Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [483]
“I quit,” said Ellis Wyatt, “because I didn’t wish to serve as the cannibals’ meal and to do the cooking, besides.”
“I discovered,” said Ken Danagger, “that the men I was fighting were impotent. The shiftless, the purposeless, the irresponsible, the irrational—it was not I who needed them, it was not theirs to dictate terms to me, it was not mine to obey demands. I quit, to let them discover it, too.”
“I quit,” said Quentin Daniels, “because, if there are degrees of damnation, the scientist who places his mind in the service of brute force is the longest-range murderer on earth.”
They were silent. She turned to Galt. “And you?” she asked. “You were first. What made you come to it?”
He chuckled. “My refusal to be born with any original sin.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have never felt guilty of my ability. I have never felt guilty of my mind. I have never felt guilty of being a man. I accepted no unearned guilt, and thus was free to earn and to know my own value. Ever since I can remember, I had felt that I would kill the man who’d claim that I exist for the sake of his need—and I had known that this was the highest moral feeling. That night, at the Twentieth Century meeting, when I heard an unspeakable evil being spoken in a tone of moral righteousness, I saw the root of the world’s tragedy, the key to it and the solution. I saw what had to be done. I went out to do it.”
“And the motor?” she asked. “Why did you abandon it? Why did you leave it to the Starnes heirs?”
“It was their father’s property. He paid me for it. It was made on his time. But I knew that it would be of no benefit to them and that no one would ever hear of it again. It was my first experimental model. Nobody but me or my equivalent could have been able to complete it or even to grasp what it was. And I knew that no equivalent of mine would come near that factory from then on.”
“You knew the kind of achievement your motor represented?”
“Yes.”
“And you knew you were leaving it to perish?”
“Yes.” He looked off into the darkness beyond the windows and chuckled softly, but it was not a sound of amusement. “I looked at my motor for the last time, before I left. I thought of the men who claim that wealth is a matter of natural resources—and of the men who claim that wealth is a matter of seizing the factories—and of the men who claim that machines condition their brains. Well, there was the motor to condition them, and there it remained as just exactly what it is without man’s mind—as a pile of metal scraps and wires, going to rust. You have been thinking of the great service which that motor could have rendered to mankind, if it had been put into production. I think that on the day when men understand the meaning of its fate in that factory’s junk heap—it will have rendered a greater one.”
“Did you expect to see that day, when you left it?”
“No.”
“Did you expect a chance to rebuild it elsewhere?”
.“No.”
“And you were willing to let it remain in a junk heap?”
“For the sake of what that motor meant to me,” he said slowly, “I had to be willing to let it crumble and vanish forever”—he looked straight at her and she heard the steady, unhesitant, uninflected ruthlessness of his voice—“just as you will have to be willing to let the rail of Taggart Transcontinental crumble and vanish.”
She held his eyes, her head was lifted, and she said softly, in the tone of a proudly open plea, “Don’t make me answer you now.”
“I won’t. We’ll tell you whatever you wish to know. We won’t urge you to make a decision.” He added, and she was shocked by the sudden gentleness