work. He’s impervious to fear.”
“But what if... I mean, with the way things are collapsing... what if he holds out too long?”
“He won’t. He’s too practical for that. By the way, are you letting him hear any news about the state of the country?”
“Why... no.”
“I would suggest that you let him have copies of your confidential reports. He’ll see that it won’t be long now.”
“That’s a good idea! A very good idea!... You know, Miss Taggart,” he said suddenly, with the sound of some desperate clinging in his voice, “I feel better whenever I talk to you. It’s because I trust you. I don’t trust anybody around me. But you—you’re different.
You’re solid.”
She was looking unflinchingly straight at him. “Thank you, Mr. Thompson,” she said.
It had been easy, she thought—until she walked out into the street and noticed that under her coat, her blouse was sticking damply to her shoulder blades.
Were she able to feel—she thought as she walked through the concourse of the Terminal—she would know that the heavy indifference she now felt for her railroad was hatred. She could not get rid of the feeling that she was running nothing but freight trains: the passengers, to her, were not living or human. It seemed senseless to waste such enormous effort on preventing catastrophes, on protecting the safety of trains carrying nothing but inanimate objects. She looked at the faces in the Terminal: if he were to die, she thought, to be murdered by the rulers of their system, that these might continue to eat, sleep and travel—would she work to provide them with trains? If she were to scream for their help, would one of them rise to his defense?
Did they want him to live, they who had heard him?
The check for five hundred thousand dollars was delivered to her office, that afternoon; it was delivered with a bouquet of flowers from Mr. Thompson. She looked at the check and let it flutter down to her desk: it meant nothing and made her feel nothing, not even a suggestion of guilt. It was a scrap of paper, of no greater significance than the ones in the office wastebasket. Whether it could buy a diamond necklace or the city dump or the last of her food, made no difference. It would never be spent. It was not a token of value and nothing it purchased could be a value. But this—she thought—this inanimate indifference was the permanent state of the people around her, of men who had no purpose and no passion. This was the state of a non-valuing soul; those who chose it—she wondered —did they want to live?
The lights were out of order in the hall of the apartment house, when she came home that evening, numb with exhaustion—and she did not notice the envelope at her feet until she switched on the light in her foyer. It was a blank, sealed envelope that had been slipped under her door. She picked it up—and then, within a moment, she was laughing soundlessly, half-kneeling, half-sitting on the floor, not to move off that spot, not to do anything but stare at the note written by a hand she knew, the hand that had written its last message on the calendar above the city. The note said:
The newspapers of the following morning admonished the public not to believe the rumors that there was any trouble in the Southern states. The confidential reports, sent to Mr. Thompson, stated that armed fighting had broken out between Georgia and Alabama, for the possession of a factory manufacturing electrical equipment—a factory cut off by the fighting and by blasted railroad tracks from any source of raw materials.
“Have you read the confidential reports I sent you?” moaned Mr. Thompson, that evening, facing Galt once more. He was accompanied by James Taggart, who had volunteered to meet the prisoner for the first time.
Galt sat on a straight-backed chair, his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. He seemed erect and relaxed, together. They could not decipher the expression on his face, except that it showed no sign of apprehension.
“I have,” he answered.
“There’s not much time left,” said Mr. Thompson.
“There isn’t.”
“Are you going to let such things go on?”
“Are you?”
“How can you be so sure you’re right?” cried James Taggart; his voice was not loud, but it had the intensity of a cry. “How can you take it upon yourself, at a terrible time like this, to stick to your own ideas at the risk of destroying the whole world?”
“Whose ideas should I consider safer to follow?”
“How can you be sure you’re right? How can you know? Nobody can be sure of his knowledge! Nobody! You’re no better than anyone else!”
“Then why do you want me?”
“How can you gamble with other people’s lives? How can you permit yourself such a selfish luxury as to hold out, when people need you?”
“You mean: when they need my ideas?”
“Nobody is fully right or wrong! There isn’t any black or white!
You don’t have a monopoly on truth!”
There was something wrong in Taggart’s manner—thought Mr. Thompson, frowning—some odd, too personal resentment, as if it were not a political issue that he had come here to solve.
“If you had any sense of responsibility,” Taggart was saying, “you wouldn’t dare take such a chance on nothing but your own judgment!
You would join us and consider some ideas other than your own and admit that we might be right, too! You would help us with our plans!
You would—”
Taggart went on speaking with feverish insistence, but Mr. Thompson could not tell whether Galt was listening: Galt had risen and was pacing the room, not in a manner of restlessness, but in the casual manner of a man enjoying the motion of his own body. Mr. Thompson noted the lightness of the steps, the straight spine, the flat stomach, the relaxed shoulders. Galt walked as if he were both unconscious of his body and tremendously conscious of his pride in it. Mr. Thompson glanced at James Taggart, at the sloppy posture of a tall figure slumped in ungainly self-distortion, and caught him watching Galt’s movements with such hatred that Mr. Thompson sat up, fearing it would become audible in the room. But Galt was not looking at Taggart.
“... your conscience!” Taggart was saying. “I came here to appeal to your conscience! How can you value your mind above thousands of human lives? People are perishing and—Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he snapped, “stop pacing!”
Galt stopped. “Is this an order?”
“No, no!” said Mr. Thompson hastily. “It’s not an order. We don’t want to give you orders... Take it easy, Jim.”
Galt resumed his pacing. “The world is collapsing,” said Taggart, his eyes following Galt irresistibly. “People are perishing—and it’s you who could save them! Does it matter who’s right or wrong? You should join us, even if you think we’re wrong, you should sacrifice your mind to save them!”
“By what means will I then save them?”
“Who do you think you are?” cried Taggart.
Galt stopped. “You know it.”
“You’re an egoist!”
“I am.”
“Do you realize what sort of egoist you are?”
“Do you?” asked Galt, looking straight at him.
It was the slow withdrawal of Taggart’s body into the depth of his armchair, while his eyes were holding Galt’s, that made Mr. Thompson unaccountably afraid of the next moment.
“Say,” Mr. Thompson interrupted in a brightly casual voice, “what sort of cigarette are you smoking?”
Galt turned to him and smiled. “I don’t know.”
“Where did you get it?”
“One of your guards brought me a package of them. He said some man asked him to give it to me as a
