Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [548]
“Mr. Meigs,” she asked, prompted by a touch of bitterly amused curiosity, “what is your economic plan for day after tomorrow?”
She saw his bleary brown eyes focus upon her without expression. “You’re impractical,” he said.
“It’s perfectly useless to theorize about the future,” snapped Taggart, “when we have to take care of the emergency of the moment. In the long run—”
“In the long run, we’ll all be dead,” said Meigs.
Then, abruptly, he shot to his feet. “I’ll run along, Jim,” he said. “I’ve got no time to waste on conversations.” He added, “You talk to her about that matter of doing something to stop all those train wrecks—if she’s the little girl who’s such a wizard at railroading.” It was said in-offensively; he was a man who would not know when he was giving offense or taking it.
“I’ll see you later, Cuffy,” said Taggart, as Meigs walked out with no parting glance at any of them.
Taggart looked at her, expectantly and fearfully, as if dreading her comment, yet desperately hoping to hear some word, any word.
“Well?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Have you anything else to discuss?”
“Well, I ...” He sounded disappointed. “Yes!” he cried, in the tone of a desperate plunge. “I have another matter to discuss, the most important one of all, the—”
“Your growing number of train wrecks?”
“No! Not that.”
“What, then?”
“It’s . . . that you’re going to appear on Bertram Scudder’s radio program tonight.”
She leaned back. “Am I?”
“Dagny, it’s imperative, it’s crucial, there’s nothing to be done about it, to refuse is out of the question, in times like these one has no choice, and—”
She glanced at her watch. “I’ll give you three minutes to explain—if you want to be heard at all. And you’d better speak straight.”
“All right!” he said desperately. “It’s considered most important—on the highest levels, I mean Chick Morrison and Wesley Mouch and Mr. Thompson, as high as that—that you should make a speech to the nation, a morale-building speech, you know, saying that you haven’t quit.”
“Why?”
“Because everybody thought you had! ... You don’t know what’s been going on lately, but . . . but it’s sort of uncanny. The country is full of rumors, all sorts of rumors, about everything, all of them dangerous. Disruptive, I mean. People seem to do nothing but whisper. They don’t believe the newspapers, they don’t believe the best speakers, they believe every vicious, scare-mongering piece of gossip that comes floating around. There’s no confidence left, no faith, no order, no ... no respect for authority. People . . . people seem to be on the verge of panic.”
“Well?”
“Well, for one thing, it’s that damnable business of all those big industrialists who’ve vanished into thin air! Nobody’s been able to explain it and it’s giving them the jitters. There’s all sorts of hysterical stuff being whispered about it, but what they whisper mostly is that ‘no decent man will work for those people.’ They mean the people in Washington. Now do you see? You wouldn’t suspect that you were so famous, but you are, or you’ve become, ever since your plane crash. Nobody believed the plane crash. They all thought you had broken the law, that is, Directive 10-289, and deserted. There’s a lot of popular ... misunderstanding of Directive 10-289, a lot of ... well, unrest. Now you see how important it is that you go on the air and tell people that it isn’t true that Directive 10-289 is destroying industry, that it’s a sound piece of legislation devised for everybody’s good, and that if they’ll just be patient a little longer, things will improve and prosperity will return. They don’t believe any public official any more. You . . . you’re an industrialist, one of the few left of the old school, and the only one who’s ever come back after they thought you’d gone. You’re known as ... as a reactionary who’s opposed