Atlas Shrugged [419]
"Okay."
"I will confer with each one of them in turn. Have them meet me in my car aboard the Comet."
"Okay."
"Send word out-unofficially-that the engineers are to make up time for the stops by going seventy, eighty, a hundred miles an hour, anything they wish as and when they need to, and that I will . . .
Eddie?"
"Yes. Okay."
"Eddie, what's the matter?"
He had to look up, to face her and, desperately, to lie for the first time in his life. "I'm . . . I'm afraid of the trouble we'll get into with the law," he said.
"Forget it. Don't you see that there isn't any law left? Anything goes now, for whoever can get away with it-and, for the moment, it's we who're setting the terms."
When she was ready, he carried her suitcase to a taxicab, then down the platform of the Taggart Terminal to her office car, the last at the end of the Comet. He stood on the platform, saw the train jerk forward and watched the red markers on the back of her car slipping slowly away from him into the long darkness of the exit tunnel. When they were gone, he felt what one feels at the loss of a dream one had not known till after it was lost.
There were few people on the platform around him and they seemed to move with self-conscious strain, as if a sense of disaster clung to the rails and to the girders above their heads. He thought indifferently that after a century of safety, men were once more regarding the departure of a train as an event involving a gamble with death.
He remembered that he had had no dinner, and he felt no desire to eat, but the underground cafeteria of the Taggart Terminal was more truly his home than the empty cube of space he now thought of as his apartment-so he walked to the cafeteria, because he had no other place to go.
The cafeteria was almost deserted-but the first thing he saw, as he entered, was a thin column of smoke rising from the cigarette of the worker, who sat alone at a table in a dark corner.
Not noticing what he put on his tray, Eddie carried it to the worker's table, said, "Hello," sat down and said nothing else. He looked at the silverware spread before him, wondered about its purpose, remembered the use of a fork and attempted to perform the motions of eating, but found that it was beyond his power. After a while, he looked up and saw that the worker's eyes were studying him attentively.
"No," said Eddie, "no, there's nothing the matter with me. . . .
Oh yes, a lot has happened, but what difference does it make now?
. . . Yes, she's back. . . . What else do you want me to say about it? . . . How did you know she's back? Oh well, I suppose the whole company knew it within the first ten minutes. . . . No, I don't know whether I'm glad that she's back. . . . Sure, she'll save the railroad-
for another year or month. . . . What do you want me to say? . . .
No, she didn't. She didn't tell me what she's counting on. She didn't tell me what she thought or felt. . . . Well, how do you suppose she'd feel? It's hell for her-all right, for me, too! Only my kind of hell is my own fault. . . . No. Nothing. I can't talk about it-talk?-I mustn't even think about it, I've got to stop it, stop thinking of her and-of her, I mean."
He remained silent and he wondered why the worker's eyes-the eyes that always seemed to see everything within him-made him feel uneasy tonight. He glanced down at the table, and he noticed the butts of many cigarettes among the remnants of food on the worker's plate.
"Are you in trouble, too?" asked Eddie. "Oh, just that you've sat here for a long time tonight, haven't you? . . . For me? Why should you have wanted to wait for me? . . . You know, I never thought you cared whether you saw me or not, me or anybody, you seemed so complete in yourself, and that's why I liked to talk to you, because I felt that you always understood, but nothing could hurt you-you looked as if nothing had ever hurt you-and it made me feel free, as if . . . as if there were no pain