Atlas Shrugged [326]
"That is for you to judge."
"Let me put it this way: would it be of value if that rail were made available for our main-line track, which is in such urgent need of repair?"
"It would help."
"Miss Taggart," asked the man with the quavering voice, "would you say that there are any shippers of consequence left on the Rio Norte Line?"
"There's Ted Nielsen of Nielsen Motors. No one else."
"Would you say that the operating costs of the Rio Norte Line could be used to relieve the financial strain on the rest of the system?"
"It would help."
"Then, as our Operating Vice-President . . ." He stopped; she waited, looking at him; he said, "Well?"
"What was your question?"
"I meant to say . . . that is, well, as our Operating Vice-President, don't you have certain conclusions to draw?"
She stood up. She looked at the faces around the table. "Gentlemen,"
she said, "I do not know by what sort of self-fraud you expect to feel that if it's I who name the decision you intend to make, it will be I who'll bear the responsibility for it. Perhaps you believe that if my voice delivers the final blow, it will make me the murderer involved-since you know that this is the last act of a long-drawn-out murder. I cannot conceive what it is you think you can accomplish by a pretense of this kind, and I will not help you to stage it. The final blow will be delivered by you, as were all the others."
She turned to go. The chairman half-rose, asking helplessly, "But, Miss Taggart-"
"Please remain seated. Please continue the discussion-and take the vote in which I shall have no voice. I shall abstain from voting. Ill stand by, if you wish me to, but only as an employee. I will not pretend to be anything else."
She turned away once more, but it was the voice of the gray-haired man that stopped her. "Miss Taggart, this is not an official question, it is only my personal curiosity, but would you tell me your view of the future of the Taggart Transcontinental system?"
She answered, looking at him in understanding, her voice gentler, "I have stopped thinking of a future or of a railroad system. I intend to continue running trains so long as it is still possible to run them. I don't think that it will be much longer."
She walked away from the table, to the window, to stand aside and let them continue without her.
She looked at the city. Jim had obtained the permit which allowed them the use of electric power to the top of the Taggart Building.
From the height of the room, the city looked like a flattened remnant, with but a few rare, lonely streaks of lighted glass still rising through the darkness to the sky.
She did not listen to the voices of the men behind her. She did not know for how long the broken snatches of their struggle kept rolling past her-the sounds that nudged and prodded one another, trying to edge back and leave someone pushed forward-a struggle, not to assert one's own will, but to squeeze an assertion from some unwilling victim -a battle in which the decision was to be pronounced, not by the winner, but by the loser: "It seems to me . . . It is, I think . . . It must, in my opinion . . .
If we were to suppose . . . I am merely suggesting . . . I am not implying, but . . . If we consider both sides . . . It is, in my opinion, indubitable . . . It seems to me to be an unmistakable fact . . ."
She did not know whose voice it was, but she heard it when the voice pronounced: ". . . and, therefore, I move that the John Galt Line be closed."
Something, she thought, had made him call the Line by its right name.
You had to bear it, too, generations ago-it was just as hard for you, just as bad, but you did not let it stop you-was it really as bad as this? as ugly?-never mind, it's different forms, but it's only pain, and you were not stopped by pain, not by whatever kind it was that you had to bear-you were not stopped-you did not give in to it-you faced it and this is the kind I have to face-you fought and I will