Atlas Shrugged [451]
"What is this valley?" she asked.
He smiled, "The Taggart Terminal."
"What do you mean?"
"You'll find out."
A dim impulse, like the recoil of an antagonist, made her want to check on what strength was left to her. She could move her arms and legs; she could lift her head; she felt a stabbing pain when she breathed deeply; she saw a thin thread of blood running down her stocking.
"Can one get out of this place?" she asked.
His voice seemed earnest, but the glint of the metal-green eyes was a smile: "Actually-no. Temporarily-yes."
She made a movement to rise. He bent to lift her, but she gathered her strength in a swift, sudden jolt and slipped out of his grasp, struggling to stand up. "I think I can-" she started saying, and collapsed against him the instant her feet rested on the ground, a stab of pain shooting up from an ankle that would not hold her.
He lifted her in his arms and smiled. "No, you can't, Miss Taggart,"
he said, and started off across the field.
She lay still, her arms about him, her head on his shoulder, and she thought: For just a few moments-while this lasts-it is all right to surrender completely-to forget everything and just permit yourself to feel. . . . When had she experienced it before?-she wondered; there had been a moment when these had been the words in her mind, but she could not remember it now. She had known it, once-this feeling of certainty, of the final, the reached, the not-to-be-questioned. But it was new to feel protected, and to feel that it was right to accept the protection, to surrender-right, because this peculiar sense of safety was not protection against the future, but against the past, not the protection of being spared from battle, but of having won it, not a protection granted to her weakness, but to her strength. . . . Aware with abnormal intensity of the pressure of his hands against her body, of the gold and copper threads of his hair, the shadows of his lashes on the skin of his face a few inches away from hers, she wondered dimly: Protected, from what? . . . it's he who was the enemy . . . was he?
. . . why? . . . She did not know, she could not think of it now. It took an effort to remember that she had had a goal and a motive a few hours ago. She forced herself to recapture it.
"Did you know that I was following you?" she asked.
"No."
"Where is your plane?"
"At the landing field."
"Where is the landing field?"
"On the other side of the valley."
"There was no landing field in this valley, when I looked down, There was no meadow, either. How did it get here?"
He glanced at the sky. "Look carefully. Do you see anything up there?"
She dropped her head back, looking straight into the sky, seeing nothing but the peaceful blue of morning. After a while she distinguished a few faint strips of shimmering air.
"Heat waves," she said.
"Refractor rays," he answered. "The valley bottom that you saw is a mountain top eight thousand feet high, five miles away from here."
"A . . . what?"
"A mountain top that no flyer would ever choose for a landing.
What you saw was its reflection projected over this valley."
"How?"
"By the same method as a mirage on a desert: an image refracted from a layer of heated air."
"How?"
"By a screen of rays calculated against everything-except a courage such as yours."
"What do you mean?"
"I never thought that any plane would attempt to drop within seven hundred feet of the ground. You hit the ray screen. Some of the rays are the kind that kill magnetic motors. Well, that's the second time you beat me: I've never been followed, either,"
"Why do you keep that screen?"
"Because this place is private property intended to remain as such."
"What is this place?"
"I'll show it to you, now that you're here, Miss Taggart. I'll answer questions after you've seen it."
She remained silent. She noticed that she had asked questions about every subject, but not about him. It was as if he were a single whole, grasped