Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [371]
Special got the Diesel. The superintendent of the Colorado Division quit. Mr. Locey gave that job to a friend of his own. I wanted to quit. I had never wanted to so badly. But I didn’t.... No, I haven’t heard from her. I haven’t heard a word since she left. Why do you keep questioning me about her? Forget it. She won’t be back.... I don’t know what it is that I’m hoping for. Nothing, I guess. I just go day by day, and I try not to look ahead. At first, I hoped that somebody would save us. I thought maybe it would be Hank Rearden. But he gave in. I don’t know what they did to him to make him sign, but I know that it must have been something terrible. Everybody thinks so. Everybody’s whispering about it, wondering what sort of pressure was used on him.... No, nobody knows. He’s made no public statements and he’s refused to see anyone.... But, listen, I’ll tell you something else that everybody’s whispering about. Lean closer, will you?—I don’t want to speak too loudly. They say that Orren Boyle seems to have known about that directive long ago, weeks or months in advance, because he had started, quietly and secretly, to reconstruct his furnaces for the production of Rearden Metal, in one of his lesser steel plants, an obscure little place way out on the coast of Maine. He was ready to start pouring the Metal the moment Rearden’s extortion paper—I mean, Gift Certincate—was signed. But—listen—the night before they were to start, Boyle’s men were heating the furnaces in that place on the coast, when they heard a voice, they didn’t know whether it came from a plane or a radio or some sort of loud-speaker, but it was a man’s voice and it said that he would give them ten minutes to get out of the place. They got out. They started going and they kept on going—because the man’s voice had said that he was Ragnar Danneskjöld. In the next half-hour, Boyle’s mills were razed to the ground. Razed, wiped out, not a brick of them left standing. They say it was done by long-range naval guns, from somewhere way out on the Atlantic. Nobody saw Danneskjöld’s ship.... That’s what people are whispering. The newspapers haven’t printed a word about it. The boys in Washington say that it’s only a rumor spread by panic-mongers .... I don’t know whether the story is true. I think it is. I hope it is.... You know, when I was fifteen years old, I used to wonder how any man could become a criminal, I couldn’t understand what would make it possible. Now—now I’m glad that Ragnar Danneskjöld has blown up those mills. May God bless him and never let them find him, whatever and wherever he is! ... Yes, that’s what I’ve come to feel. Well, how much do they think people can take? ... It’s not so bad for me in the daytime, because I can keep busy and not think, but it gets me at night. I can’t sleep any more, I lie awake for hours.... Yes!—if you want to know it—yes, it’s because I’m worried about her! I’m scared to death for her. Woodstock is just a miserable little hole of a place, miles away from everything, and the Taggart lodge is twenty miles farther, twenty miles of a twisting trail in a godforsaken forest. How do I know what might happen to her there, alone, and with the kind of gangs that are roving all through the country these nights—just through such desolate parts of the country as the Berkshires? ... I know I shouldn’t think about it. I know that she can take care of herself. Only I wish she’d drop me a line. I wish I could go there. But she told me not to. I told her I’d wait.... You know, I’m glad you’re here tonight. It helps me—talking to you and ... just seeing you here. You won’t vanish, like all the others, will you? ... What? Next week? ... Oh, on your vacation. For how long? ... How do you rate a whole month’s vacation? ... I wish I could do that, too—take a month off at my own expense. But they wouldn’t let me.... Really? I envy you.... I wouldn’t have envied you a few years ago. But now—now I’d like to get away. Now I envy you—if you’ve been able to take a month off every summer for twelve years.”
It was a dark road, but it led in