  "The commandant? You're too late, brother."  "The chief engineer, then!"  "The chief-who? Oh, Willie? Willie's okay, he's one of us, but he's out on an errand just now."  There were other figures in the hall, listening with an apprehensive curiosity. The officer's hand summoned one of them to approach-an unshaved civilian with a shabby overcoat thrown over his shoulders.  "What do you want?" he snapped at Stadler, "Would someone please tell me where are the gentlemen of the scientific staff?" Dr. Stadler asked in the courteously peremptory tone of an order.  The two men glanced at each other, as if such a question were irrelevant in this place. "Do you come from Washington?" the civilian asked suspiciously.  "I do not. I will have you understand that I'm through with that Washington gang."  "Oh?" The man seemed pleased. "Are you a Friend of the People, then?"  "I would say that I'm the best friend the people ever had. I'm the man who gave them all this." He pointed around him.  "You did?" said the man, impressed. "Are you one of those who made a deal with the Boss?"  "I'm the boss here, from now on."  The men looked at each other, retreating a few steps. The officer asked, "Did you say the name was Stadler?"  "Robert Stadler, And if you don't know what that means, you'll find out!"  "Will you please follow me, sir?" said the officer, with shaky politeness.  What happened next was not clear to Dr. Stadler, because his mind refused to admit the reality of the things he was seeing. There were shifting figures in half-lighted, disordered offices, there were too many firearms on everybody's hips, there were senseless questions asked of him by jerky voices that alternated between impertinence and fear.  He did not know whether any of them tried to give him an explanation; he would not listen; he could not permit this to be true. He kept stating in the tone of a feudal sovereign, "I'm the boss here, from now on . . . I give the orders . . . I came to take over . . . I own this place. . . . I am Dr. Robert Stadler-and if you don't know that name in this place, you have no business being here, you infernal idiots! You'll blow yourselves to pieces, if that's the' state of your knowledge! Have you had a high-school course in physics? You don't look to me as if you've ever been allowed inside a high school, any of you! What are you doing here? Who are you?"  It took him a long time to grasp-when his mind could not block it any longer-that somebody had beaten him to his plan: somebody had held the same view of existence as his own and had set out to achieve the same future. He grasped that these men, who called themselves the Friends of the People, had seized possession of Project X, tonight, a few hours ago, intending to establish a reign of their own. He laughed in their faces, with bitterly incredulous contempt, "You don't know what you're doing, you miserable juvenile delinquents! Do you think that you-you!-can handle a high-precision instrument of science? Who is your leader? I demand to see your leader!"  It was his tone of overbearing authority, his contempt and their own panic-the blind panic of men of unbridled violence, who have no standards of safety or danger-that made them waver and wonder whether he was, perhaps, some secret top-level member of their leadership; they were equally ready to defy or to obey any authority. After being shunted from one jittery commander to another, he found himself at last being led down iron stairways and down long, echoing, underground corridors of reinforced concrete to an audience with "The Boss" in person, The Boss had taken refuge in the underground control room.  Among the complex spirals of the delicate scientific machinery that produced the sound ray, against the wall panel of glittering levers, dials and gauges, known as the Xylophone, Robert Stadler faced the new ruler of Project X. It was Cuffy Meigs.  He wore a tight, semi-military tunic and leather leggings; the flesh of his neck bulged over the edge of his collar; his black curls were matted with sweat. He was pacing restlessly, unsteadily in front of the Xylophone, shouting orders to men who kept rushing in and out of the room: "Send couriers to every county seat within our reach! Tell 'em that the Friends of the People have won! Tell 'em they're not to take orders from Washington any longer! The new capital of the People's Commonwealth is Harmony City, henceforth to be known as Meigsville! Tell 'em that I'll expect five hundred thousand dollars per every five thousand heads of population, by tomorrow morning-or else!"  It took some time before Cuffy Meigs' attention and bleary brown eyes could be drawn to focus on the person of Dr. Stadler. "Well, what is it? What is it?" he snapped.  "I am Dr. Robert Stadler."  "Huh?- Oh, yeah! Yeah! You're the big guy from outer spaces, aren't you? You're the fellow who catches atoms or something. Well, what on earth are you doing here?"  "It is I who should ask you that question."  "Huh? Look, Professor, I'm in no mood for jokes."  "I have come here to take control."  "Control? Of what?"  "Of this equipment. Of this place. Of the countryside within its radius of operation."  Meigs stared at him blankly for a moment, then asked softly, "How did you get here?"  "By car."  "I mean, whom did you bring with you?"  "Nobody."  "What weapons did you bring?"  "None. My name is sufficient."  "You came here alone, with your name and your car?"  "I did."  Cuffy Meigs burst out laughing in his face.  "Do you think," asked Dr. Stadler, "that you can operate an installation of this kind?"  "Run along, Professor, run along! Beat it, before I have you shot! We've got no use for intellectuals around here!"  "How much do you know about this?" Dr. Stadler pointed at the Xylophone.  "Who cares? Technicians are a dime a dozen these days! Beat it! This ain't Washington! I'm through with those impractical dreamers in Washington! They won't get anywhere, bargaining with that radio ghost and making speeches! Action-that's what's needed! Direct action! Beat it, Doc! Your day is over!" He was weaving unsteadily back and forth, catching at a lever of the Xylophone once in a while. Dr. Stadler realized that Meigs was drunk.  "Don't touch those levers, you fool!"  Meigs jerked his hand back involuntarily, then waved it defiantly at the panel. "I'll touch anything I please! Don't you tell-me what to do!"  "Get away from that panel! Get out of here! This is mine! Do you understand? It's my property!"  "Property? Huh!" Meigs gave a brief bark that was a chuckle.  "I invented it! I created it! I made it possible!"  "You did? Well, many thanks, Doc. Many thanks, but we don't need you any longer. We've got our own mechanics."  "Have you any idea what I had to know in order to make it possible? You couldn't think of a single tube of it! Not a single bolt!"  Meigs shrugged. "Maybe not."  "Then how dare you think that you can own it? How dare you come here? What claim do you have to it?"  Meigs patted his holster. "This."  "Listen, you drunken lout!" cried Dr. Stadler. "Do you know what you're playing with?"  "Don't you talk to me like that, you old fool! Who are you to talk to me like that? I can break your neck with my bare hands! Don't you know who I am?"  "You're a scared thug way out of his depth!"  "Oh, I am, am I? I'm the Boss! I'm the Boss and I'm not going to be stopped by an old scarecrow like you! Get out of here!"  They stood staring at each other for a moment, by the panel of the Xylophone, both cornered by terror. The unadmitted root of Dr. Stadler's terror was his frantic struggle not to acknowledge that he was looking at his final product, that this was his spiritual son. Cuffy Meigs' terror had wider roots, it embraced all of existence; he had lived in chronic terror all his life, but now he was struggling not to acknowledge what it was that he had dreaded: in the moment of his triumph, when he expected to be safe, that mysterious, occult breed-the intellectual -was refusing to fear him and defying his power.  "Get out of here!" snarled Cuffy Meigs. "I'll call my men! I'll have you shot!"  "Get out of here, you lousy, brainless, swaggering moron!" snarled Dr. Stadler. "Do you think I'll let you cash in on my life? Do you think it's for you that I . . . that I sold-" He did not finish. "Stop touching those levers, God damn you!"  "Don't you give me orders! I don't need you to tell me what to do! You're not going to scare me with your classy mumbo-jumbo! I'll do as I please! What did I fight for, if I can't do as I please?" He chuckled and reached for a lever.  "Hey, Cuffy, take it easy!" yelled some figure in the back of the room, darting forward.  "Stand back!" roared Cuffy Meigs. "Stand back, all of you! Scared, am I? I'll show you who's boss!"  Dr. Stadler leaped to stop him-but Meigs shoved him aside with one arm, gave a gulp of laughter at the sight of Stadler falling to the floor, and, with the other arm, yanked a lever of the Xylophone.  The crash of sound-the screeching crash of ripped metal and of pressures colliding on conflicting circuits, the sound of a monster turning upon itself-was heard only inside the structure. No sound was heard outside. Outside, the structure merely rose into the air, suddenly and silently, cracked open into a few large pieces, shot some hissing streaks of blue light to the sky and came down as a pile of rubble. Within the circle of a radius of a hundred miles, enclosing parts of four states, telegraph poles fell like matchsticks, farmhouses collapsed into chips, city buildings went down as if slashed and minced by a single second's blow, with no time for a sound to be heard by the twisted bodies of the victims-and, on the circle's periphery, halfway across the Mississippi, the engine and the first six cars of a passenger train flew as a shower of metal into the water of the river, along with the western spans of the Taggart Bridge, cut in half.  On the site of what had once been Project X, nothing remained alive among the ruins-except, for some endless minutes longer, a huddle of torn flesh and screaming pain that had once been a great mind.  There was a sense of weightless freedom-thought Dagny-in the feeling that a telephone booth was her only immediate, absolute goal, with no concern for any of the goals of the passers-by in the streets around her. It did not make her feel estranged from the city: it made her feel, for the first time, that she owned the city and that she loved it, that she had never loved it before as she did in this moment, with so personal, solemn and confident a sense of possession. The night was still and clear; she looked at the sky; as her feeling was more solemn than joyous, but held the sense of a future joy-so the air was more windless than warm, but held the hint of a distant spring.  Get the hell out of my way-she thought, not with resentment, but almost with amusement, with a sense of detachment and deliverance, addressing it to the passers-by, to the traffic when it impeded her hurried progress, and to any fear she had known in the past. It was less than an hour ago that she had heard him utter that sentence, and his voice still seemed to ring in the air of the streets, merging into a distant hint of laughter.  She had laughed exultantly, in the ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland, when she had heard him say it; she had laughed, her hand pressed to her mouth, so that the laughter was only in her eyes-and in his, when he had looked straight at her and she had known that he heard it. They had looked at each other for the span of a second, above the heads of the gasping, screaming crowd-above the crash of the microphones being shattered, though all stations had been instantly cut off-above the bursts of breaking glass on falling tables, as some people went stampeding to the doors.  