Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [187]
She had cut her hands, she was covered with dust by the time she stood up to look at the object she had cleared. It was the broken remnant of the model of a motor. Most of its parts were missing, but enough was left to convey some idea of its former shape and purpose.
She had never seen a motor of this kind or anything resembling it. She could not understand the peculiar design of its parts or the functions they were intended to perform.
She examined the tarnished tubes and odd-shaped connections. She tried to guess their purpose, her mind going over every type of motor she knew and every possible kind of work its parts could perform. None fitted the model. It looked like an electric motor, but she could not tell what fuel it was intended to burn. It was not designed for steam, or oil, or anything she could name.
Her sudden gasp was not a sound, but a jolt that threw her at the junk pile. She was on her hands and knees, crawling over the wreckage, seizing every piece of paper in sight, flinging it away, searching further. Her hands were shaking.
She found part of what she hoped had remained in existence. It was a thin sheaf of typewritten pages clamped together—the remnant of a manuscript. Its beginning and end were gone; the bits of paper left under the clamp showed the thick number of pages it had once contained. The paper was yellowed and dry. The manuscript had been a description of the motor.
From the empty enclosure of the plant’s powerhouse, Rearden heard her voice screaming, “Hank!” It sounded like a scream of terror.
He ran in the direction of the voice. He found her standing in the middle of a room, her hands bleeding, her stockings torn, her suit smeared with dust, a bunch of papers clutched in her hand.
“Hank, what does this look like?” she asked, pointing at an odd piece of wreckage at her feet; her voice had the intense, obsessed tone of a person stunned by a shock, cut off from reality. “What does it look like?”
“Are you hurt? What happened?”
“No! ... Oh, never mind, don’t look at me! I’m all right. Look at this. Do you know what that is?”
“What did you do to yourself?”
“I had to dig it out of there. I’m all right.”
“You’re shaking.”
“You will, too, in a moment. Hank! Look at it. Just look and tell me what you think it is.”
He glanced down, then looked attentively—then he was sitting on the floor, studying the object intently. “It’s a queer way to put a motor together,” he said, frowning.
“Read this,” she said, extending the pages.
He read, looked up and said, “Good God!”
She was sitting on the floor beside him, and for a moment they could say nothing else.
“It was the coil,” she said. She felt as if her mind were racing, she could not keep up with all the things which a sudden blast had opened to her vision, and her words came hurtling against one another. “It was the coil that I noticed first—because I had seen drawings like it, not quite, but something like it, years ago, when I was in school—it was in an old book, it was given up as impossible long, long ago—but I liked to read everything I could find about railroad motors. That book said that there was a time when men were thinking of it—they worked on it, they spent years on experiments, but they couldn’t solve it and they gave it up. It was forgotten for generations. I didn’t think that any living scientist ever thought of it now. But someone did. Someone has solved it, now, today! ... Hank, do you understand? Those men, long ago, tried to invent a motor that would draw static electricity from the atmosphere, convert it and create its own power as it went along. They couldn’t do it. They gave it up.” She pointed at the broken shape. “But there it is.”
He nodded. He was not smiling. He sat looking at the remnant, intent on some thought of his own; it did not seem to be a happy thought.
“Hank! Don’t you understand what this means? It’s the greatest revolution in power motors since the internal-combustion