Atlas Shrugged [377]
He had been considered profound for uttering such things as: "Freedom? Do let's stop talking about freedom. Freedom is impossible. Man can never be free of hunger, of cold, of disease, of physical accidents.
He can never be free of the tyranny of nature. So why should he object to the tyranny of a political dictatorship?" When all of Europe put into practice the ideas which he bad preached, he came to live in America. Through the years, his style of writing and his body had grown flabby. At seventy, he was an obese old man with retouched hair and a manner of scornful cynicism retouched by quotations from the yogis about the futility of all human endeavor. Kip Chalmers had invited him, because it seemed to look distinguished. Gilbert Keith Worthing had come along, because he had no particular place to go.
"God damn these railroad people!" said Kip Chalmers. "They're doing it on purpose. They want to ruin my campaign. I can't miss that rally! For Christ's sake, Lester, do something!"
"I've tried," said Lester Tuck. At the train's last stop, he had tried, by long-distance telephone, to find air transportation to complete their journey; but there were no commercial flights scheduled for the next two days.
"If they don't get me there on time, I'll have their scalps and their railroad! Can't we tell that damn conductor to hurry?"
"You've told him three times,"
"I'll get him fired. He's given me nothing but a lot of alibis about all their messy technical troubles. I expect transportation, not alibis. They can't treat me like one of their day-coach passengers. I expect them to get me where I want to go when I want it. Don't they know that I'm on this train?"
"They know it by now," said Laura Bradford. "Shut up, Kip. You bore me."
Chalmers refilled his glass. The car was rocking and the glassware tinkled faintly on the shelves of the bar. The patches of starlit sky in the windows kept swaying jerkily, and it seemed as if the stars were tinkling against one another. They could see nothing beyond the glass bay of the observation window at the end of the car, except the small halos of red and green lanterns marking the rear of the train, and a brief stretch of rail running away from them into the darkness. A wall of rock was racing the train, and the stars dipped occasionally into a sudden break that outlined, high above them, the peaks of the mountains of Colorado.
"Mountains . . ." said Gilbert Keith-Worthing, with satisfaction.
"It is a spectacle of this kind that makes one feel the insignificance of man.' What is this presumptuous little bit of rail, which crude materialists are so proud of building-compared to that eternal grandeur? No more than the basting thread of a seamstress on the hem of the garment of nature. If a single one of those granite giants chose to crumble, it would annihilate this train."
"Why should it choose to crumble?" asked Laura Bradford, without any particular interest.
"I think this damn train is going slower," said Kip Chalmers. "Those bastards are slowing down,, in spite of what I told them!"
"Well . . . it's the mountains, you know . . ." said Lester Tuck.
"Mountains be damned! Lester, what day is this? With all those damn changes of time, I can't tell which-"
"It's May twenty-seventh," sighed Lester Tuck.
"It's May twenty-eighth," said Gilbert Keith-Worthing, glancing at his watch. "It is now twelve minutes past midnight."
"Jesus!" cried Chalmers. "Then the rally is today?"
"Yep," said Lester Tuck.
"We won't make it! We-"
The train gave a sharper lurch, knocking the glass out of his hand.
The thin sound of its crash against the floor mixed with the screech of the wheel-flanges tearing against the rail of a sharp curve.
"I say," asked Gilbert Keith-Worthing nervously, "are your railroads safe?"
"Hell, yes!" said Kip Chalmers. "We've got so many rules, regulations and controls that those bastards wouldn't dare not to be safe!
. . . Lester, how far are we now? What's the next stop?'1
"There won't be any stop