Then she had heard Mr. Thompson cry, waving his arm at Galt, "Take him back to his room, but guard him with your lives!"-and the crowd had parted as three men led him out. Mr. Thompson seemed to collapse for a moment, dropping his forehead on his arm, but he rallied, jumped to his feet, waved vaguely at his henchmen to follow and rushed out, through a private side exit. No one addressed or instructed the guests: some were running blindly to escape, others sat still, not daring to move. The ballroom was like a ship without captain. She cut through the crowd and followed the clique. No one tried to stop her.  She found them huddled in a small, private study: Mr. Thompson was slumped in an armchair, clutching his head with both hands, Wesley Mouch was moaning, Eugene Lawson was sobbing with the sound of a nasty child's rage, Jim was watching the others with an oddly expectant intensity. "I told you so!" Dr. Ferris was shouting. "I told you so, didn't I? That's where you get with your 'peaceful persuasion'!"  She remained standing by the door. They seemed to notice her presence, but they did not seem to care.  "I resign!" yelled Chick Morrison. "I resign! I'm through! I don't know what to say to the country! I can't think! I won't try! It's no use! I couldn't help it! You're not going to blame me! I've resigned!" He waved his arms in some shapeless gesture of futility or farewell, and ran out of the room, "He has a hide-out all stocked for himself in Tennessee," said Tinky Holloway reflectively, as if he, too, had taken a similar precaution and were now wondering whether the time had come.  "He won't keep it for long, if he gets there at all," said Mouch. "With the gangs of raiders and the state of transportation-" He spread his hands and did not finish.  She knew what thoughts were filling the pause; she knew that no matter what private escapes these men had once provided for themselves, they were now grasping the fact that all of them were trapped. She observed that there was no terror in their faces; she saw hints of it, but it looked like a perfunctory terror. Their expressions ranged from blank apathy to the relieved look of cheats who had believed that the game could end no other way and were making no effort to contest it or regret it-to the petulant blindness of Lawson, who refused to be conscious of anything-to the peculiar intensity of Jim, whose face suggested a secret smile.  "Well? Well?" Dr. Ferris was asking impatiently, with the crackling energy of a man who feels at home in a world of hysteria. "What are you now going to do with him? Argue? Debate? Make speeches?"  No one answered.  "He . . . has . . . to . . . save . . . us," said Mouch slowly, as if straining the last of his mind into blankness and delivering an ultimatum to reality. "He has to . . . take over . . . and save the system."  "Why don't you write him a love letter about it?" said Ferris.  "We've got to . . . make him . . . take over . . . We've got to force him to rule," said Mouch in the tone of a sleepwalker.  "Now," said Ferris, suddenly dropping his voice, "do you see what a valuable establishment the State Science Institute really is?"  Mouch did not answer him, but she observed that they all seemed to know what he meant.  "You objected to that private research project of mine as 'impractical,' " said Ferris softly. "But what did I tell you?"  Mouch did not answer; he was cracking his knuckles.  "This is no time for squeamishness," James Taggart spoke up with unexpected vigor, but his voice, too, was oddly low. "We don't have to be sissies about it."  "It seems to me . . ." said Mouch dully, "that . . . that the end justifies the means . . ."  "It's too late for any scruples or any principles," said Ferris. "Only direct action can work now."  No one answered; they were acting as if they wished that their pauses, not their words, would state what they were discussing.  "It won't work," said Tinky Holloway, "He won't give in."  "That's what you think!" said Ferris, and chuckled, "You haven't seen our experimental model in action. Last month, we got three confessions in three unsolved murder cases."  "If . . ." started Mr. Thompson, and his voice cracked suddenly into a moan, "if he dies, we all perish!"  "Don't worry," said Ferris. "He won't. The Ferris Persuader is safely calculated against that possibility."  Mr. Thompson did not answer.  "It seems to me . . . that we have no other choice . . ." said Mouch; it was almost a whisper.  They remained silent; Mr. Thompson was struggling not to see that they were all looking at him. Then he cried suddenly, "Oh, do anything you want! I couldn't help it! Do anything you want!"  Dr. Ferris turned to Lawson. "Gene," he said tensely, still whispering, "run to the radio-control office. Order all stations to stand by. Tell them that I'll have Mr. Galt on the air within three hours."  Lawson leaped to his feet, with a sudden, mirthful grin, and ran out of the room.  She knew. She knew what they intended doing and what it was within them that made it possible. They did not think that this would succeed. They did not think that Galt would give in; they did not want him to give in. They did not think that anything could save them now; they did not want to be saved. Moved by the panic of their nameless emotions, they had fought against reality all their lives-and now they had reached a moment when at last they felt at home. They did not have to know why they felt it, they who had chosen never to know what they felt-they merely experienced a sense of recognition, since this was what they had been seeking, this was the kind of reality that had been implied in all of their feelings, their actions, their desires, their choices, their dreams. This was the nature and the method of the rebellion against existence and of the undefined quest for an unnamed Nirvana. They did not want to live; they wanted him to die.  