Atlas Shrugged (219 page)

“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.