Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [455]
“Don’t move, Miss Taggart. You’re hurt.”
“You know me?” Her voice was impersonal and hard.
“I’ve known you for many years.”
“Have I known you?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“What is your name?”
“John Galt.”
She looked at him, not moving.
“Why are you frightened?” he asked.
“Because I believe it.”
He smiled, as if grasping a full confession of the meaning she attached to his name; the smile held an adversary’s acceptance of a challenge—and an adult’s amusement at the self-deception of a child.
She felt as if she were returning to consciousness after a crash that had shattered more than an airplane. She could not reassemble the pieces now, she could not recall the things she had known about his name, she knew only that it stood for a dark vacuum which she would slowly have to fill. She could not do it now, this man was too blinding a presence, like a spotlight that would not let her see the shapes strewn in the outer darkness.
“Was it you that I was following?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She glanced slowly around her. She was lying in the grass of a field at the foot of a granite drop that came down from thousands of feet away in the blue sky. On the other edge of the field, some crags and pines and the glittering leaves of birch trees hid the space that stretched to a distant wall of encircling mountains. Her plane was not shattered—it was there, a few feet away, flat on its belly in the grass. There was no other plane in sight, no structures, no sign of human habitation.
“What is this valley?” she asked.
He smiled. “The Taggart Terminal.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll find out.”
A dim impulse, like the recoil of an antagonist, made her want to check on what strength was left to her. She could move her arms and legs; she could lift her head; she felt a stabbing pain when she breathed deeply; she saw a thin thread of blood running down her stocking.
“Can one get out of this place?” she asked.
His voice seemed earnest, but the glint of the metal-green eyes was a smile: “Actually—no. Temporarily—yes.”
She made a movement to rise. He bent to lift her, but she gathered her strength in a swift, sudden jolt and slipped out of his grasp, struggling to stand up. “I think I can—” she started saying, and collapsed against him the instant her feet rested on the ground, a stab of pain shooting up from an ankle that would not hold her.
He lifted her in his arms and smiled. “No, you can.‘t, Miss Taggart,” he said, and started off across the field.
She lay still, her arms about him, her head on his shoulder, and she thought: For just a few moments—while this lasts—it is all right to surrender completely—to forget everything and just permit yourself to feel.... When had she experienced it before?—she wondered; there had been a moment when these had been the words in her mind, but she could not remember it now. She had known it, once—this feeling of certainty, of the final, the reached, the not-to-be-questioned. But it was new to feel protected, and to feel that it was right to accept the protection, to surrender—right, because this peculiar sense of safety was not protection against the future, but against the past, not the protection of being spared from battle, but of having won it, not a protection granted to her weakness, but to her strength.... Aware with abnormal intensity of the pressure of his hands against her body, of the gold and copper threads of his hair, the shadows of his lashes on the skin of his face a few inches away from hers, she wondered dimly: Protected, from what? ... it’s he who was the enemy... was he? ... why? ... She did not know, she could not think of it now. It took an effort to remember that she had had a goal and a motive a few hours ago. She forced herself to recapture it.
“Did you know that I was following you?” she asked.
“No.”
“Where is your plane?”
“At the landing field.”
“Where is the landing field?”
“On the other side of the valley.”
“There was no landing field in this valley, when I looked down. There was no meadow, either.