Atlas Shrugged [230]
"Mr. Rearden," he had said once, "if you feel you'd like to hand out more of the Metal to friends of yours-I mean, in bigger hauls-it could be arranged, you know. Why don't we apply for a special permission on the ground of essential need? I've got a few friends in Washington. Your friends are pretty important people, big businessmen, so it wouldn't be difficult to get away with the essential need dodge. Of course, there would be a few expenses. For things in Washington, You know how it is, things always occasion expenses."
"What things?"
"You understand what I mean."
"No," Rearden had said, "I don't. Why don't you explain it to me?"
The boy had looked at him uncertainly, weighed it in his mind, then come out with: "It's bad psychology."
"What is?"
"You know, Mr. Rearden, it's not necessary to use such words as that."
"As what?"
"Words are relative. They're only symbols. If we don't use ugly symbols, we won't have any ugliness. Why do you want me to say things one way, when I've already said them another?"
"Which way do I want you to say them?"
"Why do you want me to?"
"For the same reason that you don't."
The boy had remained silent for a moment, then had said, "You know, Mr. Rearden, there are no absolute standards. We can't go by rigid principles, we've got to be flexible, we've got to adjust to the reality of the day and act on the expediency of the moment."
"Run along, punk. Go and try to pour a ton of steel without rigid principles, on the expediency of the moment."
A strange sense, which was almost a sense of style, made Rearden feel contempt for the boy, but no resentment. The boy seemed to fit the spirit of the events around them. It was as if they were being carried back across a long span of centuries to the age where the boy had belonged, but he, Rearden, had not. Instead of building new furnaces, thought Rearden, he was now running a losing race to keep the old ones going; instead of starting new ventures, new research, new experiments in the use of Rearden Metal, he was spending the whole of his energy on a quest for sources of iron ore: like the men at the dawn of the Iron Age-he thought-but with less hope.
He tried to avoid these thoughts. He had to stand on guard against his own feeling-as if some part of him had become a stranger that had to be kept numb, and his will had to be its constant, watchful anesthetic. That part was an unknown of which he knew only that he must never see its root and never give it voice. He had lived through one dangerous moment which he could not allow to return.
It was the moment when-alone in his office, on a winter evening, held paralyzed by a newspaper spread on his desk with a long column of directives on the front page-he had heard on the radio the news of Ellis Wyatt's flaming oil fields. Then, his first reaction-before any thought of the future, any sense of disaster, any shock, terror or protest -had been to burst out laughing. He had laughed in triumph, in deliverance, in a spurting, living exultation-and the words which he had not pronounced, but felt, were: God bless you, Ellis, whatever you're doing!
When he had grasped the implications of his laughter, he had known that he was now condemned to constant vigilance against himself. Like the survivor of a heart attack, he knew that he had had a warning and that he carried within him a danger that could strike him at any moment.
He had held it off, since then. He had kept an even, cautious, severely controlled pace in his inner steps. But it had come close to him for a moment, once again. When he had looked at the order of the State Science Institute on his desk, it had seemed to him that the glow moving over the paper did not come from the furnaces outside, but from the flames of a burning oil field.
"Mr. Rearden," said the Wet Nurse, when he heard about the rejected order, "you shouldn't have done