You’re not going to scare me with your classy mumbo-jumbo! I’ll do as I please! What did I fight for, if I can’t do as I please?” He chuckled and reached for a lever.
“Hey, Cuffy, take it easy!” yelled some figure in the back of the room, darting forward.
“Stand back!” roared Cuffy Meigs. “Stand back, all of you! Scared, am I? I’ll show you who’s boss!”
Dr. Stadler leaped to stop him—but Meigs shoved him aside with one arm, gave a gulp of laughter at the sight of Stadler falling to the floor, and, with the other arm, yanked a lever of the Xylophone.
The crash of sound—the screeching crash of ripped metal and of pressures colliding on conflicting circuits, the sound of a monster turning upon itself—was heard only inside the structure. No sound was heard outside. Outside, the structure merely rose into the air, suddenly and silently, cracked open into a few large pieces, shot some hissing streaks of blue light to the sky and came down as a pile of rubble. Within the circle of a radius of a hundred miles, enclosing parts of four states, telegraph poles fell like matchsticks, farmhouses collapsed into chips, city buildings went down as if slashed and minced by a single second’s blow, with no time for a sound to be heard by the twisted bodies of the victims—and, on the circle’s periphery, halfway across the Mississippi, the engine and the first six cars of a passenger train flew as a shower of metal into the water of the river, along with the western spans of the Taggart Bridge, cut in half.
On the site of what had once been Project X, nothing remained alive among the ruins—except, for some endless minutes longer, a huddle of torn flesh and screaming pain that had once been a great mind.
There was a sense of weightless freedom—thought Dagny—in the feeling that a telephone booth was her only immediate, absolute goal, with no concern for any of the goals of the passers-by in the streets around her. It did not make her feel estranged from the city: it made her feel, for the first time, that she owned the city and that she loved it, that she had never loved it before as she did in this moment, with so personal, solemn and confident a sense of possession. The night was still and clear; she looked at the sky; as her feeling was more solemn than joyous, but held the sense of a future joy—so the air was more windless than warm, but held the hint of a distant spring.
Get the hell out of my way—she thought, not with resentment, but almost with amusement, with a sense of detachment and deliverance, addressing it to the passers-by, to the traffic when it impeded her hurried progress, and to any fear she had known in the past. It was less than an hour ago that she had heard him utter that sentence, and his voice still seemed to ring in the air of the streets, merging into a distant hint of laughter.
She had laughed exultantly, in the ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland, when she had heard him say it; she had laughed, her hand pressed to her mouth, so that the laughter was only in her eyes—and in his, when he had looked straight at her and she had known that he heard it. They had looked at each other for the span of a second, above the heads of the gasping, screaming crowd—above the crash of the microphones being shattered, though all stations had been instantly cut off—above the bursts of breaking glass on falling tables, as some people went stampeding to the doors.
Then she had heard Mr. Thompson cry, waving his arm at Galt, “Take him back to his room, but guard him with your lives!”—and the crowd had parted as three men led him out. Mr. Thompson seemed to collapse for a moment, dropping his forehead on his arm, but he rallied, jumped to his feet, waved vaguely at his henchmen to follow and rushed out, through a private side exit. No one addressed or instructed the guests: some were running blindly to escape, others sat still, not daring to move. The ballroom was like a ship without captain. She cut through the crowd and followed the clique. No one tried to stop her.
She found them huddled in a small, private study: Mr. Thompson was slumped in an armchair, clutching his head with both hands, Wesley Mouch was moaning, Eugene Lawson was sobbing with the sound of a nasty child’s rage, Jim was watching the others with an oddly expectant intensity. “I told you so!” Dr. Ferris was shouting. “I told you so, didn’t I? That’s where you get with your ‘peaceful persuasion’!”
She remained standing by the door. They seemed to notice her presence, but they did not seem to care.
“I resign!” yelled Chick Morrison. “I resign! I’m through! I don’t know what to say to the country! I can’t think! I won’t try! It’s no use!
I couldn’t help it! You’re not going to blame me! I’ve resigned!” He waved his arms in some shapeless gesture of futility or farewell, and ran out of the room, “He has a hide-out all stocked for himself in Tennessee,” said Tinky Holloway reflectively, as if he, too, had taken a similar precaution and were now wondering whether the time had come.
“He won’t keep it for long, if he gets there at all,” said Mouch. “With the gangs of raiders and the state of transportation—” He spread his hands and did not finish.
She knew what thoughts were filling the pause; she knew that no matter what private escapes these men had once provided for themselves, they were now grasping the fact that all of them were trapped.
She observed that there was no terror in their faces; she saw hints of it, but it looked like a perfunctory terror. Their expressions ranged from blank apathy to the relieved look of cheats who had believed that the game could end no other way and were making no effort to contest it or regret it—to the petulant blindness of Lawson, who refused to be conscious of anything—to the peculiar intensity of Jim, whose face suggested a secret smile.
“Well? Well?” Dr. Ferris was asking impatiently, with the crackling energy of a man who feels at home in a world of hysteria. “What are you now going to do with him? Argue? Debate? Make speeches?”
No one answered.
“He... has... to... save... us,” said Mouch slowly, as if straining the last of his mind into blankness and delivering an ultimatum to reality. “He has to... take over... and save the system.”
“Why don’t you write him a love letter about it?” said Ferris.
“We’ve got to... make him... take over... We’ve got to force him to rule,” said Mouch in the tone of a sleepwalker.
“Now,” said Ferris, suddenly dropping his voice, “do you see what a valuable establishment the State Science Institute really is?”
Mouch did not answer him, but she observed that they all seemed to know what he meant.
“You objected to that private research project of mine as ‘impractical,’” said Ferris softly. “But what did I tell you?”
Mouch did not answer; he was cracking his knuckles.
“This is no time for squeamishness,” James Taggart spoke up with unexpected vigor, but his voice, too, was oddly low. “We don’t have to be sissies about it.”
“It seems to me...” said Mouch dully, “that... that the end justifies the means...”
“It’s too late for any scruples or any principles,” said Ferris. “Only direct action can work now.”
No one answered; they were acting as if they wished that their pauses, not their words, would state what they were discussing.
“It won’t work,” said Tinky Holloway, “He won’t give in.”
“That’s what you think!” said Ferris, and chuckled, “You haven’t seen our experimental model in action. Last month, we got three confessions in three unsolved murder cases.”
“If...” started Mr. Thompson, and his voice cracked suddenly into a moan, “if he dies, we all perish!”
“Don’t worry,” said Ferris. “He won’t. The Ferris Persuader is safely calculated against that possibility.”
Mr. Thompson did not answer.
“It seems to me... that we have no other choice...” said Mouch; it was almost a whisper.
They remained silent; Mr. Thompson was struggling not to see that they were all looking at him. Then he cried suddenly, “Oh, do anything you want! I couldn’t help it! Do anything you want!”
Dr. Ferris turned to Lawson. “Gene,” he said tensely, still whispering, “run to the radio-control office. Order all stations to stand by. Tell them that I’ll have Mr. Galt on the air within three hours.”
Lawson leaped to his feet, with a sudden, mirthful grin, and ran out of the room.
She knew. She knew what they intended doing and what it was within them that made it possible. They did not think that this would succeed. They did not think that Galt would give in; they did not want him to give in. They did not think that anything could save them now; they did not want to be saved. Moved by the panic of their nameless emotions, they had fought against reality all their lives—and now they had reached a moment when at last they felt at home. They did not have to know why they felt it, they who had chosen never to know what they felt—they merely experienced a sense of recognition, since this was what they had been seeking, this was the kind
