Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [107]
She had doubled the price of her order. Rearden had sent two metallurgists to train Mowen’s men, to teach, to show, to explain every step of the process, and had paid the salaries of Mowen’s men while they were being trained.
She looked at the spikes in the rail at her feet. They meant the night when she had heard that Summit Casting of Illinois, the only company willing to make spikes of Rearden Metal, had gone bankrupt, with half of her order undelivered. She had flown to Chicago, that night, she had got three lawyers, a judge and a state legislator out of bed, she had bribed two of them and threatened the others, she had obtained a paper that was an emergency permit of a legality no one would ever be able to untangle, she had had the padlocked doors of the Summit Casting plant unlocked and a random, half-dressed crew working at the smelters before the windows had turned gray with daylight. The crews had remained at work, under a Taggart engineer and a Rearden metallurgist. The rebuilding of the Rio Norte Line was not held up.
She listened to the sound of the drills. The work had been held up once, when the drilling for the bridge abutments was stopped. “I couldn’t help it, Miss Taggart,” Ben Nealy had said, offended. “You know how fast drill heads wear out. I had them on order, but Incorporated Tool ran into a little trouble, they couldn’t help it either, Associated Steel was delayed in delivering the steel to them, so there’s nothing we can do but wait. It’s no use getting upset, Miss Taggart. I’m doing my best.”
“I’ve hired you to do a job, not to do your best—whatever that is.”
“That’s a funny thing to say. That’s an unpopular attitude, Miss Taggart, mighty unpopular.”
“Forget Incorporated Tool. Forget the steel. Order the drill heads made of Rearden Metal.”
“Not me. I’ve had enough trouble with the damn stuff in that rail of yours. I’m not going to mess up my own equipment.”
“A drill head of Rearden Metal will outlast three of steel.”
“Maybe.”
“I said order them made.”
“Who’s going to pay for it?”
“I am.”
“Who’s going to find somebody to make them?”
She had telephoned Rearden. He had found an abandoned tool plant, long since out of business. Within an hour, he had purchased it from the relatives of its last owner. Within a day, the plant had been reopened. Within a week, drill heads of Rearden Metal had been delivered to the bridge in Colorado.
She looked at the bridge. It represented a problem badly solved, but she had had to accept it. The bridge, twelve hundred feet of steel across the black gap, was built in the days of Nat Taggart’s son. It was long past the stage of safety; it had been patched with stringers of steel, then of iron, then of wood; it was barely worth the patching. She had thought of a new bridge of Rearden Metal. She had asked her chief engineer to submit a design and an estimate of the cost. The design he had submitted was the scheme of a steel bridge badly scaled down to the greater strength of the new metal; the cost made the project impossible to consider.
“I beg your pardon, Miss Taggart,” he had said, offended. “I don’t know what you mean when you say that I haven’t made use of the metal. This design is an adaptation of the best bridges on record. What else did you expect?”
“A new method of construction.”
“What do you mean, a new method?”
“I mean that when men got structural steel, they did not use it to build