Atlas Shrugged [151]
She looked ahead, at the haze that melted rail and distance, a haze that could rip apart at any moment to some shape of disaster. She wondered why she felt safer than she had ever felt in a car behind the engine, safer here, where it seemed as if, should an obstacle rise, her breast and the glass shield would be first to smash against it. She smiled, grasping the answer: it was the security of being first, with full sight and full knowledge of one's course-not the blind sense of being pulled into the unknown by some unknown power ahead. It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust, but to know.
The glass sheets of the cab's windows made the spread of the fields seem vaster: the earth looked as open to movement as it was to sight.
Yet nothing was distant and nothing was out of reach. She had barely grasped the sparkle of a lake ahead-and in the next instant she was beside it, then past.
It was a strange foreshortening between sight and touch, she thought, between wish and fulfillment, between-the words clicked sharply in her mind after a startled stop-between spirit and body. First, the vision-then the physical shape to express it. First, the thought-then the purposeful motion down the straight line of a single track to a chosen goal. Could one have any meaning without the other? Wasn't it evil to wish without moving-or to move without aim? Whose malevolence was it that crept through the world, struggling to break the two apart and set them against each other?
She shook her head. She did not want to think or to wonder why the world behind her was as it was. She did not care. She was flying away from it, at the rate of a hundred miles an hour. She leaned to the open window by her side, and felt the wind of the speed blowing her hair off her forehead. She lay back, conscious of nothing but the pleasure it gave her.
Yet her mind kept racing. Broken bits of thought flew past her attention, like the telegraph poles by the track. Physical pleasure?-she thought. This is a train made of steel . . . running on rails of Rearden Metal . . . moved by the energy of burning oil and electric generators . . . it's a physical sensation of physical movement through space . . . but is that the cause and the meaning of what I now feel?
. . . Do they call it a low, animal joy-this feeling that I would not care if the rail did break to bits under us now-it won't-but I wouldn't care, because I have experienced this? A low, physical, material, degrading pleasure of the body?
She smiled, her eyes closed, the wind streaming through her hair.
She opened her eyes and saw that Rearden stood looking down at her. It was the same glance with which he had looked at the rail. She felt her power of volition knocked out by some single, dull blow that made her unable to move. She held his eyes, lying back in her chair, the wind pressing the thin cloth of her shirt to her body.
He looked away, and she turned again to the sight of the earth tearing open before them.
She did not want to think, but the sound of thought went on, like the drone of the motors under the sounds of the engine. She looked at the cab around her. The fine steel mesh of the ceiling, she thought, and the row of rivets in the corner, holding sheets of steel sealed together-who made them? The brute force of men's muscles? Who made it possible for four dials and three levers in front of Pat Logan to hold the incredible power of the sixteen motors behind them and deliver it to the effortless control of one man's hand?
These things and the capacity from which they came-was this the pursuit men regarded as evil? Was this what they called an ignoble concern with the physical world? Was this the state of being enslaved by matter? Was this the surrender of man's spirit to his body?
She shook her head, as if she wished she could toss the subject out of the window and let it get shattered somewhere along the track. She looked at the sun on the summer fields. She did not have to think, because these questions