Atlas Shrugged [704]
"Don't question the personnel office or anyone. Don't call attention to his name. If you or I make any inquiries about him, somebody might begin to wonder. Don't look for him. Don't make any move in his direction. And if you ever catch sight of him by chance, act as if you didn't know him."
He nodded. After a while, he said, his voice tense and low, "I wouldn't turn him over to them, not even to save the railroad."
"Eddie-"
"Yes?"
"If you ever catch sight of him, tell me."
He nodded.
Two blocks later, he asked quietly, "You're going to quit, one of these days, and vanish, aren't you?"
"Why do you say that?" It was almost a cry.
"Aren't you?"
She did not answer at once; when she did, the sound of despair was present in her voice only in the form of too tight a monotone: "Eddie, if I quit, what would happen to the Taggart trains?"
"There would be no Taggart trains within a week. Maybe less."
"There will be no looters' government within ten days. Then men like Cuffy Meigs will devour the last of our rails and engines. Should I lose the battle by failing to wait one more moment? How can I let it go-Taggart Transcontinental, Eddie-go forever, when one last effort can still keep it in existence? If I've stood things this long, I can stand them a little longer. Just a little longer. I'm not helping the looters.
Nothing can help them now."
"What are they going to do?"
"I don't know. What can they do? They're finished."
"I suppose so."
"Didn't you see them? They're miserable, panic-stricken rats, running for their lives."
"Does it mean anything to them?"
"What?"
"Their lives."
"They're still struggling, aren't they? But they're through and they know it."
"Have they ever acted on what they know?"
"They'll have to. They'll give up. It won't be long. And we'll be here to save whatever's left."
"Mr. Thompson wishes it to be known," said official broadcasts on the morning of November 23, "that there is no cause for alarm. He urges the public not to draw any hasty conclusions. We must preserve our discipline, our morale, our unity and our sense of broad-minded tolerance. The unconventional speech, which some of you might have heard on the radio last night, was a thought-provoking contribution to our pool of ideas on world problems. We must consider it soberly, avoiding the extremes of total condemnation or of reckless agreement.
We must regard it as one viewpoint out of many in our democratic forum of public opinion, which, as last night has proved, is open to all. The truth, says Mr. Thompson, has many facets. We must remain impartial."
"They're silent," wrote Chick Morrison, as a summary of its content, across the report from one of the field agents he had sent out on a mission entitled Public Pulse Taking. "They're silent," he wrote across the next report, then across another and another. "Silence," he wrote, with a frown of uneasiness, summing up his report to Mr. Thompson.
"People seem to be silent."
The flames that went up to the sky of a winter night and devoured a home in Wyoming were not seen by the people of Kansas, who watched a trembling red glow on the prairie horizon, made by the flames that went up to devour a farm, and the glow was not reflected by the windows of a street in Pennsylvania, where the twisting red tongues were reflections of the flames that went up to devour a factory. Nobody mentioned, next morning, that those flames had not been set off. by chance and that the owners of the three places had vanished. Neighbors observed it without comment-and without astonishment. A few homes were found abandoned in random corners across the nation, some left locked, shuttered and empty, others open and gutted of all movable goods-but people watched it in silence and, through the snowdrifts of untended streets in the haze of pre-morning darkness, went on trudging to their jobs, a little slower than usual.
Then, on November 27, a speaker at a political meeting in Cleveland was beaten up and had to escape by scurrying down dark alleys.
His silent audience had come to sudden life when he