Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [464]
“Why, no. At Sanders Aircraft.”
“Where is it?”
“Where did you think it was? In that building in New Jersey, which Tinky Holloway’s cousin bought from my bankrupt successors by means of a government loan and a tax suspension? In that building where he produced six planes that never left the ground and eight that did, but crashed with forty passengers each?”
“Where is it, then?”
“Wherever I am.”
He pointed across the road. Glancing down through the tops of the pine trees, she saw the concrete rectangle of an airfield on the bottom of the valley.
“We have a few planes here and it’s my job to take care of them,” he said. “I’m the hog farmer and the airfield attendant. I’m doing quite well at producing ham and bacon, without the men from whom I used to buy it. But those men cannot produce airplanes without me—and, without me, they cannot even produce their ham and bacon.”
“But you—you have not been designing airplanes, either.”
“No, I haven’t. And I haven’t been manufacturing the Diesel engines I once promised you. Since the time I saw you last, I have designed and manufactured just one new tractor. I mean, one—I tooled it by hand—no mass production was necessary. But that tractor has cut an eight-hour workday down to four hours on”—the straight line of his arm, extended to point across the valley, moved like a royal scepter; her eyes followed it and she saw the terraced green of hanging gardens on a distant mountainside—“the chicken and dairy farm of Judge Narragansett”—his arm moved slowly to a long, flat stretch of greenish gold at the foot of a canyon, then to a band of violent green—“in the wheat fields and tobacco patch of Midas Mulligan”—his arm rose to a granite flank striped by glistening tiers of leaves—“in the orchards of Richard Halley.”
Her eyes went slowly over the curve his arm had traveled, over and over again, long after the arm had dropped; but she said only, “I see.”
“Now do you believe that I can fix your plane?” he asked.
“Yes. But have you seen it?”
“Sure. Midas called two doctors immediately—Hendricks for you, and me for your plane. It can be fixed. But it will be an expensive job.”
“How much?”
“Two hundred dollars.”
“Two hundred dollars?” she repeated incredulously; the price seemed much too low.
“In gold, Miss Taggart.”
“Oh ... ! Well, where can I buy the gold?”
“You can.‘t,” said Galt.
She jerked her head to face him defiantly. “No?”
“No. Not where you come from. Your laws forbid it.”
“Yours don’t?”
“No.”
“Then sell it to me. Choose your own rate of exchange. Name any sum you want—in my money.”
“What money? You’re penniless, Miss Taggart.”
“What?” It was a word that a Taggart heiress could not ever expect to hear.
“You’re penniless in this valley. You own millions of dollars in Taggart Transcontinental stock—but it will not buy one pound of bacon from the Sanders hog farm.”
“I see.”
Galt smiled and turned to Sanders. “Go ahead and fix that plane. Miss Taggart will pay for it eventually.”
He pressed the starter and drove on, while she sat stiffly straight, asking no questions.
A stretch of violent turquoise blue split the cliffs ahead, ending the road; it took her a second to realize that it was a lake. The motionless water seemed to condense the blue of the sky and the green of the pine-covered mountains into so brilliantly pure a color that it made the sky look a dimmed pale gray. A streak of boiling foam came from among the pines and went crashing down the rocky steps to vanish in the placid water. A small granite structure stood by the stream.
Galt stopped the car just as a husky man in overalls stepped out to the threshold of the open doorway. It was Dick McNamara, who had once been her best contractor.
“Good day, Miss Taggart!” he said happily. “I’m glad to see that you weren’t hurt badly.”
She inclined her head in silent greeting—it was like a greeting to the loss and the pain