Atlas Shrugged [729]
He noticed the metallic gleam of the bayonets held by the guards at the door, and the sound of a key being turned in a lock. He found himself walking forward and heard the door being locked behind him.
Across the long room, he saw John Galt sitting on the window sill, a tall, slender figure in slacks and shirt, one leg slanting down to the floor, the other bent, his hands clasping his knee, his head of sun-streaked hair raised against a spread of gray sky-and suddenly Dr. Stadler saw the figure of a young boy sitting on the porch-railing of his home, near the campus of the Patrick Henry University, with the sun on the chestnut hair of a head lifted against a spread of summer blue, and he heard the passionate intensity of his own voice saying twenty-two years ago: "The only sacred value in the world, John, is the human mind, the inviolate human mind . . ." -and he cried to that boy's figure, across the room and across the years: "I couldn't help it, John! I couldn't help it!"
He gripped the edge of a table between them, for support and as a protective barrier, even though the figure on the window sill had not moved.
"I didn't bring you to this!" he cried. "I didn't mean to! I couldn't help it! It's not what I intended! . . . John! I'm not to blame for it!
I'm not! I never had a chance against them! They own the world! They left me no place in it! . . . What's reason to them? What's science?
You don't know how deadly they are! You don't understand them! They don't think! They're mindless animals moved by irrational feelings-by their greedy, grasping, blind, unaccountable feelings! They seize whatever they want, that's all they know: that they want it, regardless of cause, effect or logic-they want it, the bloody, grubbing pigs! . . . The mind? Don't you know how futile it is, the mind, against those mindless hordes? Our weapons are so helplessly, laughably childish: truth, knowledge, reason, values, rights! Force is all they know, force, fraud and plunder! . , , John! Don't look at me like that! What could I do against their fists? I had to live, didn't I? It wasn't for myself-it was for the future of science! I had to be left alone, I had to be protected, I had to make terms with them-there's no way to live except on their terms-there isn't!-do you hear me?-there isn't! . . . What did you want me to do? Spend my life begging for jobs? Begging my inferiors for funds and endowments? Did you want my work to depend on the mercy of the ruffians who have a knack for making money? I had no time to compete with them for money or markets or any of their miserable material pursuit! Was that your idea of justice-that they should spend their money on liquor, yachts and women, while the priceless hours of my life were wasted for lack of scientific equipment? Persuasion? How could I persuade them? What language could I speak to men who don't think? . . . You don't know how lonely I was, how starved for some spark of intelligence! How lonely and tired and helpless! Why should a mind like mine have to bargain with ignorant fools?
They'd never contribute a penny to science! Why shouldn't they be forced? It wasn't you that I wanted to force! That gun was not aimed at the intellect! It wasn't aimed at men like you and me, only at mindless materialists! . . . Why do you look at me that way? I had no choice!
There isn't any choice except to beat them at their own game! Oh yes, it is their game, they set the rules! What do we count, the few who can think? We can only hope to get by, unnoticed-and to trick them into serving our aims! . . . Don't you know how noble a purpose it was-
my vision of the future of