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[MessengerX]

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[MessengerX]

9

 

[Dual]

BUMP.

 

[MessengerX]

Cool.

 

[MessengerX]

Cool.

 

[MessengerX]

Cool.

 

[MessengerX]

Cool.

 

[MessengerX]

Cool.

 

[FBI parte due]

CONTENTS
PART I NON-CONTRADICTION
I THE THEME
II THE CHAIN
III THE TOP AND THE BOTTOM
IV THE IMMOVABLE MOVERS
V THE CLIMAX OF THE D'ANCONIAS
VI THE NON-COMMERCIAL
VII THE EXPLOITERS AND THE EXPLOITED
VIII THE JOHN GALT LINE
IX THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE
X WYATT'S TORCH
PART II EITHER-
OR
I THE MAN WHO BELONGED ON EARTH
II THE ARISTOCRACY OF PULL
III WHITE BLACKMAIL
IV THE SANCTION OF THE VICTIM
V ACCOUNT OVERDRAWN
VI MIRACLE METAL
VII THE MORATORIUM ON BRAINS
VIII BY OUR LOVE
IX THE FACE WITHOUT PAIN OR FEAR OR GUILT
X THE SIGN OF THE DOLLAR
PART III
A IS A
I ATLANTIS
II THE UTOPIA OF GREED
III ANTI-GREED
IV ANTI-LIFE
V THEIR BROTHERS' KEEPERS
VI THE CONCERTO OF DELIVERANCE
VII "THIS IS JOHN GALT SPEAKING"
VIII THE EGOIST
IX THE GENERATOR
X IN THE NAME OF THE BEST WITHIN US

PART I
NON-CONTRADICTION

CHAPTER I
THE THEME
"Who is John Galt?"
The light was ebbing, and Eddie Willers could not distinguish the bum's face. The bum had said it simply, without expression. But from the sunset far at the end of the street, yellow glints caught his eyes, and the eyes looked straight at Eddie Willers, mocking and still—as if the question had been addressed to the causeless uneasiness within him.
"Why did you say that?" asked Eddie Willers, his voice tense.
The bum leaned against the side of the doorway; a wedge of broken glass behind him reflected the metal yellow of the sky.
"Why does it bother you?" he asked.
"It doesn't," snapped Eddie Willers.
He reached hastily into his pocket. The bum had stopped him and asked for a dime, then had gone on talking, as if to kill that moment and postpone the problem of the next. Pleas for dimes were so frequent in the streets these days that it was not necessary to listen to explanations, and he had no desire to hear the details of this bum's particular despair.
"Go get your cup of coffee," he said, handing the dime to the shadow that had no face.
"Thank you, sir," said the voice, without interest, and the face leaned forward for a moment. The face was wind-browned, cut by lines of weariness and cynical resignation; the eyes were intelligent. Eddie Willers walked on, wondering why he always felt it at this time of day, this sense of dread without reason. No, he thought, not dread, there's nothing to fear: just an immense, diffused apprehension, with no source or object. He had become accustomed to the feeling, but he could find no explanation for it; yet the bum had spoken as if he knew that Eddie felt it, as if he thought that one should feel it, and more: as if he knew the reason.
Eddie Willers pulled his shoulders straight, in conscientious self-discipline. He had to stop this, he thought; he was beginning to imagine things. Had he always felt it? He was thirty-two years old. He tried to think back. No, he hadn't; but he could not remember when it had started. The feeling came to him Suddenly, at random intervals, and now it was coming more often than ever. It's the twilight, he thought; I hate the twilight.
The clouds and the shafts of skyscrapers against them were turning brown, like an old painting in oil, the color of a fading masterpiece. Long streaks of grime ran from under the pinnacles down the slender, soot-eaten walls. High on the side of a tower there was a crack in the shape of a motionless lightning, the length of ten stories. A jagged object cut the sky above the roofs; it was half a spire, still holding the glow of the sunset; the gold leaf had long since peeled off the other half. The glow was red and still, like the reflection of a fire: not an active fire, but a dying one which it is too late to stop.
No, thought Eddie Willers, there was nothing disturbing in the sight of the city. It looked as it had always looked.
He walked on, reminding himself that he was late in returning to the office. He did not like the task which he had to perform on his return, but it had to be done. So he did not attempt to delay it, but made himself walk faster.
He turned a corner. In the narrow space between the dark silhouettes of two buildings, as in the crack of a door, he saw the page of a gigantic calendar suspended in the sky.
It was the calendar that the mayor of New York had erected last year on the top of a building, so that citizens might tell the day of the month as they told the hours of the day, by glancing up at a public tower. A white

rectangle hung over the city, imparting the date to the men in the streets below. In the rusty light of this evening's sunset, the rectangle said: September 2.
Eddie Willers looked away. He had never liked the sight of that calendar. It disturbed him, in a manner he could not explain or define. The feeling seemed to blend with his sense of uneasiness; it had the same quality.
He thought suddenly that there was some phrase, a kind of quotation, that expressed what the calendar seemed to suggest. But he could not recall it. He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it nor dismiss it. He glanced back. The white rectangle stood above the roofs, saying in immovable finality: September 2.
Eddie Willers shifted his glance down to the street, to a vegetable pushcart at the stoop of a brownstone house. He saw a pile of bright gold carrots and the fresh green of onions. He saw a clean white curtain blowing at an open window. He saw a bus turning a corner, expertly steered. He wondered why he felt reassured—and then, why he felt the sudden, inexplicable wish that these things were not left in the open, unprotected against the empty space above.
When he came to Fifth Avenue, he kept his eyes on the windows of the stores he passed. There was nothing he needed or wished to buy; but he liked to see the display of good?, any goods, objects made by men, to be used by men. He enjoyed the sight of a prosperous street; not more than every fourth one of the stores was out of business, its windows dark and empty.
He did not know why he suddenly thought of the oak tree. Nothing had recalled it. But he thought of it and of his childhood summers on the Taggart estate. He had spent most of his childhood with the Taggart children, and now he worked for them, as his father and grandfather had worked for their father and grandfather.
The great oak tree had stood on a hill over the Hudson, in a lonely spot of the Taggart estate. Eddie Willers, aged seven, liked to come and look at that tree. It had stood there for hundreds of years, and he thought it would always stand there. Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with fingers sunk into the soil, and he thought that if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string. He felt safe in the oak tree's presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was his greatest symbol of strength.
One night, lightning struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it the next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside—just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it.
Years later, he heard it said that children should be protected from shock, from their first knowledge of death, pain or fear. But these had never scarred him; his shock came when he stood very quietly, looking into the black hole of the trunk. It was an immense betrayal—the more terrible because he could not grasp what it was that had been betrayed. It was not himself, he knew, nor his trust; it was something else. He stood there for a while, making no sound, then he walked back to the house. He never spoke about it to anyone, then or since.
Eddie Willers shook his head, as the screech of a -rusty mechanism changing a traffic light stopped him on the edge of a curb. He felt anger at himself. There was no reason that he had to remember the oak tree tonight. It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness—and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question mark.

He wanted no sadness attached to his childhood; he loved its memories: any day of it he remembered now seemed flooded by a still, brilliant sunlight. It seemed to him as if a few rays from it reached into his present: not rays, more like pinpoint spotlights that gave an occasional moment's glitter to his job, to his lonely apartment, to the quiet, scrupulous progression of his existence.
He thought of a summer day when he was ten years old. That day, in a clearing of the woods, the one precious companion of his childhood told him what they would do when they grew up. The words were harsh and glowing, like the sunlight. He listened in admiration and in wonder. When he was asked what he would want to do, he answered at once, "Whatever is right," and added, "You ought to do something great . . . I mean, the two of us together." "What?" she asked. He said, "I don't know. That's what we ought to find out. Not just what you said. Not just business and earning a living. Things like winning battles, or saving people out of fires, or climbing mountains." "What for?" she asked. He said, "The minister said last Sunday that we must always reach for the best within us. What do you suppose is the best within us?" "I don't know." "We'll have to find out." She did not answer; she was looking away, up the railroad track.
Eddie Willers smiled. He had said, "Whatever is right," twenty-two years ago. He had kept that statement unchallenged ever since; the other questions had faded in his mind; he had been too busy to ask them. But he still thought it self-evident that one had to do what was right; he had never learned how people could want to do otherwise; he had learned only that they did. It still seemed simple and incomprehensible to him: simple that things should be right, and incomprehensible that they weren't. He knew that they weren't. He thought of that, as he turned a corner and came to the great building of Taggart Transcontinental.
The building stood over the street as its tallest and proudest structure. Eddie Willers always smiled at his first sight of it. Its long bands of windows were unbroken, in contrast to those of its neighbors. Its rising lines cut the sky, with no crumbling corners or worn edges. It seemed to stand above the years, untouched. It would always stand there, thought Eddie Willers.
Whenever he entered the Taggart Building, he felt relief and a sense of security. This was a place of competence and power. The floors of its hallways were mirrors made of marble. The frosted rectangles of its electric fixtures were chips of solid light. Behind sheets of glass, rows of girls sat at typewriters, the clicking of their keys like the sound of speeding train wheels. And like an answering echo, a faint shudder went through the walls at times, rising from under the building, from the tunnels of the great terminal where trains started out to cross a continent and stopped after crossing it again, as they had started and stopped for generation after generation. Taggart Transcontinental, thought Eddie Willers, From Ocean to Ocean—the proud slogan of his childhood, so much more shining and holy than any commandment of the Bible. From Ocean to Ocean, forever—thought Eddie Willers, in the manner of a rededication, as he walked through the spotless halls into the heart of the building, into the office of James Taggart, President of Taggart Transcontinental.
James Taggart sat at his desk. He looked like a man approaching fifty, who had crossed into age from adolescence, without the intermediate stage of youth. He had a small, petulant mouth, and thin hair clinging to a bald forehead. His posture had a limp, decentralized sloppiness, as if in defiance of his tall, slender body, a body with an elegance of line intended for the confident poise of an aristocrat, but transformed into the gawkiness of a lout. The flesh of his face was pale and soft. His eyes were pale and veiled, with a glance that moved slowly, never quite stopping, gliding off and past

things in eternal resentment of their existence. He looked obstinate and drained. He was thirty-nine years old.
He lifted his head with irritation, at the sound of the opening door.
"Don't bother me, don't bother me, don't bother me," said James Taggart.
Eddie Willers walked toward the-desk.
"It's important, Jim," he said, not raising his voice.
"All right, all right, what is it?"
Eddie Willers looked at a map on the wall of the office. The map's colors had faded under the glass—he wondered dimly how many Taggart presidents had sat before it and for how many years. The Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, the network of red lines slashing the faded body of the country from New York to San Francisco, looked like a system of blood vessels. It looked as if once, long ago, the blood had shot down the main artery and, under the pressure of its own overabundance, had branched out at random points, running all over the country. One red streak twisted its way from Cheyenne, Wyoming, down to El Paso, Texas—the Rio Norte Line of Taggart Transcontinental. New tracing had been added recently and the red streak had been extended south beyond El Paso—but Eddie Willers turned away hastily when his eyes reached that point.
He looked at James Taggart and said, "It's the Rio Norte Line." He noticed Taggart's glance moving down to a corner of the desk. "We've had another wreck."
"Railroad accidents happen every day. Did you have to bother me about that?"
"You know what I'm saying, Jim. The Rio Norte is done for. That track is shot. Down the whole line."
"We are getting a new track."
Eddie Willers continued as if there had been no answer: "That track is shot. It's no use trying to run trains down there. People are giving up trying to use them."
"There is not a railroad in the country, it seems to me, that doesn't have a few branches running at a deficit. We're not the only ones. It's a national condition—a temporary national condition."
Eddie stood looking at him silently. What Taggart disliked about Eddie Willers was this habit of looking straight into people's eyes. Eddie's eyes were blue, wide and questioning; he had blond hair and a square face, unremarkable except for that look of scrupulous attentiveness and open, puzzled wonder.
"What do you want?" snapped Taggart.
"I just came to tell you something you had to know, because somebody had to tell you."
"That we've had another accident?"
"That we can't give up the Rio Norte Line."
James Taggart seldom raised his head; when he looked at people, he did so by lifting his heavy eyelids and staring upward from under the expanse of his bald forehead.
"Who's thinking of giving up the Rio Norte Line?" he asked.
"There's never been any question of giving it up. I resent your saying it. I resent it very much."
"But we haven't met a schedule for the last six months. We haven't completed a run without some sort of breakdown, major or minor. We're losing all our shippers, one after another. How long can we last?"
"You're a pessimist, Eddie. You lack faith. That's what undermines the morale of an organization."
"You mean that nothing's going to be done about the Rio Norte Line?"
"I haven't said that at all. Just as soon as we get the new track-"

"Jim, there isn't going to be any new track." He watched Taggart's eyelids move up slowly. "I've just come back from the office of Associated Steel. I've spoken to Orren Boyle."
"What did he say?"
"He spoke for an hour and a half and did not give me a single straight answer."
"What did you bother him for? I believe the first order of rail wasn't due for delivery until next month."
"And before that, it was due for delivery three months ago."
"Unforeseen circumstances. Absolutely beyond Orren's control."
"And before that, it was due six months earlier. Jim, we have waited for Associated Steel to deliver that rail for thirteen months."
"What do you want me to do? I can't run Orren Boyle's business."
"I want you to understand that we can't wait."
Taggart asked slowly, his voice half-mocking, half-cautious, "What did my sister say?"
"She won't be back until tomorrow."
"Well, what do you want me to do?"
"That's for you to decide."
"Well, whatever else you say, there's one thing you're not going to mention next—and that's Rearden Steel."
Eddie did not answer at once, then said quietly, "All right, Jim. I won't mention it."
"Orren is my friend." He heard no answer. "I resent your attitude. Orren Boyle will deliver that rail just as soon as it's humanly possible. So long as he can't deliver it, nobody can blame us."
"Jim! What are you talking about? Don't you understand that the Rio Norte Line is breaking up—whether anybody blames us or not?"
"People would put up with it—they'd have to—if it weren't for the Phoenix-Durango." He saw Eddie's face tighten. "Nobody ever complained about the Rio Norte Line, until the Phoenix-Durango came on the scene."
"The Phoenix-Durango is doing a brilliant job."
"Imagine a thing called the Phoenix-Durango competing with Taggart Transcontinental! It was nothing but a local milk line ten years ago."
"It's got most of the freight traffic of Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado now." Taggart did not answer. "Jim, we can't lose Colorado. It's our last hope. It's everybody's last hope. If we don't pull ourselves together, we'll lose every big shipper in the state to the Phoenix-Durango. We've lost the Wyatt oil fields."
"I don't see why everybody keeps talking about the Wyatt oil fields."
"Because Ellis Wyatt is a prodigy who—"
"Damn Ellis Wyatt!"
Those oil wells, Eddie thought suddenly, didn't they have something in common with the blood vessels on the map? Wasn't that the way the red stream of Taggart Transcontinental had shot across the country, years ago, a feat that seemed incredible now? He thought of the oil wells spouting a black stream that ran over a continent almost faster than the trains of the Phoenix-Durango could carry it. That oil field had been only a rocky patch in the mountains of Colorado, given up as exhausted long ago. Ellis Wyatt's father had managed to squeeze an obscure living to the end of his days, out of the dying oil wells. Now it was as if somebody had given a shot of adrenalin to the heart of the mountain, the heart had started pumping, the black blood had burst through the rocks—of course it's blood, thought Eddie Willers, because blood is supposed to feed, to give life, and that is what Wyatt Oil had done. It had shocked empty slopes of ground into sudden existence, it had brought new towns, new power plants, new factories to a region nobody had ever noticed on any map. New factories, thought Eddie

Willers, at a time when the freight revenues from all the great old industries were dropping slowly year by year; a rich new oil field, at a time when the pumps were stopping in one famous field after another; a new industrial state where nobody had expected anything but cattle and beets. One man had done it, and he had done it in eight years; this, thought Eddie Willers, was like the stories he had read in school books and never quite believed, the stories of men who had lived in the days of the country's youth. He wished he could meet Ellis Wyatt. There was a great deal of talk about him, but few had ever met him; he seldom came to New York. They said he was thirty-three years old and had a violent temper. He had discovered some way to revive exhausted oil wells and he had proceeded to revive them.
"Ellis Wyatt is a greedy bastard who's after nothing but money," said James Taggart. "It seems to me that there are more important things in life than making money."
"What are you talking about, Jim? What has that got to do with—"
"Besides, he's double-crossed us. We served the Wyatt oil fields for years, most adequately. In the days of old man Wyatt, we ran a tank train a week."
"These are not the days of old man Wyatt, Jim. The Phoenix-Durango runs two tank trains a day down there—and it runs them on schedule."
"If he had given us time to grow along with him—"
"He has no time to waste."
"What does he expect? That we drop all our other shippers, sacrifice the interests of the whole country and give him all our trains?"
"Why, no. He doesn't expect anything. He just deals with the Phoenix-Durango."
"I think he's a destructive, unscrupulous ruffian. I think he's an irresponsible upstart who's been grossly overrated." It was astonishing to hear a sudden emotion in James Taggart's lifeless voice. "I'm not so sure that his oil fields are such a beneficial achievement. It seems to me that he's dislocated the economy of the whole country. Nobody expected Colorado to become an industrial state. How can we have any security or plan anything if everything changes all the time?"
"Good God, Jim! He's—"
"Yes, I know, I know, he's making money. But that is not the standard, it seems to me, by which one gauges a man's value to society. And as for his oil, he'd come crawling to us. and he'd wait his turn along with all the other shippers, and he wouldn't demand more than his fair share of transportation—if it weren't for the Phoenix-Durango. We can't help it if we're up against destructive competition of that kind. Nobody can blame us."
The pressure in his chest and temples, thought Eddie Willers, was the strain of the effort he was making; he had decided to make the issue clear for once, and the issue was so clear, he thought, that nothing could bar it from Taggart's understanding, unless it was the failure of his own presentation. So he had tried hard, but he was failing, just as he had always failed in all of their discussions; no matter what he said, they never seemed to be talking about the same subject.
"Jim, what are you saying? Does it matter that nobody blames us—when the road is falling apart?"
James Taggart smiled; it was a thin smile, amused and cold. "It's touching, Eddie," he said. "It's touching—your devotion to Taggart Transcontinental. If you don’t look out, you’ll turn into one of those real feudal serfs."
"That’s what I am, Jim."
"But may I ask whether it is your job to discuss these matters with me?"
"No, it isn't."

"Then why don't you learn that we have departments to take care of things? Why don't you report all this to whoever's concerned? Why don't you cry on my dear sister's shoulder?"
"Look. Jim, I know it's not my place to talk to you. But I can't understand what's going on. I don't know what it is that your proper advisers tell you, or why they can't make you understand. So I thought I'd try to tell you myself."
"I appreciate our childhood friendship, Eddie, but do you think that that should entitle you to walk in here unannounced whenever you wish? Considering your own rank, shouldn't you remember that I am president of Taggart Transcontinental?"
This was wasted. Eddie Willers looked at him as usual, not hurt, merely puzzled, and asked, "Then you don't intend to do anything about the Rio Norte Line?"
"I haven't said that. I haven't said that at all." Taggart was looking at the map, at the red streak south of El Paso. "Just as soon as the San Sebastian Mines get going and our Mexican branch begins to pay off—"
"Don't let's talk about that, Jim." Taggart turned, startled by the unprecedented phenomenon of an implacable anger in Eddie's voice. "What's the matter?"
"You know what's the matter. Your sister said—"
"Damn my sister!" said James Taggart.
Eddie Willers did not move. He did not answer. He stood looking straight ahead. But he did not see James Taggart or anything in the office.
After a moment, he bowed and walked out.
In the anteroom, the clerks of James Taggart's personal staff were switching off the lights, getting ready to leave for the day. But Pop Harper, chief clerk, still sat at his desk, twisting the levers of a half-dismembered typewriter. Everybody in the company had the impression that Pop Harper was born in that particular corner at that particular desk and never intended to leave it. He had been chief clerk for James Taggart's father.
Pop Harper glanced up at Eddie Willers as he came out of the president's office. It was a wise, slow glance; it seemed to say that he knew that Eddie's visit to their part of the building meant trouble on the line, knew that nothing had come of the visit, and was completely indifferent to the knowledge. It was the cynical indifference which Eddie Willers had seen in the eyes of the bum on the street corner.
"Say, Eddie, know where I could get some woolen undershirts?" he asked, "Tried all over town, but nobody's got 'em."
"I don't know," said Eddie, stopping. "Why do you ask me?"
"I just ask everybody. Maybe somebody'!! tell me."
Eddie looked uneasily at the blank, emaciated face and white hair.
"It's cold in this joint," said Pop Harper. "It's going to be colder this winter."
"What are you doing?" Eddie asked, pointing at the pieces of typewriter.
"The damn thing's busted again. No use sending it out, took them three months to fix it the last time. Thought I'd patch it up myself. Not for long, I guess." He let his fist drop down on the keys. "You're ready for the junk pile, old pal. Your days are numbered."
Eddie started. That was the sentence he had tried to remember: Your days are numbered. But he had forgotten in what connection he had tried to remember it.
"It's no use, Eddie," said Pop Harper.
"What's no use?"
"Nothing. Anything."
"What's the matter, Pop?"

"I'm not going to requisition a new typewriter. The new ones are made of tin. When the old ones go, that will be the end of typewriting. There was an accident in the subway this morning, their brakes wouldn't work. You ought to go home, Eddie, turn on the radio and listen to a good dance band. Forget it, boy. Trouble with you is you never had a hobby. Somebody stole the electric light bulbs again, from off the staircase, down where I live. I've got a pain in my chest. Couldn't get any cough drops this morning, the drugstore on our corner went bankrupt last week. The Texas-Western Railroad went bankrupt last month. They closed the Queensborough Bridge yesterday for temporary repairs. Oh well, what's the use? Who is John Galt?"
* * *
She sat at the window of the train, her head thrown back, one leg stretched across to the empty seat before her. The window frame trembled with the speed of the motion, the pane hung over empty darkness, and dots of light slashed across the glass as luminous streaks, once in a while.
Her leg, sculptured by the tight sheen of the stocking, its long line running straight, over an arched instep, to the tip of a foot in a high-heeled pump, had a feminine elegance that seemed out of place in the dusty train car and oddly incongruous with the rest of her. She wore a battered camel's hair coat that had been expensive, wrapped shapelessly about her slender, nervous body. The coat collar was raised to the slanting brim of her hat. A sweep of brown hair fell back, almost touching the line of her shoulders. Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her posture taut, as if she resented immobility, and unfeminine, as if she were unconscious of her own body and that it was a woman's body. She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.
She thought: For just a few moments—while this lasts—it is all right to surrender completely—to forget everything and just permit yourself to feel. She thought: Let go—drop the controls—this is it.
Somewhere on the edge of her mind, under the music, she heard the sound of train wheels. They knocked in an even rhythm, every fourth knock accented, as if stressing a conscious purpose. She could relax, because she heard the wheels. She listened to the symphony, thinking: This is why the wheels have to be kept going, and this is where they're going.
She had never heard that symphony before, but she knew that it was written by Richard Halley. She recognized the violence and the magnificent intensity. She recognized the style of the theme; it was a clear, complex melody—at a time when no one wrote melody any longer. . . . She sat looking up at the ceiling of the car, but she did not see it and she had forgotten where she was. She did not know whether she was hearing a full symphony orchestra or only the theme; perhaps she was hearing the orchestration in her own mind.
She thought dimly that there had been premonitory echoes of this theme in all of Richard Halley's work, through all the years of his long struggle, to the day, in his middle-age, when fame struck him suddenly and knocked him out. This—she thought, listening to the symphony— had been the goal of his

struggle. She remembered half-hinted attempts in his music, phrases that promised it, broken bits of melody that started but never quite reached it; when Richard Halley wrote this, he . . . She sat up straight. When did Richard Halley write this?
In the same instant, she realized where she was and wondered for the first time where that music came from.
A few steps away, at the end of the car, a brakeman was adjusting the controls of the air-conditioner. He was blond and young. He was whistling the theme of the symphony. She realized that he had been whistling it for some time and that this was all she had heard.
She watched him incredulously for a while, before she raised her voice to ask, "Tell me please, what are you whistling?"
The boy turned to her. She met a direct glance and saw an open, eager smile, as if he were sharing a confidence with a friend. She liked his face—its lines were tight and firm, it did not have that look of loose muscles evading the responsibility of a shape, which she had learned to expect in people's faces.
"It's the Halley Concerto," he answered, smiling.
"Which one?"
"The Fifth."
She let a moment pass, before she said slowly and very carefully, "Richard Halley wrote only four concertos."
The boy's smile vanished. It was as if he were jolted back to reality, just as she had been a few moments ago. It was as if a shutter were slammed down, and what remained was a face without expression, impersonal, indifferent and empty.
"Yes, of course," he said. "I'm wrong. I made a mistake."
"Then what was it?"
"Something I heard somewhere."
"What?"
"I don't know."
"Where did you hear it?"
"I don't remember."
She paused helplessly; he was turning away from her without further interest.
"It sounded like a Halley theme," she said. "But I know every note he's ever written and he never wrote that."
There was still no expression, only a faint look of attentiveness on the boy's face, as he turned back to her and asked, "You like the music of Richard Halley?"
"Yes," she said, "I like it very much."
He considered her for a moment, as if hesitating, then he turned away. She watched the expert efficiency of his movements as he went on working. He worked in silence.
She had not slept for two nights, but she could not permit herself to sleep; she had too many problems to consider and not much time: the train was due in New York early in the morning. She needed the time, yet she wished the train would go faster; but it was the Taggart Comet, the fastest train in the country.
She tried to think; but the music remained on the edge of her mind and she kept hearing it, in full chords, like the implacable steps of something that could not be stopped. . . . She shook her head angrily, jerked her hat off and lighted a cigarette.
She would not sleep, she thought; she could last until tomorrow night. . . . The train wheels clicked in accented rhythm. She was so used to them that she did not hear them consciously, but the sound became a sense of peace within her. . . . When she extinguished her cigarette, she knew that she

needed another one, but thought that she would give herself a minute, just a few minutes, before she would light it. . . .
She had fallen asleep and she awakened with a jolt, knowing that something was wrong, before she knew what it was: the wheels had stopped. The car stood soundless and dim in the blue glow of the night lamps. She glanced at her watch: there was no reason for stopping. She looked out the window: the train stood still in the middle of empty fields.
She heard someone moving in a seat across the aisle, and asked, "How long have we been standing?"
A man's voice answered indifferently, "About an hour." The man looked after her, sleepily astonished, because she leaped to her feet and rushed to the door. There was a cold wind outside, and an empty stretch of land under an empty sky. She heard weeds rustling in the darkness. Far ahead, she saw the figures of men standing by the engine—and above them, hanging detached in the sky, the red light of a signal.
She walked rapidly toward them, past the motionless line of wheels. No one paid attention to her when she approached. The train crew and a few passengers stood clustered under the red light. They had stopped talking, they seemed to be waiting in placid indifference.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
The engineer turned, astonished. Her question had sounded like an order, not like the amateur curiosity of a passenger. She stood, hands in pockets, coat collar raised, the wind beating her hair in strands across her face.
"Red light, lady," he said, pointing up with his thumb.
"How long has it been on?"
"An hour."
"We're off the main track, aren't we?"
"That's right."
"Why?"
"I don't know."
The conductor spoke up. "I don't think we had any business being sent off on a siding, that switch wasn't working right, and this thing's not working at all." He jerked his head up at the red light. "I don't think the signal's going to change. I think it's busted."
"Then what are you doing?"
"Waiting for it to change."
In her pause of startled anger, the fireman chuckled. "Last week, the crack special of the Atlantic Southern got left on a siding for two hours—just somebody's mistake."
"This is the Taggart Comet," she said. "The Comet has never been late."
"She's the only one in the country that hasn't," said the engineer.
"There's always a first time," said the fireman.
"You don't know about railroads, lady," said a passenger.
"There's not a signal system or a dispatcher in the country that's worth a damn."
She did not turn or notice him, but spoke to the engineer.
"If you know that the signal is broken, what do you intend to do?"
He did not like her tone of authority, and he could not understand why she assumed it so naturally. She looked like a young girl; only her mouth and eyes showed that she was a woman in her thirties. The dark gray eyes were direct and disturbing, as if they cut through things, throwing the inconsequential out of the way. The face seemed faintly familiar to him, but he could not recall where he had seen it.
"Lady, I don't intend to stick my neck out," he said.
"He means," said the fireman, "that our job's to wait for orders."
"Your job is to run this train."
"Not against a red light. If the light says stop, we stop."

