Atlas Shrugged [95]
"I read something about it in the paper this morning. Coast Guard target practice."
"Why, no," the spinster said indifferently. "Everybody down on the shore knows what it was. It was Ragnar Danneskjold. It was the Coast Guard trying to catch him."
"Ragnar Danneskjold in Delaware Bay?" a woman gasped.
"Oh, yes. They say it is not the first time."
"Did they catch him?"
"No."
"Nobody can catch him," said one of the men.
"The People's State of Norway has offered a million-dollar reward for his head."
"That's an awful lot of money to pay for a pirate's head."
"But how are we going to have any order or security or planning in the world, with a pirate running loose all over the seven seas?"
"Do you know what it was that he seized last night?" said the spinster.
"The big ship with the relief supplies we were sending to the People's State of France."
"How does he dispose of the goods he seizes?"
"Ah, that-nobody knows."
"I met a sailor once, from a ship he'd attacked, who'd seen him in person. He said that Ragnar Danneskjold has the purest gold hair and the most frightening face on earth, a face with no sign of any feeling. If there ever was a man born without a heart, he's it-the sailor said."
"A nephew of mine saw Ragnar Danneskjold's ship one night, off the coast of Scotland. He wrote me that he couldn't believe his eyes. It was a better ship than any in the navy of the People's State of England."
"They say he hides in one of those Norwegian fjords where neither God nor man will ever find him. That's where the Vikings used to hide in the Middle Ages."
"There's a reward on his head offered by the People's State of Portugal, too. And by the People's State of Turkey."
"They say it's a national scandal in Norway. He comes from one of their best families. The family lost its money generations ago, but the name is of the noblest. The ruins of their castle are still in existence.
His father is a bishop. His father has disowned him and excommunicated him. But it had no effect."
"Did you know that Ragnar Danneskjold went to school in this country? Sure. The Patrick Henry University."
"Not really?"
"Oh yes. You can look it up."
"What bothers me is . . . You know, I don't like it. I don't like it that he's now appearing right here, in our own waters. I thought things like that could happen only in the wastelands. Only in Europe. But a big-scale outlaw of that kind operating in Delaware in our day and age!"
"He's been seen off Nantucket, too. And at Bar Harbor. The newspapers have been asked not to write about it."
"Why?"
"They don't want people to know that the navy can't cope with him."
"I don't like it. It feels funny. It's like something out of the Dark Ages."
Dagny glanced up. She saw Francisco d'Anconia standing a few steps away. He was looking at her with a kind of stressed curiosity; his eyes were mocking.
"It's a strange world we're living in," said the spinster, her voice low.
"I read an article," said one of the women tonelessly. "It said that times of trouble are good for us. It is good that people are growing poorer. To accept privations is a moral virtue."
"I suppose so," said another, without conviction.
"We must not worry. I heard a speech that said it is useless to worry or to blame anyone. Nobody can help what he does, that is the way things made him. There is nothing we can do about anything. We must learn to bear it."
"What's the use anyway? What is man's fate? Hasn't it always been to hope, but never to achieve? The wise man is the one- who does not attempt to hope."
"That is the right attitude to take."
"I don't know . . . I don't know what is right any more . . . How can we ever know?"
"Oh well, who is John Galt?"
Dagny turned brusquely and started away from them. One of the women followed her.
"But I do know it," said the woman, in the soft, mysterious tone of sharing a secret.
"You know what?"
"I know who is John