Atlas Shrugged [758]
"But you know that that's impossible!"
The fireman shrugged; men did not consider any disaster impossible these days.
Eddie Willers leaped to his feet. "Go down the length of the train,"
he ordered the conductor. "Knock on all the doors-the occupied ones, that is-and see whether there's an electrical engineer aboard."
"Yes, sir."
Eddie knew that they felt, as he felt it, that they would find no such man; not among the lethargic, extinguished faces of the passengers they had seen. "Come on," he ordered, turning to the fireman.
They climbed together aboard the locomotive. The gray-haired engineer was sitting in his chair, staring out at the cacti. The engine's headlight had stayed on and it stretched out into the night, motionless and straight, reaching nothing but the dissolving blur of crossties.
"Let's try to find what's wrong," said Eddie, removing his. coat, his voice half-order, half-plea. "Let's try some more."
"Yes, sir," said the engineer, without resentment or hope.
The engineer had exhausted his meager store of knowledge; he had checked every source of trouble he could think of. He went crawling over and under the machinery, unscrewing its parts and screwing them back again, taking out pieces and replacing them, dismembering the motors at random, like a child taking a clock apart, but without the child's conviction that knowledge is possible.
The fireman kept leaning out of the cab's window, glancing at the black stillness and shivering, as if from the night air that was growing colder.
"Don't worry," said Eddie Willers, assuming a tone of confidence.
"We've got to do our best, but if we fail, they'll send us help sooner or later. They don't abandon trains in the middle of nowhere."
'They didn't used to," said the fireman.
Once in a while, the engineer raised his grease-smeared face to look at the grease-smeared face and shirt of Eddie Willers. "What's the use, Mr. Willers?" he asked.
"We can't let it go!" Eddie answered fiercely; he knew dimly that what he meant was more than the Comet . . . and more than the railroad.
Moving from the cab through the three motor units and back to the cab again, his hands bleeding, his shirt sticking to his back, Eddie Willers was struggling to remember everything he had ever known about engines, anything he had learned in college, and earlier: anything he had picked up in those days when the station agents at Rockdale Station used to chase him off the rungs of their lumbering switch engines.
The pieces connected to nothing; his brain seemed jammed and tight; he knew that motors were not his profession, he knew that he did not know and that it was now a matter of life or death for him to discover the knowledge. He was looking at the cylinders, the blades, the wires, the control panels still winking with lights. He was struggling not to allow into his mind the thought that was pressing against its periphery: What were the chances and how long would it take-according to the mathematical theory of probability-for primitive men, working by rule-of-thumb, to hit the right combination of parts and re-create the motor of this engine?
"What's the use, Mr. Willers?" moaned the engineer.
"We can't let it go!" he cried.
He did not know how many hours had passed when he heard the fireman shout suddenly, "Mr. Willers! Look!"
The fireman was leaning out the window, pointing into the darkness behind them.
Eddie Willers looked. An odd little light was swinging jerkily far in the distance; it seemed to be advancing at an imperceptible rate; it did not look like any sort of light he could identify.
After a while, it seemed to him that he distinguished some large black shapes advancing slowly; they were moving in a line parallel with the track; the spot of light hung low over the ground, swinging; he strained his ears, but heard nothing.
Then he caught a feeble, muffled beat that sounded like the hoofs of horses. The two men beside him were watching the black shapes with a look of growing terror, as if some supernatural apparition were advancing