Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [442]
“Well, you’re working for one now. You’re deputy-conductor and proxy-vice-president-in-charge-of-operation. Your job is to take charge of this train in my absence, to preserve order and to keep the cattle from stampeding. Tell them that I appointed you. You don’t need any proof. They’ll obey anybody who expects obedience.”
“Yes, ma.‘am,” he answered firmly, with a look of understanding.
She remembered that money inside a man’s pocket had the power to turn into confidence inside his mind; she took a hundred-dollar bill from her bag and slipped it into his hand. “As advance on wages,” she said.
“Yes, ma.‘am.”
She had started off, when he called after her, “Miss Taggart!”
She turned. “Yes?”
“Thank you,” he said.
She smiled, half-raising her hand in a parting salute, and walked .on.
“Who is that?” asked Kellogg.
“A tramp who was caught stealing a ride.”
“He’ll do the job, I think.”
“He will.”
They walked silently past the engine and on in the direction of its headlight. At first, stepping from tie to tie, with the violent light beating against them from behind, they still felt as if they were at home in the normal realm of a railroad. Then she found herself watching the light on the ties under her feet, watching it ebb slowly, trying to hold it, to keep seeing its fading glow, until she knew that the hint of a glow on the wood was no longer anything but moonlight. She could not prevent the shudder that made her turn to look back. The headlight still hung behind them, like the liquid silver globe of a planet, deceptively close, but belonging to another orbit and another system.
Owen Kellogg walked silently beside her, and she felt certain that they knew each other’s thoughts.
“He couldn’t have. Oh God, he couldn.‘t!” she said suddenly, not realizing that she had switched to words.
.“Who?”
“Nathaniel Taggart. He couldn’t have worked with people like those passengers. He couldn’t have run trains for them. He couldn’t have employed them. He couldn’t have used them at all, neither as customers nor as workers.”
Kellogg smiled. “You mean that he couldn’t have grown rich by exploiting them, Miss Taggart?”
She nodded. “They ...” she said, and he heard the faint trembling of her voice, which was love and pain and indignation, “they’ve said for years that he rose by thwarting the ability of others, by leaving them no chance, and that ... that human incompetence was to his selfish interest.... But he ... it wasn’t obedience that he required of people.”
“Miss Taggart,” he said, with an odd note of sternness in his voice, “just remember that he represented a code of existence which—for a brief span in all human history—drove slavery out of the civilized world. Remember it, when you feel baffled by the nature of his enemies.”
“Have you ever heard of a woman named Ivy Starnes?”
“Oh yes.”
“I keep thinking that this was what she would have enjoyed—the spectacle of those passengers tonight. This was what she’s after. But we—we can’t live with it, you and I, can we? No one can live with it. It’s not possible to live with it.”
“What makes you think that Ivy Starnes’s purpose is life?”
Somewhere on the edge of her mind—like the wisps she saw floating on the edges of the prairie, neither quite rays nor fog nor cloud—she felt some shape which she could not grasp, half-suggested and demanding to be grasped.
She did not speak, and—like the links of a chain unrolling through their silence—the rhythm of their steps went on, spaced to the ties, scored by the dry, swift beat of heels on wood.
She had not had time to be aware of him, except as of a providential comrade-in-competence; now she glanced at him with conscious attention. His face had the clear, hard look she remembered having liked in the past. But the face had grown calmer, as if more serenely at peace. His clothes were threadbare. He wore an old leather jacket, and even in the darkness she could distinguish the scuffed blotches streaking across the leather.
“What have you been doing since you left Taggart Transcontinental?” she asked.
“Oh, many things.”
“Where are