Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [750]
“What’s the matter with you?” gasped Mouch, catching a glimpse of Taggart’s face while a current was twisting Galt’s body: Taggart was staring at it intently, yet his eyes seemed glazed and dead, but around that inanimate stare the muscles of his face were pulled into an obscene caricature of enjoyment.
“Had enough?” Ferris kept yelling to Galt. “Are you ready to want what we want?”
They heard no answer. Galt raised his head once in a while and looked at them. There were dark rings under his eyes, but the eyes were clear and conscious.
In mounting panic, the watchers lost their sense of context and language—and their three voices blended into a progression of indiscriminate shrieks: “We want you to take over! ... We want you to rule! ... We order you to give orders! ... We demand that you dictate! ... We order you to save us! ... We order you to think! ...”
They heard no answer but the beating of the heart on which their own lives depended.
The current was shooting through Galt’s chest and the beating was coming in irregular spurts, as if it were racing and stumbling—when suddenly his body fell still, relaxing: the beating had stopped.
The silence was like a stunning blow, and before they had time to scream, their horror was topped by another: by the fact that Galt opened his eyes and raised his head.
Then they realized that the drone of the motor had ceased, too, and that the red light had gone out on the control panel: the current had stopped; the generator was dead.
The mechanic was jabbing his finger at the button, to no avail. He yanked the lever of the switch again and again. He kicked the side of the machine. The red light would not go on; the sound did not return. .
“Well?” snapped Ferris. “Well? What’s the matter?”
“The generator’s on the blink,” said the mechanic helplessly.
“What’s the matter with it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, find out and fix it!”
The man was not a trained electrician; he had been chosen, not for his knowledge, but for his uncritical capacity for pushing anv buttons; the effort he needed to learn his task was such that his consciousness could be relied upon to have no room for anything else. He opened the rear panel of the machine and stared in bewilderment at the intricate coils: he could find nothing visibly out of order. He put on his rubber gloves, picked up a pair of pliers, tightened a few bolts at random, and scratched his head.
“I don’t know,” he said; his voice had a sound of helpless docility. “Who am I to know?”
The three men were on their feet, crowding behind the machine to stare at its recalcitrant organs. They were acting merely by reflex: they knew that they did not know.
“But you’ve got to fix it!” yelled Ferris. “It’s got to work! We’ve got to have electricity!”
“We must continue!” cried Taggart; he was shaking. “It’s ridiculous! I won’t have it! I won’t be interrupted! I won’t let him off!” He pointed in the direction of the mattress.
“Do something!” Ferris was crying to the mechanic. “Don’t just stand there! Do something! Fix it! I order you to fix it!”
“But I don’t know what’s wrong with it,” said the man, blinking.
“Then find out!”
“How am I to find out?”
“I order you to fix it! Do you hear me? Make it work—or I’ll fire you and throw you in jail!”
“But I don’t know what’s wrong with it.” The man sighed, bewildered. “I don’t know what to do.”
“It’s the vibrator that’s out of order,” said a voice behind them; they whirled around; Galt was struggling for breath, but he was speaking in the brusque, competent tone of an engineer. “Take it out and pry off the aluminum cover. You’ll find a pair of contacts fused together. Force them apart, take a small file and clean up the pitted surfaces. Then replace the cover, plug it back into the machine—and your generator will work.”
There was a long moment of total silence.
The mechanic was staring at Galt; he was holding Galt’s glance—and even he was able to recognize the nature of the sparkle in the dark green eyes: