Atlas Shrugged (177 page)

“The chairman averted panic and called the session to order. The act of nationalization was read to the assembly, to the sound of fire-alarm sirens and distant cries. It was a gray morning, dark with rain clouds, the explosion had broken an electric transmitter—so that the assembly voted on the measure by the light of candles, while the red glow of the fire kept sweeping over the great vaulted ceiling above their heads.

“But more terrible a shock came later, when the legislators called a hasty recess to announce to the nation the good news that the people now owned d‘Anconia Copper. While they were voting, word had come from the closest and farthest points of the globe that there was no d’.Anconia Copper left on earth. Ladies and gentlemen, not anywhere. In that same instant, on the stroke of ten, by an infernal marvel of synchronization, every property of d.‘Anconia Copper on the face of the globe, from Chile to Siam to Spain to Pottsville, Montana, had been blown up and swept away.

“The d‘Anconia workers everywhere had been handed their last pay checks, in cash, at nine A.M., and by nine-thirty had been moved off the premises. The ore docks, the smelters, the laboratories, the office buildings were demolished. Nothing was left of the d’.Anconia ore ships which had been in port—and only lifeboats carrying the crews were left of those ships which had been at sea. As to the d.‘Anconia mines, some were buried under tons of blasted rock, while others were found not to be worth the price of blasting. An astounding number of these mines, as reports pouring in seem to indicate, had continued to be run, even though exhausted years ago.

“Among the thousands of d‘Anconia employees, the police have found no one with any knowledge of how this monstrous plot had been conceived, organized and carried out. But the cream of the d’.Anconia staff are not here any longer. The most efficient of the executives, mineralogists, engineers, superintendents have vanished—all the men upon whom the People’s State had been counting to carry on the work and cushion the process of readjustment. The most able—
correction:
the most selfish—of the men are gone. Reports from the various banks indicate that there are no d.‘Anconia accounts left anywhere; the money has been spent down to the last penny.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the d.‘Anconia fortune—the greatest fortune on earth, the legendary fortune of the centuries—has ceased to exist. In place of the golden dawn of a new age, the People’s States of Chile and Argentina are left with a pile of rubble and hordes of unemployed on their hands.

“No clue has been found to the fate or the whereabouts of Señor Francisco d.‘Anconia. He has vanished, leaving nothing behind him, not even a message of farewell.”

Thank you, my darling-thank you in the name of the last of us, even if you will not hear it and will not care to hear.... It was not a sentence, but the silent emotion of a prayer in her mind, addressed to the laughing face of a boy she had known at sixteen.

Then she noticed that she was clinging to the radio, as if the faint electric beat within it still held a tie to the only living force on earth, which it had transmitted for a few brief moments and which now filled the room where all else was dead.

As distant remnants of the explosion’s wreckage, she noticed a sound that came from Jim, part-moan, part-scream, part-growl-then the sight of Jim’s shoulders shaking over a telephone and his distorted voice screaming, “But, Rodrigo, you said it was safe! Rodrigo—oh God!—do you know how much I’d sunk into it?”—then the shriek of another phone on his desk, and his voice snarling into another receiver, his hand still clutching the first, “Shut your trap, Orren! What are you to do? What do I care, God damn you!”

There were people rushing into the office, the telephones were screaming and, alternating between pleas and curses, Jim kept yelling into one receiver, “Get me Santiago! ... Get Washington to get me Santiago!”

Distantly, as on the margin of her mind, she could see what sort of game the men behind the shrieking phones had played and lost. They seemed far away, like tiny commas squirming on the white field under the lens of a microscope. She wondered how they could ever expect to be taken seriously when a Francisco d.‘Anconia was possible on earth.

She saw the glare of the explosion in every face she met through the rest of the day—and in every face she passed in the darkness of the streets, that evening. If Francisco had wanted a worthy funeral pyre for d.‘Anconia Copper, she thought, he had succeeded. There it was, in the streets of New York City, the only city on earth still able to understand it—in the faces of people, in their whispers, the whispers crackling tensely like small tongues of fire, the faces lighted by a look that was both solemn and frantic, the shadings of expressions appearing to sway and weave, as if cast by a distant flame, some frightened, some angry, most of them uneasy, uncertain, expectant, but all of them acknowledging a fact much beyond an industrial catastrophe, all of them knowing what it meant, though none would name its meaning, all of them carrying a touch of laughter, a laughter of amusement and defiance, the bitter laughter of perishing victims who feel that they are avenged.