"A red light means danger, lady," said the passenger.
"We're not taking any chances," said the engineer. "Whoever's responsible for it, he'll switch the blame to us if we move. So we're not moving till somebody tells us to."
"And if nobody does?"
"Somebody will turn up sooner or later."
"How long do you propose to wait?"
The engineer shrugged. "Who is John Galt?"
"He means," said the fireman, "don't ask questions nobody can answer."
She looked at the red light and at the rail that went off into the black, untouched distance.
She said, "Proceed with caution to the next signal. If it's in order, proceed to the main track. Then stop at the first open office."
"Yeah? Who says so?"
"I do."
"Who are you?"
It was only the briefest pause, a moment of astonishment at a question she had not expected, but the engineer looked more closely at her face, and in time with her answer he gasped, "Good God!"
She answered, not offensively, merely like a person who does not hear the question often: "Dagny Taggart."
"Well, I'll be—" said the fireman, and then they all remained silent. She went on, in the same tone of unstressed authority. "Proceed to the main track and hold the train for me at the first open office."
"Yes, Miss Taggart."
"You'll have to make up time. You've got the rest of the night to do it. Get the Comet in on schedule."
"Yes, Miss Taggart."
She was turning to go, when the engineer asked, "If there's any trouble, are you taking the responsibility for it, Miss Taggart?"
"I am."
The conductor followed her as she walked back to her car. He was saying, bewildered, "But . . . just a seat in a day coach, Miss Taggart? But how come? But why didn't you let us know?"
She smiled easily. "Had no time to be formal. Had my own car attached to Number 22 out of Chicago, but got off at Cleveland—and Number 22 was running late, so I let the car go. The Comet came next and I took it. There was no sleeping-car space left."
The conductor shook his head. "Your brother—he wouldn't have taken a coach."
She laughed. "No, he wouldn't have."
The men by the engine watched her walking away. The young brakeman was among them. He asked, pointing after her, "Who is that?"
"That's who runs Taggart Transcontinental," said the engineer; the respect in his voice was genuine. "That's the Vice-president in Charge of Operation."
When the train jolted forward, the blast of its whistle dying over the fields, she sat by the window, lighting another cigarette. She thought: It's cracking to pieces, like this, all over the country, you can expect it anywhere, at any moment. But she felt no anger or anxiety; she had no time to feel.
This would be just one more issue, to be settled along with the others. She knew that the superintendent of the Ohio Division was no good and that he was a friend of James Taggart. She had not insisted on throwing him out long ago only because she had no better man to put in his place. Good men were so strangely hard to find. But she would have to get rid of him, she thought, and she would give his post to Owen Kellogg, the young engineer who was doing a brilliant job as one of the assistants to the manager of the Taggart

Terminal in New York; it was Owen Kellogg who ran the Terminal. She had watched his work for some time; she had always looked for sparks of competence, like a diamond prospector in an unpromising wasteland. Kellogg was still too young to be made superintendent of a division; she had wanted to give him another year, but there was no time to wait. She would have to speak to him as soon as she returned.
The strip of earth, faintly visible outside the window, was running faster now, blending into a gray stream. Through the dry phrases of calculations in her mind, she noticed that she did have time to feel something: it was the hard, exhilarating pleasure of action.
* * *
With the first whistling rush of air, as the Comet plunged into the tunnels of the Taggart Terminal under the city of New York, Dagny Taggart sat up straight. She always felt it when the train went underground—this sense of eagerness, of hope and of secret excitement. It was as if normal existence were a photograph of shapeless things in badly printed colors, but this was a sketch done in a few sharp strokes that made things seem clean, important—and worth doing.
She watched the tunnels as they flowed past: bare walls of concrete, a net of pipes and wires, a web of rails that went off into black holes where green and red lights hung as distant drops of color. There was nothing else, nothing to dilute it, so that one could admire naked purpose and the ingenuity that had achieved it. She thought of the Taggart Building standing above her head at this moment, growing straight to the sky, and she thought: These are the roots of the building, hollow roots twisting under the ground, feeding the city.
When the train stopped, when she got off and heard the concrete of the platform under her heels, she felt light, lifted, impelled to action.
She started off, walking fast, as if the speed of her steps could give form to the things she felt. It was a few moments before she realized that she was whistling a piece of music—and that it was the theme of Halley's Fifth Concerto. She felt someone looking at her and turned. The young brakeman stood watching her tensely.
She sat on the arm of the big chair facing James Taggart's desk, her coat thrown open over a wrinkled traveling suit. Eddie Willers sat across the room, making notes once in a while. His title was that of Special Assistant to the Vice-President in Charge of Operation, and his main duty was to be her bodyguard against any waste of time. She asked him to be present at interviews of this nature, because then she never had to explain anything to him afterwards. James Taggart sat at his desk, his head drawn into his shoulders.
"The Rio Norte Line is a pile of junk from one end to the other," she said. "It's much worse than I thought. But we're going to save it."
"Of course," said James Taggart.
"Some of the rail can be salvaged. Not much and not for long. We'll start laying new rail in the mountain sections, Colorado first. We'll get the new rail in two months."
"Oh, did Orren Boyle say he'll—"
"I've ordered the rail from Rearden Steel."
The slight, choked sound from Eddie Willers was his suppressed desire to cheer.
James Taggart did not answer at once. "Dagny, why don't you sit in the chair as one is supposed to?" he said at last; his voice was petulant.
"Nobody holds business conferences this way."
"I do."

She waited. He asked, his eyes avoiding hers, "Did you say that you have ordered the rail from Rearden?"
"Yesterday evening. I phoned him from Cleveland."
"But the Board hasn't authorized it. I haven't authorized it. You haven't consulted me."
She reached over, picked up the receiver of a telephone on his desk and handed it to him.
"Call Rearden and cancel it," she said.
James Taggart moved back in his chair. "I haven't said that," he answered angrily. "I haven't said that at all."
"Then it stands?"
"I haven't said that, either."
She turned. "Eddie, have them draw up the contract with Rearden Steel. Jim will sign it." She took a crumpled piece of notepaper from her pocket and tossed it to Eddie. "There's the figures and terms."
Taggart said, "But the Board hasn't—"
"The Board hasn't anything to do with it. They authorized you to buy the rail thirteen months ago. Where you buy it is up to you."
"I don't think it's proper to make such a decision without giving the Board a chance to express an opinion. And I don't see why I should be made to take the responsibility."
"I am taking it.”
"What about the expenditure which—"
"Rearden is charging less than Orren Boyle's Associated Steel."
"Yes, and what about Orren Boyle?"
"I've cancelled the contract. We had the right to cancel it six months ago."
"When did you do that?"
"Yesterday."
"But he hasn't called to have me confirm it."
"He won't."
Taggart sat looking down at his desk. She wondered why he resented the necessity of dealing with Rearden, and why his resentment had such an odd, evasive quality. Rearden Steel had been the chief supplier of Taggart Transcontinental for ten years, ever since the first Rearden furnace was fired, in the days when their father was president of the railroad. For ten years, most of their rail had come from Rearden Steel. There were not many firms in the country who delivered what was ordered, when and as ordered. Rearden Steel was one of them.
If she were insane, thought Dagny, she would conclude that her brother hated to deal with Rearden because Rearden did his job with superlative efficiency; but she would not conclude it, because she thought that such a feeling was not within the humanly possible.
"It isn't fair," said James Taggart.
"What isn't?"
"That we always give all our business to Rearden. It seems to me we should give somebody else a chance, too. Rearden doesn't need us; he's plenty big enough. We ought to help the smaller fellows to develop. Otherwise, we're just encouraging a monopoly."
"Don't talk tripe, Jim,"
"Why do we always have to get things from Rearden?"
"Because we always get them."
"I don't like Henry Rearden."
"I do. But what does that matter, one way or the other? We need rails and he's the only one who can give them to us."
"The human element is very important. You have no sense of the human element at all."

"We're talking about saving a railroad, Jim."
"Yes, of course, of course, but still, you haven't any sense of the human element."
"No. I haven't."
"If we give Rearden such a large order for steel rails—"
"They're not going to be steel. They're Rearden Metal."
She had always avoided personal reactions, but she was forced to break her rule when she saw the expression on Taggart's face. She burst out laughing.
Rearden Metal was a new alloy, produced by Rearden after ten years of experiments. He had placed it on the market recently. He had received no orders and had found no customers.
Taggart could not understand the transition from the laughter to the sudden tone of Dagny's voice; the voice was cold and harsh: "Drop it, Jim. I know everything you're going to say. Nobody's ever used it before. Nobody approves of Rearden Metal. Nobody's interested in it. Nobody wants it. Still, our rails are going to be made of Rearden Metal."
"But . . ." said Taggart, "but . . . but nobody's ever used it before!"
He observed, with satisfaction, that she was silenced by anger. He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points. But how one could feel a personal emotion about a metal alloy, and what such an emotion indicated, was incomprehensible to him; so he could make no use of his discovery.
"The consensus of the best metallurgical authorities," he said, "seems to be highly skeptical about Rearden Metal, contending—"
"Drop it, Jim."
"Well, whose opinion did you take?"
"I don't ask for opinions."
"What do you go by?"
"Judgment."
"Well, whose judgment did you take?"
"Mine."
"But whom did you consult about it?"
"Nobody."
"Then what on earth do you know about Rearden Metal?"
"That it's the greatest thing ever put on the market."
"Why?"
"Because it's tougher than steel, cheaper than steel and will outlast any hunk of metal in existence."
"But who says so?"
"Jim, I studied engineering in college. When I see things, I see them."
"What did you see?"
"Rearden's formula and the tests he showed me."
"Well, if it were any good, somebody would have used it, and nobody has." He saw the flash of anger, and went on nervously: "How can you know it's good? How can you be sure? How can you decide?"
"Somebody decides such things, Jim. Who?"
"Well, I don't see why we have to be the first ones. I don't see it at all."
"Do you want to save the Rio Norte Line or not?" He did not answer, "If the road could afford it, I would scrap every piece of rail over the whole system and replace it with Rearden Metal. All of it needs replacing. None of it will last much longer. But we can't afford it. We have to get out of a bad hole, first. Do you want us to pull through or not?"
"We're still the best railroad in the country. The others are doing much worse."
"Then do you want us to remain in the hole?"

"I haven't said that! Why do you always oversimplify things that way? And if you're worried about money, I don't see why you want to waste it on the Rio Norte Line, when the Phoenix-Durango has robbed us of all our business down there. Why spend money when we have no protection against a competitor who'll destroy our investment?"
"Because the Phoenix-Durango is an excellent railroad, but I intend to make the Rio Norte Line better than that. Because I'm going to beat the Phoenix-Durango, if necessary—only it won't be necessary, because there will be room for two or three railroads to make fortunes in Colorado. Because I'd mortgage the system to build a branch to any district around Ellis Wyatt."
"I'm sick of hearing about Ellis Wyatt."
He did not like the way her eyes moved to look at him and remained still, looking, for a moment.
"I don't see any need for immediate action," he said; he sounded offended. "Just what do you consider so alarming in the present situation of Taggart Transcontinental?"
"The consequences of your policies, Jim."
"Which policies?"
"That thirteen months' experiment with Associated Steel, for one. Your Mexican catastrophe, for another."
"The Board approved the Associated Steel contract," he said hastily.
"The Board voted to build the San Sebastian Line. Besides, I don't see why you call it a catastrophe."
"Because the Mexican government is going to nationalize your line any day now."
"That's a lie!" His voice was almost a scream. "That's nothing but vicious rumors! I have it on very good inside authority that—"
"Don't show that you're scared, Jim," she said contemptuously. He did not answer. "It's no use getting panicky about it now," she said. "All we can do is try to cushion the blow. It's going to be a bad blow. Forty million dollars is a loss from which we won't recover easily. But Taggart transcontinental has withstood many bad shocks in the past. I'll see to it that it withstands this one."
"I refuse to consider, I absolutely refuse to consider the possibility of the San Sebastian Line being nationalized!"
"All right. Don't consider it."
She remained silent. He said defensively, "I don't see why you're so eager to give a chance to Ellis Wyatt, yet you think it's wrong to take part in developing an underprivileged country that never had a chance."
"Ellis Wyatt is not asking anybody to give him a chance. And I'm not in business to give chances. I'm running a railroad."
"That's an extremely narrow view, it seems to me. I don't see why we should want to help one man instead of a whole nation."
"I'm not interested in. helping anybody. I want to make money."
"That's an impractical attitude. Selfish greed for profit is a thing of the past. It has been generally conceded that the interests of society as a whole must always be placed first in any business undertaking which—"
"How long do you intend to talk in order to evade the issue, Jim?"
"What issue?"
"The order for Rearden Metal."
He did not answer. He sat studying her silently. Her slender body, about to slump from exhaustion, was held erect by the straight line of the shoulders, and the shoulders were held by a conscious effort of will. Few people liked her face: the face was too cold, the eyes too intense; nothing could ever lend her the charm of a soft focus. The beautiful legs, slanting down from the chair's arm in the center of his vision, annoyed him; they spoiled the rest of his estimate.

She remained silent; he was forced to ask, "Did you decide to order it just like that, on the spur of the moment, over a telephone?"
"I decided it six months ago. I was waiting for Hank Rearden to get ready to go into production."
"Don't call him Hank Rearden. It's vulgar."
"That's what everybody calls him. Don't change the subject."
"Why did you have to telephone him last night?"
"Couldn't reach him sooner."
"Why didn't you wait until you got back to New York and—"
"Because I had seen the Rio Norte Line."
"Well, I need time to consider it, to place the matter before the Board, to consult the best—"
"There is no time."
"You haven't given me a chance to form an opinion."
"I don't give a damn about your opinion. I am not going to argue with you, with your Board or with your professors. You have a choice to make and you're going to make it now. Just say yes or no."
"That's a preposterous, high-handed, arbitrary way of-—"
"Yes or no?"
"That's the trouble with you. You always make it 'Yes' or 'No.' Things are never absolute like that. Nothing is absolute."
"Metal rails are. Whether we get them or not, is."
She waited. He did not answer. "Well?" she asked.
"Are you taking the responsibility for it?"
"I am."
"Go ahead," he said, and added, "but at your own risk. I won't cancel it, but I won't commit myself as to what I'll say to the Board."
"Say anything you wish."
She rose to go. He leaned forward across the desk, reluctant to end the interview and to end it so decisively.
"You realize, of course, that a lengthy procedure will be necessary to put this through," he said; the words sounded almost hopeful. "It isn't as simple as that."
"Oh sure," she said. "I'll send you a detailed report, which Eddie will prepare and which you won't read. Eddie will help you put it through the works. I'm going to Philadelphia tonight to see Rearden. He and I have a lot of work to do." She added, "It's as simple as that, Jim."
She had turned to go, when he spoke again—and what he said seemed bewilderingly irrelevant. "That's all right for you, because you're lucky. Others can't do it."
"Do what?"
"Other people are human. They're sensitive. They can't devote their whole life to metals and engines. You're lucky—you've never had any feelings. You've never felt anything at all."
As she looked at him, her dark gray eyes went slowly from astonishment to stillness, then to a strange expression that resembled a look of weariness, except that it seemed to reflect much more than the endurance of this one moment.
"No, Jim," she said quietly, "I guess I've never felt anything at all." Eddie Willers followed her to her office. Whenever she returned, he felt as if the world became clear, simple, easy to face—and he forgot his moments of shapeless apprehension. He was the only person who found it completely natural that she should be the Operating Vice-President of a great railroad, even though she was a woman. She had told him, when he was ten years old, that she would run the railroad some day. It did not astonish him now, just as it had not astonished him that day in a clearing of the woods.

When they entered her office, when he saw her sit down at the desk and glance at the memos he had left for her—he felt as he did in his car when the motor caught on and the wheels could move forward.
He was about to leave her office, when he remembered a matter he had not reported. "Owen Kellogg of the Terminal Division has asked me for an appointment to see you," he said.
She looked up, astonished. "That's funny. I was going to send for him. Have him come up. I want to see him. . . . Eddie," she added suddenly, "before I start, tell them to get me Ayers of the Ayers Music Publishing Company on the phone."
"The Music Publishing Company?" he repeated incredulously.
"Yes. There's something I want to ask him."
When the voice of Mr. Ayers, courteously eager, inquired of what service he could be to her, she asked, "Can you tell me whether Richard Halley has written a new piano concerto, the Fifth?"
"A fifth concerto, Miss Taggart? Why, no, of course he hasn't."
"Are you sure?"
"Quite sure, Miss Taggart. He has not written anything for eight years."
"Is he still alive?"
"Why, yes—that is, I can't say for certain, he has dropped out of public life entirely—but I'm sure we would have heard of it if he had died."
"If he wrote anything, would you know about it?"
"Of course. We would be the first to know. We publish all of his work. But he has stopped writing."
"I see. Thank you."
When Owen Kellogg entered her office, she looked at him with satisfaction. She was glad to see that she had been right in her vague recollection of his appearance—his face had the same quality as that of the young brakeman on the train, the face of the kind of man with whom she could deal.
"Sit down, Mr. Kellogg," she said, but he remained standing in front of her desk.
"You had asked me once to let you know if I ever decided to change my employment, Miss Taggart," he said. "So I came to tell you that I am quitting."
She had expected anything but that; it took her a moment before she asked quietly, "Why?"
"For a personal reason."
"Were you dissatisfied here?"
"No."
"Have you received a better offer?"
"No."
"What railroad are you going to?"
"I'm not going to any railroad, Miss Taggart."
"Then what job are you taking?"
"I have not decided that yet."
She studied him, feeling slightly uneasy. There was no hostility in his face; he looked straight at her, he answered simply, directly; he spoke like one who has nothing to hide, or to show; the face was polite and empty.
"Then why should you wish to quit?"
"It's a personal matter."
"Are you ill? Is it a question of your health?"
"No."
"Are you leaving the city?"
"No."
"Have you inherited money that permits you to retire?"
"No."
"Do you intend to continue working for a living?"

"Yes."
"But you do not wish to work for Taggart Transcontinental?"
"No."
"In that case, something must have happened here to cause your decision. What?"
"Nothing, Miss Taggart."
"I wish you'd tell me. I have a reason for wanting to know."
"Would you take my word for it, Miss Taggart?"
"Yes."
"No person, matter or event connected with my job here had any bearing upon my decision."
"You have no specific complaint against Taggart Transcontinental?"
"None."
"Then I think you might reconsider when you hear what I have to offer you."
"I'm sorry, Miss Taggart. I can't."
"May I tell you what I have in mind?"
"Yes, if you wish."
"Would you take my word for it that I decided to offer you the post I'm going to offer, before you asked to see me? I want you to know that."
"I will always take your word, Miss Taggart."
"It's the post of Superintendent of the Ohio Division. It's yours, if you want it."
His face showed no reaction, as if the words had no more significance for him than for a savage who had never heard of railroads.
"I don't want it, Miss Taggart," he answered.
After a moment, she said, her voice tight, "Write your own ticket, Kellogg. Name your price, I want you to stay. I can match anything any other railroad offers you."
"I am not going to work for any other railroad."
"I thought you loved your work."
This was the first sign of emotion in him, just a slight widening of his eyes and an oddly quiet emphasis in his voice when he answered, "I do."
"Then tell me what it is that I should say in order to hold you!" It had been involuntary and so obviously frank that he looked at her as if it had reached him.
"Perhaps I am being unfair by coming here to tell you that I'm quitting, Miss Taggart. I know that you asked me to tell you because you wanted to have a chance to make me a counter-offer. So if I came, it looks as if I'm open to a deal. But I'm not. I came only because I . . . I wanted to keep my word to you."
That one break in his voice was like a sudden flash that told her how much her interest and her request had meant to him; and that his decision had not been an easy one to make.
"Kellogg, is there nothing I can offer you?" she asked.
"Nothing, Miss Taggart. Nothing on earth."
He turned to go. For the first time in her life, she felt helpless and beaten.
"Why?" she asked, not addressing him.
He stopped. He shrugged and smiled—he was alive for a moment and it was the strangest smile she had ever seen: it held secret amusement, and heartbreak, and an infinite bitterness. He answered: "Who is John Galt?"

CHAPTER II
THE CHAIN
It began with a few lights. As a train of the Taggart line rolled toward Philadelphia, a few brilliant, scattered lights appeared in the darkness; they seemed purposeless in the empty plain, yet too powerful to have no purpose. The passengers watched them idly, without interest.
The black shape of a structure came next, barely visible against the sky, then a big building, close to the tracks; the building was dark, and the reflections of the train lights streaked across the solid glass of its walls.
An oncoming freight train hid the view, filling the windows with a rushing smear of noise. In a sudden break above the fiat cars, the passengers saw distant structures under a faint, reddish glow in the sky; the glow moved in irregular spasms, as if the structures were breathing.
When the freight train vanished, they saw angular buildings wrapped in coils of steam. The rays of a few strong lights cut straight sheafs through the coils. The steam was red as the sky.
The thing that came next did not look like a building, but like a shell of checkered glass enclosing girders, cranes and trusses in a solid, blinding, orange spread of flame.
The passengers could not grasp the complexity of what seemed to be a city stretched for miles, active without sign of human presence. They saw towers that looked like contorted skyscrapers, bridges hanging in mid-air, and sudden wounds spurting fire from out of solid walls. They saw a line of glowing cylinders moving through the night; the cylinders were red-hot metal.
An office building appeared, close to the tracks. The big neon sign on its roof lighted the interiors of the coaches as they went by. It said: REARDEN STEEL.
A passenger, who was a professor of economics, remarked to his companion: "Of what importance is an individual in the titanic collective achievements of our industrial age?" Another, who was a journalist, made a note for future use in his column: "Hank Rearden is the kind of man who sticks his name on everything he touches. You may, from this, form your own opinion about the character of Hank Rearden."
The train was speeding on into the darkness when a red gasp shot to the sky from behind a long structure. The passengers paid no attention; one more heat of steel being poured was not an event they had been taught to notice.
It was the first heat for the first order of Rearden Metal.
To the men at the tap-hole of the furnace inside the mills, the first break of the liquid metal into the open came as a shocking sensation of morning. The narrow streak pouring through space had the pure white color of sunlight. Black coils of steam were boiling upward, streaked with violent red. Fountains of sparks shot in beating spasms, as from broken arteries. The air seemed torn to rags, reflecting a raging flame that was not there, red blotches whirling and running through space, as if not to be contained within a man-made structure, as if about to consume the columns, the girders, the bridges of cranes overhead. But the liquid metal had no aspect of violence. It was a long white curve with the texture of satin and the friendly radiance of a smile. It flowed obediently through a spout of clay, with two brittle borders to restrain it. It fell through twenty feet of space, down into a ladle that held two hundred tons. A flow of stars hung above the stream, leaping out of its placid smoothness, looking delicate as lace and innocent as children's sparklers.
Only at a closer glance could one notice that the white satin was boiling. Splashes flew out at times and fell to the ground below: they were metal and, cooling while hitting the soil, they burst into flame.

Two hundred tons of a metal which was to be harder than steel, running liquid at a temperature of four thousand degrees, had the power to annihilate every wall of the structure and every one of the men who worked by the stream. But every inch of its course, every pound of its pressure and the content of every molecule within it, were controlled and made by a conscious intention that had worked upon it for ten years.
Swinging through the darkness of the shed, the red glare kept stashing the face of a man who stood in a distant corner; he stood leaning against a column, watching. The glare cut a moment's wedge across his eyes, which had the color and quality of pale blue ice—then across the black web of the metal column and the ash-blond strands of his hair— then across the belt of his trenchcoat and the pockets where he held his hands. His body was tall and gaunt; he had always been too tall for those around him. His face was cut by prominent cheekbones and by a few sharp lines; they were not the lines of age, he had always had them: this had made him look old at twenty, and young now, at forty-five.
Ever since he could remember, he had been told that his face was ugly, because it was unyielding, and cruel, because it was expressionless. It remained expressionless now, as he looked at the metal. He was Hank Rearden.
The metal came rising to the top of the ladle and went running over with arrogant prodigality. Then the blinding white trickles turned to glowing brown, and in one more instant they were black icicles of metal, starting to crumble off. The slag was crusting in thick, brown ridges that looked like the crust of the earth. As the crust grew thicker, a few craters broke open, with the white liquid still boiling within.
A man came riding through the air, in the cab of a crane overhead. He pulled a lever by the casual movement of one hand: steel hooks came down on a chain, seized the handles of the ladle, lifted it smoothly like a bucket of milk—and two hundred tons of metal went sailing through space toward a row of molds waiting to be filled.
Hank Rearden leaned back, closing his eyes. He felt the column trembling with the rumble of the crane. The job was done, he thought.
A worker saw him and grinned in understanding, like a fellow accomplice in a great celebration, who knew why that tall, blond figure had to be present here tonight. Rearden smiled in answer: it was the only salute he had received. Then he started back for his office, once again a figure with an expressionless face.
It was late when Hank Rearden left his office that night to walk from his mills to his house. It was a walk of some miles through empty country, but he had felt like doing it, without conscious reason.
He walked, keeping one hand in his pocket, his fingers closed about a bracelet. It was made of Rearden Metal, in the shape of a chain. His fingers moved, feeling its texture once in a while. It had taken ten years to make that bracelet. Ten years, he thought, is a long time. The road was dark, edged with trees. Looking up, he could see a few leaves against the stars; the leaves were twisted and dry, ready to fall.
There were distant lights in the windows of houses scattered through the countryside; but the lights made the road seem lonelier.
He never felt loneliness except when he was happy. He turned, once in a while, to look back at the red glow of the sky over the mills. He did not think of the ten years. What remained of them tonight was only a feeling which he could not name, except that it was quiet and solemn. The feeling was a sum, and he did not have to count again the parts that had gone to make it. But the parts, unrecalled, were there, within the feeling. They were the nights spent at scorching ovens in the research laboratory of the mills—-the nights spent in the workshop of his home, over sheets of paper which he filled with formulas, then tore up in angry failure—-the days when the young

scientists of the small staff he had chosen to assist him waited for instructions like soldiers ready for a hopeless battle, having exhausted their ingenuity, still willing, but silent, with the unspoken sentence hanging in the air: "Mr. Rearden, it can't be done—"—the meals, interrupted and abandoned at the sudden flash of a new thought, a thought to be pursued at once, to be tried, to be tested, to be worked on for months, and to be discarded as another failure——the moments snatched from conferences, from contracts, from theduties of running the best steel mills in the country, snatched almostguiltily, as for a secret love——the one thought held immovably across a span of ten years, undereverything he did and everything he saw, the thought held in his mindwhen he looked at the buildings of a city, at the track of a railroad, atthe light in the windows of a distant farmhouse, at the knife in the handsof a beautiful woman cutting a piece of fruit at a banquet, the thought ofa metal alloy that would do more than steel had ever done, a metal thatwould be to steel what steel had been to iron——the acts of self-racking when he discarded a hope or a sample,not permitting himself to know that he was tired, not giving himself timeto feel, driving himself through the wringing torture of: "not good enough . . . still not good enough . . ." and going on with no motor save the conviction that it could be done— —then the day when it was done and its result was called Rearden Metal— —these were the things that had come to white heat, had melted and fused within him, and their alloy was a strange, quiet feeling that made him smile at the countryside in the darkness and wonder why happiness could hurt.
After a while, he realized that he was thinking of his past, as if certain days of it were spread before him, demanding to be seen again. He did not want to look at them; he despised memories as a pointless indulgence. But then he understood that he thought of them tonight in honor of that piece of metal in his pocket. Then he permitted himself to look.
He saw the day when he stood on a rocky ledge and felt a thread of sweat running from his temple down his neck. He was fourteen years old and it was his first day of work in the iron mines of Minnesota. He was trying to learn to breathe against the scalding pain in his chest. He stood, cursing himself, because he had made up his mind that he would not be tired. After a while, he went back to his task; he decided that pain was not a valid reason for stopping, He saw the day when he stood at the window of his office and looked at the mines; he owned them as of that morning. He was thirty years old. What had gone on in the years between did not matter, just as pain had not mattered. He had worked in mines, in foundries, in the steel mills of the north, moving toward the purpose he had chosen. All he remembered of those jobs was that the men around him had never seemed to know what to do, while he had always known. He remembered wondering why so many iron mines were closing, just as these had been about to close until he took them over. He looked at the shelves of rock in the distance. Workers were putting up a new sign above a gate at the end of a road: Rearden Ore.
He saw an evening when he sat slumped across his desk in that office.
It was late and his staff had left; so he could lie there alone, unwitnessed. He was tired. It was as if he had run a race against his own body, and all the exhaustion of years, which he had refused to acknowledge, had caught him at once and flattened him against the desk top. He felt nothing, except the desire not to move. He did not have the strength to feel—not even to suffer. He had burned everything there was to burn within him; he had scattered so many sparks to start so many things— and he wondered whether someone could give him now the spark he needed, now when he felt unable ever to rise again. He asked himself who had started him and kept him going. Then he raised his head.

