Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [448]
“Yes. We have that.”
“Send them out on the track motor car.”
“Oh ... Yes, ma.‘am.”
“Tell your men to stop here, at track phone Number 83, to pick up Mr. Kellogg and myself.” She was looking at the beacon.
“Yes, ma.‘am.”
“Call the Taggart trainmaster at Laurel, report the Comet’s delay and explain to him what happened.” She put her hand into her pocket and suddenly clutched her fingers: she felt the package of cigarettes. “Say—” she asked, “what’s that beacon, about half a mile from here?”
“From where you are? Oh, that must be the emergency landing field of the Flagship Airlines.”
“I see ... Well, that’s all. Get your men started at once. Tell them to pick up Mr. Kellogg by track phone Number 83.”
“Yes, ma.‘am.”
She hung up. Kellogg was grinning.
“An airfield, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes.” She stood looking at the beacon, her hand still clutching the cigarettes in her pocket.
“So they’re going to pick up Mr. Kellogg, are they?”
She whirled to him, realizing what decision her mind had been reaching without her conscious knowledge. “No,” she said, “no, I didn’t mean to abandon you here. It’s only that I, too, have a crucial purpose out West, where I ought to hurry, so I was thinking of trying to catch a plane, but I can’t do it and it’s not necessary.”
“Come on,” he said, starting in the direction of the airfield.
“But I—”
“If there’s anything you want to do more urgently than to nurse those morons—go right ahead.”
“More urgently than anything in the world,” she whispered.
“I’ll undertake to remain in charge for you and to deliver the Comet to your man at Laurel.”
“Thank you ... But if you’re hoping ... I’m not deserting, you know.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you so eager to help me?”
“I just want you to see what it’s like to do something you want, for once.”
“There’s not much chance that they’ll have a plane at that field.”
“There’s a good chance that they will.”
There were two planes on the edge of the airfield: one, the half-charred remnant of a wreck, not worth salvaging for scrap—the other, a Dwight Sanders monoplane, brand-new, the kind of ship that men were pleading for, in vain, all over the country.
There was one sleepy attendant at the airfield, young, pudgy and, but for a faint smell of college about his vocabulary, a brain-brother of the night dispatcher of Bradshaw. He knew nothing about the two planes: they had been there when he first took this job a year ago. He had never inquired about them and neither had anybody else. In whatever silent crumbling had gone on at the distant headquarters, in the slow dissolution of a great airline company, the Sanders monoplane had been forgotten—as assets of this nature were being forgotten everywhere ... as the model of the motor had been forgotten on a junk pile and, left in plain sight, had conveyed nothing to the inheritors and the takers-over....
There were no rules to tell the young attendant whether he was expected to keep the Sanders plane or not. The decision was made for him by the brusque, confident manner of the two strangers—by the credentials of Miss Dagny Taggart, Vice-President of a railroad-by brief hints about a secret, emergency mission, which sounded like Washington to him—by the mention of an agreement with the airline’s top officials in New York, whose names he had never heard before—by a check for fifteen thousand dollars, written by Miss Taggart, as deposit against the return of the Sanders plane—and by another check, for two hundred bucks, for his own, personal courtesy.
He fueled the plane, he checked it as best he could, he found a map of the country’s airports—and she saw that a landing field on the outskirts of Afton, Utah, was marked as still in existence. She had been too tensely, swiftly active to feel anything, but at the last moment, when the attendant switched on the floodlights, when she was about to climb aboard, she paused to glance at the emptiness of the sky, then at Owen Kellogg. He stood, alone in the white glare, his feet planted firmly apart, on an island of cement in a ring of blinding lights, with