She saw it in the face of Hank Rearden, when she met him for dinner that evening. As his tall, confident figure walked toward her-the only figure that seemed at home in the costly setting of a distinguished restaurant—she saw the look of eagerness fighting the sternness of his features, the look of a young boy still open to the enchantment of the unexpected. He did not speak of this day’s event, but she knew that it was the only image in his mind.

They had been meeting whenever he came to the city, spending a brief, rare evening together—with their past still alive in their silent acknowledgment—with no future in their work and in their common struggle, but with the knowledge that they were allies gaining support from the fact of each other’s existence.

He did not want to mention today’s event, he did not want to speak of Francisco, but she noticed, as they sat at the table, that the strain of a resisted smile kept pulling at the hollows of his cheeks. She knew whom he meant, when he said suddenly, his voice soft and low with the weight of admiration, “He did keep his oath, didn’t he?”

“His
oath?”
she asked, startled, thinking of the inscription on the temple of Atlantis.

“He said to me, ‘I swear—by the woman I love—that I am your friend.’ He was.”

.“He is.”

He shook his head. “I have no right to think of him. I have no right to accept what he’s done as an act in my defense. And yet ...” He stopped.

“But it was, Hank. In defense of all of us—and of you, most of all.”

He looked away, out at the city. They sat at the side of the room, with a sheet of glass as an invisible protection against the sweep of space and streets sixty floors below. The city seemed abnormally distant: it lay flattened down to the pool of its lowest stories. A few blocks away, its tower merging into darkness, the calendar hung at the level of their faces, not as a small, disturbing rectangle, but as an enormous screen, eerily close and large, flooded by the dead, white glow of light projected through an empty film, empty but for the letters: September 2.

“Rearden Steel is now working at capacity,” he was saying indifferently. “They’ve lifted the production quotas off my mills—for the next five minutes, I guess. I don’t know how many of their own regulations they’ve suspended, I don’t think they know it, either, they don’t bother keeping track of legality any longer, I’m sure I’m a law-breaker on five or six counts, which nobody could prove or disprove—all I know is that the gangster of the moment told me to go full steam ahead.” He shrugged. “When another gangster kicks him out tomorrow, I’ll probably be shut down, as penalty for illegal operation. But according to the plan of the present split-second, they’ve begged me to keep pouring my Metal, in any amount and by any means I choose.”

She noticed the occasional, surreptitious glances that people were throwing in their direction. She had noticed it before, ever since her broadcast, ever since the two of them had begun to appear in public together. Instead of the disgrace he had dreaded, there was an air of awed uncertainty in people’s manner—uncertainty of their own moral precepts, awe in the presence of two persons who dared to be certain of being right. People were looking at them with anxious curiosity, with envy, with respect, with the fear of offending an unknown, proudly rigorous standard, some almost with an air of apology that seemed to say: “Please forgive us for being married.” There were some who had a look of angry malice, and a few who had a look of admiration.

“Dagny,” he asked suddenly, “do you suppose he’s in New York?”

“No. I’ve called the Wayne-Falkland. They told me that the lease on his suite had expired a month ago and he did not renew it.”

“They’re looking for him all over the world,” he said, smiling. “They’ll never find him.” The smile vanished. “Neither will I.” His voice slipped back to the flat, gray tone of duty: “Well, the mills are working, but I’m not. I’m doing nothing but running around the country like a scavenger, searching for illegal ways to purchase raw materials. Hiding, sneaking, lying—just to get a few tons of ore or coal or copper. They haven’t lifted their regulations off my raw materials. They know that I’m pouring more Metal than the quotas they give me could produce. They don’t care.” He added, “They think I do.”

“Tired, Hank?”

“Bored to death.”

