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By Root 5179 0

of vagrants, what my years would have brought me, if that world had existed, and I felt a desperate longing—he was the image of everything I should have been ... and he had everything that should have been mine.... But it was only a moment. Then I saw the scene in full context again and in all of its actual meaning—I saw what price he was paying for his brilliant ability, what torture he was enduring in silent bewilderment, struggling to understand what I had understood—I saw that the world he suggested, did not exist and was yet to be made, I saw him again for what he was, the symbol of my battle, the unrewarded hero whom I was to avenge and to release—and then ... then I accepted what I had learned about you and him. I saw that it changed nothing, that I should have expected it—that it was right.”

He heard the faint sound of her moan and he chuckled softly.

“Dagny, it’s not that I don’t suffer, it’s that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one’s soul and as a permanent scar across one’s view of existence. Don’t feel sorry for me. It was gone right then.”

She turned her head to look at him in silence, and he smiled, lifting himself on an elbow to look down at her face as she lay helplessly still. She whispered, “You’ve been a track laborer, here—here!—for twelve years ...”

“Yes.”

“Ever since—”

“Ever since I quit the Twentieth Century.”

“The night when you saw me for the first time ... you were working here, then?”

“Yes. And the morning when you offered to work for me as my cook, I was only your track laborer on leave of absence. Do you see why I laughed as I did?”

She was looking up at his face; hers was a smile of pain, his—of pure gaiety. “John ...”

“Say it. But say it all.”

“You were here ... all those years ...”

“Yes.”

“.... all those years ... while the railroad was perishing ... while I was searching for men of intelligence ... while I was struggling to hold onto any scrap of it I could find ...”

“.... while you were combing the country for the inventor of my motor, while you were feeding James Taggart and Wesley Mouch, while you were naming your best achievement after the enemy whom you wanted to destroy.”

She closed her eyes.

“I was here all those years,” he said, “within your reach, inside your own realm, watching your struggle, your loneliness, your longing, watching you in a battle you thought you were fighting for me, a battle in which you were supporting my enemies and taking an endless defeat -I was here, hidden by nothing but an error of your sight, as Atlantis is hidden from men by nothing but an optical illusion—I was here, waiting for the day when you would see, when you would know that by the code of the world you were supporting, it’s to the darkest bottom of the underground that all the things you valued would have to be consigned and that it’s there that you would have to look. I was here. I was waiting for you. I love you, Dagny. I love you more than my life, I who have taught men how life is to be loved. I’ve taught them also never to expect the unpaid for-and what I did tonight, I did it with full knowledge that I would pay for it and that my life might have to be the price.”

.“No!”

He smiled, nodding. “Oh yes. You know that you’ve broken me for once, that I broke the decision I had set for myself—but I did it consciously, knowing what it meant, I did it, not in blind surrender to the moment, but with full sight of the consequences and full willingness to bear them. I could not let this kind of moment pass us by, it was ours, my love, we had earned it. But you’re not ready to quit and join me—you don’t have to tell me, I know—and since I chose to take what I wanted before it was fully mine, I’ll have to pay for it, I have no way of knowing how or when, I know only that if I give in to an enemy, I’ll take the consequences.” He smiled in answer to the look on her face. “No, Dagny, you’re not my enemy in mind—and that is what brought me to this—but you are in fact, in the course you’re pursuing, though