Atlas Shrugged [616]
The tower director was too expert a man at too exacting a job to be able wholly to conceal the dangerous burden of intelligence. He understood what she wanted him to do from her first few words and answered only with an abrupt "Yes, ma'am," but he was bent over his charts by the time the others came following her up the iron stairway, he was grimly at work on the most humiliating job of calculation he had ever had to perform in his long career. She knew how fully he understood it, from a single glance he threw at her, a glance of indignation and endurance that matched some emotion he had caught in her face, "We'll do it first and feel about it afterwards," she said, even though he had made no comment. "Yes, ma'am," he answered woodenly.
His room, on the top of an underground tower, was like a glass verandah overlooking what had once been the swiftest, richest and most orderly stream in the world. He had been trained to chart the course of over ninety trains an hour and to watch them roll safely through a maze of tracks and switches in and out of the Terminal, under his glass walls and his fingertips. Now, for the first time, he was looking out at the empty darkness of a dried channel.
Through the open door of the relay room, she saw the tower men standing grimly idle-the men whose jobs had never permitted a moment's relaxation-standing by the long rows that looked like vertical copper pleats, like shelves of books and as much of a monument to human intelligence. The pull of one of the small levers, which protruded like bookmarks from the shelves, threw thousands of electric circuits into motion, made thousands of contacts and broke as many others, set dozens of switches to clear a chosen course and dozens of signals to light it, with no error left possible, no chance, no contradiction -an enormous complexity of thought condensed into one movement of a human hand to set and insure the course of a train, that hundreds of trains might safely rush by, that thousands of tons of metal and lives might pass in speeding streaks a breath away from one another, protected by nothing but a thought, the thought of the man who devised the levers. But they-she looked at the face of her signal engineer -they believed that that muscular contraction of a hand was the only thing required to move the traffic-and now the tower men stood idle-
and on the great panels in front of the tower director, the red and green lights, which had flashed announcing the progress of trains at a distance of miles, were now so many glass beads-like the glass beads for which another breed of savages had once sold the Island of Manhattan.
"Calf all of your unskilled laborers," she said to the assistant manager, "the section hands, trackwalkers, engine wipers, whoever's in the Terminal right now, and have them come here at once."
"Here?"
"Here," she said, pointing at the tracks outside the tower. "Call all your switchmen, too. Phone your storehouse and have them bring here every lantern they can lay their hands on, any sort of lantern, conductors' lanterns, storm lanterns, anything."
"Lanterns, Miss Taggart?"
"Get going."
"Yes, ma'am."
"What is it we're doing, Miss Taggart?" asked the dispatcher.
"We're going to move trains and we're going "to move them manually."
"Manually?" said the signal engineer.
"Yes, brother! Now why should you be shocked?" She could not resist it. "Man is only muscles, isn't he? We're going back-back to where there were no interlocking systems, no semaphores, no electricity -back to the time when train signals were not steel and wire, but men holding lanterns. Physical men, serving as lampposts. You've advocated it long enough-you got what you wanted. Oh, you thought that your tools would determine your ideas? But it happens to be the other way around-and now you're going to see the kind of tools your ideas have determined!"