“Yes,” he whispered. “Yes, I guess I do.”
His eyes wandered over the vast darkness, then rose to Rearden’s face; the eyes were helpless, longing, childishly bewildered. “I know... it’s crap, all those things they taught us... all of it, everything they said... about living or... or dying... Dying... it wouldn’t make any difference to chemicals, but—” he stopped, and all of his desperate protest was only in the intensity of his voice dropping lower to say, “—but it does, to me... And... and, I guess, it makes a difference to an animal, too... But they said there are no values... only social customs... No values!” His hand clutched blindly at the hole in his chest, as if trying to hold that which he was losing. “No... values...”
Then his eyes opened wider, with the sudden calm of full frankness.
“I’d like to live, Mr. Rearden. God, how I’d like to!” His voice was passionately quiet. “Not because I’m dying... but because I’ve just discovered it tonight, what it means, really to be alive... And... it’s funny... do you know when I discovered it?... In the office... when I stuck my neck out... when I told the bastards to go to hell... There’s... there’s so many things I wish I’d known sooner... But... well, it’s no use crying over spilled milk.” He saw Rearden’s involuntary glance at the flattened trail below and added, “Over spilled anything, Mr. Rearden.”
“Listen, kid,” said Rearden sternly, “I want you to do me a favor.”
“Now, Mr. Rearden?”
“Yes. Now.”
“Why, of course, Mr. Rearden... if I can.”
“You’ve done me a big favor tonight, but I want you to do a still bigger one. You’ve done a great job, climbing out of that slag heap.
Now will you try for something still harder? You were willing to die to save my mills. Will you try to live for me?”
“For you, Mr. Rearden?”
“For me. Because I’m asking you to. Because I want you to. Because we still have a great distance to climb together, you and I.”
“Does it... does it make a difference to you, Mr. Rearden?”
“It does. Will you make up your mind that you want to live—just as you did down there on the slag heap? That you want to last and live? Will you fight for it? You wanted to fight my battle. Will you fight this one with me, as our first?”
He felt the clutching of the boy’s hand; it conveyed the violent eagerness of the answer; the voice was only a whisper: “I’ll try, Mr. Rearden.”
“Now help me to get you to a doctor. Just relax, take it easy and let me lift you.”
“Yes, Mr. Rearden.” With the jerk of a sudden effort, the boy pulled himself up to lean on an elbow.
“Take it easy, Tony.”
He saw a sudden flicker in the boy’s face, an attempt at his old, bright, impudent grin. “Not ‘Non-Absolute’ any more?”
“No, not any more. You’re a full absolute now, and you know it.”
“Yes. I know several of them, now. There’s one”—he pointed at the wound in his chest—“that’s an absolute, isn’t it? And”—he went on speaking while Rearden was lifting him from the ground by imperceptible seconds and inches, speaking as if the trembling intensity of his words were serving as an anesthetic against the pain—“and men can’t live... if rotten bastards... like the ones in Washington... get away with things like... like the one they’re doing tonight... if everything becomes a stinking fake... and nothing is real... and nobody is anybody... men can’t live that way... that’s an absolute, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Tony, that’s an absolute.”
Rearden rose to his feet by a long, cautious effort; he saw the tortured spasm of the boy’s features, as he settled him slowly against his chest, like a baby held tight in his arms—but the spasm twisted into another echo of the impudent grin, and the boy asked, “Who’s the Wet Nurse now?”
“I guess I am.”
He took the first steps up the slant of crumbling soil, his body tensed to the task of shock absorber for his fragile burden, to the task of maintaining a steady progression where there was no foothold to find.
The boy’s head dropped on Rearden’s shoulder, hesitantly, almost as if this were a presumption. Rearden bent down and pressed his lips to the dust-streaked forehead.
The boy jerked back, raising his head with a shock of incredulous, indignant astonishment. “Do you know what you did?” he whispered, as if unable to believe that it was meant for him.
“Put your head down,” said Rearden, “and I’ll do it again.”
The boy’s head dropped and Rearden kissed his forehead; it was like a father’s recognition granted to a son’s battle.
The boy lay still, his face hidden, his hands clutching Rearden’s shoulders. Then, with no hint of sound, with only the sudden beat of faint, spaced, rhythmic shudders to show it, Rearden knew that the boy was crying—crying in surrender, in admission of all the things which he could not put into the words he had never found.
Rearden went on moving slowly upward, step by groping step, fighting for firmness of motion against the weeds, the drifts of dust, the chunks of scrap metal, the refuse of a distant age. He went on, toward the line where the red glow of his mills marked the edge of the pit above him, his movement a fierce struggle that had to take the form of a gentle, unhurried flow.
He heard no sobs, but he felt the rhythmic shudders, and, through the cloth of his shirt, in place of tears, he felt the small, warm, liquid spurts flung from the wound by the shudders. He knew that the tight pressure of his arms was the only answer which the boy was now able to hear and understand—and he held the trembling body as if the strength of his arms could transfuse some part of his living power into the arteries beating ever fainter against him.
Then the sobbing stopped and the boy raised his head. His face seemed thinner and paler, but the eyes were lustrous, and he looked up at Rearden, straining for the strength to speak.
“Mr. Rearden... I... I liked you very much.”
“I know it.”
The boy’s features had no power to form a smile, but it was a smile that spoke in his glance, as he looked at Rearden’s face—as he looked at that which he had not known he had been seeking through the brief span of his life, seeking as the image of that which he had not known to be his values.
Then his head fell back, and there was no convulsion in his face, only his mouth relaxing to a shape of serenity—but there was a brief stab of convulsion in his body, like a last cry of protest—and Rearden went on slowly, not altering his pace, even though he knew that no caution was necessary any longer because what he was carrying in his arms was now that which had been the boy’s teachers’ idea of man—a collection of chemicals.
He walked, as if this were his form of last tribute and funeral procession for the young life that had ended in his arms. He felt an anger too intense to identify except as a pressure within him: it was a desire to kill.
The desire was not directed at the unknown thug who had sent a bullet through the boy’s body, or at the looting bureaucrats who had hired the thug to do it, but at the boy’s teachers who had delivered him, disarmed, to the thug’s gun—at the soft, safe assassins of college classrooms who, incompetent to answer the queries of a quest for reason, took pleasure in crippling the young minds entrusted to their care.
Somewhere, he thought, there was this boy’s mother, who had trembled with protective concern over his groping steps, while teaching him to walk, who had measured his baby formulas with a jeweler’s caution, who had obeyed with a zealot’s fervor the latest words of science on his diet and hygiene, protecting his unhardened body from germs—then had sent him to be turned into a tortured neurotic by the men who taught him that he had no mind and must never attempt to think. Had she fed him tainted refuse, he thought, had she mixed poison into his food, it would have been more kind and less fatal.
He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly—yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child’s education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.
From the first catch-phrases flung at a child to the last, it is like a series of shocks to freeze his motor, to undercut the power of his consciousness. “Don’t ask so many questions, children should be seen and not heard!”—“Who are you to think? It’s so, because I say so!”—“Don’t argue, obey!”—“Don’t try to understand,
