Atlas Shrugged [737]
"Will you please let me speak to the commandant?" Dr. Stadler demanded impatiently.
"The commandant? You're too late, brother."
"The chief engineer, then!"
"The chief-who? Oh, Willie? Willie's okay, he's one of us, but he's out on an errand just now."
There were other figures in the hall, listening with an apprehensive curiosity. The officer's hand summoned one of them to approach-an unshaved civilian with a shabby overcoat thrown over his shoulders.
"What do you want?" he snapped at Stadler, "Would someone please tell me where are the gentlemen of the scientific staff?" Dr. Stadler asked in the courteously peremptory tone of an order.
The two men glanced at each other, as if such a question were irrelevant in this place. "Do you come from Washington?" the civilian asked suspiciously.
"I do not. I will have you understand that I'm through with that Washington gang."
"Oh?" The man seemed pleased. "Are you a Friend of the People, then?"
"I would say that I'm the best friend the people ever had. I'm the man who gave them all this." He pointed around him.
"You did?" said the man, impressed. "Are you one of those who made a deal with the Boss?"
"I'm the boss here, from now on,"
The men looked at each other, retreating a few steps. The officer asked, "Did you say the name was Stadler?"
"Robert Stadler, And if you don't know what that means, you'll find out!"
"Will you please follow me, sir?" said the officer, with shaky politeness.
What happened next was not clear to Dr. Stadler, because his mind refused to admit the reality of the things he was seeing. There were shifting figures in half-lighted, disordered offices, there were too many firearms on everybody's hips, there were senseless questions asked of him by jerky voices that alternated between impertinence and fear.
He did not know whether any of them tried to give him an explanation; he would not listen; he could not permit this to be true. He kept stating in the tone of a feudal sovereign, "I'm the boss here, from now on . . . I give the orders . . . I came to take over . . . I own this place.
. . . I am Dr. Robert Stadler-and if you don't know that name in this place, you have no business being here, you infernal idiots! You'll blow yourselves to pieces, if that's the' state of your knowledge! Have you had a high-school course in physics? You don't look to me as if you've ever been allowed inside a high school, any of you! What are you doing here? Who are you?"
It took him a long time to grasp-when his mind could not block it any longer-that somebody had beaten him to his plan: somebody had held the same view of existence as his own and had set out to achieve the same future. He grasped that these men, who called themselves the Friends of the People, had seized possession of Project X, tonight, a few hours ago, intending to establish a reign of their own. He laughed in their faces, with bitterly incredulous contempt, "You don't know what you're doing, you miserable juvenile delinquents! Do you think that you-you!-can handle a high-precision instrument of science? Who is your leader? I demand to see your leader!"
It was his tone of overbearing authority, his contempt and their own panic-the blind panic of men of unbridled violence, who have no standards of safety or danger-that made them waver and wonder whether he was, perhaps, some secret top-level member of their leadership; they were equally ready to defy or to obey any authority. After being shunted from one jittery commander to another, he found himself at last being led down iron stairways and down long, echoing, underground corridors of reinforced concrete to an audience with "The Boss" in person, The Boss had taken refuge in the underground control room.
Among the complex spirals of the delicate scientific machinery that produced the sound ray, against the wall panel of glittering levers, dials and gauges, known as the Xylophone, Robert Stadler faced the new ruler of Project X. It was Cuffy Meigs.
He wore a tight, semi-military tunic