Atlas Shrugged [545]
"The what?"
"The Morale Conditioner-that's Chick Morrison-has called me three times, to make sure that nothing would go wrong. They've issued orders to all the news broadcasters, who've been announcing it all day, all over the country, telling people to listen to you tonight on Bertram Scudder's hour."
He looked at her as if he were demanding both an answer and the recognition that her answer was the element of least importance in these circumstances. She said, "You know what I think of the Washington policies and of Directive 10-289."
"At a time like this, we can't afford the luxury of thinking!"
She laughed aloud.
"But don't you see that you can't refuse them now?" he yelled. "If you don't appear after all those announcements, it will support the rumors, it will amount to an open declaration of disloyalty!"
"The trap won't work, Jim."
"What trap?"
"The one you're always setting up."
"I don't know what you mean!"
"Yes, you do. You knew-all of you knew it-that I would refuse.
So you pushed me into a public trap, where my refusal would become an embarrassing scandal for you, more embarrassing than you thought I'd dare to cause. You were counting on me to save your faces and the necks you stuck out. I won't save them."
"But I promised it!"
"I didn't."
"But we can't refuse them! Don't you see that they've got us hogtied?
That they're holding us by the throat? Don't you know what they can do to us through this Railroad Pool, or through the Unification Board, or through the moratorium on our bonds?"
"I knew that two years ago."
He was shaking; there was some formless, desperate, almost superstitious quality in his terror, out of proportion to the dangers he named.
She felt suddenly certain that it came from something deeper than his fear of bureaucratic reprisal, that the reprisal was the only identification of it which he would permit himself to know, a reassuring identification which had a semblance of rationality and hid his true motive. She felt certain that it was not the country's panic he wanted to stave off, but his own-that he, and Chick Morrison and Wesley Mouch and all the rest of the looting crew needed her sanction, not to reassure their victims, but to reassure themselves, though the allegedly crafty, the allegedly practical idea of deluding their victims was the only identification they gave to their own motive and their hysterical insistence. With an awed contempt-awed by the enormity of the sight-she wondered what inner degradation those men had to reach in order to arrive at a level of self-deception where they would seek the extorted approval of an unwilling victim as the moral sanction they needed, they who thought that they were merely deceiving the world.
"We have no choice!" he cried. "Nobody has any choice!"
"Get out of here," she said, her voice very quiet and low.
Some tonal quality in the sound of her voice struck the note of the unconfessed within him, as ft, never allowing it into words, he knew from what knowledge that sound had come. He got out.
She glanced at Eddie; he looked like a man worn by fighting one more of the attacks of disgust which he was learning to endure as a chronic condition.
After a moment, he asked, "Dagny, what became of Quentin Daniels?
You were flying after him, weren't you?"
"Yes," she said. "He's gone."
'To the destroyer?"
The word hit her like a physical blow. It was the first touch of the outer world upon that radiant presence which she had kept within her all day, as a silent, changeless vision, a private vision, not to be affected