The contempt in Taggart’s voice sounded abnormally stressed, as if the sight of someone’s greater fear were tempting him to defy his own.
“What is it you’re scared to believe, Gene?”
“I won’t believe it! I won’t!” Lawson’s voice was half-snarl, half whimper. “You can’t make me lose my faith in humanity! You shouldn’t permit such a man to be possible! A ruthless egoist who—”
“You’re a fine bunch of intellectuals, you are,” said Mr. Thompson scornfully. “I thought you could talk to him in his own lingo—but he’s scared the lot of you. Ideas? Where are your ideas now? Do something! Make him join us! Win him over!”
“Trouble is, he doesn’t want anything,” said Mouch. “What can we offer a man who doesn’t want anything?”
“You mean,” said Kinnan, “what can we offer a man who wants to live?”
“Shut up!” screamed James Taggart. “Why did you say that? What made you say it?”
“What made you scream?” asked Kinnan.
“Keep quiet, all of you!” ordered Mr. Thompson. “You’re fine at fighting one another, but when it comes to fighting a real man—”
“So he’s got you, too?” yelled Lawson.
“Aw, pipe down,” said Mr. Thompson wearily. “He’s the toughest bastard I’ve ever been up against. You wouldn’t understand that. He’s as hard as they come...” The faintest tinge of admiration crept into his voice. “As hard as they come...”
“There are ways to persuade tough bastards,” drawled Dr. Ferris casually, “as I’ve explained to you.”
“No!” cried Mr. Thompson. “No! Shut up! I won’t listen to you! I won’t hear of it!” His hands moved frantically, as if struggling to dispel something he would not name. “I told him... that that’s not true... that we’re not... that I’m not a...” He shook his head violently, as if his own words were some unprecedented form of danger. “No, look, boys, what I mean is, we’ve got to be practical... and cautious. Damn cautious. We’ve got to handle it peacefully.
We can’t afford to antagonize him or... or harm him. We don’t dare take any chances on... anything happening to him. Because... because, if he goes, we go. He’s our last hope. Make no mistake about it. If he goes, we perish. You all know it.” His eyes swept over the faces around him: they knew it.
The sleet of the following morning fell down on front-page stories announcing that a constructive, harmonious conference between John Galt and the country’s leaders, on the previous afternoon, had produced “The John Galt Plan,” soon to be announced. The snowflakes of the evening fell down upon the furniture of an apartment house whose front wall had collapsed—and upon a crowd of men waiting silently at the closed cashier’s window of a plant whose owner had vanished.
“The farmers of South Dakota,” Wesley Mouch reported to Mr. Thompson, next morning, “are marching on the state capital, burning every government building on their way, and every home worth more than ten thousand dollars.”
“California’s blown to pieces,” he reported in the evening. “There’s a civil war going on there—if that’s what it is, which nobody seems to be sure of. They’ve declared that they’re seceding from the Union, but nobody knows who’s now in power. There’s armed fighting all over the state, between a ‘People’s Party,’ led by Ma Chalmers and her soybean cult of Orient-admirers—and something called ‘Back to God,’ led by some former oil-field owners.”
“Miss Taggart!” moaned Mr. Thompson, when she entered his hotel room next morning, in answer to his summons. “What are we going to do?”
He wondered why he had once felt that she possessed some reassuring kind of energy. He was looking at a blank face that seemed composed, but the composure became disquieting when one noticed that it lasted for minute after minute, with no change of expression, no sign of feeling. Her face had the same look as all the others, he thought, except for something in the set of the mouth that suggested endurance.
“I trust you, Miss Taggart. You’ve got more brains than all my boys,” he pleaded. “You’ve done more for the country than any of them—it’s you who found him for us. What are we to do? With everything falling to pieces, he’s the only one who can lead us out of this mess—but he won’t. He refuses. He simply refuses to lead. I’ve never seen anything like it: a man who has no desire to command. We beg him to give orders—and he answers that he wants to obey them! It’s preposterous!”
“It is.”
“What do you make of it? Can you figure him out?”
“He’s an arrogant egoist,” she said. “He’s an ambitious adventurer.
He’s a man of unlimited audacity who’s playing for the biggest stakes in the world.”
It was easy, she thought. It would have been difficult in that distant time when she had regarded language as a tool of honor, always to be used as if one were under oath—an oath of allegiance to reality and to respect for human beings. Now it was only a matter of making sounds, inarticulate sounds addressed to inanimate objects unrelated to such concepts as reality, human or honor.
It had been easy, that first morning, to report to Mr. Thompson how she had traced John Galt to his home. It had been easy to watch Mr. Thompson’s gulping smiles and his repeated cries of “That’s my girl!” uttered with glances of triumph at his assistants, the triumph of a man whose judgment in trusting her had been vindicated. It had been easy to express an angry hatred for Galt—“I used to agree with his ideas, but I won’t let him destroy my railroad!”—and to hear Mr. Thompson say, “Don’t you worry, Miss Taggart! We’ll protect you from him!”
It had been easy to assume a look of cold shrewdness and to remind Mr. Thompson of the five-hundred- thousand-dollar reward, her voice clear and cutting, like the sound of an adding machine punching out the sum of a bill. She had seen an instant’s pause in Mr. Thompson’s facial muscles, then a brighter, broader smile—like a silent speech declaring that he had not expected it, but was delighted to know what made her tick and that it was the kind of ticking he understood.
“Of course, Miss Taggart! Certainly! That reward is yours—all yours!
The check will be sent to you, in full!”
It had been easy, because she had felt as if she were in some dreary non-world, where her words and actions were not facts any longer—not reflections of reality, but only distorted postures in one of those side-show mirrors that project deformity for the perception of beings whose consciousness is not to be treated as consciousness. Thin, single and hot, like the burning pressure of a wire within her, like a needle selecting her course, was her only concern: the thought of his safety. The rest was a blur of shapeless dissolution, half-acid, half fog.
But this—she thought with a shudder—was the state in which they lived, all those people whom she had never understood, this was the state they desired, this rubber reality, this task of pretending, distorting, deceiving, with the credulous stare of some Mr. Thompson’s panic-bleary eyes as one’s only purpose and reward. Those who desired this state—she wondered—did they want to live?
“The biggest stakes in the world, Miss Taggart?” Mr. Thompson was asking her anxiously. “What is it? What does he want?”
“Reality. This earth.”
“I don’t know quite what you mean, but... Look, Miss Taggart, if you think you can understand him, would you... would you try to speak to him once more?”
She felt as if she heard her own voice, many light-years away, crying that she would give her life to see him—but in this room, she heard the voice of a meaningless stranger saying coldly, “No, Mr. Thompson, I wouldn’t. I hope I’ll never have to see him again.”
“I know that you can’t stand him, and I can’t say I blame you, but couldn’t you just try to—”
“I tried to reason with him, the night I found him. I heard nothing but insults in return. I think he resents me more than he’d resent anyone else. He won’t forgive me the fact that it was I who trapped him.
I’d be the last person to whom he would surrender.”
“Yeah... yeah, that’s true... Do you think he will ever surrender?”
The needle within her wavered for a moment, burning its oscillating way between two courses: should she say that he would not, and see them kill him?—should she say that he would, and see them hold onto their power till they destroyed the world?
“He will,” she said firmly. “He’ll give in, if you treat him right.
He’s too ambitious to refuse power. Don’t let him escape, but don’t threaten him—or harm him. Fear won’t
