Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [566]
“No.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I don’t want anything, Jim.”
“But you’ve got to! You’ve got to want something, damn you!”
She looked at him, faintly startled, but otherwise indifferent.
“Oh, all right, I’m sorry,” he said; he seemed astonished by his own outbreak. “I just wanted to please you,” he added sullenly, “but I guess you can’t understand it at all. You don’t know how important it is. You don’t know how big a man you’re married to.”
“I’m trying to find out,” she said slowly.
“Do you still think, as you used to, that Hank Rearden is a great man?”
“Yes, Jim, I do.”
“Well, I’ve got him beaten. I’m greater than any of them, greater than Rearden and greater than that other lover of my sister.‘s, who—” He stopped, as if he had slid too far.
“Jim,” she asked evenly, “what is going to happen on September second?”
He glanced up at her, from under his forehead—a cold glance, while his muscles creased into a semi-smile, as if in cynical breach of some hallowed restraint. “They’re going to nationalize d.‘Anconia Copper,” he said.
He heard the long, harsh roll of a motor, as a plane went by somewhere in the darkness above the roof, then a thin tinkle, as a piece of ice settled, melting, in the silver bowl of his fruit cup—before she answered. She said, “He was your friend, wasn’t he?”
“Oh, shut up!”
He remained silent, not looking at her. When his eyes came back to her face, she was still watching him and she spoke first, her voice oddly stem: “What your sister did in her radio broadcast was great.”
“Yes, I know, I know, you’ve been saying that for a month.”
“You’ve never answered me.”
“What is there to ans ... ?”
“Just as your friends in Washington have never answered her.” He remained silent. “Jim, I’m not dropping the subject.” He did not answer. “Your friends in Washington never uttered a word about it. They did not deny the things she said, they did not explain, they did not try to justify themselves. They acted as if she had never spoken. I think they’re hoping that people will forget it. Some people will. But the rest of us know what she said and that your friends were afraid to fight her.”
“That’s not true! The proper action was taken and the incident is closed and I don’t see why you keep bringing it up.”
“What action?”
“Bertram Scudder was taken off the air, as a program not in the public interest at the present time.”
“Does that answer her?”
“It closes the issue and there’s nothing more to be said about it.”
“About a government that works by blackmail and extortion?”
“You can’t say that nothing was done. It’s been publicly announced that Scudder’s programs were disruptive, destructive and untrustworthy.”
“Jim, I want to understand this. Scudder wasn’t on her side—he was on yours. He didn’t even arrange that broadcast. He was acting on orders from Washington, wasn’t he?”
“I thought you didn’t like Bertram Scudder.”
“I didn’t and I don.‘t, but—”
“Then what do you care?”
“But he was innocent, as far as your friends were concerned, wasn’t he?”
“I wish you wouldn’t bother with politics. You talk like a fool.”
“He was innocent, wasn’t he?”
“So what?”
She looked at him, her eyes incredulously wide. “Then they just made him the scapegoat, didn’t they?”
“Oh, don’t sit there looking like Eddie Willers!”
“Do I? I like Eddie Willers. He’s honest.”
“He’s a damn half-wit who doesn’t have the faintest idea of how to deal with practical reality!”
“But you do, don’t you, Jim?”
“You bet I do!”
“Then couldn’t you have helped Scudder?”
“I?” He burst into helpless, angry laughter. “Oh, why don’t you grow up? I did my best to get Scudder thrown to the lions! Somebody had to be. Don’t you know that it was my neck, if some other hadn’t been found?”
“Your neck? Why not Dagny.‘s, if she was wrong? Because she wasn’t?”
“Dagny is in