Atlas Shrugged [723]
"No!" cried Mr. Thompson. "No! Shut up! I won't listen to you!
I won't hear of it!" His hands moved frantically, as if struggling to dispel something he would not name. "I told him . . . that that's not true . . . that we're not . . . that I'm not a . . . " He shook his head violently, as if his own words were some unprecedented form of danger. "No, look, boys, what I mean is, we've got to be practical . . . and cautious. Damn cautious. We've got to handle it peacefully.
We can't afford to antagonize him or . . . or harm him. We don't dare take any chances on . . . anything happening to him. Because . . . because, if he goes, we go. He's our last hope. Make no mistake about it. If he goes, we perish. You all know it." His eyes swept over the faces around him: they knew it.
The sleet of the following morning fell down on front-page stories announcing that a constructive, harmonious conference between John Galt and the country's leaders, on the previous afternoon, had produced "The John Galt Plan," soon to be announced. The snowflakes of the evening fell down upon the furniture of an apartment house whose front wall had collapsed-and upon a crowd of men waiting silently at the closed cashier's window of a plant whose owner had vanished.
"The farmers of South Dakota," Wesley Mouch reported to Mr.
Thompson, next morning, "are marching on the state capital, burning every government building on their way, and every home worth more than ten thousand dollars."
"California's blown to pieces," he reported in the evening. "There's a civil war going on there-if that's what it is, which nobody seems to be sure of. They've declared that they're seceding from the Union, but nobody knows who's now in power. There's armed fighting all over the state, between a 'People's Party,' led by Ma Chalmers and her soybean cult of Orient-admirers-and something called 'Back to God,'
led by some former oil-field owners."
"Miss Taggart!" moaned Mr. Thompson, when she entered his hotel room next morning, in answer to his summons. "What are we going to do?"
He wondered why he had once felt that she possessed some reassuring kind of energy. He was looking at a blank face that seemed composed, but the composure became disquieting when one noticed that it lasted for minute after minute, with no change of expression, no sign of feeling. Her face had the same look as all the others, he thought, except for something in the set of the mouth that suggested endurance.
"I trust you, Miss Taggart. You've got more brains than all my boys," he pleaded. "You've done more for the country than any of them-it's you who found him for us. What are we to do? With everything falling to pieces, he's the only one who can lead us out of this mess-but he won't. He refuses. He simply refuses to lead. I've never seen anything like it: a man who has no desire to command. We beg him to give orders-and he answers that he wants to obey them! It's preposterous!"
"It is."
"What do you make of it? Can you figure him out?"
"He's an arrogant egoist," she said. "He's an ambitious adventurer.
He's a man of unlimited audacity who's playing for the biggest stakes in the world."
It was easy, she thought. It would have been difficult in that distant time when she had regarded language as a tool of honor, always to be used as if one were under oath-an oath of allegiance to reality and to respect for human beings. Now it was only a matter of making sounds, inarticulate sounds addressed to inanimate objects unrelated to such concepts as reality, human or honor.
It had been easy, that first morning, to report to Mr. Thompson how she had traced John Galt to his home. It had been easy to watch Mr.
Thompson's gulping smiles and his repeated cries of "That's my girl!" uttered with glances of triumph at his assistants, the triumph of a man whose judgment in trusting her had been vindicated. It had been easy to express an angry hatred for Galt-"I used to agree with his ideas, but I won't let him destroy my railroad!"-and to hear Mr.
Thompson