“Don’t... don’t listen to him!” snarled the chief. “Shoot! I order you to shoot!”
One of the guards looked at the chief, dropped his gun and, raising his arms, backed away from the group toward Rearden.
“God damn you!” yelled the chief, seized a gun with his left hand and fired at the deserter.
In time with the fall of the man’s body, the window burst into a shower of glass—and from the limb of a tree, as from a catapult, the tall, slender figure of a man flew into the room, landed on its feet and fired at the first guard in reach.
“Who are you?”, screamed some terror-blinded voice.
“Ragnar Danneskjold.”
Three sounds answered him: a long, swelling moan of panic—the clatter of four guns dropped to the floor— and the bark of the fifth, fired by a guard at the forehead of the chief.
By the time the four survivors of the garrison began to reassemble the pieces of their consciousness, their figures were stretched on the floor, bound and gagged; the fifth one was left standing, his hands tied behind his back.
“Where is the prisoner?” Francisco asked him.
“In the cellar... I guess.”
“Who has the key?”
“Dr. Ferris.”
“Where are the stairs to the cellar?”
“Behind a door in Dr. Ferris’ office.”
“Lead the way.”
As they started, Francisco turned to Rearden. “Are you all right, Hank?”
“Sure.”
“Need to rest?”
“Hell, no!”
From the threshold of a door in Ferris’ office, they looked down a steep flight of stone stairs and saw a guard on the landing below.
“Come here with your hands up!” ordered Francisco.
The guard saw the silhouette of a resolute stranger and the glint of a gun: It was enough. He obeyed immediately; he seemed relieved to escape from the damp stone crypt. He was left tied on the floor of the office, along with the guard who had led them.
Then the four rescuers were free to fly down the stairs to the locked steel door at the bottom. They had acted and moved with the precision of a controlled discipline. Now, it was as if their inner reins had broken.
Danneskjold had the tools to smash the lock. Francisco was first to enter the cellar, and his arm barred Dagny’s way for the fraction of a second—for the length of a look to make certain that the sight was bearable—then he let her rush past him: beyond the tangle of electric wires, he had seen Galt’s lifted head and glance of greeting.
She fell down on her knees by the side of the mattress. Galt looked up at her, as he had looked on their first morning in the valley, his smile was like the sound of a laughter that had never been touched by pain, his voice was soft and low: “We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?”
Tears running down her face, but her smile declaring a full, confident, radiant certainty, she answered, “No, we never had to.”
Rearden and Danneskjold were cutting his bonds. Francisco held a flask of brandy to Galt’s lips. Galt drank, and raised himself to lean on an elbow when his arms were free. “Give me a cigarette,” he said.
Francisco produced a package of dollar-sign cigarettes. Galt’s hand shook a little, as he held a cigarette to the flame of a lighter, but Francisco’s hand shook much more.
Glancing at his eyes over the flame, Galt smiled and said in the tone of an answer to the questions Francisco was not asking, “Yes, it was pretty bad, but bearable—and the kind of voltage they used leaves no damage.”
“I’ll find them some day, whoever they were...” said Francisco; the tone of his voice, flat, dead and barely audible, said the rest.
“If you do, you’ll find that there’s nothing left of them to kill.”
Galt glanced at the faces around him; he saw the intensity of the relief in their eyes and the violence of the anger in the grimness of their features; he knew in what manner they were now reliving his torture.
“It’s over,” he said. “Don’t make it worse for yourself than it was for me.”
Francisco turned his face away. “It’s only that it was you...” he whispered, “you... if it were anyone but you...”
“But it had to be me, if they were to try their last, and they’ve tried, and”—he moved his hand, sweeping the room—and the meaning of those who had made it—into the wastelands of the past—“and that’s that.”
Francisco nodded, his face still turned away; the violent grip of his fingers clutching Galt’s wrist for a moment was his answer.
Galt lifted himself to a sitting posture, slowly regaining control of his muscles. He glanced up at Dagny’s face, as her arm shot forward to help him; he saw the struggle of her smile against the tension of her resisted tears; it was the struggle of her knowledge that nothing could matter beside the sight of his naked body and that this body was living—against her knowledge of what it had endured. Holding her glance, he raised his hand and touched the collar of her white sweater with his fingertips, in acknowledgment and in reminder of the only things that were to matter from now on. The faint tremor of her lips, relaxing into a smile, told him that she understood.
Danneskjold found Galt’s shirt, slacks and the rest of his clothing, which had been thrown on the floor in a corner of the room. “Do you think you can walk, John?” he asked.
“Sure.”
While Francisco and Rearden were helping Galt to dress, Danneskjold proceeded calmly, systematically, with no visible emotion, to demolish the torture machine into splinters.
Galt was not fully steady on his feet, but he could stand, leaning on Francisco’s shoulder. The first few steps were hard, but by the time they reached the door, he was able to resume the motions of walking.
His one arm encircled Francisco’s shoulders for support; his other arm held Dagny’s shoulders, both to gain support and to give it.
They did not speak as they walked down the hill, with the darkness of the trees closing in about them for protection, cutting off the dead glow of the moon and the deader glow in the distance behind them, in the windows of the State Science Institute.
Francisco’s airplane was hidden in the brush, on the edge of a meadow beyond the next hill. There were no human habitations for miles around them. There were no eyes to notice or to question the sudden streaks of the airplane’s headlights shooting across the desolation of dead weeds, and the violent burst of the motor brought to life by Danneskjold, who took the wheel.
With the sound of the door slamming shut behind them and the forward thrust of the wheels under their feet, Francisco smiled for the first time.
“This is my one and only chance to give you orders,” he said, helping Galt to stretch out in a reclining chair. “Now lie still, relax and take it easy... You, too,” he added, turning to Dagny and pointing at the seat by Galt’s side.
The wheels were running faster, as if gaining speed and purpose and lightness, ignoring the impotent obstacles of small jolts from the ruts of the ground. When the motion turned to a long, smooth streak, when they saw the dark shapes of the trees sweeping down and dropping past their windows, Galt leaned silently over and pressed his lips to Dagny’s hand: he was leaving the outer world with the one value he had wanted to win from it.
Francisco had produced a first-aid kit and was removing Rearden’s shirt to bandage his wound. Galt saw the thin red trickle running from Rearden’s shoulder down his chest.
“Thank you, Hank,” he said.
Rearden smiled. “I will repeat what you said when I thanked you, on our first meeting: ‘If you understand that I acted for my own sake, you know that no gratitude is required.’”
“I will repeat,” said Galt, “the answer you gave me: ‘That is why I thank you.’”
