Atlas Shrugged [725]
Did they want him to live, they who had heard him?
The check for five hundred thousand dollars was delivered to her office, that afternoon; it was delivered with a bouquet of flowers from Mr. Thompson. She looked at the check and let it flutter down to her desk: it meant nothing and made her feel nothing, not even a suggestion of guilt. It was a scrap of paper, of no greater significance than the ones in the office wastebasket. Whether it could buy a diamond necklace or the city dump or the last of her food, made no difference. It would never be spent. It was not a token of value and nothing it purchased could be a value. But this-she thought-this inanimate indifference was the permanent state of the people around her, of men who had no purpose and no passion. This was the state of a non-valuing soul; those who chose it-she wondered-did they want to live?
The lights were out of order in the hall of the apartment house, when she came home that evening, numb with exhaustion-and she did not notice the envelope at her feet until she switched on the light in her foyer. It was a blank, sealed envelope that had been slipped under her door. She picked it up-and then, within a moment, she was laughing soundlessly, half-kneeling, half-sitting on the floor, not to move off that spot, not to do anything but stare at the note written by a hand she knew, the hand that had written its last message on the calendar above the city. The note said: Dagny: Sit tight. Watch them. When he'll need our help, call me at OR 6-5693.
F.
The newspapers of the following morning admonished the public not to believe the rumors that there was any trouble in the Southern states. The confidential reports, sent to Mr. Thompson, stated that armed fighting had broken out between Georgia and Alabama, for the possession of a factory manufacturing electrical equipment-a factory cut off by the fighting and by blasted railroad tracks from any source of raw materials.
"Have you read the confidential reports I sent you?" moaned Mr.
Thompson, that evening, facing Galt once more. He was accompanied by James Taggart, who had volunteered to meet the prisoner for the first time.
Galt sat on a straight-backed chair, his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. He seemed erect and relaxed, together. They could not decipher the expression on his face, except that it showed no sign of apprehension.
"I have," he answered.
"There's not much time left," said Mr. Thompson.
"There isn't."
"Are you going to let such things go on?"
"Are you?"
"How can you be so sure you're right?" cried James Taggart; his voice was not loud, but it had the intensity of a cry. "How can you take it upon yourself, at a terrible time like this, to stick to your own ideas at the risk of destroying the whole world?"
"Whose ideas should I consider safer to follow?"
"How can you be sure you're right? How can you know? Nobody can be sure of his knowledge! Nobody! You're no better than anyone else!"
"Then why do you want me?"
"How can you gamble with other people's lives? How can you permit yourself such a selfish luxury as to hold out, when people need you?"
"You mean: when they need my ideas?"
"Nobody is fully right or wrong! There isn't any black or white!
You don't have a monopoly on truth!"
There was something wrong in Taggart's manner-thought Mr.
Thompson, frowning-some odd, too personal resentment, as if it were not a political issue that he had come here to solve.
"If you had any sense of responsibility,"