Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [274]
The man was shaking. “Something’s ... wrong?”
“You don’t happen to own any d.‘Anconia Copper stock, do you?” The man nodded, unable to speak. “Oh my, that’s too bad! Well, listen, I’ll tell you, if you give me your word of honor that you won’t repeat it to anyone. You don’t want to start a panic.”
“Word of honor . . .” gasped the man.
“What you’d better do is run to your stockbroker and sell as fast as you can—because things haven’t been going too well for d.‘Anconia Copper, I’m trying to raise some money, but if I don’t succeed, you’ll be lucky if you’ll have ten cents on your dollar tomorrow morning—oh my! I forgot that you can’t reach your stockbroker before tomorrow morning—well, it’s too bad, but—”
The man was running across the room, pushing people out of his way, like a torpedo shot into the crowd.
“Watch,” said Francisco austerely, turning to Rearden.
The man was lost in the crowd, they could not see him, they could not tell to whom he was selling his secret or whether he had enough of his cunning left to make it a trade with those who held favors—but they saw the wake of his passage spreading through the room, the sudden cuts splitting the crowd, like the first few cracks, then like the accelerating branching that runs through a wall about to crumble, the streaks of emptiness slashed, not by a human touch, but by the impersonal breath of terror.
There were the voices abruptly choked off, the pools of silence, then sounds of a different nature: the rising, hysterical inflections of uselessly repeated questions, the unnatural whispers, a woman’s scream, the few spaced, forced giggles of those still trying to pretend that nothing was happening.
There were spots of immobility in the motion of the crowd, like spreading blotches of paralysis; there was a sudden stillness, as if a motor had been cut off; then came the frantic, jerking, purposeless, rudderless movement of objects bumping down a hill by the blind mercy of gravitation and of every rock they hit on the way. People were running out, running to telephones, running to one another, clutching or pushing the bodies around them at random. These men, the most powerful men in the country, those who held, unanswerable to any power, the power over every man’s food and every man’s enjoyment of his span of years on earth—these men had become a pile of rubble, clattering in the wind of panic, the rubble left of a structure when its key pillar has been cut.
James Taggart, his face indecent in its exposure of emotions which centuries had taught men to keep hidden, rushed up to Francisco and screamed, “Is it true?”
“Why, James,” said Francisco, smiling, “what’s the matter? Why do you seem to be upset? Money is the root of all evil—so I just got tired of being evil.”
Taggart ran toward the main exit, yelling something to Orren Boyle on the way. Boyle nodded and kept on nodding, with the eagerness and humility of an inefficient servant, then darted off in another direction. Cherryl, her wedding veil coiling like a crystal cloud upon the air, as she ran after him, caught Taggart at the door. “Jim, what’s the matter?” He pushed her aside and she fell against the stomach of Paul Larkin, as Taggart rushed out.
Three persons stood immovably still, like three pillars spaced through the room, the lines of their sight cutting across the spread of the wreckage: Dagny, looking at Francisco—Francisco and Rearden, looking at each other.
CHAPTER III
WHITE BLACKMAIL
“What time is it?”
It’s running out, thought Rearden—but he answered, “I don’t know. Not yet midnight,” and remembering his wrist watch, added, “Twenty of.”
“I’m going to take a train home,” said Lillian.
He heard the sentence, but it had to wait its turn to enter the crowded passages to his consciousness. He stood looking absently at the living room of his suite, a few minutes’ elevator ride away from the party. In a moment, he answered automatically, “At this hour?”
“It’s still early. There are plenty of trains running.”
“You’re welcome to stay here, of