Slowly, with the greatest effort of his life, he made his body rise until he was able to sit upright with only one hand pressed to the desk and a trembling arm to support him.
He never asked that question again. He saw the day when he stood on a hill and looked at a grimy wasteland of structures that had been a steel plant. It was closed and given up. He had bought it the night before. There was a strong wind and a gray light squeezed from among the clouds. In that light, he saw the brown-red of rust, like dead blood, on the steel of the giant cranes—and bright, green, living weeds, like gorged cannibals, growing over piles of broken glass at the foot of walls made of empty frames. At a gate in the distance, he saw the black silhouettes of men. They were the unemployed from the rotting hovels of what had once been a prosperous town.
They stood silently, looking at the glittering car he had left at the gate of the mills; they wondered whether the man on the hill was the Hank Rearden that people were talking about, and whether it was true that the mills were to be reopened. "The historical cycle of steel-making in Pennsylvania is obviously running down," a newspaper had said, "and experts agree that Henry Rearden's venture into steel is hopeless. You may soon witness the sensational end of the sensational Henry Rearden." That was ten years ago. Tonight, the cold wind on his face felt like the wind of that day. He turned to look back. The red glow of the mills breathed in the sky, a sight as life-giving as a sunrise. These had been his stops, the stations which an express had reached and passed. He remembered nothing distinct of the years between them; the years were blurred, like a streak of speed.
Whatever it was, he thought, whatever the strain and the agony, they were worth it, because they had made him reach this day—this day when the first heat of the first order of Rearden Metal had been poured, to become rails for Taggart Transcontinental.
He touched the bracelet in his pocket. He had had it made from that first poured metal. It was for his wife. As he touched it, he realized suddenly that he had thought of an abstraction called "his wife"—not of the woman to whom he was married.
He felt a stab of regret, wishing he had not made the bracelet, then a wave of self-reproach for the regret. He shook his head. This was not the time for his old doubts. He felt that he could forgive anything to anyone, because happiness was the greatest agent of purification. He felt certain that every living being wished him well tonight. He wanted to meet someone, to face the first stranger, to stand disarmed and open, and to say, "Look at me." People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been—for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy.
The dark road had risen imperceptibly to the top of a hill. He stopped and turned. The red glow was a narrow strip, far to the west. Above it, small at a distance of miles, the words of a neon sign stood written on the blackness of the sky: REARDEN STEEL. He stood straight, as if before a bench of judgment. He thought that in the darkness of this night other signs were lighted over the country: Rearden Ore—Rearden Coal—Rearden Limestone. He thought of the days behind him. He wished it were possible to light a neon sign above them, saying: Rearden Life.
He turned sharply and walked on. As the road came closer to his house, he noticed that his steps were slowing down and that something was ebbing away from his mood. He felt a dim reluctance to enter his home, which he did not want to feel. No, he thought, not tonight; they'll understand it, tonight. But he did not know, he had never defined, what it was that he wanted them to understand.

He saw lights in the windows of the living room, when he approached his house. The house stood on a hill, rising before him like a big white bulk; it looked naked, with a few semi-colonial pillars for reluctant ornament; it had the cheerless look of a nudity not worth revealing.
He was not certain whether his wife noticed him when he entered the living room. She sat by the fireplace, talking, the curve of her arm floating in graceful emphasis of her words. He heard a small break in her voice, and thought that she had seen him, but she did not look up and her sentence went on smoothly; he could not be certain. "—but it's just that a man of culture is bored with the alleged wonders of purely material ingenuity," she was saying. "He simply refuses to get excited about plumbing."
Then she turned her head, looked at Rearden in the shadows across the long room, and her arms spread gracefully, like two swan necks by her sides.
"Why, darling," she said in a bright tone of amusement, "isn't it too early to come home? Wasn't there some slag to sweep or tuyeres to polish?"
They all turned to him—his mother, his brother Philip and Paul Larkin, their old friend.
"I'm sorry," he answered. "I know I'm late."
"Don't say you're sorry," said his mother. "You could have telephoned." He looked at her, trying vaguely to remember something.
"You promised to be here for dinner tonight."
"Oh, that's right, I did. I'm sorry. But today at the mills, we poured—" He stopped; he did not know what made him unable to utter the one thing he had come home to say; he added only, "It's just that I . . . forgot."
"That's what Mother means," said Philip.
"Oh, let him get his bearings, he's not quite here yet, he's still at the mills," his wife said gaily. "Do take your coat off, Henry."
Paul Larkin was looking at him with the devoted eyes of an inhibited dog. "Hello, Paul," said Rearden. "When did you get in?"
"Oh, I just hopped down on the five thirty-five from New York." Larkin was smiling in gratitude for the attention.
"Trouble?"
"Who hasn't got trouble these days?" Larkin's smile became resigned, to indicate that the remark was merely philosophical. "But no, no special trouble this time. I just thought I'd drop in to see you."
His wife laughed. "You've disappointed him, Paul." She turned to Rearden. "Is it an inferiority complex or a superiority one, Henry? Do you believe that nobody can want to see you just for your own sake, or do you believe that nobody can get along without your help?”
He wanted to utter an angry denial, but she was smiling at him as if this were merely a conversational joke, and he had no capacity for the sort of conversations which were not supposed to be meant, so he did not answer. He stood looking at her, wondering about the things he had never been able to understand.
Lillian Rearden was generally regarded as a beautiful woman. She had a tall, graceful body, the kind that looked well in high-waisted gowns of the Empire style, which she made it a practice to wear. Her exquisite profile belonged to a cameo of the same period: its pure, proud lines and the lustrous, light brown waves of her hair, worn with classical simplicity, suggested an austere, imperial beauty. But when she turned full-face, people experienced a small shock of disappointment.
Her face was not beautiful. The eyes were the flaw: they were vaguely pale, neither quite gray nor brown, lifelessly empty of expression. Rearden had always wondered, since she seemed amused so often, why there was no gaiety in her face.
"We have met before, dear," she said, in answer to his silent scrutiny, "though you don't seem to be sure of it."

"Have you had any dinner, Henry?" his mother asked; there was a reproachful impatience in her voice, as if his hunger were a personal insult to her.
"Yes . . . No . . . I wasn't hungry."
"I'd better ring to have them—"
"No, Mother, not now, it doesn't matter."
"That's the trouble I've always had with you." She was not looking at him, but reciting words into space. "It's no use trying to do things for you, you don't appreciate it. I could never make you eat properly."
"Henry, you work too hard," said Philip. "It's not good for you."
Rearden laughed. "I like it."
"That's what you tell yourself. It's a form of neurosis, you know. When a man drowns himself in work, it's because he's trying to escape from something. You ought to have a hobby."
"Oh, Phil, for Christ's sake!" he said, and regretted the irritation in his voice.
Philip had always been in precarious health, though doctors had found no specific defect in his loose, gangling body. He was thirty-eight, but his chronic weariness made people think at times that he was older than his brother.
"You ought to learn to have some fun," said Philip. "Otherwise, you'll become dull and narrow. Single-tracked, you know. You ought to get out of your little private shell and take a look at the world. You don't want to miss life, the way you're doing."
Fighting anger, Rearden told himself that this was Philip's form of solicitude. He told himself that it would be unjust to feel resentment: they were all trying to show their concern for him—and he wished these were not the things they had chosen for concern.
"I had a pretty good time today, Phil," he answered, smiling—and wondered why Philip did not ask him what it was.
He wished one of them would ask him. He was finding it hard to concentrate. The sight of the running metal was still burned into his mind, filling his consciousness, leaving no room for anything else.
"You might have apologized, only I ought to know better than to expect it." It was his mother's voice; he turned: she was looking at him with that injured look which proclaims the long-bearing patience of the defenseless.
"Mrs. Beecham was here for dinner," she said reproachfully.
"What?"
"Mrs. Beecham. My friend Mrs. Beecham."
"Yes?"
"I told you about her, I told you many times, but you never remember anything I say. Mrs. Beecham was so anxious to meet you, but she had to leave after dinner, she couldn't wait, Mrs. Beecham is a very busy person. She wanted so much to tell you about the wonderful work we're doing in our parish school, and about the classes in metal craftsmanship, and about the beautiful wrought-iron doorknobs that the little slum children are making all by themselves."
It took the whole of his sense of consideration to force himself to answer evenly, "I'm sorry if I disappointed you, Mother."
"You're not sorry. You could've been here if you'd made the effort. But when did you ever make an effort for anybody but yourself? You're not interested in any of us or in anything we do. You think that if you pay the bills, that's enough, don't you? Money! That's all you know. And all you give us is money. Have you ever given us any time?"
If this meant that she missed him, he thought, then it meant affection, and if it meant affection, then he was unjust to experience a heavy, murky

feeling which kept him silent lest his voice betray that the feeling was disgust.
"You don't care," her voice went half-spitting, half-begging on. "Lillian needed you today for a very important problem, but I told her it was no use waiting to discuss it with you."
"Oh, Mother, it's not important!" said Lillian. "Not to Henry."
He turned to her. He stood in the middle of the room, with his trenchcoat still on, as if he were trapped in an unreality that would not become real to him.
"It's not important at all," said Lillian gaily; he could not tell whether her voice was apologetic or boastful. "It's not business. It's purely non-commercial."
"What is it?"
"Just a party I'm planning to give."
"A party?"
"Oh, don't look frightened, it's not for tomorrow night. I know that you're so very busy, but it's for three months from now and I want it to be a very big, very special affair, so would you promise me to be here that night and not in Minnesota or Colorado or California?"
She was looking at him in an odd manner, speaking too lightly and too purposefully at once, her smile overstressing an air of innocence and suggesting something like a hidden trump card.
"Three months from now?" he said. "But you know that I can't tell what urgent business might come up to call me out of town."
"Oh, I know! But couldn't I make a formal appointment with you, way in advance, just like any railroad executive, automobile manufacturer or junk—I mean, scrap—dealer? They say you never miss an appointment. Of course, I'd let you pick the date to suit your convenience." She was looking up at him, her glance acquiring some special quality of feminine appeal by being sent from under her lowered forehead up toward his full height; she asked, a little too casually and too cautiously, "The date I had in mind was December tenth, but would you prefer the ninth or the eleventh?"
"It makes no difference to me."
She said gently, "December tenth is our wedding anniversary, Henry."
They were all watching his face; if they expected a look of guilt, what they saw, instead, was a faint smile of amusement. She could not have intended this as a trap, he thought, because he could escape it so easily, by refusing to accept any blame for his forgetfulness and by leaving her spurned; she knew that his feeling for her was her only weapon. Her motive, he thought, was a proudly indirect attempt to test his feeling and to confess her own. A party was not his form of celebration, but it was hers. It meant nothing in his terms; in hers, it meant the best tribute she could offer to him and to their marriage. He had to respect her intention, he thought, even if he did not share her standards, even if he did not know whether he still cared for any tribute from her. He had to let her win, he thought, because she had thrown herself upon his mercy. He smiled, an open, unresentful smile in acknowledgment of her victory. "All right, Lillian," he said quietly, "I promise to be here on the night of December tenth."
"Thank you, dear." Her smile had a closed, mysterious quality; he wondered why he had a moment's impression that his attitude had disappointed them all.
If she trusted him, he thought, if her feeling for him was still alive, then he would match her trust. He had to say it; words were a lens to focus one's mind, and he could not use words for anything else tonight. "I'm sorry I'm late, Lillian, but today at the mills we poured the first heat of Rearden Metal."
There was a moment of silence. Then Philip said, "Well, that's nice."
The others said nothing.

He put his hand in his pocket. When he touched it, the reality of the bracelet swept out everything else; he felt as he had felt when the liquid metal had poured through space before him.
"I brought you a present, Lillian."
He did not know that he stood straight and that the gesture of his arm was that of a returning crusader offering his trophy to his love, when he dropped a small chain of metal into her lap.
Lillian Rearden picked it up, hooked on the tips of two straight fingers, and raised it to the light. The links were heavy, crudely made, the shining metal had an odd tinge, it was greenish-blue.
"What's that?" she asked.
"The first thing made from the first heat of the first order of Rearden Metal."
"You mean," she said, "it's fully as valuable as a piece of railroad rails?"
He looked at her blankly.
She jingled the bracelet, making it sparkle under the light. "Henry, it's perfectly wonderful! What originality! I shall be the sensation of New York, wearing jewelry made of the same stuff as bridge girders, truck motors, kitchen stoves, typewriters, and—what was it you were saying about it the other day, darling?—soup kettles?"
"God, Henry, but you're conceited!" said Philip.
Lillian laughed. "He's a sentimentalist. All men are. But, darling, I do appreciate it. It isn't the gift, it's the intention, I know."
"The intention's plain selfishness, if you ask me," said Rearden's mother. "Another man would bring a diamond bracelet, if he wanted to give his wife a present, because it's' her pleasure he'd think of, not his own. But Henry thinks that just because he's made a new kind of tin, why, it's got to be more precious than diamonds to everybody, just because it's he that's made it. That's the way he's been since he was five years old—the most conceited brat you ever saw—and I knew he'd grow up to be the most selfish creature on God's earth."
"No, it's sweet," said Lillian. "It's charming." She dropped the bracelet down on the table. She got up, put her hands on Rearden's shoulders, and raising herself on tiptoe, kissed him on the cheek, saying, "Thank you, dear."
He did not move, did not bend his head down to her. After a while, he turned, took off his coat and sat down by the fire, apart from the others. He felt nothing but an immense exhaustion.
He did not listen to their talk. He heard dimly that Lillian was arguing, defending him against his mother.
"I know him better than you do," his mother was saying. "Hank Rearden's not interested in man, beast or weed unless it's tied in some way to himself and his work. That's all he cares about. I've tried my best to teach him some humility, I've tried all my life, but I've failed."
He had offered his mother unlimited means to live as and where she pleased; he wondered why she had insisted that she wanted to live with him. His success, he had thought, meant something to her, and if it did, then it was a bond between them, the only kind of bond he recognized; if she wanted a place in the home of her successful son, he would not deny it to her.
"It's no use hoping to make a saint out of Henry, Mother," said Philip. "He wasn't meant to be one."
"Oh but, Philip, you're wrong!" said Lillian. "You're so wrong! Henry has all the makings of a saint. That's the trouble." What did they seek from him?—thought Rearden—what were they after? He had never asked anything of them; it was they who wished to hold him, they who pressed a claim on him—and the claim seemed to have the form of affection, but it was a form which he

found harder to endure than any sort of hatred. He despised causeless affection, just as he despised unearned wealth. They professed to love him for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which he could wish to be loved. He wondered what response they could hope to obtain from him in such manner—if his response was what they wanted.
And it was, he thought; else why those constant complaints, those unceasing accusations about his indifference? Why that chronic air of suspicion, as if they were waiting to be hurt? He had never had a desire to hurt them, but he had always felt their defensive, reproachful expectation; they seemed wounded by anything he said, it was not a matter of his words or actions, it was almost . . . almost as if they were Wounded by the mere fact of his being. Don't start imagining the insane —he told himself severely, struggling to face the riddle with the strictest of his ruthless sense of justice. He could not condemn them without understanding; and he could not understand.
Did he like them? No, he thought; he had wanted to like them, which was not the same. He had wanted it in the name of some unstated potentiality which he had once expected to see in any human being. He felt nothing for them now, nothing but the merciless zero of indifference, not even the regret of a loss. Did he need any person as part of his life? Did he miss the feeling he had wanted to feel? No, he thought. Had he ever missed it? Yes, he thought, in his youth; not any longer.
His sense of exhaustion was growing; he realized that it was boredom.
He owed them the courtesy of hiding it, he thought—and sat motionless, fighting a desire for sleep that was turning into physical pain.
His eyes were closing, when he felt two soft, moist fingers touching his hand: Paul Larkin had pulled a chair to his side and was leaning over for a private conversation.
"I don't care what the industry says about it, Hank, you've got a great product in Rearden Metal, a great product, it will make a fortune, like everything you touch."
"Yes," said Rearden, "it will."
"I just . . . I just hope you don't run into trouble."
"What trouble?"
"Oh, I don't know . . . the way things are nowadays . . . there's people, who . . . but how can we tell? . . . anything can happen. . . ."
"What trouble?"
Larkin sat hunched, looking up with his gentle, pleading eyes. His short, plumpish figure always seemed unprotected and incomplete, as if he needed a shell to shrink into at the slightest touch. His wistful eyes, his lost, helpless, appealing smile served as substitute for the shell. The smile was disarming, like that of a boy who throws himself at the mercy of an incomprehensible universe. He was fifty-three years old.
"Your public relations aren't any too good, Hank," he said. "You've always had a bad press."
"So what?"
"You're not popular, Hank."
"I haven't heard any complaints from my customers."
"That's not what I mean. You ought to hire yourself a good press agent to sell you to the public,"
"What for? It's steel that I'm selling."
"But you don't want to have the public against you. Public opinion, you know—it can mean a lot."
"I don't think the public's against me. And I don't think that it means a damn, one way or another,"
"The newspapers are against you."
"They have time to waste. I haven't."

"I don't like it, Hank. It's not good."
"What?"
"What they write about you."
"What do they write about me?"
"Well, you know the stuff. That you're intractable. That you're ruthless. That you won't allow anyone any voice in the running of your mills.
That your only goal is to make steel and to make money."
"But that is my only goal."
"But you shouldn't say it."
"Why not? What is it I'm supposed to say?"
"Oh, I don't know . . . But your mills—"
"They're my mills, aren't they?"
"Yes, but—but you shouldn't remind people of that too loudly. . . .
You know how it is nowadays. . . . They think that your attitude is anti-social."
"I don't give a damn what they think,"
Paul Larkin sighed.
"What's the matter, Paul? What are you driving at?"
"Nothing . . . nothing in particular. Only one never knows what can happen in times like these. . . . One has to be so careful . . ."
Rearden chuckled. "You're not trying to worry about me, are you?"
"It's just that I'm your friend, Hank. I'm your friend. You know how much I admire you."
Paul Larkin had always been unlucky. Nothing he touched ever came off quite well, nothing ever quite failed or succeeded. He was a businessman, but he could not manage to remain for long in any one line of business. At the moment, he was struggling with a modest plant that manufactured mining equipment.
He had clung to Rearden for years, in awed admiration. He came for advice, he asked for loans at times, but not often; the loans were modest and were always repaid, though not always on time. His motive in the relationship seemed to resemble the need of an anemic person who receives a kind of living transfusion from the mere sight of a savagely overabundant vitality.
Watching Larkin's efforts, Rearden felt what he did when he watched an ant struggling under the load of a matchstick. It's so hard for him, thought Rearden, and so easy for me. So he gave advice, attention and a tactful, patient interest, whenever he could.
"I'm your friend, Hank."
Rearden looked at him inquiringly.
Larkin glanced away, as if debating something in his mind. After a while, he asked cautiously, "How is your man in Washington?"
"Okay, I guess."
"You ought to be sure of it. It's important." He looked up at Rearden, and repeated with a kind of stressed insistence, as if discharging a painful moral duty, "Hank, it's very important."
"I suppose so."
"In fact, that's what I came here to tell you."
"For any special reason?"
Larkin considered it and decided that the duty was discharged. "No,"
he said.
Rearden disliked the subject. He knew that it was necessary to have a man to protect him from the legislature; all industrialists had to employ such men. But he had never given much attention to this aspect of his business; he could not quite convince himself that it was necessary.
An inexplicable kind of distaste, part fastidiousness, part boredom, stopped him whenever he tried to consider it.

"Trouble is, Paul," he said, thinking aloud, "that the men one has to pick for that job are such a crummy lot,"
Larkin looked away. "That's life," he said.
"Damned if I see why. Can you tell me that? What's wrong with the world?"
Larkin shrugged sadly. "Why ask useless questions? How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky? Who is John Galt?"
Rearden sat up straight. "No," he said sharply. "No. There's no reason to feel that way."
He got up. His exhaustion had gone while he talked about his business. He felt a sudden spurt of rebellion, a need to recapture and defiantly to reassert his own view of existence, that sense of it which he had held while walking home tonight and which now seemed threatened in some nameless manner.
He paced the room, his energy returning. He looked at his family.
They were bewildered, unhappy children—he thought—all of them, even his mother, and he was foolish to resent their ineptitude; it came from their helplessness, not from malice. It was he who had to make himself learn to understand them, since he had so much to give, since they could never share his sense of joyous, boundless power.
He glanced at them from across the room. His mother and Philip were engaged in some eager discussion; but he noted that they were not really eager, they were nervous. Philip sat in a low chair, his stomach forward, his weight on his shoulder blades, as if the miserable discomfort of his position were intended to punish the onlookers.
"What's the matter, Phil?" Rearden asked, approaching him. "You look done in."
"I've had a hard day," said Philip sullenly.
"You're not the only one who works hard," said his mother. "Others have problems, too—even if they're not billion-dollar, trans-super-continental problems like yours."
"Why, that's good. I always thought that Phil should find some interest of his own."
"Good? You mean you like to see your brother sweating his health away? It amuses you, doesn't it? I always thought it did."
"Why, no, Mother. I'd like to help."
"You don't have to help. You don't have to feel anything for any of us."
Rearden had never known what his brother was doing or wished to do. He had sent Philip through college, but Philip had not been able to decide on any specific ambition. There was something wrong, by Rearden's standards, with a man who did not seek any gainful employment, but he would not impose his standards on Philip; he could afford to support his brother and never notice the expense. Let him take it easy, Rearden had thought for years, let him have a chance to choose his career without the strain of struggling for a livelihood.
"What were you doing today, Phil?" he asked patiently.
"It wouldn't interest you."
"It does interest me. That's why I'm asking."
"I had to see twenty different people all over the place, from here to Redding to Wilmington."
"What did you have to see them about?"
"I am trying to raise money for Friends of Global Progress."
Rearden had never been able to keep track of the many organizations to which Philip belonged, nor to get a clear idea of their activities. He had heard Philip talking vaguely about this one for the last six months.
It seemed to be devoted to some sort of free lectures on psychology, folk music and co-operative farming. Rearden felt contempt for groups of that kind and saw no reason for a closer inquiry into their nature.

He remained silent. Philip added without being prompted, "We need ten thousand dollars for a vital program, but it's a martyr's task, trying to raise money. There's not a speck of social conscience left in people.
When I think of the kind of bloated money-bags I saw today—why, they spend more than that on any whim, but I couldn't squeeze just a hundred bucks a piece out of them, which was all I asked. They have no sense of moral duty, no . . . What are you laughing at?" he asked sharply. Rearden stood before him, grinning.
It was so childishly blatant, thought Rearden, so helplessly crude: the hint and the insult, offered together. It would be so easy to squash Philip by returning the insult, he thought—by returning an insult which would be deadly because it would be true—that he could not bring himself to utter it. Surely, he thought, the poor fool knows he's at my mercy, knows he's opened himself to be hurt, so I don't have to do it, and my not doing it is my best answer, which he won't be able to miss.
What sort of misery does he really live in, to get himself twisted quite so badly?
And then Rearden thought suddenly that he could break through Philip's chronic wretchedness for once, give him a shock of pleasure, the unexpected gratification of a hopeless desire. He thought: What do I care about the nature of his desire?—it's his, just as Rearden Metal was mine—it must mean to him what that meant to me—let's see him happy just once, it might teach him something—didn't I say that happiness is the agent of purification?—I'm celebrating tonight, so let him share in it—it will be so much for him, and so little for me.
"Philip," he said, smiling, "call Miss Ives at my office tomorrow.
She'll have a check for you for ten thousand dollars."
Philip stared at him blankly; it was neither shock nor pleasure; it was just the empty stare of eyes that looked glassy.
"Oh," said Philip, then added, "We'll appreciate it very much."
There was no emotion in his voice, not even the simple one of greed.
Rearden could not understand his own feeling: it was as if something leaden and empty were collapsing within him, he felt both the weight and the emptiness, together. He knew it was disappointment, but he wondered why it was so gray and ugly.
"It's very nice of you, Henry," Philip said dryly. "I'm surprised. I didn't expect it of you."
"Don't you understand it, Phil?" said Lillian, her voice peculiarly clear and lilting. "Henry's poured his metal today." She turned to Rearden. "Shall we declare it a national holiday, darling?"
"You're a good man, Henry," said his mother, and added, "but not often enough."
Rearden stood looking at Philip, as if waiting.
Philip looked away, then raised his eyes and held Rearden's glance, as if engaged in a scrutiny of his own.
"You don't really care about helping the underprivileged, do you?"
Philip asked—and Rearden heard, unable to believe it, that the tone of his voice was reproachful.
"No, Phil, I don't care about it at all. I only wanted you to be happy."
"But that money is not for me. I am not collecting it for any personal motive. I have no selfish interest in the matter whatever." His voice was cold, with a note of self-conscious virtue.
Rearden turned away. He felt a sudden loathing: not because the words were hypocrisy, but because they were true; Philip meant them.
"By the way, Henry," Philip added, "do you mind if I ask you to have Miss Ives give me the money in cash?" Rearden turned back to him, puzzled. "You see, Friends of Global Progress are a very progressive group and they have

always maintained that you represent the blackest element of social retrogression ha the country, so it would embarrass us, you know, to have your name on our list of contributors, because somebody might accuse us of being in the pay of Hank Rearden."
He wanted to slap Philip's face. But an almost unendurable contempt made him close his eyes, instead.
"All right," he said quietly, "you can have it in cash."
He walked away, to the farthest window of the room, and stood looking at the glow of the mills in the distance.
He heard Larkin's voice crying after him, "Damn it, Hank, you shouldn't have given it to him!"
Then Lillian's voice came, cold and gay: "But you're wrong, Paul, you're so wrong! What would happen to Henry's vanity if he didn't have us to throw alms to? What would become of his strength if he didn't have weaker people to dominate? What would he do with himself if he didn't keep us around as dependents? It's quite all right, really, I'm not criticizing him, it's just a law of human nature."
She took the metal bracelet and held it up, letting it glitter in the lamplight.
"A chain," she said. "Appropriate, isn't it? It's the chain by which he holds us all in bondage."

