Atlas Shrugged [465]
"Where?"
He pointed toward the mountains. "Right here. Did you ever know Midas Mulligan to make a bad investment? You'd be surprised what one can find in that stretch of rock, if one knows how to look. That's what I've been doing-looking."
"And if you don't find any iron ore?"
He shrugged. "There's other things to do. I've always been short on time in my life, never on what to use it for."
She glanced at Stockton with curiosity. "Aren't you training a man who could become your most dangerous competitor?"
"That's the only sort of men I like to hire. Dagny, have you lived too long among the looters? Have you come to think that one man's ability is a threat to another?"
"Oh no! But I thought I was almost the only one left who didn't think that."
"Any man who's afraid of hiring the best ability he can find, is a cheat who's in a business where he doesn't belong. To me-the foulest man on earth, more contemptible than a criminal, is the employer who rejects men for being too good. That's what I've always thought and-
say, what are you laughing at?"
She was listening to him with an eager, incredulous smile. "It's so startling to hear," she said, "because it's so right!"
"What else can one think?"
She chuckled softly. "You know, when I was a child, I expected every businessman to think it."
"And since then?"
"Since then, I've learned not to expect it."
"But it's right, isn't it?"
"I've learned not to expect the right."
"But it stands to reason, doesn't it?"
"I've given up expecting reason."
"That's what one must never give up," said Ken Danagger.
They had returned to the car and had started down the last, descending curves of the road, when she glanced at Galt and he turned to her at once, as if he had expected it.
"It was you in Danagger's office that day, wasn't it?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Did you know, then, that I was waiting outside?"
"Yes."
"Did you know what it was like, to wait behind that closed door?"
She could not name the nature of the glance with which he looked at her. It was not pity, because she did not seem to be its object; it was the kind of glance with which one looks at suffering, but it was not her suffering that he seemed to be seeing.
"Oh yes," he answered quietly, almost lightly.
The first shop to rise by the side of the valley's single street was like the sudden sight of an open theater: a frame box without front wall, its stage set in the bright colors of a musical comedy-with red cubes, green circles, gold triangles, which were bins of tomatoes, barrels of lettuce, pyramids of oranges, and a spangled backdrop where the sun hit shelves of metal containers. The name on the marquee said; Hammond Grocery Market. A distinguished man in shirt sleeves, with a stern profile and gray temples, was weighing a chunk of butter for an attractive young woman who stood at the counter, her posture light as a show girl's, the skirt of her cotton dress swelling faintly in the wind, like a dance costume. Dagny smiled involuntarily, even though the man was Lawrence Hammond.
The shops were small one-story structures, and as they moved past her, she caught familiar names on their signs, like headings on the pages of a book riffled by the car's motion: Mulligan General Store-Atwood Leather Goods-Nielsen Lumber-then the sign of the dollar above the door of a small brick factory with the inscription: Mulligan Tobacco Company. "Who's the Company, besides Midas Mulligan?" she asked. "Dr. Akston," he answered.
There were few passers-by, some men, fewer women, and they walked with purposeful swiftness, as if bound on specific errands. One after another, they stopped at the sight of the car, they waved to Galt and they looked at her with the unastonished curiosity of recognition.
"Have I been expected here for a long time?" she asked, "You still are," he answered.
On the edge of the road, she saw a structure made of glass sheets held together by a wooden framework, but for one instant it seemed to her that it was only a frame for the painting of a woman-a tall, fragile woman with pale blond hair and a face