“I don’t know.”
“I keep thinking of what they told us in school about the sun losing energy, growing colder each year. I remember wondering, then, what it would be like in the last days of the world. I think it would be... like this. Growing colder and things stopping.”
“I never believed that story. I thought by the time the sun was exhausted, men would find a substitute.”
“You did? Funny. I thought that, too.”
He pointed at the column of smoke. “There’s your new sunrise. It’s going to feed the rest.”
“If it’s not stopped.”
“Do you think it can be stopped?”
She looked at the rail under her feet. “No,” she said.
He smiled. He looked down at the rail, then let his eyes move along the track, up the sides of the mountains, to the distant crane. She saw two things, as if, for a moment, the two stood alone in her field of vision: the lines of his profile and the green-blue cord coiling through space.
“We’ve done it, haven’t we?” he said.
In payment for every effort, for every sleepless night, for every silent thrust against despair, this moment was all she wanted. “Yes. We have.”
She looked away, noticed an old crane on a siding, and thought that its cables were worn and would need replacing: This was the great clarity of being beyond emotion, after the reward of having felt everything one could feel. Their achievement, she thought, and one moment of acknowledging it, of possessing it together—what greater intimacy could one share? Now she was free for the simplest, most commonplace concerns of the moment, because nothing could be meaningless within her sight.
She wondered what made her certain that he felt as she did. He turned abruptly and started toward his car. She followed. They did not look at each other.
“I’m due to leave for the East in an hour,” he said.
She pointed at the car. “Where did you get that?”
“Here. It’s a Hammond. Hammond of Colorado—they’re the only people who’re still making a good car. I just bought it, on this trip.”
“Wonderful job.”
“Yes, isn’t it?”
“Going to drive it back to New York?”
“No. I’m having it shipped. I flew my plane down here.”
“Oh, you did? I drove down from Cheyenne—I had to see the line—but I’m anxious to get home as fast as possible. Would you take me along? Can I fly back with you?”
He did not answer at once. She noticed the empty moment of a pause. “I’m sorry,” he said; she wondered whether she imagined the note of abruptness in his voice. “I’m not flying back to New York. I’m going to Minnesota.”
“Oh well, then I’ll try to get on an air liner, if I can find one today.”
She watched his car vanish down the winding road. She drove to the airport an hour later. The place was a small field at the bottom of a break in the desolate chain of mountains. There were patches of snow on the hard, pitted earth. The pole of a beacon stood at one side, trailing wires to the ground; the other poles had been knocked down by a storm.
A lonely attendant came to meet her. “No, Miss Taggart,” he said regretfully, “no planes till day after tomorrow. There’s only one transcontinental liner every two days, you know, and the one that was due today has been grounded, down in Arizona. Engine trouble, as usual.” He added, “It’s a pity you didn’t get here a bit sooner. Mr. Rearden took off for New York, in his private plane, just a little while ago.”
“He wasn’t flying to New York, was he?”
“Why, yes. He said so.”
“Are you sure?”
“He said he had an appointment there tonight.”
She looked at the sky to the east, blankly, without moving. She had no clue to any reason, nothing to give her a foothold, nothing with which to weigh this or fight it or understand.
“Damn these streets!” said James Taggart. “We’re going to be late.”
Dagny glanced ahead, past the back of the chauffeur. Through the circle made by a windshield wiper on the sleet-streaked glass, she saw black, worn, glistening car tops strung in a motionless line. Far ahead, the smear of a red lantern, low over the ground, marked a street excavation.
“There’s something wrong on every other street,” said Taggart irritably. “Why doesn’t somebody fix them?”
She leaned back against the seat, tightening the collar of her wrap.
She felt exhausted at the end of a day she had started at her desk, in her office, at seven A.M.; a day she had broken off, uncompleted, to rush home and dress, because she had promised Jim to speak at the dinner of the New York Business Council “They want us to give them a talk about Rearden Metal,” he had said. “You can do it so much better than I. It’s very important that we present a good case. There’s such a controversy about Rearden Metal.”
Sitting beside him in his car, she regretted that she had agreed. She looked at the streets of New York and thought of the race between metal and time, between the rails of the Rio Norte Line and the passing days. She felt as if her nerves were being pulled tight by the stillness of the car, by the guilt of wasting an evening when she could not afford to waste an hour.
“With all those attacks on Rearden that one hears everywhere,” said Taggart, “he might need a few friends.”
She glanced at him incredulously. “You mean you want to stand by him?”
He did not answer at once; he asked, his voice bleak, “That report of the special committee of the National Council of Metal Industries—what do you think of it?”
“You know what I think of it.”
“They said Rearden Metal is a threat to public safety. They said its chemical composition is unsound, it’s brittle, it’s decomposing molecularly, and it will crack suddenly, without warning...” He stopped, as if begging for an answer. She did not answer. He asked anxiously, “You haven’t changed your mind about it, have you?”
“About what?”
“About that metal.”
“No, Jim, I have not changed my mind.”
“They’re experts, though... the men on that committee...
Top experts... Chief metallurgists for the biggest corporations, with a string of degrees from universities all over the country...” He said it unhappily, as if he were begging her to make him doubt these men and their verdict.
She watched him, puzzled; this was not like him.
The car jerked forward. It moved slowly through a gap in a plank barrier, past the hole of a broken water main. She saw the new pipe stacked by the excavation; the pipe bore a trademark: Stockton Foundry, Colorado. She looked away; she wished she were not reminded of Colorado.
“I can’t understand it...” said Taggart miserably. “The top experts of the National Council of Metal Industries...”
“Who’s the president of the National Council of Metal Industries, Jim? Orren Boyle, isn’t it?”
Taggart did not turn to her, but his jaw snapped open. “If that fat slob thinks he can—” he started, but stopped and did not finish.
She looked up at a street lamp on the corner. It was a globe of glass filled with light. It hung, secure from storm, lighting boarded windows and cracked sidewalks, as their only guardian. At the end of the street, across the river, against the glow of a factory, she saw the thin tracing of a power station. A truck went by, hiding her view. It was the kind of truck that fed the power station—a tank truck, its bright new paint impervious to sleet, green with white letters: Wyatt Oil, Colorado.
“Dagny, have you heard about that discussion at the structural steel workers’ union meeting in
