Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [468]
When she walked, leaning on her cane, out of the sunlight into the dank gloom of the building, the shock she felt was part sense of anachronism, part homesickness. This was the industrial East which, in the last few hours, had seemed to be centuries behind her. This was the old, the familiar, the loved sight of reddish billows rising to steel rafters, of sparks shooting in sunbursts from invisible sources, of sudden flames streaking through a black fog, of sand molds glowing with white metal. The fog hid the walls of the structure, dissolving its size—and for a moment, this was the great, dead foundry at Stockton, Colorado, it was Nielsen Motors... it was Rearden Steel.
“Hi, Dagny!”
The smiling face that approached her out of the fog was Andrew Stockton.‘s, and she saw a grimy hand extended to her with a gesture of confident pride, as if it held all of her moment’s vision on its palm.
She clasped the hand. “Hello,” she said softly, not knowing whether she was greeting the past or the future. Then she shook her head and added, “How come you’re not planting potatoes or making shoes around here? You’ve actually remained in your own profession.”
“Oh, Calvin Atwood of the Atwood Light and Power Company of New York City is making the shoes. Besides, my profession is one of the oldest and most immediately needed anywhere. Still, I had to fight for it. I had to ruin a competitor, first.”
“What?”
He grinned and pointed to the glass door of a sun-flooded room. “There’s my ruined competitor,” he said.
She saw a young man bent over a long table, working on a complex model for the mold of a drill head. He had the slender, powerful hands of a concert pianist and the grim face of a surgeon concentrating on his task.
“He’s a sculptor,” said Stockton. “When I came here, he and his partner had a sort of combination hand-forge and repair shop. I opened a real foundry, and took all their customers away from them. The boy couldn’t do the kind of job I did, it was only a part-time business for him, anyway—sculpture is his real business—so he came to work for me. He’s making more money now, in shorter hours, than he used to make in his own foundry. His partner was a chemist, so he went into agriculture and he’s produced a chemical fertilizer that’s doubled some of the crops around here—did you mention potatoes?—potatoes, in particular.”
“Then somebody could put you out of business, too?”
“Sure. Any time. I know one man who could and probably will, when he gets here. But, boy!—I’d work for him as a cinder sweeper. He’d blast through this valley like a rocket. He’d triple everybody’s production.”
“Who’s that?”
“Hank Rearden.”
“Yes ...” she whispered. “Oh yes!”
She wondered what had made her say it with such immediate certainty. She felt, simultaneously, that Hank Rearden’s presence in this valley was impossible—and that this was his place, peculiarly his, this was the place of his youth, of his start, and, together, the place he had been seeking all his life, the land he had struggled to reach, the goal of his tortured battle.... It seemed to her that the spirals of flame-tinged fog were drawing time into an odd circle—and while a dim .thought went floating through her mind like the streamer of an unfol lowed sentence: To hold an unchanging youth is to reach, at the end, the vision with which one started—she heard the voice of a tramp in a diner, saying, “John Gait found the fountain of youth which he wanted to bring down to men. Only he never came back... because he found that it couldn’t be brought down.”
A sheaf of sparks went up in the depth of the fog—and she saw the broad back of a foreman whose arm made the sweeping gesture of a signal, directing some invisible task. He jerked his head to snap an order—she caught a glimpse of his profile—and she caught her breath. Stockton saw it, chuckled and called into the fog:
“Hey, Ken! Come here! Here’s an old friend of yours!”
She looked at Ken Danagger as he approached them. The great industrialist, whom she had tried so desperately to hold to his desk, was now dressed