Atlas Shrugged [585]
From the sudden space of a broad intersection, she looked at the great skyscrapers in the distance. They were vanishing quietly into a veil of fog, with the faint breath of a glow behind them, with a few lights like a smile of farewell. Once, they had been a promise, and from the midst of the stagnant sloth around her she had looked to them for proof that another kind of men existed. Now she knew that they were tombstones, slender obelisks soaring in memory of the men who had been destroyed for having created them, they were the frozen shape of the silent cry that the reward of achievement was martyrdom.
Somewhere in one of those vanishing towers, she thought, there was Dagny-but Dagny was a lonely victim, fighting a losing battle, to be destroyed and to sink into fog like the others.
There is no place to go, she thought and stumbled on-T can't stand still, nor move much longer-I can neither work nor rest-I can neither surrender nor fight-but this . . . this is what they want of me, this is where they want me-neither living nor dead, neither thinking nor insane, but just a chunk of pulp that screams with fear, to be shaped by them as they please, they who have no shape of their own.
She plunged into the darkness behind a corner, shrinking in dread from any human figure. No, she thought, they're not evil, not all people . . . they're only their own first victims, but they all believe in Jim's creed, and I can't deal with them, once I know it . . . and if I spoke to them, they would try to grant me their good will, but I'd know what it is that they hold as the good and I would see death staring out of their eyes.
The sidewalk had shrunk to a broken strip, and splashes of garbage ran over from the cans at the stoops of crumbling houses. Beyond the dusty glow of a saloon, she saw a lighted sign "Young Women's Rest Club" above a locked door.
She knew the institutions of that kind and the women who ran them, the women who said that theirs was the job of helping sufferers.
If she went in-she thought, stumbling past-if she faced them and begged them for help, "What is your guilt?" they would ask her.
"Drink? Dope? Pregnancy? Shoplifting?" She would answer, "I have no guilt, I am innocent, but I'm-" "Sorry. We have no concern for the pain of the innocent."
She ran. She stopped, regaining her eyesight, on the corner of a long, wide street. The buildings and pavements merged with the sky-and two lines of green lights hung in open space, going off into an endless distance, as if stretching into other towns and oceans and foreign lands, to encircle the earth. The green glow had a look of serenity, like an inviting, unlimited path open to confident travel. Then the lights switched to red, dropping heavily lower, turning from sharp circles into foggy smears, into a warning of unlimited danger. She stood and watched a giant truck-go by, its enormous wheels crushing one more layer of shiny polish into the flattened cobbles of the street.
The lights went back to the green of safety-but she stood trembling, unable to move. That's how it works for the travel of one's body, she thought, but what have they done to the traffic of the soul? They have set the signals in reverse-and the road is safe when the lights are the red of evil-but when the lights are the green of virtue, promising that yours is the right-of-way, you venture forth and are ground by the wheels. All over the world, she thought-those inverted lights go reaching into every land, they go on, encircling the earth. And the earth is littered with mangled cripples, who don't know what has hit them or why, who crawl as best they can on their crushed limbs through their lightless days, with no answer save that pain is the core of existence-
and the traffic cops of morality chortle and tell them that man, by his nature, is unable to walk.
These were not words in her