Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [149]
“Dagny,” James Taggart said miserably, “what’s going to happen to us? Taggart Transcontinental has become so unpopular!”
Dagny laughed, in enjoyment of the moment, any moment, as if the undercurrent of enjoyment was constant within her and little was needed to tap it. She laughed easily, her mouth relaxed and open. Her teeth were very white against her sun-scorched face. Her eyes had the look, acquired in open country, of being set for great distances. On her last few visits to New York, he had noticed that she looked at him as if she did not see him.
“What are we going to do? The public is so overwhelmingly against us!”
“Jim, do you remember the story they tell about Nat Taggart? He said that he envied only one of his competitors, the one who said ‘The public be damned!’ He wished he had said it.”
In the summer days and in the heavy stillness of the evenings of the city, there were moments when a lonely man or woman—on a park bench, on a street corner, at an open window—would see in a newspaper a brief mention of the progress of the John Galt Line, and would look at the city with a sudden stab of hope. They were the very young, who felt that it was the kind of event they longed to see happening in the world—or the very old, who had seen a world in which such events did happen. They did not care about railroads, they knew nothing about business, they knew only that someone was fighting against great odds and winning. They did not admire the fighters’ purpose, they believed the voices of public opinion—and yet, when they read that the Line was growing, they felt a moment’s sparkle and wondered why it made their own problems seem easier.
Silently, unknown to everyone except to the freight yard of Taggart Transcontinental in Cheyenne and the office of the John Galt Line in the dark alley, freight was rolling in and orders for cars were piling up—for the first train to run on the John Galt Line. Dagny Taggart had announced that the first train would be, not a passenger express loaded with celebrities and politicians, as was the custom, but a freight special.
The freight came from farms, from lumber yards, from mines all over the country, from distant places whose last means of survival were the new factories of Colorado. No one wrote about these shippers, because they were men who were not disinterested.
The Phoenix-Durango Railroad was to close on July 25. The first train of the John Galt Line was to run on July 22.
“Well, it’s like this, Miss Taggart,” said the delegate of the Union of Locomotive Engineers. “I don’t think we’re going to allow you to run that train.”
Dagny sat at her battered desk, against the blotched wall of her office. She said, without moving, “Get out of here.”
It was a sentence the man had never heard in the polished offices of railroad executives. He looked bewildered. “I came to tell you—”
“If you have anything to say to me, start over again.”
“What?”
“Don’t tell me what you’re going to allow me to do.”
“Well, I meant we’re not going to allow our men to run your train.”
“That’s different.”
“Well, that’s what we’ve decided.”
“Who’s decided it?”
“The committee. What you’re doing is a violation of human rights. You can’t force men to go out to get killed—when that bridge collapses -just to make money for you.”
She reached for a sheet of blank paper and handed it to him. “Put it down in writing,” she said, “and we’ll sign a contract to that effect.”
“What contract?”
“That no member of your union will ever be employed to run an engine on the John Galt Line.”
“Why . . . wait a minute . . . I haven’t said—”
“You don’t want to sign such a contract?”
“No, I—”
“Why not, since you know that the bridge is going to collapse?”
“I only want—”
“I know what you want. You want a stranglehold on your men by means of the jobs which I give them—and on me, by means of your men. You want me to provide the jobs, and you want to make it impossible for me to have any jobs to provide. Now I’ll give you a choice. That train is going to be run. You have no choice about that. But you