She did not laugh, that day at the grade crossing, when Rearden chuckled, pointing, and she saw the train of a small local railroad come tottering from behind a hill, drawn by an ancient locomotive that coughed black smoke through a tall stack.
“Oh God, Hank, it’s not funny!”
“I know,” he said.
They were seventy miles and an hour away from it, when she said, “Hank, do you see the Taggart Comet being pulled across the continent by a coal-burner of that kind?”
“What’s the matter with you? Pull yourself together.”
“I’m sorry... It’s just that I keep thinking it won’t be any use, all my new track and all your new furnaces, if we don’t find someone able to produce Diesel engines. If we don’t find him fast.”
“Ted Nielsen of Colorado is your man.”
“Yes, if he finds a way to open his new plant. He’s sunk more money than he should into the bonds of the John Galt Line.”
“That’s turned out to be a pretty profitable investment, hasn’t it?”
“Yes, but it’s held him up. Now he’s ready to go ahead, but he can’t find the tools. There are no machine tools to buy, not anywhere, not at any price. He’s getting nothing but promises and delays. He’s combing the country, looking for old junk to reclaim, from closed factories. If he doesn’t start soon—”
“He will. Who’s going to stop him now?”
“Hank,” she said suddenly, “could we go to a place I’d like to see?”
“Sure, anywhere. Which place?”
“It’s in Wisconsin. There used to be a great motor company there, in my father’s time. We had a branch line serving it, but we closed the line—about seven years ago—when they closed the factory. I think it’s one of those blighted areas now. Maybe there’s still some machinery left there that Ted Nielsen could use. It might have been overlooked—the place is forgotten and there’s no transportation to it at all.”
“I’ll find it. What was the name of the factory?”
“The Twentieth Century Motor Company.”
“Oh, of course! That was one of the best motor firms in my youth, perhaps the best. I seem to remember that there was something odd about the way it went out of business... can’t recall what it was.”
It took them three days of inquiries, but they found the bleached, abandoned road—and now they were driving through the yellow leaves that glittered like a sea of gold coins, to the Twentieth Century Motor Company.
“Hank, what if anything happens to Ted Nielsen?” she asked suddenly, as they drove in silence.
“Why should anything happen to him?”
“I don’t know, but... well, there was Dwight Sanders. He vanished. United Locomotives is done for now. And the other plants are in no condition to produce Diesels. I’ve stopped listening to promises. And... and of what use is a railroad without motive power?”
“Of what use is anything, for that matter, without it?”
The leaves sparkled, swaying in the wind. They spread for miles, from grass to brush to trees, with the motion and all the colors of fire; they seemed to celebrate an accomplished purpose, burning in unchecked, untouched abundance.
Rearden smiled. “There’s something to be said for the wilderness.
I’m beginning to like it. New country that nobody’s discovered.” She nodded gaily. “It’s good soil—look at the way things grow. I’d clear that brush and I’d build a—”
And then they stopped smiling. The corpse they saw in the weeds by the roadside was a rusty cylinder with bits of glass—the remnant of a gas-station pump.
It was the only thing left visible. The few charred posts, the slab of concrete and the sparkle of glass dust —which had been a gas station—were swallowed in the brush, not to be noticed except by a careful glance, not to be seen at all in another year.
They looked away. They drove on, not wanting to know what else lay hidden under the miles of weeds. They felt the same wonder like a weight in the silence between them: wonder as to how much the weeds had swallowed and how fast.
The road ended abruptly behind the turn of a hill. What remained was a few chunks of concrete sticking out of a long, pitted stretch of tar and mud. The concrete had been smashed by someone and carted away; even weeds could not grow in the strip of earth left behind. On the crest of a distant hill, a single telegraph pole stood slanted against the sky, like a cross over a vast grave.
It took them three hours and a punctured tire to crawl in low gear through trackless soft, through gullies, then down ruts left by cart wheels—to reach the settlement that lay in the valley beyond the hill with the telegraph pole.
A few houses still stood within the skeleton of what had once been an industrial town. Everything that could move, had moved away; but some human beings had remained. The empty structures were vertical rubble; they had been eaten, not by time, but by men: boards torn out at random, missing patches of roofs, holes left in gutted cellars. It looked as if blind hands had seized whatever fitted the need of the moment, with no concept of remaining in existence the next morning.
The inhabited houses were scattered at random among the ruins; the smoke of their chimneys was the only movement visible in town. A shell of concrete, which had been a schoolhouse, stood on the outskirts; it looked like a skull, with the empty sockets of glassless windows, with a few strands of hair still clinging to it, in the shape of broken wires.
Beyond the town, on a distant hill, stood the factory of the Twentieth Century Motor Company. Its walls, roof lines and smokestacks looked trim, impregnable like a fortress. It would have seemed intact but for a silver water tank: the water tank was tipped sidewise.
They saw no trace of a road to the factory in the tangled miles of trees and hillsides. They drove to the door of the first house in sight that showed a feeble signal of rising smoke. The door was open. An old woman came shuffling out at the sound of the motor. She was bent and swollen, barefooted, dressed in a garment of flour sacking. She looked at the car without astonishment, without curiosity; it was the blank stare of a being who had lost the capacity to feel anything but exhaustion.
“Can you tell me the way to the factory?” asked Rearden.
The woman did not answer at once; she looked as if she would be unable to speak English. “What factory?” she asked.
Rearden pointed. “That one.”
“It’s closed.”
“I know it’s closed. But is there any way to get there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is there any sort of road?”
“There’s roads in the woods.”
“Any for a car to drive through?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, which would be the best road to take?”
“I don’t know.”
Through the open door, they could see the interior of her house.
There was a useless gas stove, its oven stuffed with rags, serving as a chest of drawers. There was a stove built of stones in a corner, with a few logs burning under an old kettle, and long streaks of soot rising up the wall. A white object lay propped against the legs of a table: it was a porcelain washbowl, torn from the wall of some bathroom, filled with wilted cabbages. A tallow candle stood in a bottle on the table. There was no paint left on the floor; its boards were scrubbed to a soggy gray that looked like the visual expression of the pain in the bones of the person who had bent and scrubbed and lost the battle against the grime now soaked into the grain of the boards.
A brood of ragged children had gathered at the door behind the woman, silently, one by one. They stared at the car, not with the bright curiosity of children, but with the tension of savages ready to vanish at the first sign of danger.