The horror she felt was only a brief stab, like the wrench of a switching perspective: she grasped that the objects she had thought to be human were not. She was left with a sense of clarity, of a final answer and of the need to act. He was in danger; there was no time and no room in her consciousness to waste emotion on the actions of the subhuman.  "We must make sure," Wesley Mouch was whispering, "that nobody -ever learns about it . . ."  "Nobody will," said Ferris; their voices had the cautious drone of conspirators. "It's a secret, separate unit on the Institute grounds . . .Sound-proofed and safely distant from the rest . . . Only a very few of our staff have ever entered it. . . ."  "If we were to fly-" said Mouch, and stopped abruptly, as if he had caught some warning in Ferris' face.  She saw Ferris' eyes move to her, as if he had suddenly remembered her presence. She held his glance, letting him see the untroubled indifference of hers, as if she had neither cared nor understood. Then, as if merely grasping the signal of a private discussion, she turned slowly, with the suggestion of a shrug, and left the room. She knew that they were now past the stage of worrying about her.  She walked with the same unhurried indifference through the halls and through the exit of the hotel. But a block away, when she had turned a corner, her head flew up and the folds of her evening gown slammed like a sail against her legs with the sudden violence of the speed of her steps. And now, as she rushed through the darkness, thinking only of finding a telephone booth, she felt a new sensation rising irresistibly within her, past the immediate tension of danger and concern: it was the sense of freedom of a world that had never had to be obstructed.  She saw the wedge of light on the sidewalk, that came from the window of a bar. No one gave her a second glance, as she crossed the half deserted room: the few customers were still waiting and whispering tensely in front of the crackling blue void of an empty television screen.  Standing in the tight space of the telephone booth, as in the cabin of a ship about to take off for a different planet, she dialed the number OR 6-5693.  The voice that answered at once was Francisco's. "Hello?"  "Francisco?"  "Hello, Dagny. I was expecting you to call."  "Did you hear the broadcast?"  "I did."  "They are now planning to force him to give in." She kept her voice to the tone of a factual report. "They intend to torture him. They have some machine called the Ferris Persuader, in an isolated unit on the grounds of the State Science Institute. It's in New Hampshire. They mentioned flying. They mentioned that they would have him on the radio within three hours."  "I see. Are you calling from a public phone booth?"  "Yes."  "You're still in evening clothes, aren't you?"  "Yes."  "Now listen carefully. Go home, change your clothes, pack a few things you'll need, take your jewelry and any valuables that you can carry, take some warm clothing. We won't have time to do it later. Meet me in forty minutes, on the northwest corner, two blocks east of the main entrance of the Taggart Terminal,"  "Right."  "So long, Slug."  "So long, Frisco."  She was in the bedroom of her apartment, in less than five minutes, tearing off her evening gown. She left it lying in the middle of the floor, like the discarded uniform of an army she was not serving any longer. She put on a dark blue suit and-remembering Galt's words-a white, high-collared sweater. She packed a suitcase and a bag with a strap that she could carry swung over her shoulder. She put her jewelry in a corner of the bag, including the bracelet of Rearden Metal she had earned in the outside world, and the five-dollar gold piece she had earned in the valley.  It was easy to leave the apartment and to lock the door, even though she knew she would probably never open it again. It seemed harder, for a moment, when she came to her office. No one had seen her come in; the anteroom of her office was empty; the great Taggart Building seemed unusually quiet. She stood looking for a moment at this room and at all the years it had contained. Then she smiled-no, it was not too hard, she thought; she opened her safe and took the documents she had come here to get. There was nothing else that she wanted to take from her office-except the picture of Nathaniel Taggart and the map of Taggart Transcontinental. She broke the two frames, folded the picture and the map, and slipped them into her suitcase.  She was locking the suitcase, when she heard the sound of hurrying steps. The door flew open and the chief engineer rushed in; he was shaking; his face was distorted.  "Miss Taggart!" he cried. "Oh, thank God, Miss Taggart, you're here! We've been calling for you all over!"  She did not answer; she looked at him inquiringly.  "Miss Taggart, have you heard?"  "What?"  "Then you haven't! Oh God, Miss Taggart, it's . . . I can't believe it, I still can't believe it, but . . . Oh God, what are we going to do?  The . . . the Taggart Bridge is gone!"  She stared at him, unable to move.  "It's gone! Blown up! Blown up, apparently, in one second! Nobody -knows for certain what happened-but it looks like . . . they think that something went wrong at Project X and . . . it looks like those sound rays, Miss Taggart! We can't get through to any point within a radius of a hundred miles! It's not possible, it can't be possible, but it looks as if everything in that circle has been wiped out! . . . We can't get any answers! Nobody can get an answer-the newspapers, the radio stations, the police! We're still checking, but the stories that are coming from the rim of that circle are-" He shuddered. "Only one thing is certain: the bridge is gone! Miss Taggart! We don't know what to do!"  