found no answer. Then, on the night when they chose to cheer me, I stood before them on the stage of a theater, thinking that this was the moment I had struggled to reach, wishing to feel it, but feeling nothing. I was seeing all the other nights behind me, hearing the ‘why?’ which still had no answer—and their cheers seemed as empty as their snubs. If they had said, ‘Sorry to be so late, thank you for waiting—I would have asked for nothing else and they could have had anything I had to give them. But what I saw in their faces, and in the way they spoke when they crowded to praise me, was the thing I had heard being preached to artists—only I had never believed that anyone human could mean it. They seemed to say that they owed me nothing, that their deafness had provided me with a moral goal, that it had been my duty to struggle, to suffer, to bear—for their sake—whatever sneers, contempt, injustice, torture they chose to inflict upon me, to bear it in order to teach them to enjoy my work, that this was their rightful due and my proper purpose. And then I understood the nature of the looter-in-spirit, a thing I had never been able to conceive. I saw them reaching into my soul, just as they reach into Mulligan’s pocket, reaching to expropriate the value of my person, just as they reach to expropriate his wealth—I saw the impertinent malice of mediocrity boastfully holding up its own emptiness as an abyss to be filled by the bodies of its betters—I saw them seeking, just as they seek to feed on Mulligan’s money, to feed on those hours when I wrote my music and on that which made me write it, seeking to gnaw their way to self-esteem by extorting from me the admission that they were the goal of my music, so that precisely by reason of my achievement, it would not be they who’d acknowledge my value, but I who would bow to theirs... It was that night that I took the oath never to let them hear another note of mine. The streets were empty when I left that theater, I was the last one to leave—and I saw a man whom I had never seen before, waiting for me in the light of a lamppost. He did not have to tell me much. But the concerto I dedicated to him is called the Concerto of Deliverance.”
She looked at the others. “Please tell me your reasons,” she said, with a faint stress of firmness in her voice, as if she were taking a beating, but wished to take it to the end.
“I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything—except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only ‘to serve.’ That a man who’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards—never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind— yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”
“I quit,” said Ellis Wyatt, “because I didn’t wish to serve as the cannibals’ meal and to do the cooking, besides.”
“I discovered,” said Ken Danagger, “that the men I was fighting were impotent. The shiftless, the purposeless, the irresponsible, the irrational—it was not I who needed them, it was not theirs to dictate terms to me, it was not mine to obey demands. I quit, to let them discover it, too.”
“I quit,” said Quentin Daniels, “because, if there are degrees of damnation, the scientist who places his mind in the service of brute force is the longest-range murderer on earth.”
They were silent. She turned to Galt. “And you?” she asked. “You were first. What made you come to it?”
He chuckled, “My refusal to be born with any original sin.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have never felt guilty of my ability. I have never felt guilty of my mind. I have never felt guilty of being a man. I accepted no unearned guilt, and thus was free to earn and to know my own value. Ever since I can remember, I had felt that I would kill the man who’d claim that I exist for the sake of his need—and I had known that this was the highest moral feeling. That night, at the Twentieth Century meeting, when I heard an unspeakable evil being spoken in a tone of moral righteousness, I saw the root of the world’s tragedy, the key to it and the solution. I saw what had to be done. I went out to do it.”
“And the motor?” she asked. “Why did you abandon it? Why did you leave it to the Starnes heirs?”
“It was then father’s property. He paid me for it. It was made on his time. But I knew that it would be of no benefit to them and that no one would ever hear of it again. It was my first experimental model.
Nobody but me or my equivalent could have been able to complete it or even to grasp what it was. And I knew that no equivalent of mine would come near that factory from then on.”
“You knew the kind of achievement your motor represented?”
“Yes.”
“And you knew you were leaving it to perish?”
“Yes.” He looked off into the darkness beyond the windows and chuckled softly, but it was not a sound of amusement. “I looked at my motor for the last tune, before I left. I thought of the men who claim that wealth is a matter of natural resources—and of the men who claim that wealth is a matter of seizing the factories—and of the men who claim that machines condition their brains. Well, there was the motor to condition them, and there it remained as just exactly what it is without man’s mind—as a pile of metal scraps and wires, going to rust. You have been thinking of the great service which that motor could have rendered to mankind, if it had been put into production. I think that on the day when men understand the meaning of its fate in that factory’s junk heap—it will have rendered a greater one.”
“Did you expect to see that day, when you left it?”
“No.”
“Did you expect a chance to rebuild it elsewhere?”
“No.”
“And you were willing to let it remain in a junk heap?”
“For the sake of what that motor meant to me,” he said slowly, “I had to be willing to let it crumble and vanish forever”—he looked straight at her and she heard the steady, unhesitant, uninflected ruthlessness of his voice—“just as you will have to be willing to let the rail of Taggart Transcontinental crumble and vanish.”
She held his eyes, her head was lifted, and she said softly, in the tone of a proudly open plea, “Don’t make me answer you now.”
“I won’t. We’ll tell you whatever you wish to know. We won’t urge you to make a decision.” He added, and she was shocked by the sudden gentleness of his voice, “I said that that kind of indifference toward a world which should have been ours was the hardest thing to attain. I know. We’ve all gone through it.”
She looked at the quiet, impregnable room, and at the light—the light that came from his motor—on the faces of men who were the most serene and confident gathering she had ever attended.
“What did you do, when you walked out of the Twentieth Century?” she asked.
“I went out to become a flame-spotter. I made it my job to watch for those bright flares in the growing night of savagery, which were the men of ability, the men of the mind—to watch their course, their struggle and their agony—and to pull them out, when I knew that they had seen enough.”
“What did you tell them to make them abandon everything?”
“I told them that they were right.”
In answer to the silent question of her glance, he added, “I gave them the pride they did not know they had. I gave them the words to identify it. I gave them that priceless possession which they had missed, had longed for, yet had not known they needed: a moral sanction. Did you call me the destroyer and the hunter of men? I was the walking delegate of this strike, the leader of the victims’ rebellion, the defender of the oppressed, the disinherited,
