Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [370]
hard at making sure that no decision can ever be pinned down on him, so that he won’t be blamed for anything. You see, his purpose is not to operate a railroad, but to hold a job. He doesn’t want to run trains—he wants to please Jim. He doesn’t give a damn whether there’s a single train moving or not, so long as he can make a good impression on Jim and on the boys in Washington. So far, Mr. Clifton Locey has managed to frame up two men: a young third assistant, for not relaying an order which Mr. Locey had never given—and the freight manager, for issuing an order which Mr. Locey did give, only the freight manager couldn’t prove it. Both men were fired, officially, by ruling of the Unification Board.... When things go well—which is never longer than half an hour—Mr. Locey makes it a point to remind us that ’.these are not the days of Miss Taggart.‘. At the first sign of trouble, he calls me into his office and asks me—casually, in the midst of the most irrelevant drivel—what Miss Taggart used to do in such an emergency. I tell him, whenever I can. I tell myself that it’s Taggart Transcontinental, and ... and there’s thousands of lives on dozens of trains that hang on our decisions. Between emergencies, Mr. Locey goes out of his way to be rude to me—that’s so I wouldn’t think that he needs me. He’s made it a point to change everything she used to do, in every respect that doesn’t matter, but he’s damn cautious not to change anything that matters. The only trouble is that he can’t always tell which is which.... On his first day in her office, he told me that it wasn’t a good idea to have a picture of Nat Taggart on the wall—’.Nat Taggart,‘. he said, ’.belongs to a dark past, to the age of selfish greed, he is not exactly a symbol of our modern, progressive policies, so it could make a bad impression, people could identify me with him.‘. ’.No, they couldn‘t,’ I said—but I took the picture off his wall.... What? ... No, she doesn’t know any of it. I haven’t communicated with her. Not once. She told me not to.... Last week, I almost quit. It was over Chick’s Special. Mr. Chick Morrison of Washington, whoever the hell he is, has gone on a speaking tour of the whole country—to speak about the directive and build up the people’s morale, as things are getting to be pretty wild everywhere. He demanded a special train, for himself and party—a sleeper, a parlor car and a diner with barroom and lounge. The Unification Board gave him permission to travel at a hundred miles an hour—by reason, the ruling said, of this being a non-profit journey. Well, so it is. It’s just a journey to talk people into continuing to break their backs at making profits in order to support men who are superior by reason of not making any. Well, our trouble came when Mr. Chick Morrison demanded a Diesel engine for his train. We had none to give him. Every Diesel we own is out on the road, pulling the Comet and the transcontinental freights, and there wasn’t a spare one anywhere on the system, except—well, that was an exception I wasn’t going to mention to Mr. Clifton Locey. Mr. Locey raised the roof, screaming that come hell or high water we couldn’t refuse a demand of Mr. Chick Morrison. I don’t know what damn fool finally told him about the extra Diesel that was kept at Winston, Colorado, at the mouth of the tunnel. You know the way our Diesels break down nowadays, they’re all breathing their last—so you can understand why that extra Diesel had to be kept at the tunnel. I explained it to Mr. Locey, I threatened him, I pleaded, I told him that she had made it our strictest rule that Winston Station was never to be left without an extra Diesel. He told me to remember that he was not Miss Taggart—as if I could ever forget it!—and that the rule was nonsense, because nothing had happened all these years, so Winston could do without a Diesel for a couple of months, and he wasn’t going to worry about some theoretical disaster in the future when we were up against the very real, practical, immediate disaster of getting Mr. Chick Morrison angry at us. Well, Chick’s