CHAPTER III
THE TOP AND THE BOTTOM
The ceiling was that of a cellar, so heavy and low that people stooped when crossing the room, as if the weight of the vaulting rested on their shoulders. The circular booths of dark red leather were built into walls of stone that looked eaten by age and dampness. There were no windows, only patches of blue light shooting from dents in the masonry, the dead blue light proper for use in blackouts. The place was entered by way of narrow steps that led down, as if descending deep under the ground. This was the most expensive barroom in New York and it was built on the roof of a skyscraper.
Four men sat at a table. Raised sixty floors above the city, they did not speak loudly as one speaks from a height in the freedom of air and space; they kept their voices low, as befitted a cellar.
"Conditions and circumstances, Jim," said Orren Boyle. "Conditions and circumstances absolutely beyond human control. We had everything mapped to roll those rails, but unforeseen developments set in which nobody could have prevented. If you'd only given us a chance, Jim."
"Disunity," drawled James Taggart, "seems to be the basic cause of all social problems. My sister has a certain influence with a certain element among our stockholders. Their disruptive tactics cannot always be defeated."
"You said it, Jim. Disunity, that's the trouble. It's my absolute opinion that in our complex industrial society, no business enterprise can succeed without sharing the burden of the problems of other enterprises."
Taggart took a sip of his drink and put it down again. "I wish they'd fire that bartender," he said.
"For instance, consider Associated Steel. We've got the most modern plant in the country and the best organization. That seems to me to be an indisputable fact, because we got the Industrial Efficiency Award of Globe Magazine last year. So we can maintain that we've done our best and nobody can blame us. But we cannot help it if the iron ore situation is a national problem. We could not get the ore, Jim."
Taggart said nothing. He sat with his elbows spread wide on the table top. The table was uncomfortably small, and this made it more uncomfortable for his three companions, but they did not seem to question his privilege.
"Nobody can get ore any longer," said Boyle. "Natural exhaustion of the mines, you know, and the wearing out of equipment, and shortages of materials, and difficulties of transportation, and other unavoidable conditions."
"The ore industry is crumbling. That's what's killing the mining equipment business," said Paul Larkin.
"It's been proved that every business depends upon every other business," said Orren Boyle. "So everybody ought to share the burdens of everybody else."
"That is, I think, true,” said Wesley Mouch. But nobody ever paid any attention to Wesley Mouch.
"My purpose," said Orren Boyle, "is the preservation of a free economy. It's generally conceded that free economy is now on trial. Unless it proves its social value and assumes its social responsibilities, the people won't stand for it. If it doesn't develop a public spirit, it's done for, make no mistake about that."
Orren Boyle had appeared from nowhere, five years ago, and had since made the cover of every national news magazine. He had started out with a hundred thousand dollars of his own and a two-hundred million-dollar loan from the government. Now he headed an enormous concern which had swallowed many

smaller companies. This proved, he liked to say, that individual ability still had a chance to succeed in the world.
"The only justification of private property," said Orren Boyle, "is public service."
"That is, I think, indubitable," said Wesley Mouch.
Orren Boyle made a noise, swallowing his liquor. He was a large man with big, virile gestures; everything about his person was loudly full of life, except the small black slits of his eyes.
"Jim," he said, "Rearden Metal seems to be a colossal kind of swindle."
"Uh-huh," said Taggart.
"I hear there's not a single expert who's given a favorable report on it."
"No, not one."
"We've been improving steel rails for generations, and increasing their weight. Now, is it true that these Rearden Metal rails are to be lighter than the cheapest grade of steel?"
"That's right," said Taggart. "Lighter."
"But it's ridiculous, Jim. It's physically impossible. For your heavy-duty, high-speed, main-line track?"
"That's right."
"But you're just inviting disaster."
"My sister is."
Taggart made the stem of his glass whirl slowly between two fingers.
There was a moment of silence.
"The National Council of Metal Industries," said Orren Boyle, "passed a resolution to appoint a committee to study the question of Rearden Metal, inasmuch as its use may be an actual public hazard."
"That is, in my opinion, wise," said Wesley Mouch.
"When everybody agrees," Taggart's voice suddenly went shrill, "when people are unanimous, how does one man dare to dissent? By what right? That's what I want to know—by what right?"
Boyle's eyes darted to Taggart's face, but the dim light of the room made it impossible to see faces clearly: he saw only a pale, bluish smear.
"When we think of the natural resources, at a time of critical shortage," Boyle said softly, "when we think of the crucial raw materials that are being wasted on an irresponsible private experiment, when we think of the ore . . ."
He did not finish. He glanced at Taggart again. But Taggart seemed to know that Boyle was waiting and to find the silence enjoyable.
"The public has a vital stake in natural resources, Jim, such as iron ore. The public can't remain indifferent to reckless, selfish waste by an anti-social individual. After all, private property is a trusteeship held for the benefit of society as a whole."
Taggart glanced at Boyle and smiled; the smile was pointed, it seemed to say that something in his words was an answer to something in the words of Boyle. "The liquor they serve here is swill. I suppose that's the price we have to pay for not being crowded by all kinds of rabble. But I do wish they'd recognize that they're dealing with experts.
Since I hold the purse strings, I expect to get my money's worth and at my pleasure."
Boyle did not answer; his face had become sullen. "Listen, Jim . . ."
he began heavily.
Taggart smiled. "What? I'm listening."
"Jim, you will agree, I'm sure, that there's nothing more destructive than a monopoly."
"Yes," said Taggart, "on the one hand. On the other, there's the blight of unbridled competition."

"That's true. That's very true. The proper course is always, in my opinion, in the middle. So it is, I think, the duty of society to snip the extremes, now isn't it?"
"Yes," said Taggart, "it is."
"Consider the picture in the iron-ore business. The national output seems to be falling at an ungodly rate. It threatens the existence of the whole steel industry. Steel mills are shutting down all over the country.
There's only one mining company that's lucky enough not to be affected by the general conditions. Its output seems to be plentiful and always available on schedule. But who gets the benefit of it? Nobody except its owner. Would you say that that's fair?"
"No," said Taggart, "it isn't fair."
"Most of us don't own iron mines. How can we compete with a man who's got a corner on God's natural resources? Is it any wonder that he can always deliver steel, while we have to struggle and wait and lose our customers and go out of business? Is it in the public interest to let one man destroy an entire industry?"
"No," said Taggart, "it isn't."
"It seems to me that the national policy ought to be aimed at the objective of giving everybody a chance at his fair share of iron ore, with a view toward the preservation of the industry as a whole. Don't you think so?"
"I think so."
Boyle sighed. Then he said cautiously, "But I guess there aren't many people in Washington capable of understanding a progressive social policy."
Taggart said slowly, "There are. No, not many and not easy to approach, but there are. I might speak to them."
Boyle picked up his drink and swallowed it in one gulp, as if he had heard all he had wanted to hear.
"Speaking of progressive policies, Orren," said Taggart, "you might ask yourself whether at a time of transportation shortages, when so many railroads are going bankrupt and large areas are left without rail service, whether it is in the public interest to tolerate wasteful duplication of services and the destructive, dog-eat-dog competition of newcomers in territories where established companies have historical priority."
"Well, now," said Boyle pleasantly, "that seems to be an interesting question to consider. I might discuss it with a few friends in the National Alliance of Railroads."
"Friendships," said Taggart in the tone of an idle abstraction, "are more valuable than gold." Unexpectedly, he turned to Larkin. "Don't you think so, Paul?"
"Why . . . yes," said Larkin, astonished. "Yes, of course."
"I am counting on yours."
"Huh?"
"I am counting on your many friendships."
They all seemed to know why Larkin did not answer at once; his shoulders seemed to shrink down, closer to the table. "If everybody could pull for a common purpose, then nobody would have to be hurt!"
he cried suddenly, in a tone of incongruous despair; he saw Taggart watching him and added, pleading, "I wish we didn't have to hurt anybody."
"That is an anti-social attitude," drawled Taggart. "People who are afraid, to sacrifice somebody have no business talking about a common purpose."
"But I'm a student of history," said Larkin hastily. "I recognize historical necessity."
"Good," said Taggart.
"I can't be expected to buck the trend of the whole world, can I?"
Larkin seemed to plead, but the plea was not addressed to anyone.

"Can I?"
"You can't, Mr. Larkin," said Wesley Mouch. "You and I are not to be blamed, if we—"
Larkin jerked his head away; it was almost a shudder; he could not bear to look at Mouch.
"Did you have a good time in Mexico, Orren?" asked Taggart, his voice suddenly loud and casual. All of them seemed to know that the purpose of their meeting was accomplished and whatever they had come here to understand was understood.
"Wonderful place, Mexico," Boyle answered cheerfully. "Very stimulating and thought-provoking. Their food rations are something awful, though. I got sick. But they're working mighty hard to put their country on its feet."
"How are things going down there?"
"Pretty splendid, it seems to me, pretty splendid. Right at the moment, however, they're . . . But then, what they're aiming at is the future. The People's State of Mexico has a great future. They'll beat us all in a few years."
"Did you go down to the San Sebastian Mines?"
The four figures at the table sat up straighter and tighter; all of them had invested heavily in the stock of the San Sebastian Mines.
Boyle did not answer at once, so that his voice seemed unexpected and unnaturally loud when it burst forth: "Oh, sure, certainly, that's what I wanted to see most."
"And?"
"And what?"
"How are things going?"
"Great. Great. They must certainly have the biggest deposits of copper on earth, down inside that mountain!"
"Did they seem to be busy?"
"Never saw such a busy place in my life."
"What were they busy doing?"
"Well, you know, with the kind of Spic superintendent they have down there, I couldn't understand half of what he was talking about, but they're certainly busy."
"Any . . . trouble of any kind?"
"Trouble? Not at San Sebastian. It's private property, the last piece of it left in Mexico, and that does seem to make a difference."
"Orren," Taggart asked cautiously, "what about those rumors that they're planning to nationalize the San Sebastian Mines?"
"Slander," said Boyle angrily, "plain, vicious slander. I know it for certain. I had dinner with the Minister of Culture and lunches with all the rest of the boys."
"There ought to be a law against irresponsible gossip," said Taggart sullenly. "Let's have another drink."
He waved irritably at a waiter. There was a small bar in a dark corner of the room, where an old, wizened bartender stood for long stretches of time without moving. When called upon, he moved with contemptuous slowness. His job was that of servant to men's relaxation and pleasure, but his manner was that of an embittered quack ministering to some guilty disease.
The four men sat in silence until the waiter returned with their drinks. The glasses he placed on the table were four spots of faint blue glitter in the semi-darkness, like four feeble jets of gas flame. Taggart reached for his glass and smiled suddenly.
"Let's drink to the sacrifices to historical necessity," he said, looking at Larkin.
There was a moment's pause; in a lighted room, it would have been the contest of two men holding each other's eyes; here, they were merely looking

at each other's eye sockets. Then Larkin picked up his glass, "It's my party, boys," said Taggart, as they drank.
Nobody found anything else to say. until Boyle spoke up with indifferent curiosity. "Say, Jim, I meant to ask you, what in hell's the matter with your train service down on the San Sebastian Line?"
"Why, what do you mean? What is the matter with it?"
"Well, I don't know, but running just one passenger train a day is—"
"One train?"
"—is pretty measly service, it seems to me, and what a train! You must have inherited those coaches from your great-grandfather, and he must have used them pretty hard. And where on earth did you get that wood-burning locomotive?"
"Wood-burning?'
"That's what I said, wood-burning. I never saw one before, except in photographs. What museum did you drag it out of? Now don't act as if you didn't know it, just tell me what's the gag?"
"Yes, of course I knew it," said Taggart hastily. "It was just . . .
You just happened to choose the one week when we had a little trouble with our motive power—our new engines are on order, but there's been a slight delay—you know what a problem we're having with the manufacturers of locomotives—but it's only temporary."
"Of course," said Boyle. "Delays can't be helped. It's the strangest train I ever rode on, though. Nearly shook my guts out."
Within a few minutes, they noticed that Taggart had become silent.
He seemed preoccupied with a problem of his own. When he rose abruptly, without apology, they rose, too, accepting it as a command.
Larkin muttered, smiling too strenuously, "It was a pleasure, Jim.
A pleasure. That's how great projects are born—over a drink with friends."
"Social reforms are slow," said Taggart coldly. "It is advisable to be patient and cautious." For the first time, he turned to Wesley Mouch.
"What I like about you, Mouch, is that you don't talk too much."
Wesley Mouch was Rearden's Washington man.
There was still a remnant of sunset light in the sky, when Taggart and Boyle emerged together into the street below. The transition was faintly shocking to them—the enclosed barroom led one to expect midnight darkness. A tall building stood outlined against the sky, sharp and straight like a raised sword. In the distance beyond it, there hung the calendar.
Taggart fumbled irritably with his coat collar, buttoning it against the chill of the streets. He had not intended to go back to the office tonight, but he had to go back. He had to see his sister.
". . . a difficult undertaking ahead of us, Jim," Boyle was saying, "a difficult undertaking, with so many dangers and complications and so much at stake . . ."
"It all depends," James Taggart answered slowly, "on knowing the people who make it possible. . . . That's what has to be known—who makes it possible."
Dagny Taggart was nine years old when she decided that she would run the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad some day. She stated it to herself when she stood alone between the rails, looking at the two straight lines of steel that went off into the distance and met in a single point. What she felt was an arrogant pleasure at the way the track cut through the woods: it did not belong in the midst of ancient trees, among green branches that hung down to meet green brush and the lonely spears of wild flowers—but there it was. The two steel lines were brilliant in the sun, and the black ties were like the rungs of a ladder which she had to climb.
It was not a sudden decision, but only the final seal of words upon something she had known long ago. In unspoken understanding, as if bound by a

vow it had never been necessary to take, she and Eddie Willers had given themselves to the railroad from the first conscious days of their childhood.
She felt a bored indifference toward the immediate world around her, toward other children and adults alike. She took it as a regrettable accident, to be borne patiently for a while, that she happened to be imprisoned among people who were dull. She had caught a glimpse of another world and she knew that it existed somewhere, the world that had created trains, bridges, telegraph wires and signal lights winking in the night. She had to wait, she thought, and grow up to that world.
She never tried to explain why she liked the railroad. Whatever it was that others felt, she knew that this was one emotion for which they had no equivalent and no response. She felt the same emotion in school, in classes of mathematics, the only lessons she liked. She felt the excitement of solving problems, the insolent delight of taking up a challenge and disposing of it without effort, the eagerness to meet another, harder test. She felt, at the same time, a growing respect for the adversary, for a science that was so clean, so strict, so luminously rational. Studying mathematics, she felt, quite simply and at once: "How great that men have done this" and "How wonderful that I'm so good at it." It was the joy of admiration and of one's own ability, growing together. Her feeling for the railroad was the same: worship of the skill that had gone to make it, of the ingenuity of someone's clean, reasoning mind, worship with a secret smile that said she would know how to make it better some day. She hung around the tracks and the roundhouses like a humble student, but the humility had a touch of future pride, a pride to be earned.
"You're unbearably conceited," was one of the two sentences she heard throughout her childhood, even though she never spoke of her own ability. The other sentence was: "You're selfish." She asked what was meant, but never received an answer. She looked at the adults, wondering how they could imagine that she would feel guilt from an undefined accusation.
She was twelve years old when she told Eddie Willers that she would run the railroad when they grew up. She was fifteen when it occurred to her for the first time that women did not run railroads and that people might object. To hell with that, she thought—and never worried about it again.
She went to work for Taggart Transcontinental at the age of sixteen.
Her father permitted it: he was amused and a little curious. She started as night operator at a small country station. She had to work nights for the first few years, while attending a college of engineering.
James Taggart began his career on the railroad at the same time; he was twenty-one. He started in the Department of Public Relations.
Dagny's rise among the men who operated Taggart Transcontinental was swift and uncontested. She took positions of responsibility because there was no one else to take them. There were a few rare men of talent around her, but they were becoming rarer every year. Her superiors, who held the authority, seemed afraid to exercise it, they spent their time avoiding decisions, so she told people what to do and they did it.
At every step of her rise, she did the work long before she was granted the title. It was like advancing through empty rooms. Nobody opposed her, yet nobody approved of her progress.
Her father seemed astonished and proud of her, but he said nothing and there was sadness in his eyes when he looked at her in the office She was twenty-nine years old when he died. "There has always been a Taggart to run the railroad," was the last thing he said to her. He looked at her with an odd glance: it had the quality of a salute and of compassion, together.
The controlling stock of Taggart Transcontinental was left to James Taggart. He was thirty-four when he became President of the railroad Dagny had expected the Board of Directors to elect him, but she had never been able

to understand why they did it so eagerly. They talked about tradition, the president had always been the eldest son of the Taggart family; they elected James Taggart in the same manner as they refused to walk under a ladder, to propitiate the same kind of fear. They talked about his gift of "making railroads popular," his "good press," his "Washington ability." He seemed unusually skillful at obtaining favors from the Legislature.
Dagny knew nothing about the field of "Washington ability" or what such an ability implied. But it seemed to be necessary, so she dismissed it with the thought that there were many kinds of work which were offensive, yet necessary, such as cleaning sewers; somebody had to do it, and Jim seemed to like it.
She had never aspired to the presidency; the Operating Department was her only concern. When she went out on the line, old railroad men, who hated Jim, said, "There will always be a Taggart to run the railroad," looking at her as her father had looked. She was armed against Jim by the conviction that he was not smart enough to harm the railroad too much and that she would always be able to correct whatever damage he caused.
At sixteen, sitting at her operator's desk, watching the lighted windows of Taggart trains roll past, she had thought that she had entered her kind of world. In the years since, she learned that she hadn't. The adversary she found herself forced to fight was not worth matching or beating; it was not a superior ability which she would have found honor in challenging; it was ineptitude—a gray spread of cotton that deemed soft and shapeless, that could offer no resistance to anything or anybody, yet managed to be a barrier in her way. She stood, disarmed, before the riddle of what made this possible. She could find no answer.
It was only in the first few years that she felt herself screaming silently, at times, for a glimpse of human ability, a single glimpse of clean, hard, radiant competence. She had fits of tortured longing for a friend or an enemy with a mind better than her own. But the longing passed. She had a job to do. She did not have time to feel pain; not often.
The first step of the policy that James Taggart brought to the railroad was the construction of the San Sebastian Line. Many men were responsible for it; but to Dagny, one name stood written across that venture, a name that wiped out all others wherever she saw it. It stood across five years of struggle, across miles of wasted track, across sheets of figures that recorded the losses of Taggart Transcontinental like a red trickle from a wound which would not heal—as it stood on the ticker tape of every stock exchange left in the world—as it stood on smokestacks in the red glare of furnaces melting copper—as it stood in scandalous headlines—as it stood on parchment pages recording the nobility of the centuries—as it stood on cards attached to flowers in the boudoirs of women scattered through three continents.
The name was Francisco d'Anconia.
At the age of twenty-three, when he inherited his fortune, Francisco d'Anconia had been famous as the copper king of the world. Now, at thirty-six, he was famous as the richest man and the most spectacularly worthless playboy on earth. He was the last descendant of one of the noblest families of Argentina. He owned cattle ranches, coffee plantations and most of the copper mines of Chile. He owned half of South America and sundry mines scattered through the United States as small change.
When Francisco d'Anconia suddenly bought miles of bare mountains in Mexico, news leaked out that he had discovered vast deposits of copper. He made no effort to sell stock in his venture; the stock was begged out of his hands, and he merely chose those whom he wished to favor from among the applicants. His financial talent was called phenomenal; no one had ever beaten him in any transaction—he added to his incredible fortune with every

deal he touched and every step he made, when he took the trouble to make it. Those who censured him most were first to seize the chance of riding on his talent, toward a share of his new wealth. James Taggart, Orren Boyle and their friends were among the heaviest stockholders of the project which Francisco d'Anconia had named the San Sebastian Mines.
Dagny was never able to discover what influences prompted James Taggart to build a railroad branch from Texas into the wilderness of San Sebastian. It seemed likely that he did not know it himself: like a field without a windbreak, he seemed open to any current, and the final sum was made by chance, A few among the Directors of Taggart Transcontinental objected to the project. The company needed all its resources to rebuild the Rio Norte Line; it could not do both. But James Taggart was the road's new president. It was the first year of his administration. He won.
The People's State of Mexico was eager to co-operate, and signed a contract guaranteeing for two hundred years the property right of Taggart Transcontinental to its railroad line in a country where no property rights existed. Francisco d'Anconia had obtained the same guaranty for his mines.
Dagny fought against the building of the San Sebastian Line. She fought by means of whoever would listen to her; but she was only an assistant in the Operating Department, too young, without authority, and nobody listened.
She was unable, then or since, to understand the motives of those who decided to build the line. Sitting as a helpless spectator, a minority member, at one of the Board meetings, she felt a strange evasiveness in the air of the room, in every speech, in every argument, as if the real reason of their decision were never stated, but clear to everyone except herself.
They spoke about the future importance of the trade with Mexico, about a rich stream of freight, about the large revenues assured to the exclusive carrier of an inexhaustible supply of copper. They proved it by citing Francisco d'Anconia's past achievements. They did not mention any mineralogical facts about the San Sebastian Mines. Few facts were available; the information which d'Anconia had released was not very specific; but they did not seem to need facts.
They spoke at great length about the poverty of the Mexicans and their desperate need of railroads, "They've never had a chance." "It is our duty to help an underprivileged nation to develop. A country, it seems to me, is its neighbors' keeper."
She sat, listening, and she thought of the many branch lines which Taggart Transcontinental had had to abandon; the revenues of the great railroad had been falling slowly for many years. She thought of the ominous need of repairs, ominously neglected over the entire system.
Their policy on the problem of maintenance was not a policy but a game they seemed to be playing with a piece of rubber that could be stretched a little, then a little more.
"The Mexicans, it seems to me, are a very diligent people, crushed by their primitive economy. How can they become industrialized if nobody lends them a hand?" "When considering an investment, we should, in my opinion, take a chance on human beings, rather than on purely material factors."
She thought of an engine that lay in a ditch beside the Rio Norte Line, because a splice bar had cracked. She thought of the five days when all traffic was stopped on the Rio Norte Line, because a retaining wall had collapsed, pouring tons of rock across the track.
"Since a man must think of the good of his brothers before he thinks of his own, it seems to me that a nation must think of its neighbors before it thinks of itself."
She thought of a newcomer called Ellis Wyatt whom people were beginning to watch, because his activity was the first trickle of a torrent of goods about to burst from the dying stretches of Colorado. The Rio Norte Line was being

allowed to run its way to a final collapse, just when its fullest efficiency was about to be needed and used.
"Material greed isn't everything. There are non-material ideals to consider." "I confess to a feeling of shame when I think that we own a huge network of railways, while the Mexican people have nothing but one or two inadequate lines." "The old theory of economic self-sufficiency has been exploded long ago. It is impossible for one country to prosper in the midst of a starving world."
She thought that to make Taggart Transcontinental what it had been once, long before her time, every available rail, spike and dollar was needed—and how desperately little of it was available.
They spoke also, at the same session, in the same speeches, about the efficiency of the Mexican government that held complete control of everything. Mexico had a great future, they said, and would become a dangerous competitor in a few years. "Mexico's got discipline," the men of the Board kept saying, with a note of envy in their voices.
James Taggart let it be understood—in unfinished sentences and undefined hints—that his friends in Washington, whom he never named, wished to see a railroad line built in Mexico, that such a line would be of great help in matters of international diplomacy, that the good will of the public opinion of the world would more than repay Taggart Transcontinental for its investment.
They voted to build the San Sebastian Line at a cost of thirty million dollars.
When Dagny left the Board room and walked through the clean, cold air of the streets, she heard two words repeated clearly, insistently in the numbed emptiness of her mind: Get out . . . Get out . . .
Get out.
She listened, aghast. The thought of leaving Taggart Transcontinental did not belong among the things she could hold as conceivable. She felt terror, not at the thought, but at the question of what had made her think it. She shook her head angrily; she told herself that Taggart Transcontinental would now need her more than ever.
Two of the Directors resigned; so did the Vice-President in Charge of Operation. He was replaced by a friend of James Taggart, Steel rail was laid across the Mexican desert—while orders were issued to reduce the speed of trains on the Rio Norte Line, because the track was shot. A depot of reinforced concrete, with marble columns and mirrors, was built amidst the dust of an unpaved square in a Mexican village—while a train of tank cars carrying oil went hurtling down an embankment and into a blazing junk pile, because a rail had split on the Rio Norte Line. Ellis Wyatt did not wait for the court to decide whether the accident was an act of God, as James Taggart claimed, He transferred the shipping of his oil to the Phoenix-Durango, an obscure railroad which was small and struggling, but struggling well.
This was the rocket that sent the Phoenix-Durango on its way. From then on, it grew, as Wyatt Oil grew, as factories grew in nearby valleys —as a band of rails and ties grew, at the rate of two miles a month, across the scraggly fields of Mexican corn.
Dagny was thirty-two years old, when she told James Taggart that she would resign. She had run the Operating Department for the past three years, without title, credit or authority. She was defeated by loathing for the hours, the days, the nights she had to waste circumventing the interference of Jim's friend who bore the title of Vice-President in Charge of Operation. The man had no policy, and any decision he made was always hers, but he made it only after he had made every effort to make it impossible. What she delivered to her brother was an ultimatum. He gasped, "But, Dagny, you're a

woman! A woman as Operating Vice-President? It's unheard of! The Board won't consider it!" "Then I'm through," she answered.
She did not think of what she would do with the rest of her life. To face leaving Taggart Transcontinental was like waiting to have her legs amputated; she thought she would let it happen, then take up the load of whatever was left.
She never understood why the Board of Directors voted unanimously to make her Vice-President in Charge of Operation.
It was she who finally gave them their San Sebastian Line. When she took over, the construction had been under way for three years; one third of its track was laid; the cost to date was beyond the authorized total. She fired Jim's friends and found a contractor who completed the job in one year.
The San Sebastian Line was now in operation. No surge of trade had come across the border, nor any trains loaded with copper. A few carloads came clattering down the mountains from San Sebastian, at long intervals. The mines, said Francisco d'Anconia, were still in the process of development. The drain on Taggart Transcontinental had not stopped.
Now she sat at the desk in her office, as she had sat for many evenings, trying to work out the problem of what branches could save the system and in how many years.
The Rio Norte Line, when rebuilt, would redeem the rest. As she looked at the sheets of figures announcing losses and more losses, she did not think of the long, senseless agony of the Mexican venture. She thought of a telephone call. "Hank, can you save us? Can you give us rail on the shortest notice and the longest credit possible?" A quiet, steady voice had answered, "Sure."
The thought was a point of support. She leaned over the sheets of paper on her desk, finding it suddenly easier to concentrate. There was one thing, at least, that could be counted upon not to crumble when needed.
James Taggart crossed the anteroom of Dagny's office, still holding the kind of confidence he had felt among his companions at the barroom half an hour ago. When he opened her door, the confidence vanished. He crossed the room to her desk like a child being dragged to punishment, storing the resentment for all his future years.
He saw a head bent over sheets of paper, the light of the desk lamp glistening on strands of disheveled hair, a white shirt clinging to her shoulders, its loose folds suggesting the thinness of her body.
"What is it, Jim?"
"What are you trying to pull on the San Sebastian Line?"
She raised her head. "Pull? Why?"
"What sort of schedule are we running down there and what kind of trains?"
She laughed; the sound was gay and a little weary. "You really ought to read the reports sent to the president's office, Jim, once in a while."
"What do you mean?"
"We've been running that schedule and those trains on the San Sebastian for the last three months."
"One passenger train a day?"
"—in the morning. And one freight train every other night."
"Good God! On an important branch like that?"
"The important branch can't pay even for those two trams."
"But the Mexican people expect real service from us!"
"I'm sure they do."
"They need trains!"
"For what?"
"For . . . To help them develop local industries. How do you expect them to

 

[FBI parte due]

OWNED.

