Atlas Shrugged [566]
It was true, but not in the manner he implied, not in any manner or meaning she could ever hope to grasp. It was true that he needed her, but the nature of his need kept slipping past her every effort to define it. She did not know what he wanted of her. It was not flattery that he wanted, she had seen him listening to the obsequious compliments of liars, listening with a look of resentful inertness-almost the look of a drug addict at a dose inadequate to rouse him. But she had seen him look at her as if he were waiting for some reviving shot and, at times, as if he were begging. She had seen a flicker of life in his eyes whenever she granted him some sign of admiration-yet a burst of anger was his answer, whenever she named a reason for admiring him.
He seemed to want her to consider him great, but never dare ascribe any specific content to his greatness.
She did not understand the night, in mid-April, when he returned from a trip to Washington. "Hi, kid!" he said loudly, dropping a sheaf of lilac into her arms. "Happy days are here again! Just saw those flowers and thought of you. Spring is coming, baby!"
He poured himself a drink and paced the room, talking with too light, too brash a manner of gaiety. There was a feverish sparkle in his eyes, and his voice seemed shredded by some unnatural excitement. She began to wonder whether he was elated or crushed.
"I know what it is that they're planning!" he said suddenly, without transition, and she glanced up at him swiftly: she knew the sound of one of his inner explosions. "There's not a dozen people in the whole country who know it, but I do! The top boys are keeping it secret till they're ready to spring it on the nation. Will it surprise a lot of people!
Will it knock them flat! A lot of people? Hell, every single person in this country! It will affect every single person. That's how important it is."
"Affect-how, Jim?"
"It will affect them! And they don't know what's coming, but I do.
There they sit tonight"-he waved at the lighted windows of the city-
"making plans, counting their money, hugging their children or their dreams, and they don't know, but I do, that all of it will be struck, stopped, changed!"
"Changed-for the worse or the better?"
"For the better, of course," he answered impatiently, as if it were irrelevant; his voice seemed to lose its fire and to slip into the fraudulent sound of duty. "It's a plan to save the country, to stop our economic decline, to hold things still, to achieve stability and security."
"What plan?"
"I can't tell you. It's secret. Top secret. You have no idea how many people would like to know it. There's no industrialist who wouldn't give a dozen of his best furnaces for just one hint of warning, which he's not going to get! Like Hank Rearden, for instance, whom you admire so much." He chuckled, looking off into the future.
"Jim," she asked, the sound of fear in her voice telling him what the sound of his chuckle had been like, "why do you hate Hank Rearden?"
"I don't hate him!" He whirled to her, and his face, incredibly, looked anxious, almost frightened. "I never said I hated him. Don't worry, he'll approve of the plan. Everybody will. It's for everybody's good." He sounded as if he were pleading. She felt the dizzying certainty that he was lying, yet that the plea was sincere-as if he had a desperate need to reassure her, but not about the things he said.
She forced herself to smile. "Yes, Jim, of course," she answered, wondering what instinct in what impossible kind of chaos had made her say it as if it were her part to reassure him.
The look she saw on his face was almost a smile and almost of gratitude. "1 had to tell you about it tonight. I had to tell you. I wanted you to know what tremendous issues I deal with. You always talk about my work, but you don't understand it at all, it's so much wider than you imagine. You think that running a railroad is a matter of track laying and fancy metals and getting trains there on time. But