Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [470]
The shops were small one-story structures, and as they moved past her, she caught familiar names on their signs, like headings on the pages of a book riffled by the car’s motion: Mulligan General Store—Atwood Leather Goods—Nielsen Lumber—then the sign of the dollar above the door of a small brick factory with the inscription: Mulligan Tobacco Company. “Who’s the Company, besides Midas Mulligan?” she asked. “Dr. Akston,” he answered.
There were few passers-by, some men, fewer women, and they walked with purposeful swiftness, as if bound on specific errands. One after another, they stopped at the sight of the car, they waved to Galt and they looked at her with the unastonished curiosity of recognition. “Have I been expected here for a long time?” she asked. “You still are,” he answered.
On the edge of the road, she saw a structure made of glass sheets held together by a wooden framework, but for one instant it seemed to her that it was only a frame for the painting of a woman—a tall, fragile woman with pale blond hair and a face of such beauty that it seemed veiled by distance, as if the artist had been merely able to suggest it, not to make it quite real. In the next instant the woman moved her head—and Dagny realized that there were people at the tables inside the structure, that it was a cafeteria, that the woman stood behind the counter, and that she was Kay Ludlow, the movie star who, once seen, could never be forgotten; the star who had retired and vanished five years ago, to be replaced by girls of indistinguishable names and interchangeable faces. But at the shock of the realization, Dagny thought of the sort of movies that were now being made—and then she felt that the glass cafeteria was a cleaner use for Kay Ludlow’s beauty than a role in a picture glorifying the commonplace for possessing no glory.
The building that came next was a small, squat block of rough granite, sturdy, solid, neatly built, the lines of its rectangular bulk as severely precise as the creases of a formal garment—but she saw, like an instant’s ghost, the long streak of a skyscraper rising into the coils of Chicago’s fog, the skyscraper that had once borne the sign she now saw written in gold letters above a modest pine-wood door: Mulligan Bank.
Gait slowed the car while moving past the bank, as if placing the motion in some special italics.
A small brick structure came next, bearing the sign: Mulligan Mint. “A mint?” she asked. “What’s Mulligan doing with a mint?” Galt reached into his pocket and dropped two small coins into the palm of her hand. They were miniature disks of shining gold, smaller than pennies, the kind that had not been in circulation since the days of Nat Taggart; they bore the head of the Statue of Liberty on one side, the words “United States of America—One Dollar” on the other, but the dates stamped upon them were of the past two years.
“That’s the money we use here,” he said. “It’s minted by Midas Mulligan.”
“But . . . on whose authority?”
“That’s stated on the coin—on both sides of it.”
“What do you use for small change?”
“Mulligan mints that, too, in silver. We don’t accept any other currency in this valley. We accept nothing but objective values.”
She was studying the coins. “This looks like... like something from the first morning in the age of my ancestors.”
He pointed at the valley. “Yes, doesn’t it?”
She sat looking at the two thin, delicate, almost weightless drops of gold in the palm of her hand, knowing that the whole of the Taggart Transcontinental system had rested upon them, that this had been the keystone supporting all the keystones, all the arches, all the girders of the Taggart track, the Taggart Bridge, the Taggart Building.... She shook her head and slipped the coins back into his hand.
“You’re not