Atlas Shrugged [462]
She laughed. "It was the Fifth Concerto by Richard Halley, wasn't it?"
"Sure," he answered. "But do you think I'd tell that to a scab?"
"A what?"
"What am I paying you for?" asked Ellis Wyatt, approaching; the boy chuckled, darting back to seize the lever he had abandoned for a moment. "It's Miss Taggart who couldn't fire you, if you loafed on the job. lean."
"That's one of the reasons why I quit the railroad, Miss Taggart,"
said the boy.
"Did you know that I stole him from you?" said Wyatt. "He used to be your best brakeman and now he's my best grease-monkey, but neither one of us is going to hold him permanently."
"Who is?"
"Richard Halley. Music. He's Halley's best pupil."
She smiled, "I know, this is a place where one employs nothing but aristocrats for the lousiest kinds of jobs."
"They're all aristocrats, that's true," said Wyatt, "because they know that there's no such thing as a lousy job-only lousy men who don't care to do it."
The roughneck was watching them from above, listening with curiosity. She glanced up at him, he looked like a truck driver, so she asked, "What were you outside? A professor of comparative philology, I suppose?"
"No, ma'am," he answered. "I was a truck driver." He added, "But that's not what I wanted to remain."
Ellis Wyatt was looking at the place around them with a kind of youthful pride eager for acknowledgment: it was the pride of a host at a formal reception in a drawing room, and the eagerness of an artist at the opening of his show in a gallery. She smiled and asked, pointing at the machinery, "Shale oil?"
"Uh-huh."
"That's the process which you were working to develop while you were on earth?" She said it involuntarily and she gasped a little at her own words.
He laughed. "While I was in hell-yes. I'm on earth now."
"How much do you produce?"
"Two hundred barrels a day."
A note of sadness came back into her voice: "It's the process by which you once intended to fill five tank-trains a day."
"Dagny," he said earnestly, pointing at his tank, "one gallon of it is worth more than a trainful back there in hell-because this is mine, all of it, every single drop of it, to be spent on nothing but myself." He raised his smudged hand, displaying the greasy stains as a treasure, and a black drop on the tip of his finger flashed like a gem in the sun.
"Mine," he said. "Have you let them beat you into forgetting what that word means, what it feels like? You should give yourself a chance to relearn it."
"You're hidden in a hole in the wilderness," she said bleakly, "and you're producing two hundred barrels of oil, when you could have flooded the world with it."
"What for? To feed the looters?"
"No! To earn the fortune you deserve."
"But I'm richer now than I was in the world. What's wealth but the means of expanding one's life? There's two ways one can do it: either by producing more or by producing it faster. And that's what I'm doing: I'm manufacturing time."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm producing everything I need, I'm working to improve my methods, and every hour I save is an hour added to my life. It used to take me five hours to fill that tank. It now takes three. The two I saved are mine-as pricelessly mine as if I moved my grave two further hours away for every five I've got. It's two hours released from one task, to be invested in another-two more hours in which to work, to grow, to move forward. That's the savings account I'm -hoarding. Is there any sort of safety vault that could protect this account in the outside world?"
"But what space do you have for moving forward? Where's your market?"
He chuckled. "Market? I now work for use, not for profit-my use, not the looters' profit. Only those who add to my life, not those who devour it, are my market. Only those who produce, not those who consume, can ever be anybody's market. I deal with the life-givers, not with the cannibals. If my oil takes less effort to produce, I ask less of the men to whom I trade it for the things I need.