Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [760]
She did not gasp and she felt no tremor when, in the darkness below, she saw a small string of lighted dots struggling slowly westward through the void, with the long, bright dash of a headlight groping to protect the safety of its way; she felt nothing, even though it was a train and she knew that it had no destination but the void.
She turned to Galt. He was watching her face, as if he had been following her thoughts. She saw the reflection of her smile in his. “It’s the end,” she said. “It’s the beginning,” he answered.
Then they lay still, leaning back in their chairs, silently looking at each other. Then their persons filled each other’s awareness, as the sum and meaning of the future—but the sum included the knowledge of all that had had to be earned, before the person of another being could come to embody the value of one’s existence.
New York was far behind them, when they heard Danneskjöld answer a call from the radio: “Yes, he’s awake. I don’t think he’ll sleep tonight.... Yes, I think he can.” He turned to glance over his shoulder. “John, Dr. Akston would like to speak to you.”
“What? Is he on one of those planes behind us?”
“Certainly.”
Galt leaped forward to seize the microphone. “Hello, Dr. Akston,” he said; the quiet, low tone of his voice was the audible image of a smile transmitted through space.
“Hello, John.” The too-conscious steadiness of Hugh Akston’s voice confessed at what cost he had waited to learn whether he would ever pronounce these two words again. “I just wanted to hear your voice ... just to know that you’re all right.”
Galt chuckled and—in the tone of a student proudly presenting a completed task of homework as proof of a lesson well learned—he answered, “Of course I am all right, Professor. I had to be. A is A.”
The locomotive of the eastbound Comet broke down in the middle of a desert in Arizona. It stopped abruptly, for no visible reason, like a man who had not permitted himself to know that he was bearing too much: some overstrained connection snapped for good.
When Eddie Willers called for the conductor, he waited a long time before the man came in, and he sensed the answer to his question by the look of resignation on the man’s face.
“The engineer is trying to find out what’s wrong, Mr. Willers,” he answered softly, in a tone implying that it was his duty to hope, but that he had held no hope for years.
“He doesn’t know?”
“He’s working on it.” The conductor waited for a polite half-minute and turned to go, but stopped to volunteer an explanation, as if some dim, rational habit told him that any attempt to explain made any unadmitted terror easier to bear. “Those Diesels of ours aren’t fit to be sent out on the road, Mr. Willers. They weren’t worth repairing long ago.”
“I know,” said Eddie Willers quietly.
The conductor sensed that his explanation was worse than none: it led to questions that men did not ask these days. He shook his head and went out.
Eddie Willers sat looking at the empty darkness beyond the window. This was the first eastbound Comet out of San Francisco in many days: she was the child of his tortured effort to re-establish transcontinental service. He could not tell what the past few days had cost him or what he had done to save the San Francisco terminal from the blind chaos of a civil war that men were fighting with no concept of their goals; there was no way to remember the deals he had made on the basis of the range of every shifting moment. He knew only that he had obtained immunity for the terminal from the leaders of three different warring factions; that he had found a man for the post of terminal manager who did not seem to have given up altogether; that he had started one more Taggart Comet on her eastward run, with the best Diesel engine and the best crew available; and that he had boarded her for his return journey to New York, with no knowledge of how long his achievement would last.