Atlas Shrugged [464]
"What?"
He grinned and pointed to the glass door of a sun-flooded room.
"There's my ruined competitor," he said.
She saw a young man bent over a long table, working on a complex model for the mold of a drill head. He had the slender, powerful hands of a concert pianist and the grim face of a surgeon concentrating on his task.
"He's a sculptor," said Stockton. "When I came here, he and his partner had a sort of combination hand-forge and repair shop. I opened a real foundry, and took all their customers away from them. The boy couldn't do the kind of job I did, it was only a part-time business for him, anyway-sculpture is his real business-so he came to work for me. He's making more money now, in shorter hours, than he used to make in his own foundry. His partner was a chemist, so he went into agriculture and he's produced a chemical fertilizer that's doubled some of the crops around here-did you mention potatoes?-potatoes, in particular."
"Then somebody could put you out of business, too?"
"Sure. Any time. I know one man who could and probably will, when he gets here. But, boy!-I'd work for him as a cinder sweeper. He'd blast through this valley like a rocket. He'd triple everybody's production."
"Who's that?"
"Hank Rearden."
"Yes . . ." she whispered, "Oh yes!"
She wondered what had made her say it with such immediate certainty. She felt, simultaneously, that Hank Rearden's presence in this valley was impossible-and that this was his place, peculiarly his, this was the place of his youth, of his start, and, together, the place he had been seeking all his life, the land he had struggled to reach, the goal of his tortured battle. . . . It seemed to her that the spirals of flame tinged fog were drawing time into an odd circle-and while a dim thought went floating through her mind like the streamer of an unfollowed sentence: To hold an unchanging youth is to reach, at the end, the vision with which one started-she heard the voice of a tramp in a diner, saying, "John Galt found the fountain of youth which he wanted to bring down to men. Only he never came back . . . because he found that it couldn't be brought down."
A sheaf of sparks went up in the depth of the fog-and she saw the broad back of a foreman whose arm made the sweeping gesture of a signal, directing some invisible task. He jerked his head to snap an order-she caught a glimpse of his profile-and she caught her breath.
Stockton saw it, chuckled and called into the fog: "Hey, Ken! Come here! Here's an old friend of yours!"
She looked at Ken Danagger as he approached them. The great industrialist, whom she had tried so desperately to hold to his desk, was now dressed in smudged overalls.
"Hello, Miss Taggart. I told you we'd soon meet again."
Her head dropped, as if in assent and in greeting, but her hand bore down heavily upon her cane, for a moment, while she stood reliving their last encounter: the tortured hour of waiting, then the gently distant face at the desk and the tinkling of a glass-paneled door closing upon a stranger.
It was so brief a moment that two of the men before her could take it only as a greeting-but it was at Galt that she looked when she raised her head, and she saw him looking at her as if he knew what she felt-she saw him seeing in her face the realization that it was he who had walked out of Danagger's office, that day. His face gave her nothing in answer: it had that look of respectful severity with which a man stands before the fact that the truth is the truth.
"I didn't expect it," she said softly, to Danagger. "I never expected to see you again."
Danagger was watching her as if she were a promising child he had once discovered and was now affectionately amused to watch. "I know," he said. "But why are you so shocked?"
"I . . . oh, it's just that it's preposterous!" She pointed at his clothes.
"What's wrong with it?"
"Is this, then, the end of your road?"
"Hell, no! The beginning."
"What are you aiming at?"
"Mining. Not coal, though. Iron."