Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [246]
It seemed to her that some destroyer was moving soundlessly through the country and the lights were dying at his touch—someone, she thought bitterly, who had reversed the principle of the Twentieth Century motor and was now turning kinetic energy into static.
That was the enemy—she thought, as she sat at her desk in the gathering twilight—with whom she was running a race. The monthly report from Quentin Daniels lay on her desk. She could not be certain, as yet, that Daniels would solve the secret of the motor; but the destroyer, she thought, was moving swiftly, surely, at an ever accelerating tempo; she wondered whether, by the time she rebuilt the motor, there would be any world left to use it.
She had liked Quentin Daniels from the moment he entered her office on their first interview. He was a lanky man in his early thirties, with a homely, angular face and an attractive smile. A hint of the smile remained in his features at all times, particularly when he listened; it was a look of good-natured amusement, as if he were swiftly and patiently discarding the irrelevant in the words he heard and going straight to the point a moment ahead of the speaker.
“Why did you refuse to work for Dr. Stadler?” she asked.
The hint of his smile grew harder and more stressed; this was as near as he came to showing an emotion; the emotion was anger. But he answered in his even, unhurried drawl, “You know, Dr. Stadler once said that the first word of ‘Free, scientific inquiry’ was redundant. He seems to have forgotten it. Well, I’ll just say that ’Governmental scientific inquiry’ is a contradiction in terms.”
She asked him what position he held at the Utah Institute of Technology. “Night watchman,” he answered. “What?” she gasped. “Night watchman,” he repeated politely, as if she had not caught the words, as if there were no cause for astonishment.
Under her questioning, he explained that he did not like any of the scientific foundations left in existence, that he would have liked a job in the research laboratory of some big industrial concern—“But which one of them can afford to undertake any long-range work nowadays, and why should they?”—so when the Utah Institute of Technology was closed for lack of funds, he had remained there as night watchman and sole inhabitant of the place; the salary was sufficient to pay for his needs—and the Institute’s laboratory was there, intact, for his own private, undisturbed use.
“So you’re doing research work of your own?”
“That’s right.”
“For what purpose?”
“For my own pleasure.”
“What do you intend to do, if you discover something of scientific importance or commercial value? Do you intend to put it to some public use?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Haven’t you any desire to be of service to humanity?”
“I don’t talk that kind of language, Miss Taggart. I don’t think you do, either.”
She laughed. “I think we’ll get along together, you and I.”
“We will.”
When she had told him the story of the motor, when he had studied the manuscript, he made no comment, but merely said that he would take the job on any terms she named.
She asked him to choose his own terms. She protested, in astonishment, against the low monthly salary he quoted. “Miss