“To the country. To a cabin I own in the Berkshires. If you want to see me, Eddie Willers will tell you the way to get there. I’ll be back in two weeks.”
“Will you do me a favor?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t come back until I come for you.”
“But I want to be here, when it happens.”
“Leave that up to me.”
“Whatever they do to you, I want it done to me also.”
“Leave it up to me. Dearest, don’t you understand? I think that what I want most right now is what you want: not to see any of them. But I have to stay here for a while. So it will help me if I know that you, at least, are out of their reach. I want to keep one clean point in my mind, to lean against. It will be only a short while—and then I’ll come for you. Do you understand?”
“Yes, my darling. So long.”
It was weightlessly easy to walk out of her office and down the stretching halls of Taggart Transcontinental. She walked, looking ahead, her steps advancing with the unbroken, unhurried rhythm of finality.
Her face was held level and it had a look of astonishment, of acceptance, of repose.
She walked across the concourse of the Terminal. She saw the statue of Nathaniel Taggart. But she felt no pain from it and no reproach, only the rising fullness of her love, only the feeling that she was going to join him, not in death, but in that which had been his life.
The first man to quit at Rearden Steel was Tom Colby, rolling mill foreman, head of the Rearden Steel Workers Union. For ten years, he had heard himself denounced throughout the country, because his was a “company union” and because he had never engaged in a violent conflict with the management. This was true: no conflict had ever been necessary; Rearden paid a higher wage scale than any union scale in the country, for which he demanded—and got—the best labor force to be found anywhere.
When Tom Colby told him that he was quitting, Rearden nodded, without comment or questions.
“I won’t work under these conditions, myself,” Colby added quietly, “and I won’t help, to keep the men working. They trust me. I won’t be the Judas goat leading them to the stockyards.”
“What are you going to do for a living?” asked Rearden.
“I’ve saved enough to last me for about a year.”
“And after that?”
Colby shrugged.
Rearden thought of the boy with the angry eyes, who mined coal at night as a criminal. He thought of all the dark roads, the alleys, the back yards of the country, where the best of the country’s men would now exchange their services in jungle barter, in chance jobs, in unrecorded transactions. He thought of the end of that road.
Tom Colby seemed to know what he was thinking. “You’re on your way to end up right alongside of me, Mr. Rearden,” he said. “Are you going to sign your brains over to them?”
“No.”
“And after that?”
Rearden shrugged.
Colby’s eyes watched him for a moment, pale, shrewd eyes in a furnace-tanned face with soot-engraved wrinkles. “They’ve been telling us for years that it’s you against me, Mr. Rearden. But it isn’t. It’s Orren Boyle and Fred Kinnan against you and me.”
“I know it.”
The Wet Nurse had never entered Rearden’s office, as if sensing that that was a place he had no right to enter. He always waited to catch a glimpse of Rearden outside. The directive had attached him to his job, as the mills’ official watchdog of over-or-under-production. He stopped Rearden, a few days later, in an alley between the rows of open-hearth furnaces. There was an odd look of fierceness on the boy’s face.
“Mr. Rearden,” he said, “I wanted to tell you that if you want to pour ten times the quota of Rearden Metal or steel or pig iron or anything, and bootleg it all over the place to anybody at any price—I wanted to tell you to go ahead. I’ll fix it up. I’ll juggle the books, I’ll fake the reports, I’ll get phony witnesses, I’ll forge affidavits, I’ll commit perjury—so you don’t have to worry, there won’t be any trouble!”
“Now why do you want to do that?” asked Rearden, smiling, but his smile vanished when he heard the boy answer earnestly: “Because I want, for once, to do something moral.”
“That’s not the way to be moral—” Rearden started, and stopped abruptly, realizing that it was the way, the only way left, realizing through how many twists of intellectual corruption upon corruption this boy had to struggle toward his momentous discovery.
“I guess that’s not the word,” the boy said sheepishly. “I know it’s a stuffy, old-fashioned word. That’s not what I meant. I meant—” It was a sudden, desperate cry of incredulous anger: “Mr. Rearden, they have no right to do it!”
“What?”
“Take Rearden Metal away from you.”
Rearden smiled and, prompted by a desperate pity, said, “Forget it, Non-Absolute. There are no rights.”
“I know there aren’t. But I mean... what I mean is that they can’t do it.”
“Why not?” He could not help smiling.
“Mr. Rearden, don’t sign the Gift Certificate! Don’t sign it, on principle.”
“I won’t sign it. But there aren’t any principles.”
“I know there aren’t.” He was reciting it in full earnestness, with the honesty of a conscientious student: “I know that everything is relative and that nobody can know anything and that reason is an illusion and that there isn’t any reality. But I’m just talking about Rearden Metal.
Don’t sign, Mr. Rearden. Morals or no morals, principles or no principles, just don’t sign it—because it isn’t right!”
No one else mentioned the directive in Rearden’s presence. Silence was the new aspect about the mills. The men did not speak to him when he appeared in the workshops, and he noticed that they did not speak to one another. The personnel office received no formal resignations. But every other morning, one or two men failed to appear and never appeared again. Inquiries at their homes found the homes abandoned and the men gone. The personnel office did not report these desertions, as the directive required; instead, Rearden began to see unfamiliar faces among the workers, the drawn, beaten faces of the long unemployed, and heard them addressed by the names of the men who had quit. He asked no questions.
There was silence throughout the country. He did not know how many industrialists had retired and vanished on May 1 and 2, leaving their plants to be seized. He counted ten among his own customers, including McNeil of the McNeil Car Foundry in Chicago. He had no way of learning about the others; no reports appeared in the newspapers.
The front pages of the newspapers were suddenly full of stories about spring floods, traffic accidents, school picnics and golden-wedding anniversaries.
There was silence in his own home. Lillian had departed on a vacation trip to Florida, in mid-April; it had astonished him, as an inexplicable whim; it was the first trip she had taken alone since their marriage. Philip avoided him, with a look of panic. His mother stared at Rearden in reproachful bewilderment; she said nothing, but she kept bursting into tears in his presence, her manner suggesting that her tears were the most important aspect to consider in whatever disaster it was that she sensed approaching.
On the morning of May 15, he sat at the desk in his office, above the spread of the mills, and watched the colors of the smoke rising to the clear, blue sky. There were spurts of transparent smoke, like waves of heat, invisible but for the structures that shivered behind them; there were streaks of red smoke, and sluggish columns of yellow, and light, floating spirals of blue—and the thick, tight, swiftly pouring coils that looked like twisted bolts of satin tinged a mother-of-pearl pink by the summer sun.
The buzzer rang on his desk, and Miss Ives voice said, “Dr. Floyd Ferris to see you, without appointment, Mr. Rearden.” In spite of its rigid formality, her tone conveyed the question: Shall I throw him out?
There was a faint movement of astonishment in Rearden’s face, barely above the line of indifference: he had not expected that particular emissary. He answered evenly, “Ask him to come in.”
Dr. Ferris did not smile as he walked toward Rearden’s desk; he merely wore a look suggesting that Rearden