 

[MessengerX]

CONTENTS
PART I NON-CONTRADICTION
I THE THEME
II THE CHAIN
III THE TOP AND THE BOTTOM
IV THE IMMOVABLE MOVERS
V THE CLIMAX OF THE D'ANCONIAS
VI THE NON-COMMERCIAL
VII THE EXPLOITERS AND THE EXPLOITED
VIII THE JOHN GALT LINE
IX THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE
X WYATT'S TORCH
PART II EITHER-
OR
I THE MAN WHO BELONGED ON EARTH
II THE ARISTOCRACY OF PULL
III WHITE BLACKMAIL
IV THE SANCTION OF THE VICTIM
V ACCOUNT OVERDRAWN
VI MIRACLE METAL
VII THE MORATORIUM ON BRAINS
VIII BY OUR LOVE
IX THE FACE WITHOUT PAIN OR FEAR OR GUILT
X THE SIGN OF THE DOLLAR
PART III
A IS A
I ATLANTIS
II THE UTOPIA OF GREED
III ANTI-GREED
IV ANTI-LIFE
V THEIR BROTHERS' KEEPERS
VI THE CONCERTO OF DELIVERANCE
VII "THIS IS JOHN GALT SPEAKING"
VIII THE EGOIST
IX THE GENERATOR
X IN THE NAME OF THE BEST WITHIN US

PART I
NON-CONTRADICTION

CHAPTER I
THE THEME
"Who is John Galt?"
The light was ebbing, and Eddie Willers could not distinguish the bum's face. The bum had said it simply, without expression. But from the sunset far at the end of the street, yellow glints caught his eyes, and the eyes looked straight at Eddie Willers, mocking and still—as if the question had been addressed to the causeless uneasiness within him.
"Why did you say that?" asked Eddie Willers, his voice tense.
The bum leaned against the side of the doorway; a wedge of broken glass behind him reflected the metal yellow of the sky.
"Why does it bother you?" he asked.
"It doesn't," snapped Eddie Willers.
He reached hastily into his pocket. The bum had stopped him and asked for a dime, then had gone on talking, as if to kill that moment and postpone the problem of the next. Pleas for dimes were so frequent in the streets these days that it was not necessary to listen to explanations, and he had no desire to hear the details of this bum's particular despair.
"Go get your cup of coffee," he said, handing the dime to the shadow that had no face.
"Thank you, sir," said the voice, without interest, and the face leaned forward for a moment. The face was wind-browned, cut by lines of weariness and cynical resignation; the eyes were intelligent. Eddie Willers walked on, wondering why he always felt it at this time of day, this sense of dread without reason. No, he thought, not dread, there's nothing to fear: just an immense, diffused apprehension, with no source or object. He had become accustomed to the feeling, but he could find no explanation for it; yet the bum had spoken as if he knew that Eddie felt it, as if he thought that one should feel it, and more: as if he knew the reason.
Eddie Willers pulled his shoulders straight, in conscientious self-discipline. He had to stop this, he thought; he was beginning to imagine things. Had he always felt it? He was thirty-two years old. He tried to think back. No, he hadn't; but he could not remember when it had started. The feeling came to him Suddenly, at random intervals, and now it was coming more often than ever. It's the twilight, he thought; I hate the twilight.
The clouds and the shafts of skyscrapers against them were turning brown, like an old painting in oil, the color of a fading masterpiece. Long streaks of grime ran from under the pinnacles down the slender, soot-eaten walls. High on the side of a tower there was a crack in the shape of a motionless lightning, the length of ten stories. A jagged object cut the sky above the roofs; it was half a spire, still holding the glow of the sunset; the gold leaf had long since peeled off the other half. The glow was red and still, like the reflection of a fire: not an active fire, but a dying one which it is too late to stop.
No, thought Eddie Willers, there was nothing disturbing in the sight of the city. It looked as it had always looked.
He walked on, reminding himself that he was late in returning to the office. He did not like the task which he had to perform on his return, but it had to be done. So he did not attempt to delay it, but made himself walk faster.
He turned a corner. In the narrow space between the dark silhouettes of two buildings, as in the crack of a door, he saw the page of a gigantic calendar suspended in the sky.
It was the calendar that the mayor of New York had erected last year on the top of a building, so that citizens might tell the day of the month as they told the hours of the day, by glancing up at a public tower. A white

rectangle hung over the city, imparting the date to the men in the streets below. In the rusty light of this evening's sunset, the rectangle said: September 2.
Eddie Willers looked away. He had never liked the sight of that calendar. It disturbed him, in a manner he could not explain or define. The feeling seemed to blend with his sense of uneasiness; it had the same quality.
He thought suddenly that there was some phrase, a kind of quotation, that expressed what the calendar seemed to suggest. But he could not recall it. He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it nor dismiss it. He glanced back. The white rectangle stood above the roofs, saying in immovable finality: September 2.
Eddie Willers shifted his glance down to the street, to a vegetable pushcart at the stoop of a brownstone house. He saw a pile of bright gold carrots and the fresh green of onions. He saw a clean white curtain blowing at an open window. He saw a bus turning a corner, expertly steered. He wondered why he felt reassured—and then, why he felt the sudden, inexplicable wish that these things were not left in the open, unprotected against the empty space above.
When he came to Fifth Avenue, he kept his eyes on the windows of the stores he passed. There was nothing he needed or wished to buy; but he liked to see the display of good?, any goods, objects made by men, to be used by men. He enjoyed the sight of a prosperous street; not more than every fourth one of the stores was out of business, its windows dark and empty.
He did not know why he suddenly thought of the oak tree. Nothing had recalled it. But he thought of it and of his childhood summers on the Taggart estate. He had spent most of his childhood with the Taggart children, and now he worked for them, as his father and grandfather had worked for their father and grandfather.
The great oak tree had stood on a hill over the Hudson, in a lonely spot of the Taggart estate. Eddie Willers, aged seven, liked to come and look at that tree. It had stood there for hundreds of years, and he thought it would always stand there. Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with fingers sunk into the soil, and he thought that if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string. He felt safe in the oak tree's presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was his greatest symbol of strength.
One night, lightning struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it the next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside—just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it.
Years later, he heard it said that children should be protected from shock, from their first knowledge of death, pain or fear. But these had never scarred him; his shock came when he stood very quietly, looking into the black hole of the trunk. It was an immense betrayal—the more terrible because he could not grasp what it was that had been betrayed. It was not himself, he knew, nor his trust; it was something else. He stood there for a while, making no sound, then he walked back to the house. He never spoke about it to anyone, then or since.
Eddie Willers shook his head, as the screech of a -rusty mechanism changing a traffic light stopped him on the edge of a curb. He felt anger at himself. There was no reason that he had to remember the oak tree tonight. It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness—and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question mark.

He wanted no sadness attached to his childhood; he loved its memories: any day of it he remembered now seemed flooded by a still, brilliant sunlight. It seemed to him as if a few rays from it reached into his present: not rays, more like pinpoint spotlights that gave an occasional moment's glitter to his job, to his lonely apartment, to the quiet, scrupulous progression of his existence.
He thought of a summer day when he was ten years old. That day, in a clearing of the woods, the one precious companion of his childhood told him what they would do when they grew up. The words were harsh and glowing, like the sunlight. He listened in admiration and in wonder. When he was asked what he would want to do, he answered at once, "Whatever is right," and added, "You ought to do something great . . . I mean, the two of us together." "What?" she asked. He said, "I don't know. That's what we ought to find out. Not just what you said. Not just business and earning a living. Things like winning battles, or saving people out of fires, or climbing mountains." "What for?" she asked. He said, "The minister said last Sunday that we must always reach for the best within us. What do you suppose is the best within us?" "I don't know." "We'll have to find out." She did not answer; she was looking away, up the railroad track.
Eddie Willers smiled. He had said, "Whatever is right," twenty-two years ago. He had kept that statement unchallenged ever since; the other questions had faded in his mind; he had been too busy to ask them. But he still thought it self-evident that one had to do what was right; he had never learned how people could want to do otherwise; he had learned only that they did. It still seemed simple and incomprehensible to him: simple that things should be right, and incomprehensible that they weren't. He knew that they weren't. He thought of that, as he turned a corner and came to the great building of Taggart Transcontinental.
The building stood over the street as its tallest and proudest structure. Eddie Willers always smiled at his first sight of it. Its long bands of windows were unbroken, in contrast to those of its neighbors. Its rising lines cut the sky, with no crumbling corners or worn edges. It seemed to stand above the years, untouched. It would always stand there, thought Eddie Willers.
Whenever he entered the Taggart Building, he felt relief and a sense of security. This was a place of competence and power. The floors of its hallways were mirrors made of marble. The frosted rectangles of its electric fixtures were chips of solid light. Behind sheets of glass, rows of girls sat at typewriters, the clicking of their keys like the sound of speeding train wheels. And like an answering echo, a faint shudder went through the walls at times, rising from under the building, from the tunnels of the great terminal where trains started out to cross a continent and stopped after crossing it again, as they had started and stopped for generation after generation. Taggart Transcontinental, thought Eddie Willers, From Ocean to Ocean—the proud slogan of his childhood, so much more shining and holy than any commandment of the Bible. From Ocean to Ocean, forever—thought Eddie Willers, in the manner of a rededication, as he walked through the spotless halls into the heart of the building, into the office of James Taggart, President of Taggart Transcontinental.
James Taggart sat at his desk. He looked like a man approaching fifty, who had crossed into age from adolescence, without the intermediate stage of youth. He had a small, petulant mouth, and thin hair clinging to a bald forehead. His posture had a limp, decentralized sloppiness, as if in defiance of his tall, slender body, a body with an elegance of line intended for the confident poise of an aristocrat, but transformed into the gawkiness of a lout. The flesh of his face was pale and soft. His eyes were pale and veiled, with a glance that moved slowly, never quite stopping, gliding off and past

things in eternal resentment of their existence. He looked obstinate and drained. He was thirty-nine years old.
He lifted his head with irritation, at the sound of the opening door.
"Don't bother me, don't bother me, don't bother me," said James Taggart.
Eddie Willers walked toward the-desk.
"It's important, Jim," he said, not raising his voice.
"All right, all right, what is it?"
Eddie Willers looked at a map on the wall of the office. The map's colors had faded under the glass—he wondered dimly how many Taggart presidents had sat before it and for how many years. The Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, the network of red lines slashing the faded body of the country from New York to San Francisco, looked like a system of blood vessels. It looked as if once, long ago, the blood had shot down the main artery and, under the pressure of its own overabundance, had branched out at random points, running all over the country. One red streak twisted its way from Cheyenne, Wyoming, down to El Paso, Texas—the Rio Norte Line of Taggart Transcontinental. New tracing had been added recently and the red streak had been extended south beyond El Paso—but Eddie Willers turned away hastily when his eyes reached that point.
He looked at James Taggart and said, "It's the Rio Norte Line." He noticed Taggart's glance moving down to a corner of the desk. "We've had another wreck."
"Railroad accidents happen every day. Did you have to bother me about that?"
"You know what I'm saying, Jim. The Rio Norte is done for. That track is shot. Down the whole line."
"We are getting a new track."
Eddie Willers continued as if there had been no answer: "That track is shot. It's no use trying to run trains down there. People are giving up trying to use them."
"There is not a railroad in the country, it seems to me, that doesn't have a few branches running at a deficit. We're not the only ones. It's a national condition—a temporary national condition."
Eddie stood looking at him silently. What Taggart disliked about Eddie Willers was this habit of looking straight into people's eyes. Eddie's eyes were blue, wide and questioning; he had blond hair and a square face, unremarkable except for that look of scrupulous attentiveness and open, puzzled wonder.
"What do you want?" snapped Taggart.
"I just came to tell you something you had to know, because somebody had to tell you."
"That we've had another accident?"
"That we can't give up the Rio Norte Line."
James Taggart seldom raised his head; when he looked at people, he did so by lifting his heavy eyelids and staring upward from under the expanse of his bald forehead.
"Who's thinking of giving up the Rio Norte Line?" he asked.
"There's never been any question of giving it up. I resent your saying it. I resent it very much."
"But we haven't met a schedule for the last six months. We haven't completed a run without some sort of breakdown, major or minor. We're losing all our shippers, one after another. How long can we last?"
"You're a pessimist, Eddie. You lack faith. That's what undermines the morale of an organization."
"You mean that nothing's going to be done about the Rio Norte Line?"
"I haven't said that at all. Just as soon as we get the new track-"

"Jim, there isn't going to be any new track." He watched Taggart's eyelids move up slowly. "I've just come back from the office of Associated Steel. I've spoken to Orren Boyle."
"What did he say?"
"He spoke for an hour and a half and did not give me a single straight answer."
"What did you bother him for? I believe the first order of rail wasn't due for delivery until next month."
"And before that, it was due for delivery three months ago."
"Unforeseen circumstances. Absolutely beyond Orren's control."
"And before that, it was due six months earlier. Jim, we have waited for Associated Steel to deliver that rail for thirteen months."
"What do you want me to do? I can't run Orren Boyle's business."
"I want you to understand that we can't wait."
Taggart asked slowly, his voice half-mocking, half-cautious, "What did my sister say?"
"She won't be back until tomorrow."
"Well, what do you want me to do?"
"That's for you to decide."
"Well, whatever else you say, there's one thing you're not going to mention next—and that's Rearden Steel."
Eddie did not answer at once, then said quietly, "All right, Jim. I won't mention it."
"Orren is my friend." He heard no answer. "I resent your attitude. Orren Boyle will deliver that rail just as soon as it's humanly possible. So long as he can't deliver it, nobody can blame us."
"Jim! What are you talking about? Don't you understand that the Rio Norte Line is breaking up—whether anybody blames us or not?"
"People would put up with it—they'd have to—if it weren't for the Phoenix-Durango." He saw Eddie's face tighten. "Nobody ever complained about the Rio Norte Line, until the Phoenix-Durango came on the scene."
"The Phoenix-Durango is doing a brilliant job."
"Imagine a thing called the Phoenix-Durango competing with Taggart Transcontinental! It was nothing but a local milk line ten years ago."
"It's got most of the freight traffic of Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado now." Taggart did not answer. "Jim, we can't lose Colorado. It's our last hope. It's everybody's last hope. If we don't pull ourselves together, we'll lose every big shipper in the state to the Phoenix-Durango. We've lost the Wyatt oil fields."
"I don't see why everybody keeps talking about the Wyatt oil fields."
"Because Ellis Wyatt is a prodigy who—"
"Damn Ellis Wyatt!"
Those oil wells, Eddie thought suddenly, didn't they have something in common with the blood vessels on the map? Wasn't that the way the red stream of Taggart Transcontinental had shot across the country, years ago, a feat that seemed incredible now? He thought of the oil wells spouting a black stream that ran over a continent almost faster than the trains of the Phoenix-Durango could carry it. That oil field had been only a rocky patch in the mountains of Colorado, given up as exhausted long ago. Ellis Wyatt's father had managed to squeeze an obscure living to the end of his days, out of the dying oil wells. Now it was as if somebody had given a shot of adrenalin to the heart of the mountain, the heart had started pumping, the black blood had burst through the rocks—of course it's blood, thought Eddie Willers, because blood is supposed to feed, to give life, and that is what Wyatt Oil had done. It had shocked empty slopes of ground into sudden existence, it had brought new towns, new power plants, new factories to a region nobody had ever noticed on any map. New factories, thought Eddie

Willers, at a time when the freight revenues from all the great old industries were dropping slowly year by year; a rich new oil field, at a time when the pumps were stopping in one famous field after another; a new industrial state where nobody had expected anything but cattle and beets. One man had done it, and he had done it in eight years; this, thought Eddie Willers, was like the stories he had read in school books and never quite believed, the stories of men who had lived in the days of the country's youth. He wished he could meet Ellis Wyatt. There was a great deal of talk about him, but few had ever met him; he seldom came to New York. They said he was thirty-three years old and had a violent temper. He had discovered some way to revive exhausted oil wells and he had proceeded to revive them.
"Ellis Wyatt is a greedy bastard who's after nothing but money," said James Taggart. "It seems to me that there are more important things in life than making money."
"What are you talking about, Jim? What has that got to do with—"
"Besides, he's double-crossed us. We served the Wyatt oil fields for years, most adequately. In the days of old man Wyatt, we ran a tank train a week."
"These are not the days of old man Wyatt, Jim. The Phoenix-Durango runs two tank trains a day down there—and it runs them on schedule."
"If he had given us time to grow along with him—"
"He has no time to waste."
"What does he expect? That we drop all our other shippers, sacrifice the interests of the whole country and give him all our trains?"
"Why, no. He doesn't expect anything. He just deals with the Phoenix-Durango."
"I think he's a destructive, unscrupulous ruffian. I think he's an irresponsible upstart who's been grossly overrated." It was astonishing to hear a sudden emotion in James Taggart's lifeless voice. "I'm not so sure that his oil fields are such a beneficial achievement. It seems to me that he's dislocated the economy of the whole country. Nobody expected Colorado to become an industrial state. How can we have any security or plan anything if everything changes all the time?"
"Good God, Jim! He's—"
"Yes, I know, I know, he's making money. But that is not the standard, it seems to me, by which one gauges a man's value to society. And as for his oil, he'd come crawling to us. and he'd wait his turn along with all the other shippers, and he wouldn't demand more than his fair share of transportation—if it weren't for the Phoenix-Durango. We can't help it if we're up against destructive competition of that kind. Nobody can blame us."
The pressure in his chest and temples, thought Eddie Willers, was the strain of the effort he was making; he had decided to make the issue clear for once, and the issue was so clear, he thought, that nothing could bar it from Taggart's understanding, unless it was the failure of his own presentation. So he had tried hard, but he was failing, just as he had always failed in all of their discussions; no matter what he said, they never seemed to be talking about the same subject.
"Jim, what are you saying? Does it matter that nobody blames us—when the road is falling apart?"
James Taggart smiled; it was a thin smile, amused and cold. "It's touching, Eddie," he said. "It's touching—your devotion to Taggart Transcontinental. If you don’t look out, you’ll turn into one of those real feudal serfs."
"That’s what I am, Jim."
"But may I ask whether it is your job to discuss these matters with me?"
"No, it isn't."

"Then why don't you learn that we have departments to take care of things? Why don't you report all this to whoever's concerned? Why don't you cry on my dear sister's shoulder?"
"Look. Jim, I know it's not my place to talk to you. But I can't understand what's going on. I don't know what it is that your proper advisers tell you, or why they can't make you understand. So I thought I'd try to tell you myself."
"I appreciate our childhood friendship, Eddie, but do you think that that should entitle you to walk in here unannounced whenever you wish? Considering your own rank, shouldn't you remember that I am president of Taggart Transcontinental?"
This was wasted. Eddie Willers looked at him as usual, not hurt, merely puzzled, and asked, "Then you don't intend to do anything about the Rio Norte Line?"
"I haven't said that. I haven't said that at all." Taggart was looking at the map, at the red streak south of El Paso. "Just as soon as the San Sebastian Mines get going and our Mexican branch begins to pay off—"
"Don't let's talk about that, Jim." Taggart turned, startled by the unprecedented phenomenon of an implacable anger in Eddie's voice. "What's the matter?"
"You know what's the matter. Your sister said—"
"Damn my sister!" said James Taggart.
Eddie Willers did not move. He did not answer. He stood looking straight ahead. But he did not see James Taggart or anything in the office.
After a moment, he bowed and walked out.
In the anteroom, the clerks of James Taggart's personal staff were switching off the lights, getting ready to leave for the day. But Pop Harper, chief clerk, still sat at his desk, twisting the levers of a half-dismembered typewriter. Everybody in the company had the impression that Pop Harper was born in that particular corner at that particular desk and never intended to leave it. He had been chief clerk for James Taggart's father.
Pop Harper glanced up at Eddie Willers as he came out of the president's office. It was a wise, slow glance; it seemed to say that he knew that Eddie's visit to their part of the building meant trouble on the line, knew that nothing had come of the visit, and was completely indifferent to the knowledge. It was the cynical indifference which Eddie Willers had seen in the eyes of the bum on the street corner.
"Say, Eddie, know where I could get some woolen undershirts?" he asked, "Tried all over town, but nobody's got 'em."
"I don't know," said Eddie, stopping. "Why do you ask me?"
"I just ask everybody. Maybe somebody'!! tell me."
Eddie looked uneasily at the blank, emaciated face and white hair.
"It's cold in this joint," said Pop Harper. "It's going to be colder this winter."
"What are you doing?" Eddie asked, pointing at the pieces of typewriter.
"The damn thing's busted again. No use sending it out, took them three months to fix it the last time. Thought I'd patch it up myself. Not for long, I guess." He let his fist drop down on the keys. "You're ready for the junk pile, old pal. Your days are numbered."
Eddie started. That was the sentence he had tried to remember: Your days are numbered. But he had forgotten in what connection he had tried to remember it.
"It's no use, Eddie," said Pop Harper.
"What's no use?"
"Nothing. Anything."
"What's the matter, Pop?"

"I'm not going to requisition a new typewriter. The new ones are made of tin. When the old ones go, that will be the end of typewriting. There was an accident in the subway this morning, their brakes wouldn't work. You ought to go home, Eddie, turn on the radio and listen to a good dance band. Forget it, boy. Trouble with you is you never had a hobby. Somebody stole the electric light bulbs again, from off the staircase, down where I live. I've got a pain in my chest. Couldn't get any cough drops this morning, the drugstore on our corner went bankrupt last week. The Texas-Western Railroad went bankrupt last month. They closed the Queensborough Bridge yesterday for temporary repairs. Oh well, what's the use? Who is John Galt?"
* * *
She sat at the window of the train, her head thrown back, one leg stretched across to the empty seat before her. The window frame trembled with the speed of the motion, the pane hung over empty darkness, and dots of light slashed across the glass as luminous streaks, once in a while.
Her leg, sculptured by the tight sheen of the stocking, its long line running straight, over an arched instep, to the tip of a foot in a high-heeled pump, had a feminine elegance that seemed out of place in the dusty train car and oddly incongruous with the rest of her. She wore a battered camel's hair coat that had been expensive, wrapped shapelessly about her slender, nervous body. The coat collar was raised to the slanting brim of her hat. A sweep of brown hair fell back, almost touching the line of her shoulders. Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her posture taut, as if she resented immobility, and unfeminine, as if she were unconscious of her own body and that it was a woman's body. She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.
She thought: For just a few moments—while this lasts—it is all right to surrender completely—to forget everything and just permit yourself to feel. She thought: Let go—drop the controls—this is it.
Somewhere on the edge of her mind, under the music, she heard the sound of train wheels. They knocked in an even rhythm, every fourth knock accented, as if stressing a conscious purpose. She could relax, because she heard the wheels. She listened to the symphony, thinking: This is why the wheels have to be kept going, and this is where they're going.
She had never heard that symphony before, but she knew that it was written by Richard Halley. She recognized the violence and the magnificent intensity. She recognized the style of the theme; it was a clear, complex melody—at a time when no one wrote melody any longer. . . . She sat looking up at the ceiling of the car, but she did not see it and she had forgotten where she was. She did not know whether she was hearing a full symphony orchestra or only the theme; perhaps she was hearing the orchestration in her own mind.
She thought dimly that there had been premonitory echoes of this theme in all of Richard Halley's work, through all the years of his long struggle, to the day, in his middle-age, when fame struck him suddenly and knocked him out. This—she thought, listening to the symphony— had been the goal of his

struggle. She remembered half-hinted attempts in his music, phrases that promised it, broken bits of melody that started but never quite reached it; when Richard Halley wrote this, he . . . She sat up straight. When did Richard Halley write this?
In the same instant, she realized where she was and wondered for the first time where that music came from.
A few steps away, at the end of the car, a brakeman was adjusting the controls of the air-conditioner. He was blond and young. He was whistling the theme of the symphony. She realized that he had been whistling it for some time and that this was all she had heard.
She watched him incredulously for a while, before she raised her voice to ask, "Tell me please, what are you whistling?"
The boy turned to her. She met a direct glance and saw an open, eager smile, as if he were sharing a confidence with a friend. She liked his face—its lines were tight and firm, it did not have that look of loose muscles evading the responsibility of a shape, which she had learned to expect in people's faces.
"It's the Halley Concerto," he answered, smiling.
"Which one?"
"The Fifth."
She let a moment pass, before she said slowly and very carefully, "Richard Halley wrote only four concertos."
The boy's smile vanished. It was as if he were jolted back to reality, just as she had been a few moments ago. It was as if a shutter were slammed down, and what remained was a face without expression, impersonal, indifferent and empty.
"Yes, of course," he said. "I'm wrong. I made a mistake."
"Then what was it?"
"Something I heard somewhere."
"What?"
"I don't know."
"Where did you hear it?"
"I don't remember."
She paused helplessly; he was turning away from her without further interest.
"It sounded like a Halley theme," she said. "But I know every note he's ever written and he never wrote that."
There was still no expression, only a faint look of attentiveness on the boy's face, as he turned back to her and asked, "You like the music of Richard Halley?"
"Yes," she said, "I like it very much."
He considered her for a moment, as if hesitating, then he turned away. She watched the expert efficiency of his movements as he went on working. He worked in silence.
She had not slept for two nights, but she could not permit herself to sleep; she had too many problems to consider and not much time: the train was due in New York early in the morning. She needed the time, yet she wished the train would go faster; but it was the Taggart Comet, the fastest train in the country.
She tried to think; but the music remained on the edge of her mind and she kept hearing it, in full chords, like the implacable steps of something that could not be stopped. . . . She shook her head angrily, jerked her hat off and lighted a cigarette.
She would not sleep, she thought; she could last until tomorrow night. . . . The train wheels clicked in accented rhythm. She was so used to them that she did not hear them consciously, but the sound became a sense of peace within her. . . . When she extinguished her cigarette, she knew that she

needed another one, but thought that she would give herself a minute, just a few minutes, before she would light it. . . .
She had fallen asleep and she awakened with a jolt, knowing that something was wrong, before she knew what it was: the wheels had stopped. The car stood soundless and dim in the blue glow of the night lamps. She glanced at her watch: there was no reason for stopping. She looked out the window: the train stood still in the middle of empty fields.
She heard someone moving in a seat across the aisle, and asked, "How long have we been standing?"
A man's voice answered indifferently, "About an hour." The man looked after her, sleepily astonished, because she leaped to her feet and rushed to the door. There was a cold wind outside, and an empty stretch of land under an empty sky. She heard weeds rustling in the darkness. Far ahead, she saw the figures of men standing by the engine—and above them, hanging detached in the sky, the red light of a signal.
She walked rapidly toward them, past the motionless line of wheels. No one paid attention to her when she approached. The train crew and a few passengers stood clustered under the red light. They had stopped talking, they seemed to be waiting in placid indifference.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
The engineer turned, astonished. Her question had sounded like an order, not like the amateur curiosity of a passenger. She stood, hands in pockets, coat collar raised, the wind beating her hair in strands across her face.
"Red light, lady," he said, pointing up with his thumb.
"How long has it been on?"
"An hour."
"We're off the main track, aren't we?"
"That's right."
"Why?"
"I don't know."
The conductor spoke up. "I don't think we had any business being sent off on a siding, that switch wasn't working right, and this thing's not working at all." He jerked his head up at the red light. "I don't think the signal's going to change. I think it's busted."
"Then what are you doing?"
"Waiting for it to change."
In her pause of startled anger, the fireman chuckled. "Last week, the crack special of the Atlantic Southern got left on a siding for two hours—just somebody's mistake."
"This is the Taggart Comet," she said. "The Comet has never been late."
"She's the only one in the country that hasn't," said the engineer.
"There's always a first time," said the fireman.
"You don't know about railroads, lady," said a passenger.
"There's not a signal system or a dispatcher in the country that's worth a damn."
She did not turn or notice him, but spoke to the engineer.
"If you know that the signal is broken, what do you intend to do?"
He did not like her tone of authority, and he could not understand why she assumed it so naturally. She looked like a young girl; only her mouth and eyes showed that she was a woman in her thirties. The dark gray eyes were direct and disturbing, as if they cut through things, throwing the inconsequential out of the way. The face seemed faintly familiar to him, but he could not recall where he had seen it.
"Lady, I don't intend to stick my neck out," he said.
"He means," said the fireman, "that our job's to wait for orders."
"Your job is to run this train."
"Not against a red light. If the light says stop, we stop."

