Atlas Shrugged [743]
Crossing the concourse of the Terminal for the last time, she glanced at the statue of Nathaniel Taggart-and remembered a promise she had made. It would be only a symbol now, she thought, but it would be the kind of farewell that Nathaniel Taggart deserved. She had no other writing instrument, so she took the lipstick from her bag and, smiling up at the marble face of the man who would have understood, she drew a large sign of the dollar on the pedestal under his feet.
She was first to reach the corner, two blocks east of the Terminal entrance. As she waited, she observed the first trickles of the panic that was soon to engulf the city: there were automobiles driving too fast, some of them loaded with household effects, there were too many police cars speeding by, and too many sirens bursting in the distance.
The news of the destruction of the Bridge was apparently spreading through the city; they would know that the city was doomed and they would start a stampede to escape-but they had no place to go, and it was not her concern any longer.
She saw Francisco's figure approaching from some distance away; she recognized the swiftness of his walk, before she could distinguish the face under the cap pulled low over his eyes. She caught the moment when he saw her, as he came closer. He waved his arm, with a smile of greeting. Some conscious stress in the sweep of his arm made it the gesture of a d'Anconia, welcoming the arrival of a long-awaited traveler at the gates of his own domain.
When he approached, she stood solemnly straight and, looking at his face and at the buildings of the greatest city in the world, as at the kind of witnesses she wanted, she said slowly, her voice confident and steady: "I swear-by my life and my love of it-that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
He inclined his head, as if in sign of admittance. His smile was now a salute.
Then he took her suitcase with one hand, her arm with the other, and said, "Come on."
The unit known as "Project F"-in honor of its originator, Dr. Ferns-was a small structure of reinforced concrete, low on the slope of the hill that supported the State Science Institute on a higher, more public level. Only the small gray patch of the unit's roof could be seen from the Institute's windows, hidden in a jungle of ancient trees; it looked no bigger than the cover of a manhole.
The unit consisted of two stories in the shape of a small cube placed asymmetrically on top of a larger one. The first story had no windows, only a door studded with iron spikes; the second story had but one window, as if in reluctant concession to daylight, like a face with a single eye. The men on the staff of the Institute felt no curiosity about that structure and avoided the paths that led down to its door; nobody had ever suggested it, but they had the impression that the structure housed a project devoted to experiments with the germs of deadly diseases.
The two floors were occupied by laboratories that contained a great many cages with guinea pigs, dogs and rats. But the heart and meaning of the structure was a room in its cellar, deep under the ground; the room had been incompetently lined with the porous sheets of soundproofing material; the sheets had begun to crack and the naked rock of a cave showed through.
The unit was always protected by a squad of four special guards.
Tonight, the squad had been augmented to sixteen, summoned for emergency duty by a long-distance telephone call from New York. The guards, as well as all other employees of "Project F," had been carefully chosen on the basis of a single qualification: an unlimited capacity for obedience.
The sixteen were stationed for the night outside the structure and in the deserted laboratories above the ground, where they remained uncritically on duty, with no curiosity about anything that might be taking place below.
In the cellar