Atlas Shrugged [479]
"What do you mean?"
"I have never felt guilty of my ability. I have never felt guilty of my mind. I have never felt guilty of being a man. I accepted no unearned guilt, and thus was free to earn and to know my own value. Ever since I can remember, I had felt that I would kill the man who'd claim that I exist for the sake of his need-and I had known that this was the highest moral feeling. That night, at the Twentieth Century meeting, when I heard an unspeakable evil being spoken in a tone of moral righteousness, I saw the root of the world's tragedy, the key to it and the solution. I saw what had to be done. I went out to do it."
"And the motor?" she asked. "Why did you abandon it? Why did you leave it to the Starnes heirs?"
"It was then- father's property. He paid me for it. It was made on his time. But I knew that it would be of no benefit to them and that no one would ever hear of it again. It was my first experimental model.
Nobody but me or my equivalent could have been able to complete it or even to grasp what it was. And I knew that no equivalent of mine would come near that factory from then on."
"You knew the kind of achievement your motor represented?"
"Yes."
"And you knew you were leaving it to perish?"
"Yes." He looked off into the darkness beyond the windows and chuckled softly, but it was not a sound of amusement. "I looked at my motor for the last tune, before I left. I thought of the men who claim that wealth is a matter of natural resources-and of the men who claim that wealth is a matter of seizing the factories-and of the men who claim that machines condition their brains. Well, there was the motor to condition them, and there it remained as just exactly what it is without man's mind-as a pile of metal scraps and wires, going to rust. You have been thinking of the great service which that motor could have rendered to mankind, if it had been put into production. I think that on the day when men understand the meaning of its fate in that factory's junk heap-it will have rendered a greater one."
"Did you expect to see that day, when you left it?"
"No."
"Did you expect a chance to rebuild it elsewhere?"
"No."
"And you were willing to let it remain in a junk heap?"
"For the sake of what that motor meant to me," he said slowly, "I had to be willing to let it crumble and vanish forever"-he looked straight at her and she heard the steady, unhesitant, uninflected ruthlessness of his voice-"just as you will have to be willing to let the rail of Taggart Transcontinental crumble and vanish."
She held his eyes, her head was lifted, and she said softly, in the tone of a proudly open plea, "Don't make me answer you now."
"I won't. We'll tell you whatever you wish to know. We won't urge you to make a decision." He added, and she was shocked by the sudden gentleness of his voice, "I said that that kind of indifference toward a world which should have been ours was the hardest thing to attain. I know. We've all gone through it."
She looked at the quiet, impregnable room, and at the light-the light that came from his motor-on the faces of men who were the most serene and confident gathering she had ever attended.
"What did you do, when you walked out of the Twentieth Century?"
she asked.
"I went out to become a flame-spotter. I made it my job to watch for those bright flares in the growing night of savagery, which were the men of ability, the men of the mind-to watch their course, their struggle and their agony-and to pull them out, when I knew that they had seen enough."
"What did you tell them to make them abandon everything?"
"I told them that they were right."
In answer to the silent question of her glance, he added, "I gave them the pride they did not know they had. I gave them the words to identify it. I gave them that priceless possession which they had missed, had longed for, yet had not known they needed: a moral sanction. Did you call me the destroyer and the hunter of men? I was the walking delegate of this strike, the leader of the victims' rebellion, the defender of