Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [162]
Rearden grinned. “I’ve guessed it by now.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t like to be careless, but I was too excited.”
“What were you excited about?” asked Dagny, her eyes narrowed in mockery.
Wyatt held her glance for a moment; his answer had a tone of solemn intensity strangely conveyed by a smiling voice. “About the most beautiful slap in the face I ever got and deserved.”
“Do you mean, for our first meeting?”
“I mean, for our first meeting.”
“Don’t. You were right.”
“I was. About everything but you. Dagny, to find an exception after years of ... Oh, to hell with them! Do you want me to turn on the radio and hear what they’re saying about the two of you tonight?”
“No.”
“Good. I don’t want to hear them. Let them swallow their own speeches. They’re all climbing on the band wagon now. We’re the band.” He glanced at Rearden. “What are you smiling at?”
“I’ve always been curious to see what you’re like.”
“I’ve never had a chance to be what I’m like—except tonight.”
“Do you live here alone, like this, miles away from everything?”
Wyatt pointed at the window. “I’m a couple of steps away from—everything.”
“What about people?”
“I have guest rooms for the kind of people who come to see me on business. I want as many miles as possible between myself and all the other kinds.” He leaned forward to refill their wine glasses. “Hank, why don’t you move to Colorado? To hell with New York and the Eastern Seaboard! This is the capital of the Renaissance. The Second Renaissance—not of oil paintings and cathedrals—but of oil derricks, power plants, and motors made of Rearden Metal. They had the Stone Age and the Iron Age and now they’re going to call it the Rearden Metal Age—because there’s no limit to what your Metal has made possible.”
“I’m going to buy a few square miles of Pennsylvania,” said Rearden. “The ones around my mills. It would have been cheaper to build a branch here, as I wanted, but you know why I can‘t, and to hell with them! I’ll beat them anyway. I’m going to expand the mills—and if she can give me three-day freight service to Colorado, I’ll give you a race for who’s going to be the capital of the Renaissance!”
“Give me a year,” said Dagny, “of running trains on the John Galt Line, give me time to pull the Taggart system together—and I’ll give you three-day freight service across the continent, on a Rearden Metal track from ocean to ocean!”
“Who was it that said he needed a fulcrum?” said Ellis Wyatt. “Give me an unobstructed right-of-way and I’ll show them how to move the earth!”
She wondered what it was that she liked about the sound of Wyatt’s laughter. Their voices, even her own, had a tone she had never heard before. When they rose from the table, she was astonished to notice that the candles were the only illumination of the room: she had felt as if she were sitting in a violent light.
Ellis Wyatt picked up his glass, looked at their faces and said, “To the world as it seems to be right now!”
He emptied the glass with a single movement.
She heard the crash of the glass against the wall in the same instant that she saw a circling current—from the curve of his body to the sweep of his arm to the terrible violence of his hand that flung the glass across the room. It was not the conventional gesture meant as celebration, it was the gesture of a rebellious anger, the vicious gesture which is movement substituted for a scream of pain.
“Ellis,” she whispered, “what’s the matter?”
He turned to look at her. With the same violent suddenness, his eyes were clear, his face was calm; what frightened her was seeing him smile gently.