Atlas Shrugged [600]
to talk to you."
"About what?"
"I . . . Well, I need a job."
He said it belligerently and drew back a little. Rearden stood looking at him blankly.
"Henry, I want a job. I mean, here, at the mills. I want you to give me something to do. I need a job, I need to earn my living.
I'm tired of alms." He was groping for something to say, his voice both offended and pleading, as if the necessity to justify the plea were an unfair imposition upon him. "I want a livelihood of my own, I'm not asking you for charity, I'm asking you to give me a chance!"
"This is a factory, Philip, not a gambling joint,"
"Uh?"
"We don't take chances or give them."
'I'm asking you to give me a job!"
"Why should I?"
"Because I need it!"
Rearden pointed to the red spurts of flame shooting from the black shape of a furnace, shooting safely into space four hundred feet of steel-clay-and-steam-embodied thought above them. "I needed that furnace, Philip. "It wasn't my need that gave it to me."
Philip's face assumed a look of not having heard. "You're not officially supposed to hire anybody, bat that's just a technicality, if you'll put me on, my friends will okay it without any trouble and-" Something about Rearden's eyes made him stop abruptly, then ask in an angrily impatient voice, "Well, what's the matter? What have I said that's wrong?"
"What you haven't said."
"I beg your pardon?"
"What you're squirming to leave unmentioned."
"What?"
"That you'd be of no use to me whatever."
"Is that what you-" Philip started with automatic righteousness, but stopped and did not finish.
"Yes," said Rearden, smiling, "that's what I think of first."
Philip's eyes oozed away; when he spoke, his voice sounded as if it were darting about at random, picking stray sentences: "Everybody is entitled to a livelihood . . . How am I going to get it, if nobody gives me my chance?"
"How did I get mine?"
"I wasn't born owning a steel plant."
"Was I?"
"I can do anything you can-if you'll teach me."
"Who taught me?"
"Why do you keep saying that? I'm not talking about you!"
"I am."
In a moment, Philip muttered, "What do you have to worry about?
It's not your livelihood that's in question!"
Rearden pointed to the figures of men in the steaming rays of the furnace. "Can you do what they're doing?"
"I don't see what you're-"
"What will happen if I put you there and you ruin a heat of steel for me?"
"What's more important, that your damn steel gets poured or that I eat?"
"How do you propose to eat if the steel doesn't get poured?"
Philip's face assumed a look of reproach. "I'm not in a position to argue with you right now, since you hold the upper hand."
"Then don't argue."
"Uh?"
"Keep your mouth shut and get out of here."
"But I meant-" He stopped.
Rearden chuckled. "You meant that it's I who should keep my mouth shut, because I hold the upper hand, and should give in to you, because you hold no hand at all?"
"That's a peculiarly crude way of stating a moral principle."
"But that's what your moral principle amounts to, doesn't it?"
"You can't discuss morality in materialistic terms."
"We're discussing a job in a steel plant-and, boy! is that a materialistic place!"
Philip's 'body drew a shade tighter together and his eyes became a shade more glazed, as if in fear of the place around him, in resentment of its sight, in an effort not to concede its reality. He said, in the soft, stubborn whine of a voodoo incantation, "It's a moral imperative, universally conceded in our day and age, that every man is entitled to a job." His voice rose: "I'm entitled to it!"
"You are? Go on, then, collect your claim."
"Uh?"
"Collect your job. Pick it off the bush where you think it grows."
"I mean-"
"You mean that it doesn't? You mean that you need it, but can't create it? You mean that you're entitled to a job which I must create for you?"
"Yes!"
"And if I don't?"
The silence went stretching through second after second. "I don't understand you," said Philip; his voice had the angry bewilderment of a man who recites