"A red light means danger, lady," said the passenger.
"We're not taking any chances," said the engineer. "Whoever's responsible for it, he'll switch the blame to us if we move. So we're not moving till somebody tells us to."
"And if nobody does?"
"Somebody will turn up sooner or later."
"How long do you propose to wait?"
The engineer shrugged. "Who is John Galt?"
"He means," said the fireman, "don't ask questions nobody can answer."
She looked at the red light and at the rail that went off into the black, untouched distance.
She said, "Proceed with caution to the next signal. If it's in order, proceed to the main track. Then stop at the first open office."
"Yeah? Who says so?"
"I do."
"Who are you?"
It was only the briefest pause, a moment of astonishment at a question she had not expected, but the engineer looked more closely at her face, and in time with her answer he gasped, "Good God!"
She answered, not offensively, merely like a person who does not hear the question often: "Dagny Taggart."
"Well, I'll be—" said the fireman, and then they all remained silent. She went on, in the same tone of unstressed authority. "Proceed to the main track and hold the train for me at the first open office."
"Yes, Miss Taggart."
"You'll have to make up time. You've got the rest of the night to do it. Get the Comet in on schedule."
"Yes, Miss Taggart."
She was turning to go, when the engineer asked, "If there's any trouble, are you taking the responsibility for it, Miss Taggart?"
"I am."
The conductor followed her as she walked back to her car. He was saying, bewildered, "But . . . just a seat in a day coach, Miss Taggart? But how come? But why didn't you let us know?"
She smiled easily. "Had no time to be formal. Had my own car attached to Number 22 out of Chicago, but got off at Cleveland—and Number 22 was running late, so I let the car go. The Comet came next and I took it. There was no sleeping-car space left."
The conductor shook his head. "Your brother—he wouldn't have taken a coach."
She laughed. "No, he wouldn't have."
The men by the engine watched her walking away. The young brakeman was among them. He asked, pointing after her, "Who is that?"
"That's who runs Taggart Transcontinental," said the engineer; the respect in his voice was genuine. "That's the Vice-president in Charge of Operation."
When the train jolted forward, the blast of its whistle dying over the fields, she sat by the window, lighting another cigarette. She thought: It's cracking to pieces, like this, all over the country, you can expect it anywhere, at any moment. But she felt no anger or anxiety; she had no time to feel.
This would be just one more issue, to be settled along with the others. She knew that the superintendent of the Ohio Division was no good and that he was a friend of James Taggart. She had not insisted on throwing him out long ago only because she had no better man to put in his place. Good men were so strangely hard to find. But she would have to get rid of him, she thought, and she would give his post to Owen Kellogg, the young engineer who was doing a brilliant job as one of the assistants to the manager of the Taggart

Terminal in New York; it was Owen Kellogg who ran the Terminal. She had watched his work for some time; she had always looked for sparks of competence, like a diamond prospector in an unpromising wasteland. Kellogg was still too young to be made superintendent of a division; she had wanted to give him another year, but there was no time to wait. She would have to speak to him as soon as she returned.
The strip of earth, faintly visible outside the window, was running faster now, blending into a gray stream. Through the dry phrases of calculations in her mind, she noticed that she did have time to feel something: it was the hard, exhilarating pleasure of action.
* * *
With the first whistling rush of air, as the Comet plunged into the tunnels of the Taggart Terminal under the city of New York, Dagny Taggart sat up straight. She always felt it when the train went underground—this sense of eagerness, of hope and of secret excitement. It was as if normal existence were a photograph of shapeless things in badly printed colors, but this was a sketch done in a few sharp strokes that made things seem clean, important—and worth doing.
She watched the tunnels as they flowed past: bare walls of concrete, a net of pipes and wires, a web of rails that went off into black holes where green and red lights hung as distant drops of color. There was nothing else, nothing to dilute it, so that one could admire naked purpose and the ingenuity that had achieved it. She thought of the Taggart Building standing above her head at this moment, growing straight to the sky, and she thought: These are the roots of the building, hollow roots twisting under the ground, feeding the city.
When the train stopped, when she got off and heard the concrete of the platform under her heels, she felt light, lifted, impelled to action.
She started off, walking fast, as if the speed of her steps could give form to the things she felt. It was a few moments before she realized that she was whistling a piece of music—and that it was the theme of Halley's Fifth Concerto. She felt someone looking at her and turned. The young brakeman stood watching her tensely.
She sat on the arm of the big chair facing James Taggart's desk, her coat thrown open over a wrinkled traveling suit. Eddie Willers sat across the room, making notes once in a while. His title was that of Special Assistant to the Vice-President in Charge of Operation, and his main duty was to be her bodyguard against any waste of time. She asked him to be present at interviews of this nature, because then she never had to explain anything to him afterwards. James Taggart sat at his desk, his head drawn into his shoulders.
"The Rio Norte Line is a pile of junk from one end to the other," she said. "It's much worse than I thought. But we're going to save it."
"Of course," said James Taggart.
"Some of the rail can be salvaged. Not much and not for long. We'll start laying new rail in the mountain sections, Colorado first. We'll get the new rail in two months."
"Oh, did Orren Boyle say he'll—"
"I've ordered the rail from Rearden Steel."
The slight, choked sound from Eddie Willers was his suppressed desire to cheer.
James Taggart did not answer at once. "Dagny, why don't you sit in the chair as one is supposed to?" he said at last; his voice was petulant.
"Nobody holds business conferences this way."
"I do."

She waited. He asked, his eyes avoiding hers, "Did you say that you have ordered the rail from Rearden?"
"Yesterday evening. I phoned him from Cleveland."
"But the Board hasn't authorized it. I haven't authorized it. You haven't consulted me."
She reached over, picked up the receiver of a telephone on his desk and handed it to him.
"Call Rearden and cancel it," she said.
James Taggart moved back in his chair. "I haven't said that," he answered angrily. "I haven't said that at all."
"Then it stands?"
"I haven't said that, either."
She turned. "Eddie, have them draw up the contract with Rearden Steel. Jim will sign it." She took a crumpled piece of notepaper from her pocket and tossed it to Eddie. "There's the figures and terms."
Taggart said, "But the Board hasn't—"
"The Board hasn't anything to do with it. They authorized you to buy the rail thirteen months ago. Where you buy it is up to you."
"I don't think it's proper to make such a decision without giving the Board a chance to express an opinion. And I don't see why I should be made to take the responsibility."
"I am taking it.”
"What about the expenditure which—"
"Rearden is charging less than Orren Boyle's Associated Steel."
"Yes, and what about Orren Boyle?"
"I've cancelled the contract. We had the right to cancel it six months ago."
"When did you do that?"
"Yesterday."
"But he hasn't called to have me confirm it."
"He won't."
Taggart sat looking down at his desk. She wondered why he resented the necessity of dealing with Rearden, and why his resentment had such an odd, evasive quality. Rearden Steel had been the chief supplier of Taggart Transcontinental for ten years, ever since the first Rearden furnace was fired, in the days when their father was president of the railroad. For ten years, most of their rail had come from Rearden Steel. There were not many firms in the country who delivered what was ordered, when and as ordered. Rearden Steel was one of them.
If she were insane, thought Dagny, she would conclude that her brother hated to deal with Rearden because Rearden did his job with superlative efficiency; but she would not conclude it, because she thought that such a feeling was not within the humanly possible.
"It isn't fair," said James Taggart.
"What isn't?"
"That we always give all our business to Rearden. It seems to me we should give somebody else a chance, too. Rearden doesn't need us; he's plenty big enough. We ought to help the smaller fellows to develop. Otherwise, we're just encouraging a monopoly."
"Don't talk tripe, Jim,"
"Why do we always have to get things from Rearden?"
"Because we always get them."
"I don't like Henry Rearden."
"I do. But what does that matter, one way or the other? We need rails and he's the only one who can give them to us."
"The human element is very important. You have no sense of the human element at all."

"We're talking about saving a railroad, Jim."
"Yes, of course, of course, but still, you haven't any sense of the human element."
"No. I haven't."
"If we give Rearden such a large order for steel rails—"
"They're not going to be steel. They're Rearden Metal."
She had always avoided personal reactions, but she was forced to break her rule when she saw the expression on Taggart's face. She burst out laughing.
Rearden Metal was a new alloy, produced by Rearden after ten years of experiments. He had placed it on the market recently. He had received no orders and had found no customers.
Taggart could not understand the transition from the laughter to the sudden tone of Dagny's voice; the voice was cold and harsh: "Drop it, Jim. I know everything you're going to say. Nobody's ever used it before. Nobody approves of Rearden Metal. Nobody's interested in it. Nobody wants it. Still, our rails are going to be made of Rearden Metal."
"But . . ." said Taggart, "but . . . but nobody's ever used it before!"
He observed, with satisfaction, that she was silenced by anger. He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points. But how one could feel a personal emotion about a metal alloy, and what such an emotion indicated, was incomprehensible to him; so he could make no use of his discovery.
"The consensus of the best metallurgical authorities," he said, "seems to be highly skeptical about Rearden Metal, contending—"
"Drop it, Jim."
"Well, whose opinion did you take?"
"I don't ask for opinions."
"What do you go by?"
"Judgment."
"Well, whose judgment did you take?"
"Mine."
"But whom did you consult about it?"
"Nobody."
"Then what on earth do you know about Rearden Metal?"
"That it's the greatest thing ever put on the market."
"Why?"
"Because it's tougher than steel, cheaper than steel and will outlast any hunk of metal in existence."
"But who says so?"
"Jim, I studied engineering in college. When I see things, I see them."
"What did you see?"
"Rearden's formula and the tests he showed me."
"Well, if it were any good, somebody would have used it, and nobody has." He saw the flash of anger, and went on nervously: "How can you know it's good? How can you be sure? How can you decide?"
"Somebody decides such things, Jim. Who?"
"Well, I don't see why we have to be the first ones. I don't see it at all."
"Do you want to save the Rio Norte Line or not?" He did not answer, "If the road could afford it, I would scrap every piece of rail over the whole system and replace it with Rearden Metal. All of it needs replacing. None of it will last much longer. But we can't afford it. We have to get out of a bad hole, first. Do you want us to pull through or not?"
"We're still the best railroad in the country. The others are doing much worse."
"Then do you want us to remain in the hole?"

"I haven't said that! Why do you always oversimplify things that way? And if you're worried about money, I don't see why you want to waste it on the Rio Norte Line, when the Phoenix-Durango has robbed us of all our business down there. Why spend money when we have no protection against a competitor who'll destroy our investment?"
"Because the Phoenix-Durango is an excellent railroad, but I intend to make the Rio Norte Line better than that. Because I'm going to beat the Phoenix-Durango, if necessary—only it won't be necessary, because there will be room for two or three railroads to make fortunes in Colorado. Because I'd mortgage the system to build a branch to any district around Ellis Wyatt."
"I'm sick of hearing about Ellis Wyatt."
He did not like the way her eyes moved to look at him and remained still, looking, for a moment.
"I don't see any need for immediate action," he said; he sounded offended. "Just what do you consider so alarming in the present situation of Taggart Transcontinental?"
"The consequences of your policies, Jim."
"Which policies?"
"That thirteen months' experiment with Associated Steel, for one. Your Mexican catastrophe, for another."
"The Board approved the Associated Steel contract," he said hastily.
"The Board voted to build the San Sebastian Line. Besides, I don't see why you call it a catastrophe."
"Because the Mexican government is going to nationalize your line any day now."
"That's a lie!" His voice was almost a scream. "That's nothing but vicious rumors! I have it on very good inside authority that—"
"Don't show that you're scared, Jim," she said contemptuously. He did not answer. "It's no use getting panicky about it now," she said. "All we can do is try to cushion the blow. It's going to be a bad blow. Forty million dollars is a loss from which we won't recover easily. But Taggart transcontinental has withstood many bad shocks in the past. I'll see to it that it withstands this one."
"I refuse to consider, I absolutely refuse to consider the possibility of the San Sebastian Line being nationalized!"
"All right. Don't consider it."
She remained silent. He said defensively, "I don't see why you're so eager to give a chance to Ellis Wyatt, yet you think it's wrong to take part in developing an underprivileged country that never had a chance."
"Ellis Wyatt is not asking anybody to give him a chance. And I'm not in business to give chances. I'm running a railroad."
"That's an extremely narrow view, it seems to me. I don't see why we should want to help one man instead of a whole nation."
"I'm not interested in. helping anybody. I want to make money."
"That's an impractical attitude. Selfish greed for profit is a thing of the past. It has been generally conceded that the interests of society as a whole must always be placed first in any business undertaking which—"
"How long do you intend to talk in order to evade the issue, Jim?"
"What issue?"
"The order for Rearden Metal."
He did not answer. He sat studying her silently. Her slender body, about to slump from exhaustion, was held erect by the straight line of the shoulders, and the shoulders were held by a conscious effort of will. Few people liked her face: the face was too cold, the eyes too intense; nothing could ever lend her the charm of a soft focus. The beautiful legs, slanting down from the chair's arm in the center of his vision, annoyed him; they spoiled the rest of his estimate.

She remained silent; he was forced to ask, "Did you decide to order it just like that, on the spur of the moment, over a telephone?"
"I decided it six months ago. I was waiting for Hank Rearden to get ready to go into production."
"Don't call him Hank Rearden. It's vulgar."
"That's what everybody calls him. Don't change the subject."
"Why did you have to telephone him last night?"
"Couldn't reach him sooner."
"Why didn't you wait until you got back to New York and—"
"Because I had seen the Rio Norte Line."
"Well, I need time to consider it, to place the matter before the Board, to consult the best—"
"There is no time."
"You haven't given me a chance to form an opinion."
"I don't give a damn about your opinion. I am not going to argue with you, with your Board or with your professors. You have a choice to make and you're going to make it now. Just say yes or no."
"That's a preposterous, high-handed, arbitrary way of-—"
"Yes or no?"
"That's the trouble with you. You always make it 'Yes' or 'No.' Things are never absolute like that. Nothing is absolute."
"Metal rails are. Whether we get them or not, is."
She waited. He did not answer. "Well?" she asked.
"Are you taking the responsibility for it?"
"I am."
"Go ahead," he said, and added, "but at your own risk. I won't cancel it, but I won't commit myself as to what I'll say to the Board."
"Say anything you wish."
She rose to go. He leaned forward across the desk, reluctant to end the interview and to end it so decisively.
"You realize, of course, that a lengthy procedure will be necessary to put this through," he said; the words sounded almost hopeful. "It isn't as simple as that."
"Oh sure," she said. "I'll send you a detailed report, which Eddie will prepare and which you won't read. Eddie will help you put it through the works. I'm going to Philadelphia tonight to see Rearden. He and I have a lot of work to do." She added, "It's as simple as that, Jim."
She had turned to go, when he spoke again—and what he said seemed bewilderingly irrelevant. "That's all right for you, because you're lucky. Others can't do it."
"Do what?"
"Other people are human. They're sensitive. They can't devote their whole life to metals and engines. You're lucky—you've never had any feelings. You've never felt anything at all."
As she looked at him, her dark gray eyes went slowly from astonishment to stillness, then to a strange expression that resembled a look of weariness, except that it seemed to reflect much more than the endurance of this one moment.
"No, Jim," she said quietly, "I guess I've never felt anything at all." Eddie Willers followed her to her office. Whenever she returned, he felt as if the world became clear, simple, easy to face—and he forgot his moments of shapeless apprehension. He was the only person who found it completely natural that she should be the Operating Vice-President of a great railroad, even though she was a woman. She had told him, when he was ten years old, that she would run the railroad some day. It did not astonish him now, just as it had not astonished him that day in a clearing of the woods.

When they entered her office, when he saw her sit down at the desk and glance at the memos he had left for her—he felt as he did in his car when the motor caught on and the wheels could move forward.
He was about to leave her office, when he remembered a matter he had not reported. "Owen Kellogg of the Terminal Division has asked me for an appointment to see you," he said.
She looked up, astonished. "That's funny. I was going to send for him. Have him come up. I want to see him. . . . Eddie," she added suddenly, "before I start, tell them to get me Ayers of the Ayers Music Publishing Company on the phone."
"The Music Publishing Company?" he repeated incredulously.
"Yes. There's something I want to ask him."
When the voice of Mr. Ayers, courteously eager, inquired of what service he could be to her, she asked, "Can you tell me whether Richard Halley has written a new piano concerto, the Fifth?"
"A fifth concerto, Miss Taggart? Why, no, of course he hasn't."
"Are you sure?"
"Quite sure, Miss Taggart. He has not written anything for eight years."
"Is he still alive?"
"Why, yes—that is, I can't say for certain, he has dropped out of public life entirely—but I'm sure we would have heard of it if he had died."
"If he wrote anything, would you know about it?"
"Of course. We would be the first to know. We publish all of his work. But he has stopped writing."
"I see. Thank you."
When Owen Kellogg entered her office, she looked at him with satisfaction. She was glad to see that she had been right in her vague recollection of his appearance—his face had the same quality as that of the young brakeman on the train, the face of the kind of man with whom she could deal.
"Sit down, Mr. Kellogg," she said, but he remained standing in front of her desk.
"You had asked me once to let you know if I ever decided to change my employment, Miss Taggart," he said. "So I came to tell you that I am quitting."
She had expected anything but that; it took her a moment before she asked quietly, "Why?"
"For a personal reason."
"Were you dissatisfied here?"
"No."
"Have you received a better offer?"
"No."
"What railroad are you going to?"
"I'm not going to any railroad, Miss Taggart."
"Then what job are you taking?"
"I have not decided that yet."
She studied him, feeling slightly uneasy. There was no hostility in his face; he looked straight at her, he answered simply, directly; he spoke like one who has nothing to hide, or to show; the face was polite and empty.
"Then why should you wish to quit?"
"It's a personal matter."
"Are you ill? Is it a question of your health?"
"No."
"Are you leaving the city?"
"No."
"Have you inherited money that permits you to retire?"
"No."
"Do you intend to continue working for a living?"

"Yes."
"But you do not wish to work for Taggart Transcontinental?"
"No."
"In that case, something must have happened here to cause your decision. What?"
"Nothing, Miss Taggart."
"I wish you'd tell me. I have a reason for wanting to know."
"Would you take my word for it, Miss Taggart?"
"Yes."
"No person, matter or event connected with my job here had any bearing upon my decision."
"You have no specific complaint against Taggart Transcontinental?"
"None."
"Then I think you might reconsider when you hear what I have to offer you."
"I'm sorry, Miss Taggart. I can't."
"May I tell you what I have in mind?"
"Yes, if you wish."
"Would you take my word for it that I decided to offer you the post I'm going to offer, before you asked to see me? I want you to know that."
"I will always take your word, Miss Taggart."
"It's the post of Superintendent of the Ohio Division. It's yours, if you want it."
His face showed no reaction, as if the words had no more significance for him than for a savage who had never heard of railroads.
"I don't want it, Miss Taggart," he answered.
After a moment, she said, her voice tight, "Write your own ticket, Kellogg. Name your price, I want you to stay. I can match anything any other railroad offers you."
"I am not going to work for any other railroad."
"I thought you loved your work."
This was the first sign of emotion in him, just a slight widening of his eyes and an oddly quiet emphasis in his voice when he answered, "I do."
"Then tell me what it is that I should say in order to hold you!" It had been involuntary and so obviously frank that he looked at her as if it had reached him.
"Perhaps I am being unfair by coming here to tell you that I'm quitting, Miss Taggart. I know that you asked me to tell you because you wanted to have a chance to make me a counter-offer. So if I came, it looks as if I'm open to a deal. But I'm not. I came only because I . . . I wanted to keep my word to you."
That one break in his voice was like a sudden flash that told her how much her interest and her request had meant to him; and that his decision had not been an easy one to make.
"Kellogg, is there nothing I can offer you?" she asked.
"Nothing, Miss Taggart. Nothing on earth."
He turned to go. For the first time in her life, she felt helpless and beaten.
"Why?" she asked, not addressing him.
He stopped. He shrugged and smiled—he was alive for a moment and it was the strangest smile she had ever seen: it held secret amusement, and heartbreak, and an infinite bitterness. He answered: "Who is John Galt?"

CHAPTER II
THE CHAIN
It began with a few lights. As a train of the Taggart line rolled toward Philadelphia, a few brilliant, scattered lights appeared in the darkness; they seemed purposeless in the empty plain, yet too powerful to have no purpose. The passengers watched them idly, without interest.
The black shape of a structure came next, barely visible against the sky, then a big building, close to the tracks; the building was dark, and the reflections of the train lights streaked across the solid glass of its walls.
An oncoming freight train hid the view, filling the windows with a rushing smear of noise. In a sudden break above the fiat cars, the passengers saw distant structures under a faint, reddish glow in the sky; the glow moved in irregular spasms, as if the structures were breathing.
When the freight train vanished, they saw angular buildings wrapped in coils of steam. The rays of a few strong lights cut straight sheafs through the coils. The steam was red as the sky.
The thing that came next did not look like a building, but like a shell of checkered glass enclosing girders, cranes and trusses in a solid, blinding, orange spread of flame.
The passengers could not grasp the complexity of what seemed to be a city stretched for miles, active without sign of human presence. They saw towers that looked like contorted skyscrapers, bridges hanging in mid-air, and sudden wounds spurting fire from out of solid walls. They saw a line of glowing cylinders moving through the night; the cylinders were red-hot metal.
An office building appeared, close to the tracks. The big neon sign on its roof lighted the interiors of the coaches as they went by. It said: REARDEN STEEL.
A passenger, who was a professor of economics, remarked to his companion: "Of what importance is an individual in the titanic collective achievements of our industrial age?" Another, who was a journalist, made a note for future use in his column: "Hank Rearden is the kind of man who sticks his name on everything he touches. You may, from this, form your own opinion about the character of Hank Rearden."
The train was speeding on into the darkness when a red gasp shot to the sky from behind a long structure. The passengers paid no attention; one more heat of steel being poured was not an event they had been taught to notice.
It was the first heat for the first order of Rearden Metal.
To the men at the tap-hole of the furnace inside the mills, the first break of the liquid metal into the open came as a shocking sensation of morning. The narrow streak pouring through space had the pure white color of sunlight. Black coils of steam were boiling upward, streaked with violent red. Fountains of sparks shot in beating spasms, as from broken arteries. The air seemed torn to rags, reflecting a raging flame that was not there, red blotches whirling and running through space, as if not to be contained within a man-made structure, as if about to consume the columns, the girders, the bridges of cranes overhead. But the liquid metal had no aspect of violence. It was a long white curve with the texture of satin and the friendly radiance of a smile. It flowed obediently through a spout of clay, with two brittle borders to restrain it. It fell through twenty feet of space, down into a ladle that held two hundred tons. A flow of stars hung above the stream, leaping out of its placid smoothness, looking delicate as lace and innocent as children's sparklers.
Only at a closer glance could one notice that the white satin was boiling. Splashes flew out at times and fell to the ground below: they were metal and, cooling while hitting the soil, they burst into flame.

Two hundred tons of a metal which was to be harder than steel, running liquid at a temperature of four thousand degrees, had the power to annihilate every wall of the structure and every one of the men who worked by the stream. But every inch of its course, every pound of its pressure and the content of every molecule within it, were controlled and made by a conscious intention that had worked upon it for ten years.
Swinging through the darkness of the shed, the red glare kept stashing the face of a man who stood in a distant corner; he stood leaning against a column, watching. The glare cut a moment's wedge across his eyes, which had the color and quality of pale blue ice—then across the black web of the metal column and the ash-blond strands of his hair— then across the belt of his trenchcoat and the pockets where he held his hands. His body was tall and gaunt; he had always been too tall for those around him. His face was cut by prominent cheekbones and by a few sharp lines; they were not the lines of age, he had always had them: this had made him look old at twenty, and young now, at forty-five.
Ever since he could remember, he had been told that his face was ugly, because it was unyielding, and cruel, because it was expressionless. It remained expressionless now, as he looked at the metal. He was Hank Rearden.
The metal came rising to the top of the ladle and went running over with arrogant prodigality. Then the blinding white trickles turned to glowing brown, and in one more instant they were black icicles of metal, starting to crumble off. The slag was crusting in thick, brown ridges that looked like the crust of the earth. As the crust grew thicker, a few craters broke open, with the white liquid still boiling within.
A man came riding through the air, in the cab of a crane overhead. He pulled a lever by the casual movement of one hand: steel hooks came down on a chain, seized the handles of the ladle, lifted it smoothly like a bucket of milk—and two hundred tons of metal went sailing through space toward a row of molds waiting to be filled.
Hank Rearden leaned back, closing his eyes. He felt the column trembling with the rumble of the crane. The job was done, he thought.
A worker saw him and grinned in understanding, like a fellow accomplice in a great celebration, who knew why that tall, blond figure had to be present here tonight. Rearden smiled in answer: it was the only salute he had received. Then he started back for his office, once again a figure with an expressionless face.
It was late when Hank Rearden left his office that night to walk from his mills to his house. It was a walk of some miles through empty country, but he had felt like doing it, without conscious reason.
He walked, keeping one hand in his pocket, his fingers closed about a bracelet. It was made of Rearden Metal, in the shape of a chain. His fingers moved, feeling its texture once in a while. It had taken ten years to make that bracelet. Ten years, he thought, is a long time. The road was dark, edged with trees. Looking up, he could see a few leaves against the stars; the leaves were twisted and dry, ready to fall.
There were distant lights in the windows of houses scattered through the countryside; but the lights made the road seem lonelier.
He never felt loneliness except when he was happy. He turned, once in a while, to look back at the red glow of the sky over the mills. He did not think of the ten years. What remained of them tonight was only a feeling which he could not name, except that it was quiet and solemn. The feeling was a sum, and he did not have to count again the parts that had gone to make it. But the parts, unrecalled, were there, within the feeling. They were the nights spent at scorching ovens in the research laboratory of the mills—-the nights spent in the workshop of his home, over sheets of paper which he filled with formulas, then tore up in angry failure—-the days when the young

scientists of the small staff he had chosen to assist him waited for instructions like soldiers ready for a hopeless battle, having exhausted their ingenuity, still willing, but silent, with the unspoken sentence hanging in the air: "Mr. Rearden, it can't be done—"—the meals, interrupted and abandoned at the sudden flash of a new thought, a thought to be pursued at once, to be tried, to be tested, to be worked on for months, and to be discarded as another failure——the moments snatched from conferences, from contracts, from theduties of running the best steel mills in the country, snatched almostguiltily, as for a secret love——the one thought held immovably across a span of ten years, undereverything he did and everything he saw, the thought held in his mindwhen he looked at the buildings of a city, at the track of a railroad, atthe light in the windows of a distant farmhouse, at the knife in the handsof a beautiful woman cutting a piece of fruit at a banquet, the thought ofa metal alloy that would do more than steel had ever done, a metal thatwould be to steel what steel had been to iron——the acts of self-racking when he discarded a hope or a sample,not permitting himself to know that he was tired, not giving himself timeto feel, driving himself through the wringing torture of: "not good enough . . . still not good enough . . ." and going on with no motor save the conviction that it could be done— —then the day when it was done and its result was called Rearden Metal— —these were the things that had come to white heat, had melted and fused within him, and their alloy was a strange, quiet feeling that made him smile at the countryside in the darkness and wonder why happiness could hurt.
After a while, he realized that he was thinking of his past, as if certain days of it were spread before him, demanding to be seen again. He did not want to look at them; he despised memories as a pointless indulgence. But then he understood that he thought of them tonight in honor of that piece of metal in his pocket. Then he permitted himself to look.
He saw the day when he stood on a rocky ledge and felt a thread of sweat running from his temple down his neck. He was fourteen years old and it was his first day of work in the iron mines of Minnesota. He was trying to learn to breathe against the scalding pain in his chest. He stood, cursing himself, because he had made up his mind that he would not be tired. After a while, he went back to his task; he decided that pain was not a valid reason for stopping, He saw the day when he stood at the window of his office and looked at the mines; he owned them as of that morning. He was thirty years old. What had gone on in the years between did not matter, just as pain had not mattered. He had worked in mines, in foundries, in the steel mills of the north, moving toward the purpose he had chosen. All he remembered of those jobs was that the men around him had never seemed to know what to do, while he had always known. He remembered wondering why so many iron mines were closing, just as these had been about to close until he took them over. He looked at the shelves of rock in the distance. Workers were putting up a new sign above a gate at the end of a road: Rearden Ore.
He saw an evening when he sat slumped across his desk in that office.
It was late and his staff had left; so he could lie there alone, unwitnessed. He was tired. It was as if he had run a race against his own body, and all the exhaustion of years, which he had refused to acknowledge, had caught him at once and flattened him against the desk top. He felt nothing, except the desire not to move. He did not have the strength to feel—not even to suffer. He had burned everything there was to burn within him; he had scattered so many sparks to start so many things— and he wondered whether someone could give him now the spark he needed, now when he felt unable ever to rise again. He asked himself who had started him and kept him going. Then he raised his head.

