Atlas Shrugged [354]
"No, Miss Taggart."
"Put them through to me immediately, when they call,"
"Yes, Miss Taggart."
Switching the communicator off, she wondered whether she imagined it or whether there had been something strange in the girl's voice: it had sounded unnaturally tense.
She felt the faint light-headedness of hunger and thought that she should go down to get a cup of coffee, but there was still the report of the chief engineer to finish, so she lighted one more cigarette.
The chief engineer was out on the road, supervising the reconstruction of the main track with the Rearden Metal rail taken from the corpse of the John Galt Line; she had chosen the sections most urgently in need of repair. Opening his report, she read-with a shock of incredulous anger-that he had stopped work in the mountain section of Winston, Colorado. He recommended a change of plans: he suggested that the rail intended for Winston be used, instead, to repair the track of their Washington-to-Miami branch. He gave his reasons: a derailment had occurred on that branch last week, and Mr. Tinky Holloway of Washington, traveling with a party of friends, had been delayed for three hours; it had been reported to the chief engineer that Mr. Holloway had expressed extreme displeasure. Although, from a purely technological viewpoint-said the chief engineer's report-the rail of the Miami branch was in better condition than that of the Winston section, one had to remember, from a sociological viewpoint, that the Miami branch carried a much more important class of passenger traffic; therefore, the chief engineer suggested that Winston could be kept waiting a little longer, and recommended the sacrifice of an obscure section of mountain trackage for the sake of a branch where "Taggart Transcontinental could not afford to create an unfavorable impression."
She read, slashing furious pencil marks on the margins of the pages, thinking that her first duty of the day, ahead of any other, was to stop this particular piece of insanity.
The telephone rang.
"Yes?" she asked, snatching the receiver. "McNeil Car Foundry?"
"No," said the voice of her secretary. "Senor Francisco d'Anconia."
She looked at the phone's mouthpiece for the instant of a brief shock. "All right. Put him on."
The next voice she heard was Francisco's. "I see that you're in your office just the same," he said; his voice was mocking, harsh and tense.
"Where did you expect me to be?"
"How do you like the new suspension?"
"What suspension?"
"The moratorium on brains."
"What are you talking about?"
"Haven't you seen today's newspapers?"
"No."
There was a pause; then his voice came slowly, changed and grave: "Better take a look at them, Dagny."
"All right."
"I'll call you later."
She hung up and pressed the switch of the communicator on her desk. "Get me a newspaper," she said to her secretary.
"Yes, Miss Taggart," the secretary's voice answered grimly.
It was Eddie Willers who came in and put the newspaper down on her desk. The meaning of the look on his face' was the same as the tone she had caught in Francisco's voice: the advance notice of some inconceivable disaster.
"None of us wanted to be first to tell you," he said very quietly and walked out.
When she rose from her desk, a few moments later, she felt that she had full control of her body and that she was not aware of her body's existence. She felt lifted to her feet and it seemed to her that she stood straight, not touching the ground. There was an abnormal clarity about every object in the room, yet she was seeing nothing around her, but she knew that she would be able to see the thread of a cobweb if her purpose required it, just as she would be able to walk with a somnambulist's assurance along the edge of a roof. She could not know that she was looking at the room with the eyes of a person who had lost the capacity and the concept of doubt, and what remained to her was the simplicity of a single perception and of a single goal. She did not know that the thing which seemed so violent, yet felt like such a still,