She leaped to her desk and seized the telephone receiver. Her hand stopped in mid-air. Then, slowly, twistedly, with the greatest effort ever demanded of her, she began to move her arm down to place the receiver back. It seemed to her that it took a long time, as if her arm had to move against some atmospheric pressure that no human body could combat-and in the span of these few brief moments, in the stillness of a blinding pain, she knew what Francisco had felt, that night, twelve years ago-and what a boy of twenty-six had felt when he had looked at his motor for the last time.  "Miss Taggart!" cried the chief engineer. "We don't know what to do!"  The receiver clicked softly back into its cradle. "I don't, either," she answered. In a moment, she knew it was over. She heard her voice telling the man to check further and report to her later-and she waited for the sound of his steps to vanish in the echoing silence of the hall.  Crossing the concourse of the Terminal for the last time, she glanced at the statue of Nathaniel Taggart-and remembered a promise she had made. It would be only a symbol now, she thought, but it would be the kind of farewell that Nathaniel Taggart deserved. She had no other writing instrument, so she took the lipstick from her bag and, smiling up at the marble face of the man who would have understood, she drew a large sign of the dollar on the pedestal under his feet.  She was first to reach the corner, two blocks east of the Terminal entrance. As she waited, she observed the first trickles of the panic that was soon to engulf the city: there were automobiles driving too fast, some of them loaded with household effects, there were too many police cars speeding by, and too many sirens bursting in the distance.  The news of the destruction of the Bridge was apparently spreading through the city; they would know that the city was doomed and they would start a stampede to escape-but they had no place to go, and it was not her concern any longer.  She saw Francisco's figure approaching from some distance away; she recognized the swiftness of his walk, before she could distinguish the face under the cap pulled low over his eyes. She caught the moment when he saw her, as he came closer. He waved his arm, with a smile of greeting. Some conscious stress in the sweep of his arm made it the gesture of a d'Anconia, welcoming the arrival of a long-awaited traveler at the gates of his own domain.  When he approached, she stood solemnly straight and, looking at his face and at the buildings of the greatest city in the world, as at the kind of witnesses she wanted, she said slowly, her voice confident and steady: "I swear-by my life and my love of it-that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."  He inclined his head, as if in sign of admittance. His smile was now a salute.  Then he took her suitcase with one hand, her arm with the other, and said, "Come on."  The unit known as "Project F"-in honor of its originator, Dr. Ferris-was a small structure of reinforced concrete, low on the slope of the hill that supported the State Science Institute on a higher, more public level. Only the small gray patch of the unit's roof could be seen from the Institute's windows, hidden in a jungle of ancient trees; it looked no bigger than the cover of a manhole.  The unit consisted of two stories in the shape of a small cube placed asymmetrically on top of a larger one. The first story had no windows, only a door studded with iron spikes; the second story had but one window, as if in reluctant concession to daylight, like a face with a single eye. The men on the staff of the Institute felt no curiosity about that structure and avoided the paths that led down to its door; nobody had ever suggested it, but they had the impression that the structure housed a project devoted to experiments with the germs of deadly diseases.  The two floors were occupied by laboratories that contained a great many cages with guinea pigs, dogs and rats. But the heart and meaning of the structure was a room in its cellar, deep under the ground; the room had been incompetently lined with the porous sheets of soundproofing material; the sheets had begun to crack and the naked rock of a cave showed through.  The unit was always protected by a squad of four special guards. Tonight, the squad had been augmented to sixteen, summoned for emergency duty by a long-distance telephone call from New York. The guards, as well as all other employees of "Project F," had been carefully chosen on the basis of a single qualification: an unlimited capacity for obedience. The sixteen were stationed for the night outside the structure and in the deserted laboratories above the ground, where they remained uncritically on duty, with no curiosity about anything that might be taking place below.  In the cellar room, under the ground, Dr. Ferris, Wesley Mouch and James Taggart sat in armchairs lined up against one wall. A machine that looked like a small cabinet of irregular shape stood in a corner across from them. Its face bore rows of glass dials, each dial marked by a segment of red, a square screen that looked like an amplifier, rows of numbers, rows of wooden knobs and plastic buttons, a single lever controlling a switch at one side and a single red glass button at the other. The face of the machine seemed to have more expression than the face of the mechanic in charge of it; he was a husky young man in a sweat-stained shirt with sleeves rolled above the elbows; his pale blue eyes were glazed by an enormously conscientious concentration on his task; he moved his lips once in a while, as if reciting a memorized lesson.  A short wire led from the machine to an electric storage battery behind it. Long coils of wire, like the twisted arms of an octopus, stretched forward across the stone floor, from the machine to a leather mattress spread under a cone of violent light. John Galt lay strapped to the mattress. He was naked; the small metal disks of electrodes at the ends of the wires were attached to his wrists, his shoulders, his hips and his ankles; a device resembling a stethoscope was attached to his chest and connected to the amplifier.  "Get this straight," said Dr. Ferris, addressing him for the first time.  "We want you to take full power over the economy of the country. We want you to become a dictator. We want you to rule. Understand? We want you to give orders and to figure out the right orders to give. What we want, we mean to get Speeches, logic, arguments or passive obedience won't save you now. We want ideas-or else. We won't let you out of here until you tell us the exact measures you'll take to save our system. Then we'll have you tell it to the country over the radio."  He raised his wrist, displaying a stop-watch. "I'll give you thirty seconds to decide whether you want to start talking right now. If not, then we'll start. Do you understand?"  Galt was looking straight at them, his face expressionless, as if he understood too much. He did not answer. They heard the sound of the stop-watch in the silence, counting off the seconds, and the sound of Mouch's choked, irregular breathing as he gripped the arms of his chair.  Ferris waved a signal to the mechanic at the machine. The mechanic threw the switch; it lighted the red glass button and set off two sounds: one was the low, humming drone of an electric generator, the other was a peculiar beat, as regular as the ticking of a clock, but with an oddly muffled resonance. It took them a moment to realize that it came from the amplifier and that they were hearing the beat of Galt's heart.  "Number three," said Ferris, raising a finger in signal.  The mechanic pressed a button under one of the dials. A long shudder ran through Galt's body; his left arm shook in jerking spasms, convulsed by the electric current that circled between his wrist and shoulder. His head fell back, his eyes closed, his lips drawn tight. He made no sound.  When the mechanic lifted his finger off the button, Galt's arm stopped shaking. He did not move.  The three men glanced about them with an instant's look of groping. Ferris' eyes were blank, Mouch's terrified, Taggart's disappointed. The sound of the thumping beat went on through the silence.  "Number two," said Ferris, It was Galt's right leg that twisted in convulsions, with the current now circling between his hip and ankle. His hands gripped the edges of the mattress. His head jerked once, from side to side, then lay still.  The beating of the heart grew faintly faster. Mouch was drawing away, pressing against the back of his armchair. Taggart was sitting on the edge of his, leaning forward.  "Number one, gradual," said Ferris.  Galt's torso jerked upward and fell back and twisted in long shudders, straining against his strapped wrists-as the current was now running from his one wrist to the other, across his lungs. The mechanic was slowly turning a knob, increasing the voltage of the current; the needle on the dial was moving toward the red segment that marked danger. Galt's breath was coming in broken, panting sounds out of convulsed lungs.  "Had enough?" snarled Ferris, when the current went off.  Galt did not answer. His lips moved faintly, opening for air. The beat from the stethoscope was racing. But his breath was falling to an even rhythm, by a controlled effort at relaxation.  "You're too easy on him!" yelled Taggart, staring at the naked body on the mattress.  Galt opened his eyes and glanced at them for a moment. They could tell nothing, except that his glance was steady and fully conscious. Then he dropped his head again and lay still, as if he had forgotten them.  His naked body looked strangely out of place in this cellar. They knew it, though none of them would identify that knowledge. The long lines of his body, running from his ankles to the flat hips, to the angle of the waist, to the straight shoulders, looked like a statue of ancient Greece, sharing that statue's meaning, but stylized to a longer, lighter, more active form and a gaunter strength, suggesting more restless an energy-the body, not of a chariot driver, but of a builder of airplanes. And as the meaning of a statue of ancient Greece-the statue of man as a god-clashed with the spirit of this century's halls, so his body clashed with a cellar devoted to prehistorical activities. The clash was the greater, because he seemed to belong with electric wires, with stainless steel, with precision instruments, with the levers of a control board. Perhaps-this was the thought most fiercely resisted and most deeply buried at the bottom of his watchers sensations, the thought they knew only as a diffused hatred and an unfocused terror-perhaps it was the absence of such statues from the modern world that had transformed a generator into an octopus and brought a body such as his into its tentacles.  "I understand you're some sort of electrical expert," said Ferris, and chuckled. "So are we-don't you think so?"  Two sounds answered him in the silence: the drone of the generator and the beating of Galt's heart.  "The mixed series!" ordered Ferris, waving one finger at the mechanic.  The shocks now came at irregular, unpredictable intervals, one after another or minutes apart. Only the shuddering convulsions of Galt's legs, arms, torso or entire body showed whether the current was racing between two particular electrodes or through all of them at once. The needles on the dials kept coming close to the red marks, then receding: the machine was calculated to inflict the maximum intensity of pain without damaging the body of the victim.  It was the watchers who found it unbearable to wait through the minutes of the pauses filled with the sound of the heartbeat: the heart was now racing in an irregular rhythm. The pauses were calculated to let that beat slow down, but allow no relief to the victim, who had to wait for a shock at any moment.  