Atlas Shrugged [449]
She knew the danger only as part of the job. It had no personal meaning any longer. The savage thing she felt was almost enjoyment. It was the last rage of a lost battle. No!-she was crying in her mind, crying it to the destroyer, to the world she had left, to the years behind her, to the long progression of defeat-No! . . .No!
. . . No! . . .
Her eyes swept past the instrument panel-and then she sat still but for the sound of a gasp. Her altimeter had stood at 11,000 feet the last time she remembered seeing it. Now it stood at 10,000. But the floor of the valley had not changed. It had come no closer. It remained as distant as at her first glance down.
She knew that the figure 8,000 meant the level of the ground in this part of Colorado. She had not noticed the length of her descent.
She had not noticed that the ground, which had seemed too clear and too close from the height, was now too dim and too far. She was looking at the same rocks from the same perspective, they had grown no larger, their shadows had not moved, and the oddly unnatural light still hung over the bottom of the valley.
She thought that her altimeter was off, and she went on circling downward. She saw the needle of her dial moving down;, she saw the walls of granite moving up, she saw the ring of mountains growing higher, its peaks coming closer together in the sky-but the floor of the valley remained unchanged, as if she were dropping down a well with a bottom never to be reached. The needle moved to 9,500-
to 9,300-to 9,000-to 8,700.
The flash of light that hit her had no source. It was as if the air within and beyond the plane became an explosion of blinding cold fire, sudden and soundless. The shock threw her back, her hands off the wheel and over her eyes. In the break of an instant, when she seized the wheel again, the light was gone, but her ship was spinning.
her ears were bursting with silence and her propeller stood stiffly straight before her: her motor was dead.
She tried to pull for a rise, but the ship was going down-and what she saw flying at her face was not the spread of mangled boulders, but the green grass of a field where no field had been before.
There was no time to see the rest. There was no time to think of explanations. There was no time to come out of the spin. The earth was a green ceiling coming down upon her, a few hundred swiftly shrinking feet away.
Flung from side to side, like a battered pendulum, clinging to the wheel, half in her seat, half on her knees, she fought to pull the ship into a glide, for an attempt to make a belly-landing, while the green ground was whirling about her, sweeping above her, then below, its spiral coils coming closer. Her arms pulling at the wheel, with no chance to know whether she could succeed, with her space and time running out-she felt, in a flash of its full, violent purity, that special sense of existence which had always been hers. In a moment's consecration to her love-to her rebellious denial of disaster, to her love of life and of the matchless value that was herself-she felt the fiercely proud certainty that she would survive.
And in answer to the earth that flew to meet her, she heard in her mind, as her mockery at fate, as her cry of defiance, the words of the sentence she hated-the words of defeat, of despair and of a plea for help: "Oh hell! Who is John Galt?"
PART III: A is A
Chapter I: ATLANTIS
When she opened her eyes, she saw sunlight, green leaves and a man's face. She thought: I know what this is. This was the world as she had expected to see it at sixteen-and now she had reached it-and it seemed so simple, so unastonishing, that the thing she felt was like a blessing pronounced upon the universe by means of three words: But of course.
She was looking up at the face of a man who knelt by her side, and she knew that in all the years behind her, this was what she would have