Atlas Shrugged [380]
"Well, where do we get a Diesel?" he asked angrily.
"We don't," said the road foreman.
"But we can't keep the Comet waiting on a siding all night!"
"Looks like we'll have to," said the trainmaster. "What's the use of talking about it, Dave? You know that there is no Diesel anywhere on the division."
"But Christ Almighty, how do they expect us to move trains without engines?"
"Miss Taggart didn't," said the road foreman. "Mr. Locey does."
"Bill," asked Mitchum, in the tone of pleading for a favor, "isn't there anything transcontinental that's due tonight, with any sort of a Diesel?"
"The first one to come," said Bill Brent implacably, "will be Number 236, the fast freight from San Francisco, which is due at Winston at seven-eighteen A.M." He added, "That's the Diesel closest to us at this moment. I've checked,"
"What about the Army Special?"
"Better not think about it, Dave. That one has superiority over everything on the line, including the Comet, by order of the Army.
They're running late as it is-journal boxes caught fire twice. They're carrying munitions for the West Coast arsenals. Better pray that nothing stops them on your division. If you think we'll catch hell for holding the Comet, it's nothing to what we'll catch if we try to stop that Special."
They remained silent. The windows were open to the summer night and they could hear the ringing of the telephone in the dispatcher's office downstairs. The signal lights winked over the deserted yards that had once been a busy division point.
Mitchum looked toward the roundhouse, where the black silhouettes of a few steam engines stood outlined in a dim light.
"The tunnel-" he said and stopped.
"-is eight miles long," said the trainmaster, with a harsh emphasis.
"I was only thinking," snapped Mitchum.
"Better not think of it," said Brent softly.
"I haven't said anything!"
"What was that talk you had with Dick Horton before he quit?" the road foreman asked too innocently, as if the subject were irrelevant.
"Wasn't it something about the ventilation system of the tunnel being on the bum? Didn't he say that that tunnel was hardly safe nowadays even for Diesel engines?"
"Why do you bring that up?" snapped Mitchum. "I haven't said anything!" Dick Horton, the division chief engineer, had quit three days after Mitchum's arrival.
"I thought I'd just mention it," the road foreman answered innocently.
"Look, Dave," said Bill Brent, knowing that Mitchum would stall for another hour rather than formulate a decision, "you know that there's only one thing to do: hold the Comet at Winston till morning, wait for Number 236, have her Diesel take the Comet through the tunnel, then let the Comet finish her run with the best coal-burner we can give her on the other side,"
"But how late will that make her?"
Brent shrugged. "Twelve hours-eighteen hours-who knows?"
"Eighteen hours-for the Comet? Christ, that's never happened before!"
"None of what's been happening to us has ever happened before,"
said Brent, with an astonishing sound of weariness in his brisk, competent voice.
"But they'll blame us for it in New York! They'll put all the blame on us!"
Brent shrugged. A month ago, he would have considered such an injustice inconceivable; today, he knew better.
"I guess . . ." said Mitchum miserably, "I guess there's nothing else that we can do."
"There isn't, Dave,"
"Oh God! Why did this have to happen to us?"
"Who is John Galt?"
It was half-past two when the Comet, pulled by an old switch engine, jerked to a stop on a siding of Winston Station. Kip Chalmers glanced out with incredulous anger at the few shanties on a desolate mountainside and at the ancient hovel of a station.
"Now what? What in hell are they stopping here for?" he cried, and rang for the conductor.
With the return of motion and safety, his terror had turned into rage. He felt almost as if he had been cheated by having been made to experience an unnecessary fear. His companions were still clinging