Galt lay relaxed, as if not attempting to fight the pain, but surrendering to it, not attempting to negate it, but to bear it. When his lips parted for breath and a sudden jolt slammed them tight again, he did not resist the shaking rigidity of his body, but he let it vanish the instant the current left him. Only the skin of his face was pulled tight, and the sealed line of his lips twisted sidewise once in a while. When a shock raced through his chest, the gold-copper strands of his hair flew with the jerking of his head, as if waving in a gust of wind, beating against his face, across his eyes. The watchers wondered why his hair seemed to be growing darker, until they realized that it was drenched in sweat.  The terror of hearing one's own heart struggling as if about to burst at any moment, had been intended to be felt by the victim. It was the torturers who were trembling with terror, as they listened to the jagged, broken rhythm and missed a breath with every missing beat. It sounded now as if the heart were leaping, beating frantically against its cage of ribs, in agony and in a desperate anger. The heart was protesting; the man would not. He lay still, his eyes closed, his hands relaxed, hearing his heart as it fought for his life.  Wesley Mouch was first to break. "Oh God, Floyd!" he screamed. "Don't kill him! Don't dare kill him! If he dies, we die!"  "He won't," snarled Ferris. "He'll wish he did, but he won't! The machine won't let him! It's mathematically computed! It's safe!"  "Oh, isn't it enough? He'll obey us now! I'm sure he'll obey!"  "No! It's not enough! I don't want him to obey! I want him to believe! To accept! To want to accept! We've got to have him work for us voluntarily!"  "Go ahead!" cried Taggart. "What are you waiting for? Can't you make the current stronger? He hasn't even screamed yet!"  "What's the matter with you?" gasped Mouch, catching a glimpse of Taggart's face while a current was twisting Galt's body: Taggart was staring at it intently, yet his eyes seemed glazed and dead, but around that inanimate stare the muscles of his face were pulled into an obscene caricature of enjoyment.  "Had enough?" Ferris kept yelling to Galt. "Are you ready to want what we want?"  They heard no answer. Galt raised his head once in a while and looked at them. There were dark rings under his eyes, but the eyes were clear and conscious.  In mounting panic, the watchers lost their sense of context and language-and their three voices blended into a progression of indiscriminate shrieks: "We want you to take over! . . . We want you to rule! . . . We order you to give orders! . . . We demand that you dictate! . . . We order you to save us! . . . We order you to think! . . ."  They heard no answer but the beating of the heart on which their own lives depended. The current was shooting through Galt's chest and the beating was coming in irregular spurts, as if it were racing and stumbling-when suddenly his body fell still, relaxing: the beating had stopped. The silence was like a stunning blow, and before they had time to scream, their horror was topped by another: by the fact that Galt opened his eyes and raised his head. Then they realized that the drone of the motor had ceased, too, and that the red light had gone out on the control panel: the current had stopped; the generator was dead.  The mechanic was jabbing his ringer at the button, to no avail. He yanked the lever of the switch again and again. He kicked the side of the machine. The red light would not go on; the sound did not return.  "Well?" snapped Ferris. "Well? What's the matter?"  "The generator's on the blink," said the mechanic helplessly.  "What's the matter with it?"  "I don't know."  "Well, find out and fix it!"  The man was not a trained electrician; he had been chosen, not for his knowledge, but for his uncritical capacity for pushing any buttons; the effort he needed to learn his task was such that his consciousness could be relied upon to have no room for anything else. He opened the rear panel of the machine and stared in bewilderment at the intricate coils: he could find nothing visibly out of order. He put on his rubber gloves, picked up a pair of pliers, tightened a few bolts at random, and scratched his head.  "I don't know," he said; his voice had a sound of helpless docility.  "Who am I to know?"  The three men were on their feet, crowding behind the machine to stare at its recalcitrant organs. They were acting merely by reflex: they knew that they did not know.  "But you've got to fix it!" yelled Ferris. "It's got to work! We've got to have electricity!"  "We must continue!" cried Taggart; he was shaking, "It's ridiculous! I won't have it! I won't be interrupted! I won't let him off!" He pointed in the direction of the mattress.  "Do something!" Ferris was crying to the mechanic. "Don't just stand there! Do something! Fix it! I order you to fix it!"  "But I don't know what's wrong with it," said the man, blinking.  "Then find out!"  "How am I to find out?"  "I order you to fix it! Do you hear me? Make it work-or I'll fire you and throw you in jail!"  "But I don't know what's wrong with it." The man sighed, bewildered. "I don't know what to do."  "It's the vibrator that's out of order," said a voice behind them; they whirled around; Galt was struggling for breath, but he was speaking in the brusque, competent tone of an engineer. "Take it out and pry off the aluminum cover. You'll find a pair of contacts fused together. Force them apart, take a small file and clean up the pitted surfaces. Then replace the cover, plug it back into the machine-and your generator will work."  There was a long moment of total silence.  The mechanic was staring at Galt; he was holding Galt's glance-and even he was able to recognize the nature of the sparkle in the dark green eyes; it was a sparkle of contemptuous mockery. He made a step back. In the incoherent dimness of his consciousness, in some wordless, shapeless, unintelligible manner, even he suddenly grasped the meaning of what was occurring in that cellar.  