Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [235]
“Run along, punk. Go and try to pour a ton of steel without rigid principles, on the expediency of the moment.”
A strange sense, which was almost a sense of style, made Rearden feel contempt for the boy, but no resentment. The boy seemed to fit the spirit of the events around them. It was as if they were being carried back across a long span of centuries to the age where the boy had belonged, but he, Rearden, had not. Instead of building new furnaces, thought Rearden, he was now running a losing race to keep the old ones going; instead of starting new ventures, new research, new experiments in the use of Rearden Metal, he was spending the whole of his energy on a quest for sources of iron ore: like the men at the dawn of the Iron Age—he thought—but with less hope.
He tried to avoid these thoughts. He had to stand on guard against his own feeling—as if some part of him had become a stranger that had to be kept numb, and his will had to be its constant, watchful anesthetic. That part was an unknown of which he knew only that he must never see its root and never give it voice. He had lived through one dangerous moment which he could not allow to return.
It was the moment when—alone in his office, on a winter evening, held paralyzed by a newspaper spread on his desk with a long column of directives on the front page—he had heard on the radio the news of Ellis Wyatt’s flaming oil fields. Then, his first reaction—before any thought of the future, any sense of disaster, any shock, terror or protest -had been to burst out laughing. He had laughed in triumph, in deliverance, in a spurting, living exultation—and the words which he had not pronounced, but felt, were: God bless you, Ellis, whatever you’re doing!
When he had grasped the implications of his laughter, he had known that he was now condemned to constant vigilance against himself. Like the survivor of a heart attack, he knew that he had had a warning and that he carried within him a danger that could strike him at any moment.
He had held it off, since then. He had kept an even, cautious, severely controlled pace in his inner steps. But it had come close to him for a moment, once again. When he had looked at the order of the State Science Institute on his desk, it had seemed to him that the glow moving over the paper did not come from the furnaces outside, but from the flames of a burning oil field.
“Mr. Rearden,” said the Wet Nurse, when he heard about the rejected order, “you shouldn’t have done that.”
“Why not?”
“There’s going to be trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“It’s a government order. You can’t reject a government order.”
“Why can’t I?”
“It’s an Essential Need project, and secret, too. It’s very important.”
“What kind of a project is it?”
“I don’t know. It’s secret.”
“Then how do you know it’s important?”
“It said so.”
“Who said so?”
“You can’t doubt such a thing as that, Mr. Rearden!”
“Why can’t I?”
“But you can’t.”
“If I can‘t, then that would make it an absolute and you said there aren’t any absolutes.”
“That’s different.”
“How is it different?”
“It’s the government.”
“You mean, there aren’t any absolutes except the government?”
“I mean, if they say it’s important, then it is.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want you to get in trouble, Mr. Rearden, and you’re going to, sure as hell. You ask too many why’s. Now why do you do that?”
Rearden glanced at him and chuckled. The boy noticed his own words and grinned sheepishly, but he looked unhappy.
The man who came to see Rearden a week later was youngish and slenderish, but neither as young nor as slender as he tried to make himself appear. He wore civilian clothes and the leather leggings of a traffic cop. Rearden could not quite get it clear whether he came from the State Science Institute or from Washington.
“I understand that you refused to sell metal to the State Science Institute, Mr. Rearden,” he