Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [467]
“No! To earn the fortune you deserve.”
“But I’m richer now than I was in the world. What’s wealth but the means of expanding one’s life? There’s two ways one can do it: either by producing more or by producing it faster. And that’s what I’m doing: I’m manufacturing time.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m producing everything I need, I’m working to improve my methods, and every hour I save is an hour added to my life. It used to take me five hours to fill that tank. It now takes three. The two I saved are mine—as pricelessly mine as if I moved my grave two further hours away for every five I’ve got. It’s two hours released from one task, to be invested in another—two more hours in which to work, to grow, to move forward. That’s the savings account I’m hoarding. Is there any sort of safety vault that could protect this account in the outside world?”
“But what space do you have for moving forward? Where’s your market?”
He chuckled. “Market? I now work for use, not for profit—my use, not the looters’ profit. Only those who add to my life, not those who devour it, are my market. Only those who produce, not those who consume, can ever be anybody’s market. I deal with the life-givers, not with the cannibals. If my oil takes less effort to produce, I ask less of the men to whom I trade it for the things I need. I add an extra span of time to their lives with every gallon of my oil that they burn. And since they’re men like me, they keep inventing faster ways to make the things they make—so every one of them grants me an added minute, hour or day with the bread I buy from them, with the clothes, the lumber, the metal”—he glanced at Galt—“an added year with every month of electricity I purchase. That’s our market and that’s how it works for us—but that was not the way it worked in the outer world. Down what drain were they poured out there, our days, our lives and our energy? Into what bottomless, futureless sewer of the unpaid-for? Here, we trade achievements, not failures—values, not needs. We’re free of one another, yet we all grow together. Wealth, Dagny? What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can’t stand still. It must grow or perish. Look—” He pointed at a plant fighting upward from under the weight of a rock—a long, gnarled stem, contorted by an unnatural struggle, with drooping, yellow remnants of unformed leaves and a single green shoot thrust upward to the sun with the desperation of a last, spent, inadequate effort. “That’s what they’re doing to us back there in hell. Do you see me submitting to it?”
“No,” she whispered.
“Do you see him submitting?” He pointed at Galt.
“God, no!”
“Then don’t be astonished by anything you see in this valley.”
She remained silent when they drove on. Galt said nothing.
On a distant mountainside, in the dense green of a forest, she saw a pine tree slanting down suddenly, tracing a curve, like the hand of a clock, then crashing abruptly out of sight. She knew that it was a man-made motion.
“Who’s the lumberjack around here?” she asked.
“Ted Nielsen.”
The road was relaxing into wider curves and gentler grades, among the softer shapes of hillsides. She saw a rust-brown slope patched by two squares of unmatching green: the dark, dusty green of potato plants, and the pale, greenish-silver of cabbages. A man in a red shirt was riding a small tractor, cutting weeds.
“Who’s the cabbage tycoon?” she asked.
“Roger Marsh.”
She closed her eyes. She thought of the weeds that were climbing up the steps of a closed factory, over its lustrous tile front, a few hundred miles away, beyond the mountains.
The road was descending to the bottom of the valley. She saw the roofs of the town straight below, and the small, shining spot of the dollar sign in the distance at the other end. Galt stopped the car in front of the first structure on a ledge above the roofs, a brick building with a faint tinge of red trembling over its smokestack. It almost shocked her to see so logical a sign as “Stockton Foundry