Atlas Shrugged [597]
I don't know how they managed to survive till last spring. I don't know how they managed to plant their wheat. But they did. They did." There was a look of intensity on his face, as if he were contemplating a rare, forgotten sight: a vision of men-and she knew what motive was still holding him to his job. "Dagny, they had to have tools for their harvest. I've been selling all the Metal I could steal out of my own mills to the manufacturers of farm equipment. On credit. They've been sending the equipment to Minnesota as fast as they could put it out.
Selling it in the same way-illegally and on credit. But they will be paid, this fall, and so will I. Charity, hell! We're helping producers-
and what tenacious producers!-not lousy, mooching 'consumers.1
We're giving loans, not alms. We're supporting ability, not need. I'll be damned if I'll stand by and let those men be destroyed while the pull peddlers grow rich!"
He was looking at the image of a sight he had seen in Minnesota: the silhouette of an abandoned factory, with the light of the sunset streaming, unopposed, through the holes of its windows and the cracks of its roof, with the remnant of a sign: Ward Harvester Company.
"Oh, I know," he said. "We'll save them this winter, but the looters will devour them next year. Still, we'll save them this winter. . . .
Well, that's why I won't be able to smuggle any rail for you. Not in the immediate future-and there's nothing left to us but the immediate future. I don't know what is the use of feeding a country, if it loses its railroads-but what is the use of railroads where there is no food?
What is the use, anyway?"
"It's all right, Hank, We'll last with such rail as we have, for-"
She stopped.
"For a month?"
"For the winter-I hope."
Cutting across their silence, a shrill voice reached them from another table, and they turned to look at a man who had the jittery manner of a cornered gangster about to reach for his gun. "An act of anti-social destruction," he was snarling to a sullen companion, "at a time when there's such a desperate shortage of copper! . . . We can't permit it!
We can't permit it to be true!"
Rearden turned abruptly to look off, at the city. "I'd give anything to know where he is," he said, his voice low. "Just to know where he is, right now, at this moment."
"What would you do, if you knew it?"
He dropped his hand in a gesture of futility. "[ wouldn't approach him. The only homage I can still pay him is not to cry for forgiveness where no forgiveness is possible."
They remained silent. They listened to the voices around them, to the splinters of panic trickling through the luxurious room.
She had not been aware that the same presence seemed to be an invisible guest at every table, that the same subject kept breaking through the attempts at any other conversation. People sat in a manner, not quite of cringing, but as if they found the room too large and too exposed-a room of glass, blue velvet, aluminum and gentle lighting. They looked as if they had come to this room at the price of countless evasions, to let it help them pretend that theirs was still a civilized existence-but an act o?primeval violence had blasted the nature of their world into the open and they were no longer able not to see.
"How could he? How could he?" a woman was demanding with petulant terror. "He had no right to do it!"
"It was an accident," said a young man with a staccato voice and an odor of public payroll. "It was a chain of coincidences, as any statistical curve of probabilities can easily prove. It is unpatriotic to spread rumors exaggerating the power of the people's enemies."
"Right and wrong is all very well for academic conversations," said a woman with a schoolroom voice and a barroom mouth, "but how can anybody take his own ideas seriously enough to destroy a fortune when people need it?"
"f don't understand it," an old man was saying with