Atlas Shrugged [455]
The car stopped in front of the lonely house. It was built of rough granite blocks, with a sheet of glass for most of its front wall. "I'll send the doctor over," said Mulligan, driving off, while Galt carried her up the path.
"Your house?" she asked.
"Mine," he answered, kicking the door open.
He carried her across the threshold into the glistening space of his living room, where shafts of sunlight hit walls of polished pine. She saw a few pieces of furniture made by hand, a ceiling of bare rafters, an archway open upon a small kitchen with rough shelves, a bare wooden table and the astonishing sight of chromium glittering on an electric stove; the place had the primitive simplicity of a frontiersman's cabin, reduced to essential necessities, but reduced with a super-modern skill.
He carried her across the sunrays into a small guest room and placed her down on a bed. She noticed a window open upon a long slant of rocky steps and pines going off into the sky. She noticed small streaks that looked like inscriptions cut into the wood of the walls, a few scattered lines that seemed made by different handwritings; she could not distinguish the words. She noticed another door, left half-open; it led to his bedroom.
"Am I a guest here or a prisoner?" she asked.
"The choice will be yours, Miss Taggart."
"I can make no choice when I'm dealing with a stranger."
"But you're not Didn't you name a railroad line after me?"
"Oh! . . . Yes . . ." It was the small jolt of another connection falling into place. "Yes, I-" She was looking at the tall figure with the sun-streaked hair, with the suppressed smile in the mercilessly perceptive eyes-she was seeing the struggle to build her Line and the summer day of the first train's run-she was thinking that if a human figure could be fashioned as an emblem of that Line, this was the figure.
"Yes . . . I did . . . " Then, remembering the rest, she added, "But I named it after an enemy."
He smiled. "That's the contradiction you had to resolve sooner or later, Miss Taggart."
"It was you . . . wasn't it? . . . who destroyed my Line. . . ."
"Why, no. It was the contradiction."
She closed her eyes; in a moment, she asked, "All those stories I heard about you-which of them were true?"
"All of them."
"Was it you who spread them?"
"No. What for? I never had any wish to be talked about."
"But you do know that you've become a legend?"
"Yes."
"The young inventor of the Twentieth Century Motor Company is the one real version of the legend, isn't it?"
"The one that's concretely real-yes."
She could not say it indifferently; there was still a breathless tone and the drop of her voice toward a whisper, when she asked, "The motor . . . the motor I found . . . it was you who made it?"
"Yes."
She could not prevent the jolt of eagerness that threw her head up.
"The secret of transforming energy-" she began, and stopped, "I could tell it to you in fifteen minutes," he said, in answer to the desperate plea she had not uttered, "but there's no power on earth that can force me to tell it. If you understand this, you'll understand everything that's baffling you."
"That night . . . twelve years ago . . . a spring night when you walked out of a meeting of six thousand murderers-that story is true, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"You told them that you would stop the motor of the world."
"I have."
"What have you done?"
"I've done nothing, Miss Taggart. And that's the whole of my secret."
She looked at him silently for a long moment. He stood waiting, as if he could read her thoughts. "The destroyer-" she said in a tone of wonder and helplessness.
"-the most evil creature that's ever existed," he said in the tone of a quotation, and she recognized her own words, "the man who's draining the brains of the world."
"How thoroughly have you been watching me," she asked, "and for how long?"
It was only an instant's pause, his eyes did not move, but it seemed to her that his glance was stressed, as if in special awareness of seeing her, and