Slowly, with the greatest effort of his life, he made his body rise until he was able to sit upright with only one hand pressed to the desk and a trembling arm to support him.
He never asked that question again. He saw the day when he stood on a hill and looked at a grimy wasteland of structures that had been a steel plant. It was closed and given up. He had bought it the night before. There was a strong wind and a gray light squeezed from among the clouds. In that light, he saw the brown-red of rust, like dead blood, on the steel of the giant cranes—and bright, green, living weeds, like gorged cannibals, growing over piles of broken glass at the foot of walls made of empty frames. At a gate in the distance, he saw the black silhouettes of men. They were the unemployed from the rotting hovels of what had once been a prosperous town.
They stood silently, looking at the glittering car he had left at the gate of the mills; they wondered whether the man on the hill was the Hank Rearden that people were talking about, and whether it was true that the mills were to be reopened. "The historical cycle of steel-making in Pennsylvania is obviously running down," a newspaper had said, "and experts agree that Henry Rearden's venture into steel is hopeless. You may soon witness the sensational end of the sensational Henry Rearden." That was ten years ago. Tonight, the cold wind on his face felt like the wind of that day. He turned to look back. The red glow of the mills breathed in the sky, a sight as life-giving as a sunrise. These had been his stops, the stations which an express had reached and passed. He remembered nothing distinct of the years between them; the years were blurred, like a streak of speed.
Whatever it was, he thought, whatever the strain and the agony, they were worth it, because they had made him reach this day—this day when the first heat of the first order of Rearden Metal had been poured, to become rails for Taggart Transcontinental.
He touched the bracelet in his pocket. He had had it made from that first poured metal. It was for his wife. As he touched it, he realized suddenly that he had thought of an abstraction called "his wife"—not of the woman to whom he was married.
He felt a stab of regret, wishing he had not made the bracelet, then a wave of self-reproach for the regret. He shook his head. This was not the time for his old doubts. He felt that he could forgive anything to anyone, because happiness was the greatest agent of purification. He felt certain that every living being wished him well tonight. He wanted to meet someone, to face the first stranger, to stand disarmed and open, and to say, "Look at me." People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been—for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy.
The dark road had risen imperceptibly to the top of a hill. He stopped and turned. The red glow was a narrow strip, far to the west. Above it, small at a distance of miles, the words of a neon sign stood written on the blackness of the sky: REARDEN STEEL. He stood straight, as if before a bench of judgment. He thought that in the darkness of this night other signs were lighted over the country: Rearden Ore—Rearden Coal—Rearden Limestone. He thought of the days behind him. He wished it were possible to light a neon sign above them, saying: Rearden Life.
He turned sharply and walked on. As the road came closer to his house, he noticed that his steps were slowing down and that something was ebbing away from his mood. He felt a dim reluctance to enter his home, which he did not want to feel. No, he thought, not tonight; they'll understand it, tonight. But he did not know, he had never defined, what it was that he wanted them to understand.

He saw lights in the windows of the living room, when he approached his house. The house stood on a hill, rising before him like a big white bulk; it looked naked, with a few semi-colonial pillars for reluctant ornament; it had the cheerless look of a nudity not worth revealing.
He was not certain whether his wife noticed him when he entered the living room. She sat by the fireplace, talking, the curve of her arm floating in graceful emphasis of her words. He heard a small break in her voice, and thought that she had seen him, but she did not look up and her sentence went on smoothly; he could not be certain. "—but it's just that a man of culture is bored with the alleged wonders of purely material ingenuity," she was saying. "He simply refuses to get excited about plumbing."
Then she turned her head, looked at Rearden in the shadows across the long room, and her arms spread gracefully, like two swan necks by her sides.
"Why, darling," she said in a bright tone of amusement, "isn't it too early to come home? Wasn't there some slag to sweep or tuyeres to polish?"
They all turned to him—his mother, his brother Philip and Paul Larkin, their old friend.
"I'm sorry," he answered. "I know I'm late."
"Don't say you're sorry," said his mother. "You could have telephoned." He looked at her, trying vaguely to remember something.
"You promised to be here for dinner tonight."
"Oh, that's right, I did. I'm sorry. But today at the mills, we poured—" He stopped; he did not know what made him unable to utter the one thing he had come home to say; he added only, "It's just that I . . . forgot."
"That's what Mother means," said Philip.
"Oh, let him get his bearings, he's not quite here yet, he's still at the mills," his wife said gaily. "Do take your coat off, Henry."
Paul Larkin was looking at him with the devoted eyes of an inhibited dog. "Hello, Paul," said Rearden. "When did you get in?"
"Oh, I just hopped down on the five thirty-five from New York." Larkin was smiling in gratitude for the attention.
"Trouble?"
"Who hasn't got trouble these days?" Larkin's smile became resigned, to indicate that the remark was merely philosophical. "But no, no special trouble this time. I just thought I'd drop in to see you."
His wife laughed. "You've disappointed him, Paul." She turned to Rearden. "Is it an inferiority complex or a superiority one, Henry? Do you believe that nobody can want to see you just for your own sake, or do you believe that nobody can get along without your help?”
He wanted to utter an angry denial, but she was smiling at him as if this were merely a conversational joke, and he had no capacity for the sort of conversations which were not supposed to be meant, so he did not answer. He stood looking at her, wondering about the things he had never been able to understand.
Lillian Rearden was generally regarded as a beautiful woman. She had a tall, graceful body, the kind that looked well in high-waisted gowns of the Empire style, which she made it a practice to wear. Her exquisite profile belonged to a cameo of the same period: its pure, proud lines and the lustrous, light brown waves of her hair, worn with classical simplicity, suggested an austere, imperial beauty. But when she turned full-face, people experienced a small shock of disappointment.
Her face was not beautiful. The eyes were the flaw: they were vaguely pale, neither quite gray nor brown, lifelessly empty of expression. Rearden had always wondered, since she seemed amused so often, why there was no gaiety in her face.
"We have met before, dear," she said, in answer to his silent scrutiny, "though you don't seem to be sure of it."

"Have you had any dinner, Henry?" his mother asked; there was a reproachful impatience in her voice, as if his hunger were a personal insult to her.
"Yes . . . No . . . I wasn't hungry."
"I'd better ring to have them—"
"No, Mother, not now, it doesn't matter."
"That's the trouble I've always had with you." She was not looking at him, but reciting words into space. "It's no use trying to do things for you, you don't appreciate it. I could never make you eat properly."
"Henry, you work too hard," said Philip. "It's not good for you."
Rearden laughed. "I like it."
"That's what you tell yourself. It's a form of neurosis, you know. When a man drowns himself in work, it's because he's trying to escape from something. You ought to have a hobby."
"Oh, Phil, for Christ's sake!" he said, and regretted the irritation in his voice.
Philip had always been in precarious health, though doctors had found no specific defect in his loose, gangling body. He was thirty-eight, but his chronic weariness made people think at times that he was older than his brother.
"You ought to learn to have some fun," said Philip. "Otherwise, you'll become dull and narrow. Single-tracked, you know. You ought to get out of your little private shell and take a look at the world. You don't want to miss life, the way you're doing."
Fighting anger, Rearden told himself that this was Philip's form of solicitude. He told himself that it would be unjust to feel resentment: they were all trying to show their concern for him—and he wished these were not the things they had chosen for concern.
"I had a pretty good time today, Phil," he answered, smiling—and wondered why Philip did not ask him what it was.
He wished one of them would ask him. He was finding it hard to concentrate. The sight of the running metal was still burned into his mind, filling his consciousness, leaving no room for anything else.
"You might have apologized, only I ought to know better than to expect it." It was his mother's voice; he turned: she was looking at him with that injured look which proclaims the long-bearing patience of the defenseless.
"Mrs. Beecham was here for dinner," she said reproachfully.
"What?"
"Mrs. Beecham. My friend Mrs. Beecham."
"Yes?"
"I told you about her, I told you many times, but you never remember anything I say. Mrs. Beecham was so anxious to meet you, but she had to leave after dinner, she couldn't wait, Mrs. Beecham is a very busy person. She wanted so much to tell you about the wonderful work we're doing in our parish school, and about the classes in metal craftsmanship, and about the beautiful wrought-iron doorknobs that the little slum children are making all by themselves."
It took the whole of his sense of consideration to force himself to answer evenly, "I'm sorry if I disappointed you, Mother."
"You're not sorry. You could've been here if you'd made the effort. But when did you ever make an effort for anybody but yourself? You're not interested in any of us or in anything we do. You think that if you pay the bills, that's enough, don't you? Money! That's all you know. And all you give us is money. Have you ever given us any time?"
If this meant that she missed him, he thought, then it meant affection, and if it meant affection, then he was unjust to experience a heavy, murky

feeling which kept him silent lest his voice betray that the feeling was disgust.
"You don't care," her voice went half-spitting, half-begging on. "Lillian needed you today for a very important problem, but I told her it was no use waiting to discuss it with you."
"Oh, Mother, it's not important!" said Lillian. "Not to Henry."
He turned to her. He stood in the middle of the room, with his trenchcoat still on, as if he were trapped in an unreality that would not become real to him.
"It's not important at all," said Lillian gaily; he could not tell whether her voice was apologetic or boastful. "It's not business. It's purely non-commercial."
"What is it?"
"Just a party I'm planning to give."
"A party?"
"Oh, don't look frightened, it's not for tomorrow night. I know that you're so very busy, but it's for three months from now and I want it to be a very big, very special affair, so would you promise me to be here that night and not in Minnesota or Colorado or California?"
She was looking at him in an odd manner, speaking too lightly and too purposefully at once, her smile overstressing an air of innocence and suggesting something like a hidden trump card.
"Three months from now?" he said. "But you know that I can't tell what urgent business might come up to call me out of town."
"Oh, I know! But couldn't I make a formal appointment with you, way in advance, just like any railroad executive, automobile manufacturer or junk—I mean, scrap—dealer? They say you never miss an appointment. Of course, I'd let you pick the date to suit your convenience." She was looking up at him, her glance acquiring some special quality of feminine appeal by being sent from under her lowered forehead up toward his full height; she asked, a little too casually and too cautiously, "The date I had in mind was December tenth, but would you prefer the ninth or the eleventh?"
"It makes no difference to me."
She said gently, "December tenth is our wedding anniversary, Henry."
They were all watching his face; if they expected a look of guilt, what they saw, instead, was a faint smile of amusement. She could not have intended this as a trap, he thought, because he could escape it so easily, by refusing to accept any blame for his forgetfulness and by leaving her spurned; she knew that his feeling for her was her only weapon. Her motive, he thought, was a proudly indirect attempt to test his feeling and to confess her own. A party was not his form of celebration, but it was hers. It meant nothing in his terms; in hers, it meant the best tribute she could offer to him and to their marriage. He had to respect her intention, he thought, even if he did not share her standards, even if he did not know whether he still cared for any tribute from her. He had to let her win, he thought, because she had thrown herself upon his mercy. He smiled, an open, unresentful smile in acknowledgment of her victory. "All right, Lillian," he said quietly, "I promise to be here on the night of December tenth."
"Thank you, dear." Her smile had a closed, mysterious quality; he wondered why he had a moment's impression that his attitude had disappointed them all.
If she trusted him, he thought, if her feeling for him was still alive, then he would match her trust. He had to say it; words were a lens to focus one's mind, and he could not use words for anything else tonight. "I'm sorry I'm late, Lillian, but today at the mills we poured the first heat of Rearden Metal."
There was a moment of silence. Then Philip said, "Well, that's nice."
The others said nothing.

He put his hand in his pocket. When he touched it, the reality of the bracelet swept out everything else; he felt as he had felt when the liquid metal had poured through space before him.
"I brought you a present, Lillian."
He did not know that he stood straight and that the gesture of his arm was that of a returning crusader offering his trophy to his love, when he dropped a small chain of metal into her lap.
Lillian Rearden picked it up, hooked on the tips of two straight fingers, and raised it to the light. The links were heavy, crudely made, the shining metal had an odd tinge, it was greenish-blue.
"What's that?" she asked.
"The first thing made from the first heat of the first order of Rearden Metal."
"You mean," she said, "it's fully as valuable as a piece of railroad rails?"
He looked at her blankly.
She jingled the bracelet, making it sparkle under the light. "Henry, it's perfectly wonderful! What originality! I shall be the sensation of New York, wearing jewelry made of the same stuff as bridge girders, truck motors, kitchen stoves, typewriters, and—what was it you were saying about it the other day, darling?—soup kettles?"
"God, Henry, but you're conceited!" said Philip.
Lillian laughed. "He's a sentimentalist. All men are. But, darling, I do appreciate it. It isn't the gift, it's the intention, I know."
"The intention's plain selfishness, if you ask me," said Rearden's mother. "Another man would bring a diamond bracelet, if he wanted to give his wife a present, because it's' her pleasure he'd think of, not his own. But Henry thinks that just because he's made a new kind of tin, why, it's got to be more precious than diamonds to everybody, just because it's he that's made it. That's the way he's been since he was five years old—the most conceited brat you ever saw—and I knew he'd grow up to be the most selfish creature on God's earth."
"No, it's sweet," said Lillian. "It's charming." She dropped the bracelet down on the table. She got up, put her hands on Rearden's shoulders, and raising herself on tiptoe, kissed him on the cheek, saying, "Thank you, dear."
He did not move, did not bend his head down to her. After a while, he turned, took off his coat and sat down by the fire, apart from the others. He felt nothing but an immense exhaustion.
He did not listen to their talk. He heard dimly that Lillian was arguing, defending him against his mother.
"I know him better than you do," his mother was saying. "Hank Rearden's not interested in man, beast or weed unless it's tied in some way to himself and his work. That's all he cares about. I've tried my best to teach him some humility, I've tried all my life, but I've failed."
He had offered his mother unlimited means to live as and where she pleased; he wondered why she had insisted that she wanted to live with him. His success, he had thought, meant something to her, and if it did, then it was a bond between them, the only kind of bond he recognized; if she wanted a place in the home of her successful son, he would not deny it to her.
"It's no use hoping to make a saint out of Henry, Mother," said Philip. "He wasn't meant to be one."
"Oh but, Philip, you're wrong!" said Lillian. "You're so wrong! Henry has all the makings of a saint. That's the trouble." What did they seek from him?—thought Rearden—what were they after? He had never asked anything of them; it was they who wished to hold him, they who pressed a claim on him—and the claim seemed to have the form of affection, but it was a form which he

found harder to endure than any sort of hatred. He despised causeless affection, just as he despised unearned wealth. They professed to love him for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which he could wish to be loved. He wondered what response they could hope to obtain from him in such manner—if his response was what they wanted.
And it was, he thought; else why those constant complaints, those unceasing accusations about his indifference? Why that chronic air of suspicion, as if they were waiting to be hurt? He had never had a desire to hurt them, but he had always felt their defensive, reproachful expectation; they seemed wounded by anything he said, it was not a matter of his words or actions, it was almost . . . almost as if they were Wounded by the mere fact of his being. Don't start imagining the insane —he told himself severely, struggling to face the riddle with the strictest of his ruthless sense of justice. He could not condemn them without understanding; and he could not understand.
Did he like them? No, he thought; he had wanted to like them, which was not the same. He had wanted it in the name of some unstated potentiality which he had once expected to see in any human being. He felt nothing for them now, nothing but the merciless zero of indifference, not even the regret of a loss. Did he need any person as part of his life? Did he miss the feeling he had wanted to feel? No, he thought. Had he ever missed it? Yes, he thought, in his youth; not any longer.
His sense of exhaustion was growing; he realized that it was boredom.
He owed them the courtesy of hiding it, he thought—and sat motionless, fighting a desire for sleep that was turning into physical pain.
His eyes were closing, when he felt two soft, moist fingers touching his hand: Paul Larkin had pulled a chair to his side and was leaning over for a private conversation.
"I don't care what the industry says about it, Hank, you've got a great product in Rearden Metal, a great product, it will make a fortune, like everything you touch."
"Yes," said Rearden, "it will."
"I just . . . I just hope you don't run into trouble."
"What trouble?"
"Oh, I don't know . . . the way things are nowadays . . . there's people, who . . . but how can we tell? . . . anything can happen. . . ."
"What trouble?"
Larkin sat hunched, looking up with his gentle, pleading eyes. His short, plumpish figure always seemed unprotected and incomplete, as if he needed a shell to shrink into at the slightest touch. His wistful eyes, his lost, helpless, appealing smile served as substitute for the shell. The smile was disarming, like that of a boy who throws himself at the mercy of an incomprehensible universe. He was fifty-three years old.
"Your public relations aren't any too good, Hank," he said. "You've always had a bad press."
"So what?"
"You're not popular, Hank."
"I haven't heard any complaints from my customers."
"That's not what I mean. You ought to hire yourself a good press agent to sell you to the public,"
"What for? It's steel that I'm selling."
"But you don't want to have the public against you. Public opinion, you know—it can mean a lot."
"I don't think the public's against me. And I don't think that it means a damn, one way or another,"
"The newspapers are against you."
"They have time to waste. I haven't."

"I don't like it, Hank. It's not good."
"What?"
"What they write about you."
"What do they write about me?"
"Well, you know the stuff. That you're intractable. That you're ruthless. That you won't allow anyone any voice in the running of your mills.
That your only goal is to make steel and to make money."
"But that is my only goal."
"But you shouldn't say it."
"Why not? What is it I'm supposed to say?"
"Oh, I don't know . . . But your mills—"
"They're my mills, aren't they?"
"Yes, but—but you shouldn't remind people of that too loudly. . . .
You know how it is nowadays. . . . They think that your attitude is anti-social."
"I don't give a damn what they think,"
Paul Larkin sighed.
"What's the matter, Paul? What are you driving at?"
"Nothing . . . nothing in particular. Only one never knows what can happen in times like these. . . . One has to be so careful . . ."
Rearden chuckled. "You're not trying to worry about me, are you?"
"It's just that I'm your friend, Hank. I'm your friend. You know how much I admire you."
Paul Larkin had always been unlucky. Nothing he touched ever came off quite well, nothing ever quite failed or succeeded. He was a businessman, but he could not manage to remain for long in any one line of business. At the moment, he was struggling with a modest plant that manufactured mining equipment.
He had clung to Rearden for years, in awed admiration. He came for advice, he asked for loans at times, but not often; the loans were modest and were always repaid, though not always on time. His motive in the relationship seemed to resemble the need of an anemic person who receives a kind of living transfusion from the mere sight of a savagely overabundant vitality.
Watching Larkin's efforts, Rearden felt what he did when he watched an ant struggling under the load of a matchstick. It's so hard for him, thought Rearden, and so easy for me. So he gave advice, attention and a tactful, patient interest, whenever he could.
"I'm your friend, Hank."
Rearden looked at him inquiringly.
Larkin glanced away, as if debating something in his mind. After a while, he asked cautiously, "How is your man in Washington?"
"Okay, I guess."
"You ought to be sure of it. It's important." He looked up at Rearden, and repeated with a kind of stressed insistence, as if discharging a painful moral duty, "Hank, it's very important."
"I suppose so."
"In fact, that's what I came here to tell you."
"For any special reason?"
Larkin considered it and decided that the duty was discharged. "No,"
he said.
Rearden disliked the subject. He knew that it was necessary to have a man to protect him from the legislature; all industrialists had to employ such men. But he had never given much attention to this aspect of his business; he could not quite convince himself that it was necessary.
An inexplicable kind of distaste, part fastidiousness, part boredom, stopped him whenever he tried to consider it.

"Trouble is, Paul," he said, thinking aloud, "that the men one has to pick for that job are such a crummy lot,"
Larkin looked away. "That's life," he said.
"Damned if I see why. Can you tell me that? What's wrong with the world?"
Larkin shrugged sadly. "Why ask useless questions? How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky? Who is John Galt?"
Rearden sat up straight. "No," he said sharply. "No. There's no reason to feel that way."
He got up. His exhaustion had gone while he talked about his business. He felt a sudden spurt of rebellion, a need to recapture and defiantly to reassert his own view of existence, that sense of it which he had held while walking home tonight and which now seemed threatened in some nameless manner.
He paced the room, his energy returning. He looked at his family.
They were bewildered, unhappy children—he thought—all of them, even his mother, and he was foolish to resent their ineptitude; it came from their helplessness, not from malice. It was he who had to make himself learn to understand them, since he had so much to give, since they could never share his sense of joyous, boundless power.
He glanced at them from across the room. His mother and Philip were engaged in some eager discussion; but he noted that they were not really eager, they were nervous. Philip sat in a low chair, his stomach forward, his weight on his shoulder blades, as if the miserable discomfort of his position were intended to punish the onlookers.
"What's the matter, Phil?" Rearden asked, approaching him. "You look done in."
"I've had a hard day," said Philip sullenly.
"You're not the only one who works hard," said his mother. "Others have problems, too—even if they're not billion-dollar, trans-super-continental problems like yours."
"Why, that's good. I always thought that Phil should find some interest of his own."
"Good? You mean you like to see your brother sweating his health away? It amuses you, doesn't it? I always thought it did."
"Why, no, Mother. I'd like to help."
"You don't have to help. You don't have to feel anything for any of us."
Rearden had never known what his brother was doing or wished to do. He had sent Philip through college, but Philip had not been able to decide on any specific ambition. There was something wrong, by Rearden's standards, with a man who did not seek any gainful employment, but he would not impose his standards on Philip; he could afford to support his brother and never notice the expense. Let him take it easy, Rearden had thought for years, let him have a chance to choose his career without the strain of struggling for a livelihood.
"What were you doing today, Phil?" he asked patiently.
"It wouldn't interest you."
"It does interest me. That's why I'm asking."
"I had to see twenty different people all over the place, from here to Redding to Wilmington."
"What did you have to see them about?"
"I am trying to raise money for Friends of Global Progress."
Rearden had never been able to keep track of the many organizations to which Philip belonged, nor to get a clear idea of their activities. He had heard Philip talking vaguely about this one for the last six months.
It seemed to be devoted to some sort of free lectures on psychology, folk music and co-operative farming. Rearden felt contempt for groups of that kind and saw no reason for a closer inquiry into their nature.

He remained silent. Philip added without being prompted, "We need ten thousand dollars for a vital program, but it's a martyr's task, trying to raise money. There's not a speck of social conscience left in people.
When I think of the kind of bloated money-bags I saw today—why, they spend more than that on any whim, but I couldn't squeeze just a hundred bucks a piece out of them, which was all I asked. They have no sense of moral duty, no . . . What are you laughing at?" he asked sharply. Rearden stood before him, grinning.
It was so childishly blatant, thought Rearden, so helplessly crude: the hint and the insult, offered together. It would be so easy to squash Philip by returning the insult, he thought—by returning an insult which would be deadly because it would be true—that he could not bring himself to utter it. Surely, he thought, the poor fool knows he's at my mercy, knows he's opened himself to be hurt, so I don't have to do it, and my not doing it is my best answer, which he won't be able to miss.
What sort of misery does he really live in, to get himself twisted quite so badly?
And then Rearden thought suddenly that he could break through Philip's chronic wretchedness for once, give him a shock of pleasure, the unexpected gratification of a hopeless desire. He thought: What do I care about the nature of his desire?—it's his, just as Rearden Metal was mine—it must mean to him what that meant to me—let's see him happy just once, it might teach him something—didn't I say that happiness is the agent of purification?—I'm celebrating tonight, so let him share in it—it will be so much for him, and so little for me.
"Philip," he said, smiling, "call Miss Ives at my office tomorrow.
She'll have a check for you for ten thousand dollars."
Philip stared at him blankly; it was neither shock nor pleasure; it was just the empty stare of eyes that looked glassy.
"Oh," said Philip, then added, "We'll appreciate it very much."
There was no emotion in his voice, not even the simple one of greed.
Rearden could not understand his own feeling: it was as if something leaden and empty were collapsing within him, he felt both the weight and the emptiness, together. He knew it was disappointment, but he wondered why it was so gray and ugly.
"It's very nice of you, Henry," Philip said dryly. "I'm surprised. I didn't expect it of you."
"Don't you understand it, Phil?" said Lillian, her voice peculiarly clear and lilting. "Henry's poured his metal today." She turned to Rearden. "Shall we declare it a national holiday, darling?"
"You're a good man, Henry," said his mother, and added, "but not often enough."
Rearden stood looking at Philip, as if waiting.
Philip looked away, then raised his eyes and held Rearden's glance, as if engaged in a scrutiny of his own.
"You don't really care about helping the underprivileged, do you?"
Philip asked—and Rearden heard, unable to believe it, that the tone of his voice was reproachful.
"No, Phil, I don't care about it at all. I only wanted you to be happy."
"But that money is not for me. I am not collecting it for any personal motive. I have no selfish interest in the matter whatever." His voice was cold, with a note of self-conscious virtue.
Rearden turned away. He felt a sudden loathing: not because the words were hypocrisy, but because they were true; Philip meant them.
"By the way, Henry," Philip added, "do you mind if I ask you to have Miss Ives give me the money in cash?" Rearden turned back to him, puzzled. "You see, Friends of Global Progress are a very progressive group and they have

always maintained that you represent the blackest element of social retrogression ha the country, so it would embarrass us, you know, to have your name on our list of contributors, because somebody might accuse us of being in the pay of Hank Rearden."
He wanted to slap Philip's face. But an almost unendurable contempt made him close his eyes, instead.
"All right," he said quietly, "you can have it in cash."
He walked away, to the farthest window of the room, and stood looking at the glow of the mills in the distance.
He heard Larkin's voice crying after him, "Damn it, Hank, you shouldn't have given it to him!"
Then Lillian's voice came, cold and gay: "But you're wrong, Paul, you're so wrong! What would happen to Henry's vanity if he didn't have us to throw alms to? What would become of his strength if he didn't have weaker people to dominate? What would he do with himself if he didn't keep us around as dependents? It's quite all right, really, I'm not criticizing him, it's just a law of human nature."
She took the metal bracelet and held it up, letting it glitter in the lamplight.
"A chain," she said. "Appropriate, isn't it? It's the chain by which he holds us all in bondage."

