Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [447]
“Listen,” she said into the phone, “do you know that the Comet was due at Bradshaw over three hours ago?”
“Oh, sure. But nobody’s going to make any trouble about that. No train’s ever on schedule these days.”
“Then do you intend to leave us blocking your track forever?”
“We’ve got nothing due till Number 4, the northbound passenger out of Laurel, at eight thirty-seven A.M. You can wait till then. The day-trick dispatcher will be on then. You can speak to him.”
“You blasted idiot! This is the Comet!”
“What’s that to me? This isn’t Taggart Transcontinental. You people expect a lot for your money. You’ve been nothing but a headache to us, with all the extra work at no extra pay for the little fellows.” His voice was slipping into whining insolence. “You can’t talk to me that way. The time’s past when you could talk to people that way.”
She had never believed that there were men with whom a certain method, which she had never used, would work; such men were not hired by Taggart Transcontinental and she had never been forced to deal with them before.
“Do you know who I am?” she asked, in the cold, overbearing tone of a personal threat.
It worked. “I ... I guess so,” he answered.
“Then let me tell you that if you don’t send a crew to me at once, you’ll be out of a job within one hour after I reach Bradshaw, which I’ll reach sooner or later. You’d better make it sooner.”
“Yes, ma.‘am,” he said.
“Call out a full passenger train crew and give them orders to run us to Laurel, where we have our own men.”
“Yes, ma.‘am.” He added, “Will you tell headquarters that it was you who told me to do it?”
“I will.”
“And that it’s you who’re responsible for it?”
“I am.”
There was a pause, then he asked helplessly, “Now how am I going to call the men? Most of them haven’t got any phones.”
“Do you have a call boy?”
“Yes, but he won’t get here till morning.”
“Is there anybody in the yards right now?”
“There’s the wiper in the roundhouse.”
“Send him out to call the men.”
“Yes, ma.‘am. Hold the line.”
She leaned against the side of the phone box, to wait. Kellogg was smiling.
“And you propose to run a railroad—a transcontinental railroad—with that?” he asked.
She shrugged.
She could not keep her eyes off the beacon. It seemed so close, so easily within her reach. She felt as if the unconfessed thought were struggling furiously against her, splattering bits of the struggle all over her mind: A man able to harness an untapped source of energy, a man working on a motor to make all other motors useless ... she could be talking to him, to his kind of brain, in a few hours ... in just a few hours.... What if there was no need to hurry to him? It was what she wanted to do. It was all she wanted.... Her work? What was her work: to move on to the fullest, most exacting use of her mind—or to spend the rest of her life doing his thinking for a man unfit to be a night dispatcher? Why had she chosen to work? Was it in order to remain where she had started—night operator of Rockdale Station—no, lower than that—she had been better than that dispatcher, even at Rockdale—was this to be the final sum: an end lower than her beginning? ... There was no reason to hurry? She was the reason.... They needed the trains, but they did not need the motor? She needed the motor.... Her duty? To whom?
The dispatcher was gone for a long time; when he came back, his voice sounded sulky: “Well, the wiper says he can get the men all right, but it’s no use, because how am I going to send them out to you? We have no engine.”
“No engine?”
“No. The superintendent took one to run down to Laurel, and the other’s in the shops, been there for weeks, and the switch engine jumped a rail this morning, they’ll be working on her till tomorrow afternoon.”
“What about the wrecker’s engine that you were offering to send us?”
“Oh, she’s up north. They had a wreck there yesterday. She hasn’t come back yet.”
“Have you a Diesel car?”
“Never had any such thing. Not around here.”
“Have you a track motor