Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [612]
“What is it? Who are you?”
“One of your employees of the Minnesota Division, Miss Taggart. In another day or two, the trains will stop running out of here—and you know what that means, at the height of the harvest. At the height of the biggest harvest we’ve ever had. They’ll stop, because we have no cars. The harvest freight cars have not been sent to us this year.”
“What did you say?” She felt as if minutes went by between the words of the unnatural voice that did not sound like her own.
“The cars have not been sent. Fifteen thousand should have been here by now. As far as I could learn, about eight thousand cars is all we got. I’ve been calling Division Headquarters for a week. They’ve been telling me not to worry. Last time, they told me to mind my own damn business. Every shed, silo, elevator, warehouse, garage and dance hall along the track is filled with wheat. At the Sherman elevators, there’s a line of farmers’ trucks and wagons two miles long, waiting on the road. At Lakewood Station, the square is packed solid and has been for three nights. They keep telling us it’s only temporary, the cars are coming and we’ll catch up. We won’t. There aren’t any cars coming. I’ve called everyone I could. I know, by the way they answer. They know, and not one of them wants to admit it. They’re scared, scared to move or speak or ask or answer. All they’re thinking of is who will be blamed when that harvest rots here around the stations-and not of who’s going to move it. Maybe nobody can, now. Maybe there’s nothing you can do about it, either. But I thought you’re the only person left who’d want to know and that somebody had to tell you.”
“I ...” She made an effort to breathe. “I see ... Who are you?”
“The name wouldn’t matter. When I hang up, I will have become a deserter. I don’t want to stay here to see it when it happens. I don’t want any part of it any more. Good luck to you, Miss Taggart.”
She heard the click. “Thank you,” she said over a dead wire.
The next time she noticed the office around her and permitted herself to feel, it was noon of the following day. She stood in the middle of the office, running stiff, spread fingers through a strand of hair, brushing it back off her face—and for an instant, she wondered where she was and what was the unbelievable thing that had happened in the last twenty hours. What she felt was horror, and she knew that she had felt it from the first words of the man on the wire, only there had been no time to know it.
There was not much that remained in her mind of the last twenty hours, only disconnected bits, held together by the single constant that had made them possible—by the soft, loose faces of men who fought to hide from themselves that they knew the answers to the questions she asked.
From the moment when she was told that the manager of the Car Service Department had been out of town for a week and had left no address where one could reach him—she knew that the report of the man from Minnesota was true. Then came the faces of the assistants in the Car Service Department, who would neither confirm the report nor deny it, but kept showing her papers, orders, forms, file cards that bore words in the English language, but no connection to intelligible facts. “Were the freight cars sent to Minnesota?” “Form 357W is filled out in every particular, as required by the office of the Co-ordinator in conformance with the instructions of the comptroller and by Directive 11-493.” “Were the freight cars sent to Minnesota?” “The entries for the months of August and September have been processed by—” “Were the freight cars sent to Minnesota?” “My files indicate the locations of freight cars by state, date, classification and—” “Do you know whether