There was a time, she thought, when his mind, his energy, his inexhaustible resourcefulness had been given to the task of a producer devising better ways to deal with nature; now, they were switched to the task of a criminal outwitting men. She wondered how long a man could endure a change of that kind.

“It’s becoming almost impossible to get iron ore,” he said indifferently, then added, his voice suddenly alive, “Now it’s going to be completely impossible to get copper.” He was grinning.

She wondered how long a man could continue to work against himself, to work when his deepest desire was not to succeed, but to fail.

She understood the connection of his thoughts when he said, “I’ve never told you, but I’ve met Ragnar Danneskjöld.”

“He told me.”

“What?
Where did you ever—” He stopped. “Of course,” he said, his voice tense and low. “He would be one of them. You would have met him. Dagny, what are they like, those men who ... No. Don’t answer me.” In a moment he added, “So I’ve met one of their agents.”

“You’ve met two of them.”

His response was a span of total stillness. “Of course,” he said dully. “I knew it ... I just wouldn’t admit to myself that I knew ... He was their recruiting agent, wasn’t he?”

“One of their earliest and best.”

He chuckled; it was a sound of bitterness and longing. “That night ... when they got Ken Danagger ... I thought that they had not sent anyone after
me....”

The effort by which he made his face grow rigid, was almost like the slow, resisted turn of a key locking a sunlit room he could not permit himself to examine. Aftei a while, he said impassively, “Dagny, that new rail we discussed last month—I don’t think I’ll be able to deliver it. They haven’t lifted their regulations off my output, they’re still controlling my sales and disposing of my Metal as they please. But the bookkeeping is in such a snarl that I’m smuggling a few thousand tons into the black market every week. I think they know it. They’re pretending not to. They don’t want to antagonize me, right now. But, you see, I’ve been shipping every ton I could snatch, to some emergency customers of mine. Dagny, I was in Minnesota last month. I’ve seen what’s going on there. The country will starve, not next year, but
this
winter, unless a few of us act and act fast. There are no grain reserves left anywhere. With Nebraska gone, Oklahoma wrecked, North Dakota abandoned, Kansas barely subsisting—there isn’t going to be any wheat this winter, not for the city of New York nor for any Eastern city. Minnesota is our last granary. They’ve had two bad years in succession, but they have a bumper crop this fall—and they have to be able to harvest it. Have you had a chance to take a look at the condition of the farm-equipment industry? They’re not big enough, any of them, to keep a staff of efficient gangsters in Washington or to pay percentages to pull-peddlers. So they haven’t been getting many allocations of materials. Two-thirds of them have shut down and the rest are about to. And farms are perishing all over the country—for lack of tools. You should have seen those farmers in Minnesota. They’ve been spending more time fixing old tractors that can’t be fixed than plowing their fields. I don’t know how they managed to survive till last spring. I don’t know how they managed to plant their wheat. But they did. They did.” There was a look of intensity on his face, as if he were contemplating a rare, forgotten sight: a vision of
men
—and she knew what motive was still holding him to his job. “Dagny, they had to have tools for their harvest. I’ve been selling all the Metal I could steal out of my own mills to the manufacturers of farm equipment. On credit. They’ve been sending the equipment to Minnesota as fast as they could put it out. Selling it in the same way—illegally and on credit. But they will be paid, this fall, and so will I. Charity, hell! We’re helping producers—and what tenacious producers!—not lousy, mooching ‘consumers.’ We’re giving
loans,
not alms. We’re supporting
ability,
not
need.
I’ll be damned if I’ll stand by and let those men be destroyed while the pull-peddlers grow rich!”

He was looking at the image of a sight he had seen in Minnesota: the silhouette of an abandoned factory, with the light of the sunset streaming, unopposed, through the holes of its windows and the cracks of its roof, with the remnant of a sign: Ward Harvester Company.

“Oh, I know,” he said. “We’ll save them this winter, but the looters will devour them next year. Still, we’ll save them this winter.... Well, that’s why I won’t be able to smuggle any rail for you. Not in the immediate future—and there’s nothing left to us but the immediate future. I don’t know what is the use of feeding a country, if it loses its railroads—but what is the use of railroads where there is no food? What is the use, anyway?”