Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [457]
“How does he know that?”
“I told him.”
The look on her face was like a question that would have begun with “How in hell . . . ?”—but she saw the look of his eyes, and she laughed, her laughter giving sound to the meaning of his glance.
She could not question anything, she thought, she could not doubt, not now—not with the sound of that music rising triumphantly through the sun-drenched leaves, the music of release, of deliverance, played as it was intended to be played, as her mind had struggled to hear it in a rocking coach through the beat of wounded wheels—it was this that her mind had seen in the sounds, that night—this valley and the morning sun and—
And then she gasped, because the trail had turned and from the height of an open ledge she saw the town on the floor of the valley.
It was not a town, only a cluster of houses scattered at random from the bottom to the rising steps of the mountains that went on rising above their roofs, enclosing them within an abrupt, impassable circle. They were homes, small and new, with naked, angular shapes and the glitter of broad windows. Far in the distance, some structures seemed taller, and the faint coils of smoke above them suggested an industrial district. But close before her, rising on a slender granite column from a ledge below to the level of her eyes, blinding her by its glare, dimming the rest, stood a dollar sign three feet tall, made of solid gold. It hung in space above the town, as its coat-of-arms, its trademark, its beacon—and it caught the sunrays, like some transmitter of energy that sent them in shining blessing to stretch horizontally through the air above the roofs.
“What’s that?” she gasped, pointing at the sign.
“Oh, that’s Francisco’s private joke.”
“Francisco—who?” she whispered, knowing the answer.
“Francisco d.‘Anconia.”
“Is he here, too?”
“He will be, any day now.”
“What do you mean, his joke?”
“He gave that sign as an anniversary present to the owner of this place. And then we all adopted it as our particular emblem. We liked the idea.”
“Aren’t you the owner of this place?”
“I? No.” He glanced down at the foot of the ledge and added, pointing, “There’s the owner of this place, coming now.”
A car had stopped at the end of a dirt road below, and two men were hurrying up the trail. She could not distinguish their faces; one of them was slender and tall, the other shorter, more muscular. She lost sight of them behind the twists of the trail, as he went on carrying her down to meet them.
She met them when they emerged suddenly from behind a rocky corner a few feet away. The sight of their faces hit her with the abruptness of a collision.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned!” said the muscular man, whom she did not know, staring at her.
She was staring at the tall, distinguished figure of his companion: it was Hugh Akston.
It was Hugh Akston who spoke first, bowing to her with a courteous smile of welcome. “Miss Taggart, this is the first time anyone has ever proved me wrong. I didn’t know—when I told you you’d never find him -that the next time I saw you, you would be in his arms.”
“In whose arms?”
“Why, the inventor of the motor.”
She gasped, closing her eyes; this was one connection she knew she should have made. When she opened her eyes, she was looking at Galt. He was smiling, faintly, derisively, as if he knew fully what this meant to her.
“It would have served you right if you’d broken your neck!” the muscular man snapped at her, with the anger of concern, almost of affection. “What a stunt to pull—for a person who’d have been admitted here so eagerly, if she’d chosen to come through the front door!”
“Miss Taggart, may I present Midas Mulligan?” said Galt.
“Oh,” she said weakly, and laughed; she had no capacity for astonishment any longer. “Do you suppose I was killed in that crash—and this is some other kind of existence?”
“It is another kind of existence,” said Galt. “But as for being killed, doesn’t it seem more like the other way around?”
“Oh yes,