He looked at Galt-he looked at the three men-he looked at the machine. He shuddered, he dropped his pliers and ran out of the room.  Galt burst out laughing.  The three men were backing slowly away from the machine. They were struggling not to allow themselves to understand what the mechanic had understood.  "No!" cried Taggart suddenly, glancing at Galt and leaping forward, "No! I won't let him get away with it!" He fell down on his knees, groping frantically to find the aluminum cylinder of the vibrator.  "I'll fix it! I'll work it myself! We've got to go on! We've got to break him!"  "Take it easy, Jim," said Ferris uneasily, jerking him up to his feet.  "Hadn't we . . . hadn't we better lay off for the night?" said Mouch pleadingly; he was looking at the door through which the mechanic had escaped, his glance part-envy, part-terror.  "No!" cried Taggart, "Jim, hasn't he had enough? Don't forget, we have to be careful."  "No! He hasn't had enough! He hasn't even screamed yet!"  "Jim!" cried Mouch suddenly, terrified by something in Taggart's face. "We can't afford to kill him! You know it!"  "I don't care! I want to break him! I want to hear him scream! I want-"  And then it was Taggart who screamed. It was a long, sudden, piercing scream, as if at some sudden sight, though his eyes were staring at space and seemed blankly sightless. The sight he was confronting was within him. The protective walls of emotion, of evasion, of pretense, of semi-thinking and pseudo-words, built up by him through all of his years, had crashed in the span of one moment-the moment when he knew that he wanted Galt to die, knowing fully that his own death would follow.  He was suddenly seeing the motive that had directed all the actions of his life. It was not his incommunicable soul or his love for others or his social duty or any of the fraudulent sounds by which he had maintained his self-esteem: it was the lust to destroy whatever was living, for the sake of whatever was not. It was the urge to defy reality by the destruction of every living value, for the sake of proving to himself that he could exist in defiance of reality and would never have to be bound by any solid, immutable facts. A moment ago, he had been able to feel that he hated Galt above all men, that the hatred was proof of Galt's evil, which he need define no further, that he wanted Galt to be destroyed for the sake of his own survival. Now he knew that he had wanted Galt's destruction at the price of his own destruction to follow, he knew that he had never wanted to survive, he knew that it was Galt's greatness he had wanted to torture and destroy-he was seeing, it as greatness by his own admission, greatness by the only standard that existed, whether anyone chose to admit it or not: the greatness of a man who was master of reality in a manner no other had equaled. In the moment when he, James Taggart, had found himself facing the ultimatum: to accept reality or die, it was death his emotions had chosen, death, rather than surrender to that realm of which Galt was so radiant a son. In the person of Galt-he knew-he had sought the destruction of all existence.  It was not by means of words that this knowledge confronted his consciousness: as all his knowledge had consisted of emotions, so now he was held by an emotion and a vision that he had no power to dispel. He was no longer able to summon the fog to conceal the sight of all those blind alleys he had struggled never to be forced to see: now, at the end of every alley, he was seeing his hatred of existence-he was seeing the face of Cherryl Taggart with her joyous eagerness to live and that it was this particular eagerness he had always wanted to defeat-he was seeing his face as the face of a killer whom all men should rightfully loathe, who destroyed values for being values, who killed in order not to discover his own irredeemable evil.  "No . . ." he moaned, staring at that vision, shaking his head to escape it. "No . . . No . . . "  "Yes," said Galt.  He saw Galt's eyes looking straight at his, as if Galt were seeing the things he was seeing.  "1 told you that on the radio, didn't I?" said Galt.  This was the stamp James Taggart had dreaded, from which there was no escape: the stamp and proof of objectivity. "No . . ." he said feebly once more, but it was no longer the voice of a living consciousness. He stood for a moment, staring blindly at space, then his legs gave way, folding limply, and he sat on the floor, still staring, unaware of his action or surroundings.  "Jim . . . !" called Mouch. There was no answer.  Mouch and Ferris did not ask themselves or wonder what it was that had happened to Taggart: they knew that they must never attempt to discover it, under peril of sharing his fate. They knew who it was that had been broken tonight. They knew that this was the end of James Taggart, whether his physical body survived or not.  "Let's . . . let's get Jim out of here," said Ferris shakily. "Let's get him to a doctor . . . or somewhere . . ."  They pulled Taggart to his feet; he did not resist, he obeyed lethargically, and he moved his feet when pushed. It was he who had reached the state to which he had wanted Galt to be reduced. Holding his arms at both sides, his two friends led him out of the room. He saved them from the necessity of admitting to themselves that they wanted to escape Galt's eyes. Galt was watching them; his glance was too austerely perceptive.  "We'll be back," snapped Ferris to the chief of the guards. "Stay here and don't let anyone in. Understand? No one."  They pushed Taggart into their car, parked by the trees at the entrance. "We'll be back." said Ferris to no one in particular, to the trees and the darkness of the sky.  For the moment, their only certainty was that they had to escape from that cellar-the cellar where the living generator was left tied by the side of the dead one.