CHAPTER III
THE TOP AND THE BOTTOM
The ceiling was that of a cellar, so heavy and low that people stooped when crossing the room, as if the weight of the vaulting rested on their shoulders. The circular booths of dark red leather were built into walls of stone that looked eaten by age and dampness. There were no windows, only patches of blue light shooting from dents in the masonry, the dead blue light proper for use in blackouts. The place was entered by way of narrow steps that led down, as if descending deep under the ground. This was the most expensive barroom in New York and it was built on the roof of a skyscraper.
Four men sat at a table. Raised sixty floors above the city, they did not speak loudly as one speaks from a height in the freedom of air and space; they kept their voices low, as befitted a cellar.
"Conditions and circumstances, Jim," said Orren Boyle. "Conditions and circumstances absolutely beyond human control. We had everything mapped to roll those rails, but unforeseen developments set in which nobody could have prevented. If you'd only given us a chance, Jim."
"Disunity," drawled James Taggart, "seems to be the basic cause of all social problems. My sister has a certain influence with a certain element among our stockholders. Their disruptive tactics cannot always be defeated."
"You said it, Jim. Disunity, that's the trouble. It's my absolute opinion that in our complex industrial society, no business enterprise can succeed without sharing the burden of the problems of other enterprises."
Taggart took a sip of his drink and put it down again. "I wish they'd fire that bartender," he said.
"For instance, consider Associated Steel. We've got the most modern plant in the country and the best organization. That seems to me to be an indisputable fact, because we got the Industrial Efficiency Award of Globe Magazine last year. So we can maintain that we've done our best and nobody can blame us. But we cannot help it if the iron ore situation is a national problem. We could not get the ore, Jim."
Taggart said nothing. He sat with his elbows spread wide on the table top. The table was uncomfortably small, and this made it more uncomfortable for his three companions, but they did not seem to question his privilege.
"Nobody can get ore any longer," said Boyle. "Natural exhaustion of the mines, you know, and the wearing out of equipment, and shortages of materials, and difficulties of transportation, and other unavoidable conditions."
"The ore industry is crumbling. That's what's killing the mining equipment business," said Paul Larkin.
"It's been proved that every business depends upon every other business," said Orren Boyle. "So everybody ought to share the burdens of everybody else."
"That is, I think, true,” said Wesley Mouch. But nobody ever paid any attention to Wesley Mouch.
"My purpose," said Orren Boyle, "is the preservation of a free economy. It's generally conceded that free economy is now on trial. Unless it proves its social value and assumes its social responsibilities, the people won't stand for it. If it doesn't develop a public spirit, it's done for, make no mistake about that."
Orren Boyle had appeared from nowhere, five years ago, and had since made the cover of every national news magazine. He had started out with a hundred thousand dollars of his own and a two-hundred million-dollar loan from the government. Now he headed an enormous concern which had swallowed many

smaller companies. This proved, he liked to say, that individual ability still had a chance to succeed in the world.
"The only justification of private property," said Orren Boyle, "is public service."
"That is, I think, indubitable," said Wesley Mouch.
Orren Boyle made a noise, swallowing his liquor. He was a large man with big, virile gestures; everything about his person was loudly full of life, except the small black slits of his eyes.
"Jim," he said, "Rearden Metal seems to be a colossal kind of swindle."
"Uh-huh," said Taggart.
"I hear there's not a single expert who's given a favorable report on it."
"No, not one."
"We've been improving steel rails for generations, and increasing their weight. Now, is it true that these Rearden Metal rails are to be lighter than the cheapest grade of steel?"
"That's right," said Taggart. "Lighter."
"But it's ridiculous, Jim. It's physically impossible. For your heavy-duty, high-speed, main-line track?"
"That's right."
"But you're just inviting disaster."
"My sister is."
Taggart made the stem of his glass whirl slowly between two fingers.
There was a moment of silence.
"The National Council of Metal Industries," said Orren Boyle, "passed a resolution to appoint a committee to study the question of Rearden Metal, inasmuch as its use may be an actual public hazard."
"That is, in my opinion, wise," said Wesley Mouch.
"When everybody agrees," Taggart's voice suddenly went shrill, "when people are unanimous, how does one man dare to dissent? By what right? That's what I want to know—by what right?"
Boyle's eyes darted to Taggart's face, but the dim light of the room made it impossible to see faces clearly: he saw only a pale, bluish smear.
"When we think of the natural resources, at a time of critical shortage," Boyle said softly, "when we think of the crucial raw materials that are being wasted on an irresponsible private experiment, when we think of the ore . . ."
He did not finish. He glanced at Taggart again. But Taggart seemed to know that Boyle was waiting and to find the silence enjoyable.
"The public has a vital stake in natural resources, Jim, such as iron ore. The public can't remain indifferent to reckless, selfish waste by an anti-social individual. After all, private property is a trusteeship held for the benefit of society as a whole."
Taggart glanced at Boyle and smiled; the smile was pointed, it seemed to say that something in his words was an answer to something in the words of Boyle. "The liquor they serve here is swill. I suppose that's the price we have to pay for not being crowded by all kinds of rabble. But I do wish they'd recognize that they're dealing with experts.
Since I hold the purse strings, I expect to get my money's worth and at my pleasure."
Boyle did not answer; his face had become sullen. "Listen, Jim . . ."
he began heavily.
Taggart smiled. "What? I'm listening."
"Jim, you will agree, I'm sure, that there's nothing more destructive than a monopoly."
"Yes," said Taggart, "on the one hand. On the other, there's the blight of unbridled competition."

"That's true. That's very true. The proper course is always, in my opinion, in the middle. So it is, I think, the duty of society to snip the extremes, now isn't it?"
"Yes," said Taggart, "it is."
"Consider the picture in the iron-ore business. The national output seems to be falling at an ungodly rate. It threatens the existence of the whole steel industry. Steel mills are shutting down all over the country.
There's only one mining company that's lucky enough not to be affected by the general conditions. Its output seems to be plentiful and always available on schedule. But who gets the benefit of it? Nobody except its owner. Would you say that that's fair?"
"No," said Taggart, "it isn't fair."
"Most of us don't own iron mines. How can we compete with a man who's got a corner on God's natural resources? Is it any wonder that he can always deliver steel, while we have to struggle and wait and lose our customers and go out of business? Is it in the public interest to let one man destroy an entire industry?"
"No," said Taggart, "it isn't."
"It seems to me that the national policy ought to be aimed at the objective of giving everybody a chance at his fair share of iron ore, with a view toward the preservation of the industry as a whole. Don't you think so?"
"I think so."
Boyle sighed. Then he said cautiously, "But I guess there aren't many people in Washington capable of understanding a progressive social policy."
Taggart said slowly, "There are. No, not many and not easy to approach, but there are. I might speak to them."
Boyle picked up his drink and swallowed it in one gulp, as if he had heard all he had wanted to hear.
"Speaking of progressive policies, Orren," said Taggart, "you might ask yourself whether at a time of transportation shortages, when so many railroads are going bankrupt and large areas are left without rail service, whether it is in the public interest to tolerate wasteful duplication of services and the destructive, dog-eat-dog competition of newcomers in territories where established companies have historical priority."
"Well, now," said Boyle pleasantly, "that seems to be an interesting question to consider. I might discuss it with a few friends in the National Alliance of Railroads."
"Friendships," said Taggart in the tone of an idle abstraction, "are more valuable than gold." Unexpectedly, he turned to Larkin. "Don't you think so, Paul?"
"Why . . . yes," said Larkin, astonished. "Yes, of course."
"I am counting on yours."
"Huh?"
"I am counting on your many friendships."
They all seemed to know why Larkin did not answer at once; his shoulders seemed to shrink down, closer to the table. "If everybody could pull for a common purpose, then nobody would have to be hurt!"
he cried suddenly, in a tone of incongruous despair; he saw Taggart watching him and added, pleading, "I wish we didn't have to hurt anybody."
"That is an anti-social attitude," drawled Taggart. "People who are afraid, to sacrifice somebody have no business talking about a common purpose."
"But I'm a student of history," said Larkin hastily. "I recognize historical necessity."
"Good," said Taggart.
"I can't be expected to buck the trend of the whole world, can I?"
Larkin seemed to plead, but the plea was not addressed to anyone.

"Can I?"
"You can't, Mr. Larkin," said Wesley Mouch. "You and I are not to be blamed, if we—"
Larkin jerked his head away; it was almost a shudder; he could not bear to look at Mouch.
"Did you have a good time in Mexico, Orren?" asked Taggart, his voice suddenly loud and casual. All of them seemed to know that the purpose of their meeting was accomplished and whatever they had come here to understand was understood.
"Wonderful place, Mexico," Boyle answered cheerfully. "Very stimulating and thought-provoking. Their food rations are something awful, though. I got sick. But they're working mighty hard to put their country on its feet."
"How are things going down there?"
"Pretty splendid, it seems to me, pretty splendid. Right at the moment, however, they're . . . But then, what they're aiming at is the future. The People's State of Mexico has a great future. They'll beat us all in a few years."
"Did you go down to the San Sebastian Mines?"
The four figures at the table sat up straighter and tighter; all of them had invested heavily in the stock of the San Sebastian Mines.
Boyle did not answer at once, so that his voice seemed unexpected and unnaturally loud when it burst forth: "Oh, sure, certainly, that's what I wanted to see most."
"And?"
"And what?"
"How are things going?"
"Great. Great. They must certainly have the biggest deposits of copper on earth, down inside that mountain!"
"Did they seem to be busy?"
"Never saw such a busy place in my life."
"What were they busy doing?"
"Well, you know, with the kind of Spic superintendent they have down there, I couldn't understand half of what he was talking about, but they're certainly busy."
"Any . . . trouble of any kind?"
"Trouble? Not at San Sebastian. It's private property, the last piece of it left in Mexico, and that does seem to make a difference."
"Orren," Taggart asked cautiously, "what about those rumors that they're planning to nationalize the San Sebastian Mines?"
"Slander," said Boyle angrily, "plain, vicious slander. I know it for certain. I had dinner with the Minister of Culture and lunches with all the rest of the boys."
"There ought to be a law against irresponsible gossip," said Taggart sullenly. "Let's have another drink."
He waved irritably at a waiter. There was a small bar in a dark corner of the room, where an old, wizened bartender stood for long stretches of time without moving. When called upon, he moved with contemptuous slowness. His job was that of servant to men's relaxation and pleasure, but his manner was that of an embittered quack ministering to some guilty disease.
The four men sat in silence until the waiter returned with their drinks. The glasses he placed on the table were four spots of faint blue glitter in the semi-darkness, like four feeble jets of gas flame. Taggart reached for his glass and smiled suddenly.
"Let's drink to the sacrifices to historical necessity," he said, looking at Larkin.
There was a moment's pause; in a lighted room, it would have been the contest of two men holding each other's eyes; here, they were merely looking

at each other's eye sockets. Then Larkin picked up his glass, "It's my party, boys," said Taggart, as they drank.
Nobody found anything else to say. until Boyle spoke up with indifferent curiosity. "Say, Jim, I meant to ask you, what in hell's the matter with your train service down on the San Sebastian Line?"
"Why, what do you mean? What is the matter with it?"
"Well, I don't know, but running just one passenger train a day is—"
"One train?"
"—is pretty measly service, it seems to me, and what a train! You must have inherited those coaches from your great-grandfather, and he must have used them pretty hard. And where on earth did you get that wood-burning locomotive?"
"Wood-burning?'
"That's what I said, wood-burning. I never saw one before, except in photographs. What museum did you drag it out of? Now don't act as if you didn't know it, just tell me what's the gag?"
"Yes, of course I knew it," said Taggart hastily. "It was just . . .
You just happened to choose the one week when we had a little trouble with our motive power—our new engines are on order, but there's been a slight delay—you know what a problem we're having with the manufacturers of locomotives—but it's only temporary."
"Of course," said Boyle. "Delays can't be helped. It's the strangest train I ever rode on, though. Nearly shook my guts out."
Within a few minutes, they noticed that Taggart had become silent.
He seemed preoccupied with a problem of his own. When he rose abruptly, without apology, they rose, too, accepting it as a command.
Larkin muttered, smiling too strenuously, "It was a pleasure, Jim.
A pleasure. That's how great projects are born—over a drink with friends."
"Social reforms are slow," said Taggart coldly. "It is advisable to be patient and cautious." For the first time, he turned to Wesley Mouch.
"What I like about you, Mouch, is that you don't talk too much."
Wesley Mouch was Rearden's Washington man.
There was still a remnant of sunset light in the sky, when Taggart and Boyle emerged together into the street below. The transition was faintly shocking to them—the enclosed barroom led one to expect midnight darkness. A tall building stood outlined against the sky, sharp and straight like a raised sword. In the distance beyond it, there hung the calendar.
Taggart fumbled irritably with his coat collar, buttoning it against the chill of the streets. He had not intended to go back to the office tonight, but he had to go back. He had to see his sister.
". . . a difficult undertaking ahead of us, Jim," Boyle was saying, "a difficult undertaking, with so many dangers and complications and so much at stake . . ."
"It all depends," James Taggart answered slowly, "on knowing the people who make it possible. . . . That's what has to be known—who makes it possible."
Dagny Taggart was nine years old when she decided that she would run the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad some day. She stated it to herself when she stood alone between the rails, looking at the two straight lines of steel that went off into the distance and met in a single point. What she felt was an arrogant pleasure at the way the track cut through the woods: it did not belong in the midst of ancient trees, among green branches that hung down to meet green brush and the lonely spears of wild flowers—but there it was. The two steel lines were brilliant in the sun, and the black ties were like the rungs of a ladder which she had to climb.
It was not a sudden decision, but only the final seal of words upon something she had known long ago. In unspoken understanding, as if bound by a

vow it had never been necessary to take, she and Eddie Willers had given themselves to the railroad from the first conscious days of their childhood.
She felt a bored indifference toward the immediate world around her, toward other children and adults alike. She took it as a regrettable accident, to be borne patiently for a while, that she happened to be imprisoned among people who were dull. She had caught a glimpse of another world and she knew that it existed somewhere, the world that had created trains, bridges, telegraph wires and signal lights winking in the night. She had to wait, she thought, and grow up to that world.
She never tried to explain why she liked the railroad. Whatever it was that others felt, she knew that this was one emotion for which they had no equivalent and no response. She felt the same emotion in school, in classes of mathematics, the only lessons she liked. She felt the excitement of solving problems, the insolent delight of taking up a challenge and disposing of it without effort, the eagerness to meet another, harder test. She felt, at the same time, a growing respect for the adversary, for a science that was so clean, so strict, so luminously rational. Studying mathematics, she felt, quite simply and at once: "How great that men have done this" and "How wonderful that I'm so good at it." It was the joy of admiration and of one's own ability, growing together. Her feeling for the railroad was the same: worship of the skill that had gone to make it, of the ingenuity of someone's clean, reasoning mind, worship with a secret smile that said she would know how to make it better some day. She hung around the tracks and the roundhouses like a humble student, but the humility had a touch of future pride, a pride to be earned.
"You're unbearably conceited," was one of the two sentences she heard throughout her childhood, even though she never spoke of her own ability. The other sentence was: "You're selfish." She asked what was meant, but never received an answer. She looked at the adults, wondering how they could imagine that she would feel guilt from an undefined accusation.
She was twelve years old when she told Eddie Willers that she would run the railroad when they grew up. She was fifteen when it occurred to her for the first time that women did not run railroads and that people might object. To hell with that, she thought—and never worried about it again.
She went to work for Taggart Transcontinental at the age of sixteen.
Her father permitted it: he was amused and a little curious. She started as night operator at a small country station. She had to work nights for the first few years, while attending a college of engineering.
James Taggart began his career on the railroad at the same time; he was twenty-one. He started in the Department of Public Relations.
Dagny's rise among the men who operated Taggart Transcontinental was swift and uncontested. She took positions of responsibility because there was no one else to take them. There were a few rare men of talent around her, but they were becoming rarer every year. Her superiors, who held the authority, seemed afraid to exercise it, they spent their time avoiding decisions, so she told people what to do and they did it.
At every step of her rise, she did the work long before she was granted the title. It was like advancing through empty rooms. Nobody opposed her, yet nobody approved of her progress.
Her father seemed astonished and proud of her, but he said nothing and there was sadness in his eyes when he looked at her in the office She was twenty-nine years old when he died. "There has always been a Taggart to run the railroad," was the last thing he said to her. He looked at her with an odd glance: it had the quality of a salute and of compassion, together.
The controlling stock of Taggart Transcontinental was left to James Taggart. He was thirty-four when he became President of the railroad Dagny had expected the Board of Directors to elect him, but she had never been able

to understand why they did it so eagerly. They talked about tradition, the president had always been the eldest son of the Taggart family; they elected James Taggart in the same manner as they refused to walk under a ladder, to propitiate the same kind of fear. They talked about his gift of "making railroads popular," his "good press," his "Washington ability." He seemed unusually skillful at obtaining favors from the Legislature.
Dagny knew nothing about the field of "Washington ability" or what such an ability implied. But it seemed to be necessary, so she dismissed it with the thought that there were many kinds of work which were offensive, yet necessary, such as cleaning sewers; somebody had to do it, and Jim seemed to like it.
She had never aspired to the presidency; the Operating Department was her only concern. When she went out on the line, old railroad men, who hated Jim, said, "There will always be a Taggart to run the railroad," looking at her as her father had looked. She was armed against Jim by the conviction that he was not smart enough to harm the railroad too much and that she would always be able to correct whatever damage he caused.
At sixteen, sitting at her operator's desk, watching the lighted windows of Taggart trains roll past, she had thought that she had entered her kind of world. In the years since, she learned that she hadn't. The adversary she found herself forced to fight was not worth matching or beating; it was not a superior ability which she would have found honor in challenging; it was ineptitude—a gray spread of cotton that deemed soft and shapeless, that could offer no resistance to anything or anybody, yet managed to be a barrier in her way. She stood, disarmed, before the riddle of what made this possible. She could find no answer.
It was only in the first few years that she felt herself screaming silently, at times, for a glimpse of human ability, a single glimpse of clean, hard, radiant competence. She had fits of tortured longing for a friend or an enemy with a mind better than her own. But the longing passed. She had a job to do. She did not have time to feel pain; not often.
The first step of the policy that James Taggart brought to the railroad was the construction of the San Sebastian Line. Many men were responsible for it; but to Dagny, one name stood written across that venture, a name that wiped out all others wherever she saw it. It stood across five years of struggle, across miles of wasted track, across sheets of figures that recorded the losses of Taggart Transcontinental like a red trickle from a wound which would not heal—as it stood on the ticker tape of every stock exchange left in the world—as it stood on smokestacks in the red glare of furnaces melting copper—as it stood in scandalous headlines—as it stood on parchment pages recording the nobility of the centuries—as it stood on cards attached to flowers in the boudoirs of women scattered through three continents.
The name was Francisco d'Anconia.
At the age of twenty-three, when he inherited his fortune, Francisco d'Anconia had been famous as the copper king of the world. Now, at thirty-six, he was famous as the richest man and the most spectacularly worthless playboy on earth. He was the last descendant of one of the noblest families of Argentina. He owned cattle ranches, coffee plantations and most of the copper mines of Chile. He owned half of South America and sundry mines scattered through the United States as small change.
When Francisco d'Anconia suddenly bought miles of bare mountains in Mexico, news leaked out that he had discovered vast deposits of copper. He made no effort to sell stock in his venture; the stock was begged out of his hands, and he merely chose those whom he wished to favor from among the applicants. His financial talent was called phenomenal; no one had ever beaten him in any transaction—he added to his incredible fortune with every

deal he touched and every step he made, when he took the trouble to make it. Those who censured him most were first to seize the chance of riding on his talent, toward a share of his new wealth. James Taggart, Orren Boyle and their friends were among the heaviest stockholders of the project which Francisco d'Anconia had named the San Sebastian Mines.
Dagny was never able to discover what influences prompted James Taggart to build a railroad branch from Texas into the wilderness of San Sebastian. It seemed likely that he did not know it himself: like a field without a windbreak, he seemed open to any current, and the final sum was made by chance, A few among the Directors of Taggart Transcontinental objected to the project. The company needed all its resources to rebuild the Rio Norte Line; it could not do both. But James Taggart was the road's new president. It was the first year of his administration. He won.
The People's State of Mexico was eager to co-operate, and signed a contract guaranteeing for two hundred years the property right of Taggart Transcontinental to its railroad line in a country where no property rights existed. Francisco d'Anconia had obtained the same guaranty for his mines.
Dagny fought against the building of the San Sebastian Line. She fought by means of whoever would listen to her; but she was only an assistant in the Operating Department, too young, without authority, and nobody listened.
She was unable, then or since, to understand the motives of those who decided to build the line. Sitting as a helpless spectator, a minority member, at one of the Board meetings, she felt a strange evasiveness in the air of the room, in every speech, in every argument, as if the real reason of their decision were never stated, but clear to everyone except herself.
They spoke about the future importance of the trade with Mexico, about a rich stream of freight, about the large revenues assured to the exclusive carrier of an inexhaustible supply of copper. They proved it by citing Francisco d'Anconia's past achievements. They did not mention any mineralogical facts about the San Sebastian Mines. Few facts were available; the information which d'Anconia had released was not very specific; but they did not seem to need facts.
They spoke at great length about the poverty of the Mexicans and their desperate need of railroads, "They've never had a chance." "It is our duty to help an underprivileged nation to develop. A country, it seems to me, is its neighbors' keeper."
She sat, listening, and she thought of the many branch lines which Taggart Transcontinental had had to abandon; the revenues of the great railroad had been falling slowly for many years. She thought of the ominous need of repairs, ominously neglected over the entire system.
Their policy on the problem of maintenance was not a policy but a game they seemed to be playing with a piece of rubber that could be stretched a little, then a little more.
"The Mexicans, it seems to me, are a very diligent people, crushed by their primitive economy. How can they become industrialized if nobody lends them a hand?" "When considering an investment, we should, in my opinion, take a chance on human beings, rather than on purely material factors."
She thought of an engine that lay in a ditch beside the Rio Norte Line, because a splice bar had cracked. She thought of the five days when all traffic was stopped on the Rio Norte Line, because a retaining wall had collapsed, pouring tons of rock across the track.
"Since a man must think of the good of his brothers before he thinks of his own, it seems to me that a nation must think of its neighbors before it thinks of itself."
She thought of a newcomer called Ellis Wyatt whom people were beginning to watch, because his activity was the first trickle of a torrent of goods about to burst from the dying stretches of Colorado. The Rio Norte Line was being

allowed to run its way to a final collapse, just when its fullest efficiency was about to be needed and used.
"Material greed isn't everything. There are non-material ideals to consider." "I confess to a feeling of shame when I think that we own a huge network of railways, while the Mexican people have nothing but one or two inadequate lines." "The old theory of economic self-sufficiency has been exploded long ago. It is impossible for one country to prosper in the midst of a starving world."
She thought that to make Taggart Transcontinental what it had been once, long before her time, every available rail, spike and dollar was needed—and how desperately little of it was available.
They spoke also, at the same session, in the same speeches, about the efficiency of the Mexican government that held complete control of everything. Mexico had a great future, they said, and would become a dangerous competitor in a few years. "Mexico's got discipline," the men of the Board kept saying, with a note of envy in their voices.
James Taggart let it be understood—in unfinished sentences and undefined hints—that his friends in Washington, whom he never named, wished to see a railroad line built in Mexico, that such a line would be of great help in matters of international diplomacy, that the good will of the public opinion of the world would more than repay Taggart Transcontinental for its investment.
They voted to build the San Sebastian Line at a cost of thirty million dollars.
When Dagny left the Board room and walked through the clean, cold air of the streets, she heard two words repeated clearly, insistently in the numbed emptiness of her mind: Get out . . . Get out . . .
Get out.
She listened, aghast. The thought of leaving Taggart Transcontinental did not belong among the things she could hold as conceivable. She felt terror, not at the thought, but at the question of what had made her think it. She shook her head angrily; she told herself that Taggart Transcontinental would now need her more than ever.
Two of the Directors resigned; so did the Vice-President in Charge of Operation. He was replaced by a friend of James Taggart, Steel rail was laid across the Mexican desert—while orders were issued to reduce the speed of trains on the Rio Norte Line, because the track was shot. A depot of reinforced concrete, with marble columns and mirrors, was built amidst the dust of an unpaved square in a Mexican village—while a train of tank cars carrying oil went hurtling down an embankment and into a blazing junk pile, because a rail had split on the Rio Norte Line. Ellis Wyatt did not wait for the court to decide whether the accident was an act of God, as James Taggart claimed, He transferred the shipping of his oil to the Phoenix-Durango, an obscure railroad which was small and struggling, but struggling well.
This was the rocket that sent the Phoenix-Durango on its way. From then on, it grew, as Wyatt Oil grew, as factories grew in nearby valleys —as a band of rails and ties grew, at the rate of two miles a month, across the scraggly fields of Mexican corn.
Dagny was thirty-two years old, when she told James Taggart that she would resign. She had run the Operating Department for the past three years, without title, credit or authority. She was defeated by loathing for the hours, the days, the nights she had to waste circumventing the interference of Jim's friend who bore the title of Vice-President in Charge of Operation. The man had no policy, and any decision he made was always hers, but he made it only after he had made every effort to make it impossible. What she delivered to her brother was an ultimatum. He gasped, "But, Dagny, you're a

woman! A woman as Operating Vice-President? It's unheard of! The Board won't consider it!" "Then I'm through," she answered.
She did not think of what she would do with the rest of her life. To face leaving Taggart Transcontinental was like waiting to have her legs amputated; she thought she would let it happen, then take up the load of whatever was left.
She never understood why the Board of Directors voted unanimously to make her Vice-President in Charge of Operation.
It was she who finally gave them their San Sebastian Line. When she took over, the construction had been under way for three years; one third of its track was laid; the cost to date was beyond the authorized total. She fired Jim's friends and found a contractor who completed the job in one year.
The San Sebastian Line was now in operation. No surge of trade had come across the border, nor any trains loaded with copper. A few carloads came clattering down the mountains from San Sebastian, at long intervals. The mines, said Francisco d'Anconia, were still in the process of development. The drain on Taggart Transcontinental had not stopped.
Now she sat at the desk in her office, as she had sat for many evenings, trying to work out the problem of what branches could save the system and in how many years.
The Rio Norte Line, when rebuilt, would redeem the rest. As she looked at the sheets of figures announcing losses and more losses, she did not think of the long, senseless agony of the Mexican venture. She thought of a telephone call. "Hank, can you save us? Can you give us rail on the shortest notice and the longest credit possible?" A quiet, steady voice had answered, "Sure."
The thought was a point of support. She leaned over the sheets of paper on her desk, finding it suddenly easier to concentrate. There was one thing, at least, that could be counted upon not to crumble when needed.
James Taggart crossed the anteroom of Dagny's office, still holding the kind of confidence he had felt among his companions at the barroom half an hour ago. When he opened her door, the confidence vanished. He crossed the room to her desk like a child being dragged to punishment, storing the resentment for all his future years.
He saw a head bent over sheets of paper, the light of the desk lamp glistening on strands of disheveled hair, a white shirt clinging to her shoulders, its loose folds suggesting the thinness of her body.
"What is it, Jim?"
"What are you trying to pull on the San Sebastian Line?"
She raised her head. "Pull? Why?"
"What sort of schedule are we running down there and what kind of trains?"
She laughed; the sound was gay and a little weary. "You really ought to read the reports sent to the president's office, Jim, once in a while."
"What do you mean?"
"We've been running that schedule and those trains on the San Sebastian for the last three months."
"One passenger train a day?"
"—in the morning. And one freight train every other night."
"Good God! On an important branch like that?"
"The important branch can't pay even for those two trams."
"But the Mexican people expect real service from us!"
"I'm sure they do."
"They need trains!"
"For what?"
"For . . . To help them develop local industries. How do you expect them to

Nice.

 

[MessengerX]

OWNED.

Let me guess. Another wordforge reject? :roll:

 

[FBI parte due]

Let me guess. Another wordforge reject? :roll:

:roll:

 

[MessengerX]

Well I don't know. But I do know that you join the myriad of people who try to flame me without any sort of provocation. I'd rethink you exclaiming 'owned.'

 

[FBI parte due]

I'd rethink assuming that I was serious.

 

[MessengerX]

Big whoop.

 

[FBI parte due]

That was just below the belt.

That was terrible.