Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [207]
No—thought Dagny—no, apart from the sickening feeling it gave her, this case was not much worse than any of the other things that Midas Mulligan had borne for years. He had taken many losses under laws of a similar justice, under rules and edicts that had cost him much larger sums of money; he had borne them and fought and worked the harder; it was not likely that this case had broken him.
“What happened to Judge Narragansett?” she asked involuntarily, and wondered what subconscious connection had made her ask it. She knew little about Judge Narragansett, but she had heard and remembered his name, because it was a name that belonged so exclusively to the North American continent. Now she realized suddenly that she had heard nothing about him for years.
“Oh, he retired,” said Lee Hunsacker.
“He did?” The question was almost a gasp.
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“Oh, about six months later.”
“What did he do after he retired?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think anybody’s heard from him since.”
He wondered why she looked frightened. Part of the fear she felt, was that she could not name its reason, either. “Please tell me about the motor factory,” she said with effort.
“Well, Eugene Lawson of the Community National Bank in Madison finally gave us a loan to buy the factory—but he was just a messy cheapskate, he didn’t have enough money to see us through, he couldn’t help us when we went bankrupt. It was not our fault. We had everything against us from the start. How could we run a factory when we had no railroad? Weren’t we entitled to a railroad? I tried to get them to reopen their branch line, but those damn people at Taggart Trans—” He stopped. “Say, are you by any chance one of those Taggarts?”
“I am the Operating Vice-President of Taggart Transcontinental.”
For a moment, he stared at her in blank stupor; she saw the struggle of fear, obsequiousness and hatred in his filmy eyes. The result was a sudden snarl: “I don’t need any of you big shots! Don’t think I’m going to be afraid of you. Don’t expect me to beg for a job. I’m not asking favors of anybody. I bet you’re not used to hear people talk to you this way, are you?”
“Mr. Hunsacker, I will appreciate it very much if you will give me the information I need about the factory.”
“You’re a little late getting interested. What’s the matter? Your conscience bothering you? You people let Jed Starnes grow filthy rich on that factory, but you wouldn’t give us a break. It was the same factory. We did everything he did. We started right in manufacturing the particular type of motor that had been his biggest money-maker for years. And then some newcomer nobody ever heard of opened a two-bit factory down in Colorado, by the name of Nielsen Motors, and put out a new motor of the same class as the Starnes model, at half the price! We couldn’t help that, could we? It was all right for Jed Starnes, no destructive competitor happened to come up in his time, but what were we to do? How could we fight this Nielsen, when nobody had given us a motor to compete with his?”
“Did you take over the Starnes research laboratory?”
“Yes, yes, it was there. Everything was there.”
“His staff, too?”
“Oh, some of them. A lot of them had gone while the factory was closed.”
“His research staff?”
“They were gone.”
“Did you hire any research men of your own?”
“Yes, yes, some—but let me tell you, I didn’t have much money to spend on such things as laboratories, when I never had enough funds to give me a breathing spell. I couldn’t even pay the bills I owed for the absolutely essential modernizing and redecorating which I’d had to do -that factory was disgracefully old-fashioned from the standpoint of human efficiency. The executive offices had bare plaster walls and a dinky little washroom. Any modern psychologist will tell