Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [112]
“Oh well, then I’ll try to get on an air liner, if I can find one today.”
She watched his car vanish down the winding road. She drove to the airport an hour later. The place was a small field at the bottom of a break in the desolate chain of mountains. There were patches of snow on the hard, pitted earth. The pole of a beacon stood at one side, trailing wires to the ground; the other poles had been knocked down by a storm.
A lonely attendant came to meet her. “No, Miss Taggart,” he said regretfully, “no planes till day after tomorrow. There’s only one transcontinental liner every two days, you know, and the one that was due today has been grounded, down in Arizona. Engine trouble, as usual.” He added, “It’s a pity you didn’t get here a bit sooner. Mr. Rearden took off for New York, in his private plane, just a little while ago.”
“He wasn’t flying to New York, was he?”
“Why, yes. He said so.”
“Are you sure?”
“He said he had an appointment there tonight.”
She looked at the sky to the east, blankly, without moving. She had no clue to any reason, nothing to give her a foothold, nothing with which to weigh this or fight it or understand.
“Damn these streets!” said James Taggart. “We’re going to be late.”
Dagny glanced ahead, past the back of the chauffeur. Through the circle made by a windshield wiper on the sleet-streaked glass, she saw black, worn, glistening car tops strung in a motionless line. Far ahead, the smear of a red lantern, low over the ground, marked a street excavation.
“There’s something wrong on every other street,” said Taggart irritably. “Why doesn’t somebody fix them?”
She leaned back against the seat, tightening the collar of her wrap. She felt exhausted at the end of a day she had started at her desk, in her office, at seven A.M.; a day she had broken off, uncompleted, to rush home and dress, because she had promised Jim to speak at the dinner of the New York Business Council. “They want us to give them a talk about Rearden Metal,” he had said. “You can do it so much better than I. It’s very important that we present a good case. There’s such a controversy about Rearden Metal.”
Sitting beside him in his car, she regretted that she had agreed. She looked at the streets of New York and thought of the race between metal and time, between the rails of the Rio Norte Line and the passing days. She felt as if her nerves were being pulled tight by the stillness of the car, by the guilt of wasting an evening when she could not afford to waste an hour.
“With all those attacks on Rearden that one hears everywhere,” said Taggart, “he might need a few friends.”
She glanced at him incredulously. “You mean you want to stand by him?”
He did not answer at once; he asked, his voice bleak, “That report of the special committee of the National Council of Metal Industries—what do you think of it?”
“You know what I think of it.”
“They said Rearden Metal is a threat to public safety. They said its chemical composition is unsound, it’s brittle, it’s decomposing molec ularly, and it will crack suddenly, without warning ...” He stopped, as if begging for an answer. She did not answer. He asked anxiously, “You haven’t changed your mind about it, have you?”
“About what?”
“About that metal.”
“No, Jim, I have not changed my mind.”
“They’re experts, though ... the men on that committee.... Top experts ... Chief metallurgists for the biggest corporations, with a string of degrees from universities all over the country ...” He said it unhappily, as if he were begging her to make him doubt these men and their verdict.
She watched him, puzzled; this was not like him.
The car jerked forward. It moved slowly through a gap in a plank barrier, past the hole of a broken water main. She saw the new pipe stacked by the excavation; the pipe bore a trademark: Stockton Foundry, Colorado. She looked away; she wished she were not reminded of Colorado.
“I can’t understand it ...” said Taggart miserably. “The top experts of the National Council of Metal Industries ...”
“Who’s the president of the National Council