Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [325]
The steel shipped across the Atlantic by the Bureau of Global Relief had not reached the People’s State of Germany. It had been seized by Ragnar Danneskjold—but nobody heard of it outside the Bureau, because the newspapers had long since stopped mentioning the activities of Ragnar Danneskjöld.
It was not until the public began to notice the growing shortage, then the disappearance from the market of electric irons, toasters, washing machines and all electrical appliances, that people began to ask questions and to hear whispers. They heard that no ship loaded with d.‘Anconia copper was able to reach a port of the United States; it could not get past Ragnar Danneskjöld.
In the foggy winter nights, on the waterfront, sailors whispered the story that Ragnar Danneskjöld always seized the cargoes of relief vessels, but never touched the copper: he sank the d.‘Anconia ships with their loads; he let the crews escape in lifeboats, but the copper went to the bottom of the ocean. They whispered it as a dark legend beyond men’s power to explain; nobody could find a reason why Danneskjöld did not choose to take the copper.
In the second week of February, for the purpose of conserving copper wire and electric power, a directive forbade the running of elevators above the twenty-fifth floor. The upper floors of the buildings had to be vacated, and partitions of unpainted boards went up to cut off the stairways. By special permit, exceptions were granted—on the grounds of “essential need”—to a few of the larger business enterprises and the more fashionable hotels. The tops of the cities were cut down.
The inhabitants of New York had never had to be aware of the weather. Storms had been only a nuisance that slowed the traffic and made puddles in the doorways of brightly lighted shops. Stepping against the wind, dressed in raincoats, furs and evening slippers, people had felt that a storm was an intruder within the city. Now, facing the gusts of snow that came sweeping down the narrow streets, people felt in dim terror that they were the temporary intruders and that the wind had the right-of-way.
“It won’t make any difference to us now, forget it, Hank, it doesn’t matter,” said Dagny when Rearden told her that he would not be able to deliver the rail; he had not been able to find a supplier of copper. “Forget it, Hank.” He did not answer her. He could not forget the first failure of Rearden Steel.
On the evening of February 15, a plate cracked on a rail joint and sent an engine off the track, half a mile from Winston, Colorado, on a division which was to have been relaid with the new rail. The station agent of Winston sighed and sent for a crew with a crane; it was only one of the minor accidents that were happening in his section every other day or so, he was getting used to it.
Rearden, that evening, his coat collar raised, his hat slanted low over his eyes, the snow drifts rising to his knees, was tramping through an abandoned open-pit coal mine, in a forsaken comer of Pennsylvania, supervising the loading of pirated coal upon the trucks which he had provided. Nobody owned the mine, nobody could afford the cost of working it. But a young man with a brusque voice and dark, angry eyes, who came from a starving settlement, had organized a gang of the unemployed and made a deal with Rearden to deliver the coal. They mined it at night, they stored it in hidden culverts, they were paid in cash, with no questions asked or answered. Guilty