Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [465]
He smiled, pointing at the stone structure and down at the rocky drop where the tube of a water main went vanishing into the underbrush. “I’m the utilities man,” he said. “I take care of the water lines, the power lines and the telephone service.”
.“Alone?”
“Used to. But we’ve grown so much in the past year that I’ve had to hire three men to help me.”
“What men? From where?”
“Well, one of them is a professor of economics who couldn’t get a job outside, because he taught that you can’t consume more than you have produced—one is a professor of history who couldn’t get a job because he taught that the inhabitants of slums were not the men who made this country—and one is a professor of psychology who couldn’t get a job because he taught that men are capable of thinking.”
“They work for you as plumbers and linesmen?”
“You’d be surprised how good they are at it.”
“And to whom have they abandoned our colleges?”
“To those who’re wanted there.” He chuckled. “How long ago was it that I betrayed you, Miss Taggart? Not quite three years ago, wasn’t it? It’s the John Galt Line that I refused to build for you. Where is your Line now? But my lines have grown, in that time, from the couple of miles that Mulligan had built when I took over, to hundreds of miles of pipe and wire, all within the space of this valley.”
He saw the swift, involuntary look of eagerness on her face, the look of a competent person’s appreciation; he smiled, glanced at her companion and said softly, “You know, Miss Taggart, when it comes to the John Galt Line—maybe it’s I who’ve followed it and you who’re betraying it.”
She glanced at Galt. He was watching her face, but she could read nothing in his.
As they drove on along the edge of the lake, she asked, “You’ve mapped this route deliberately, haven’t you? You’re showing me all the men whom”—she stopped, feeling inexplicably reluctant to say it, and said, instead—“whom I have lost?”
“I’m showing you all the men whom I have taken away from you,” he answered firmly.
This was the root, she thought, of the guiltlessness of his face: he had guessed and named the words she had wanted to spare him, he had rejected a good will that was not based on his values—and in proud certainty of being right, he had made a boast of that which she had intended as an accusation.
Ahead of them, she saw a wooden pier projecting into the water of the lake. A young woman lay stretched on the sun-flooded planks, watching a battery of fishing rods. She glanced up at the sound of the car, then leaped to her feet in a single swift movement, a shade too swift, and ran to the road. She wore slacks, rolled above the knees of her bare legs, she had dark, disheveled hair and large eyes. Galt waved to her.
“Hello, John! When did you get in?” she called.
“This morning,” he answered, smiling and driving on.
Dagny jerked her head to look back and saw the glance with which the young woman stood looking after Galt. And even though hopelessness, serenely accepted, was part of the worship in that glance, she experienced a feeling she had never known before: a stab of jealousy.
“Who is that?” she asked.
“Our best fishwife. She provides the fish for Hammond’s grocery market.”
“What else is she?”
“You’ve noticed that there’s a .‘what else’ for every one of us here? She’s a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn’t be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.”
The car turned into a narrow path, climbing steeply into a wilderness of brush and pine trees. She knew what to expect when she saw a handmade sign nailed to a tree, with an arrow pointing the way: The Buena Esperanza Pass.
It was not a pass, it was a wall of laminated rock with a complex chain of pipes, pumps