Atlas Shrugged [483]
He shook his head. "No. I want you to remember that that had been your wish. You were right, in the past. So long as you were part of the outer world, you had to seek to destroy me. And of the two courses now open to you, one will lead you to the day when you will find yourself forced to do it." She did not answer, she sat looking down, he saw the strands of her hair swing jerkily as she shook her head in desperate protest. "You are my only danger. You are the only person who could deliver me to my enemies. If you remain with them, you will. Choose that, if you wish, but choose it with full knowledge.
Don't answer me now. But until you do"-the stress of severity in his voice was the sound of effort directed against himself-"remember that I know the meaning of either answer."
"As fully as I do?" she whispered.
"As fully."
He turned to go, when her eyes fell suddenly upon the inscriptions she had noticed, and forgotten, on the walls of the room.
They were cut into the polish of the wood, still showing the force of the pencil's pressure in the hands that had made them, each in his own violent writing: "You'll get over it-Ellis Wyatt" "It will be all right by morning-Ken Danagger" "It's worth it-Roger Marsh."
There were others, "What is that?" she asked.
He smiled. "This is the room where they spent their first night in the valley. The first night is the hardest. It's the last pull of the break with one's memories, and the worst. I let them stay here, so they can call for me, if they want me. I speak to them, if they can't sleep.
Most of them can't. But they're free of it by morning. . . . They've all gone through this room. Now they call it the torture chamber or the anteroom-because everyone has to enter the valley through my house."
He turned to go, he stopped on the threshold and added: "This is the room I never intended you to occupy. Good night, Miss Taggart."
Chapter II: THE UTOPIA OF GREED
"Good morning."
She looked at him across the living room from the threshold of her door. In the windows behind him, the mountains had that tinge of silver-pink which seems brighter than daylight, with the promise of a light to come. The sun. had risen somewhere over the earth, but it had not reached the top of the barrier, and the sky was glowing in its stead, announcing its motion. She had heard the joyous greeting to the sunrise, which was not the song of birds, but the ringing of the telephone a moment ago; she saw the start of day, not in the shining green of the branches outside, but in the glitter of chromium on the stove, the sparkle of a glass ashtray on a table, and the crisp whiteness of his shirt sleeves. Irresistibly, she heard the sound of a smile in her own voice, matching his, as she answered: "Good morning."
He was gathering notes of penciled calculations from his desk and stuffing them into his pocket. "I have to go down to the powerhouse,"
he said. "They've just phoned me that they're having trouble with the ray screen. Your plane seems to have knocked it off key. I'll be back in half an hour and then I'll cook our breakfast"
It was the casual simplicity of his voice, the manner of taking her presence and their domestic routine for granted, as if it were of no significance to them, that gave her the sense of an underscored significance and the feeling that he knew it.
She answered as casually, "If you'll bring me the cane I left in the car, I'll have breakfast ready for you by the time you come back."
He glanced at her with a slight astonishment; his eyes moved from her bandaged ankle to the short sleeves of the blouse that left her arms bare to display the heavy bandage on her elbow. But the transparent blouse, the open collar, the hair falling down to the shoulders that seemed innocently naked under a thin film of cloth, made her look like a schoolgirl, not an invalid, and her posture made the bandages look irrelevant.
He smiled, not quite at her, but as if in amusement at some sudden memory of his own. "If you wish," he said.
It was strange to be left alone in his house. Part of it was an