knew full well that he had good reason to smile and so he would abstain from the obvious.
He sat down in front of the desk, not waiting for an invitation; he carried a briefcase, which he placed across his knees; he acted as if words were superfluous, since his reappearance in this office had made everything clear.
Rearden sat watching him in patient silence.
“Since the deadline for the signing of the national Gift Certificates expires tonight at midnight,” said Dr. Ferris, in the tone of a salesman extending a special courtesy to a customer, “I have come to obtain your signature, Mr. Rearden.”
He paused, with an air of suggesting that the formula now called for an answer.
“Go on,” said Rearden. “I am listening.”
“Yes, I suppose I should explain,” said Dr. Ferris, “that we wish to get your signature early in the day in order to announce the fact on a national news broadcast. Although the gift program has gone through quite smoothly, there are still a few stubborn individualists left, who have failed to sign—small fry, really, whose patents are of no crucial value, but we cannot let them remain unbound, as a matter of principle, you understand. They are, we believe, waiting to follow your lead. You have a great popular following, Mr. Rearden, much greater than you suspected or knew how to use. Therefore, the announcement that you have signed will remove the last hopes of resistance and, by midnight, will bring in the last signatures, thus completing the program on schedule.”
Rearden knew that of all possible speeches, this was the last Dr. Ferris would make if any doubt of his surrender remained in the man’s mind.
“Go on,” said Rearden evenly. “You haven’t finished.”
“You know—as you have demonstrated at your trial—how important it is, and why, that we obtain all that property with the voluntary consent of the victims.” Dr. Ferris opened his briefcase. “Here is the Gift Certificate, Mr. Rearden. We have filled it out and all you have to do is to sign your name at the bottom.”
The piece of paper, which he placed in front of Rearden, looked like a small college diploma, with the text printed in old-fashioned script and the particulars inserted by typewriter. The thing stated that he, Henry Rearden, hereby transferred to the nation all rights to the metal alloy now known as “Rearden Metal,” which would henceforth be manufactured by all who so desired, and which would bear the name of “Miracle Metal,” chosen by the representatives of the people.
Glancing at the paper, Rearden wondered whether it was a deliberate mockery of decency, or so low an estimate of their victims’ intelligence, that had made the designers of this paper print the text across a faint drawing of the Statue of Liberty.
His eyes moved slowly to Dr. Ferris’ face. “You would not have come here,” he said, “unless you had some extraordinary kind of blackjack to use on me. What is it?”
“Of course,” said Dr. Ferris. “I would expect you to understand that. That is why no lengthy explanations are necessary.” He opened his briefcase. “Do you wish to see my blackjack? I have brought a few samples.”
In the manner of a cardsharp whisking out a long fan of cards with one snap of the hand, he spread before Rearden a line of glossy photographic prints. They were photostats of hotel and auto court registers, bearing in Rearden’s handwriting the names of Mr. and Mrs. J. Smith.
“You know, of course,” said Dr. Ferris softly, “but you might wish to see whether we know it, that Mrs. J. Smith is Miss Dagny Taggart.”
He found nothing to observe in Rearden’s face. Rearden had not moved to bend over the prints, but sat looking down at them with grave attentiveness, as if, from the perspective of distance, he were discovering something about them which he had not known.
“We have a great deal of additional evidence,” said Dr. Ferris, and tossed down on the desk a photostat of the jeweler’s bill for the ruby pendant. “You wouldn’t care to see the sworn statements of apartment house doormen and night clerks—they contain nothing that would be new to you, except the number of witnesses who know where you spent your nights in New York, for about the last two years. You mustn’t blame those people too much. It’s an interesting characteristic of epochs such as ours that people begin to be afraid of saying the things they want to say—and afraid, when questioned, to remain silent about things they’d prefer never to utter. That is to be expected. But you would be astonished if you knew who gave us the original tip.”
“I know it,” said Rearden; his voice conveyed no reaction. The trip to Florida was not inexplicable to him any longer.
“There is nothing in this blackjack of mine that can harm you personally,” said Dr. Ferris, “We knew that no form of personal injury would ever make you give in. Therefore, I am telling you frankly that this will not hurt you at all. It will only hurt Miss Taggart.”
Rearden was looking straight at him now, but Dr. Ferris wondered why it seemed to him that the calm, closed face was moving away into a greater and greater distance.
“If this affair of yours is spread from one end of the country to the other,” said Dr. Ferris, “by such experts in the art of smearing as Bertram Scudder, it will do no actual damage to your reputation.
Beyond a few glances of curiosity and a few raised eyebrows in a few of the stuffier drawing rooms, you will get off quite easily. Affairs of this sort are expected of a man. In fact, it will enhance your reputation.
It will give you an aura of romantic glamour among the women and, among the men, it will give you a certain kind of prestige, in the nature of envy for an unusual conquest. But what it will do to Miss Taggart—with her spotless name, her reputation for being above scandal, her peculiar position of a woman in a strictly masculine business—what it will do to her, what she will see in the eyes of everyone she meets, what she will hear from every man she deals with—I will leave that up to your own mind to imagine. And to consider.”
Rearden felt nothing but a great stillness and a great clarity. It was as if some voice were telling him sternly: This is the time—the scene is lighted—now look. And standing naked in the great light, he was looking quietly, solemnly, stripped of fear, of pain, of hope, with nothing left to him but the desire to know.
Dr. Ferris was astonished to hear him say slowly, in the dispassionate tone of an abstract statement that did not seem to be addressed to his listener, “But all your calculations rest on the fact that Miss Taggart is a virtuous woman, not the slut you’re going to call her.”
“Yes, of course,” said Dr. Ferris.
“And that this means much more to me than a casual affair.”
“Of course.”
“If she and I were the kind of scum you’re going to make us appear, your blackjack wouldn’t work.”
“No, it wouldn’t.”
“If our relationship were the depravity you’re going to proclaim it to be, you’d have no way to harm us.”
“No.”
“We’d be outside your power.”
“Actually—yes.”
It was not to Dr. Ferris that Rearden was speaking. He was seeing a long line of men stretched through the centuries from Plato onward, whose heir and final product was an incompetent little professor with the appearance of a gigolo and the soul of a thug.
“I offered you, once, a chance to join us,” said Dr. Ferris. “You refused. Now you can see the consequences. How a man of your intelligence thought that he could win by playing it straight, I can’t imagine.”
“But if I had joined you,” said Rearden with the same detachment, as if he were not speaking about himself, “what would I have found worth looting from Orren Boyle?”
“Oh hell, there’s always enough suckers to expropriate in the world!”
“Such as Miss Taggart? As Ken Danagger? As Ellis Wyatt? As I?”
“Such as any man who wants to be impractical.”
“You mean that it is not practical to live on earth, is it?”
He did not know whether Dr. Ferris answered him. He was not listening any longer. He was seeing the pendulous face of Orren Boyle with the small slits of pig’s eyes, the doughy face of Mr. Mowen with the eyes that scurried away from any speaker and any fact—he was seeing them go through the jerky motions of an ape performing a routine it had learned to copy by muscular habit, performing it in order to manufacture Rearden Metal, with no knowledge and no capacity to know what had taken place in the experimental laboratory of Rearden Steel through ten years of passionate devotion to an excruciating effort. It was proper that they should now call it “Miracle Metal”—a miracle was the only name they could give to those ten years and to that faculty from which
