Atlas Shrugged [328]
"How did you know that they'd do it tonight?" she asked.
"It's been obvious for months that that would be the next step at their next meeting."
"Why did you come here?"
"To see how you'd take it."
"Want to laugh about it?"
"No, Dagny, I don't want to laugh about it."
She saw no hint of amusement in his face; she answered trustingly, "I don't know how I'm taking it."
"I do."
"I was expecting it, I knew they'd have to do it, so now it's only a matter of getting through"-tonight, she wanted to say, but said-"all the work and details."
He took her arm. "Let's go some place where we can have a drink together."
"Francisco, why don't you laugh at me? You've always laughed about that Line."
"I will-tomorrow, when I see you going on with all the work and details. Not tonight."
"Why not?"
"Come on. You're in no condition to talk about it."
"I-" She wanted to protest, but said, "No, I guess I'm not."
He led her out to the street, and she found herself walking silently in time with the steady rhythm of his steps, the grasp of his fingers on her arm unstressed and firm. He signaled a passing taxicab and held the door open for her. She obeyed him without questions; she felt relief, like a swimmer who stops struggling. The spectacle of a man acting with assurance, was a life belt thrown to her at a moment when she had forgotten the hope of its existence. The relief was not in the surrender of responsibility, but in the sight of a man able to assume it.
"Dagny," he said, looking at the city as it moved past their taxi window, "think of the first man who thought of making a steel girder. He knew what he saw, what he thought and what he wanted. He did not say, 'It seems to me,' and he did not take orders from those who say, 'In my opinion.'"
She chuckled, wondering at his accuracy: he had guessed the nature of the sickening sense that held her, the sense of a swamp which she had to escape.
"Look around you," he said. "A city is the frozen shape of human courage-the courage of those men who thought for the first time of every bolt, rivet and power generator that went to make it. The courage to say, not 'It seems to me,' but 'It is'-and to stake one's life on one's judgment. You're not alone. Those men exist. They have always existed. There was a time when human beings crouched in caves, at the mercy of any pestilence and any storm. Could men such as those on your Board of Directors have brought them out of the cave and up to this?" He pointed at the city.
"God, no!"
"Then there's your proof that another kind of men do exist."
"Yes," she said avidly. "Yes."
"Think of them and forget your Board of Directors."
"Francisco, where are they now-the other kind of men?"
"Now they're not wanted."
"I want them. Oh God, how I want them!"
"When you do, you'll find them."
He did not question her about the John Galt Line and she did not speak of it, until they sat at a table in a dimly lighted booth and she saw the stem of a glass between her fingers. She had barely noticed how they had come here. It was a quiet, costly place that looked like a secret retreat; she saw a small, lustrous table under her hand, the leather of a circular seat behind her shoulders, and a niche of dark blue mirror that cut them off from the sight of whatever enjoyment or pain others had come here to hide. Francisco was leaning against the table, watching her, and she felt as if she were leaning against the steady attentiveness of his eyes.
They did not speak of the Line, but she said suddenly, looking down at the liquid in her glass: "I'm thinking of the night when Nat Taggart was told that he had to abandon the bridge he was building. The bridge across the Mississippi. He had been desperately short of money-because people were afraid of the bridge, they called it an impractical venture. That morning, he was told that the river steamboat concerns had filed suit against him, demanding that his bridge be destroyed as a threat to the public