“I quit,” said Ellis Wyatt, “because I didn’t wish to serve as the cannibals’ meal and to do the cooking, besides,”
“I discovered,” said Ken Danagger, “that the men I was fighting were impotent. The shiftless, the purposeless, the irresponsible, the irrational—it was not I who needed them, it was not theirs to dictate terms to me, it was not mine to obey demands. I quit, to let them discover it, too.”
“I quit,” said Quentin Daniels, “because, if there are degrees of damnation, the scientist who places his mind in the service of brute force is the longest-range murderer on earth.”
They were silent. She turned to Galt. “And you?” she asked. “You were first. What made you come to it?”
He chuckled, “My refusal to be born with any original sin.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have never felt guilty of my ability. I have never felt guilty of my mind. I have never felt guilty of being a man. I accepted no unearned guilt, and thus was free to earn and to know my own value. Ever since I can remember, I had felt that I would kill the man who’d claim that I exist for the sake of his need—and I had known that this was the highest moral feeling. That night, at the Twentieth Century meeting, when I heard an unspeakable evil being spoken in a tone of moral righteousness, I saw the root of the world’s tragedy, the key to it and the solution. I saw what had to be done. I went out to do it.”
“And the motor?” she asked. “Why did you abandon it? Why did you leave it to the Starnes heirs?”
“It was then- father’s property. He paid me for it. It was made on his time. But I knew that it would be of no benefit to them and that no one would ever hear of it again. It was my first experimental model.
Nobody but me or my equivalent could have been able to complete it or even to grasp what it was. And I knew that no equivalent of mine would come near that factory from then on.”
“You knew the kind of achievement your motor represented?”
“Yes.”
“And you knew you were leaving it to perish?”
“Yes.” He looked off into the darkness beyond the windows and chuckled softly, but it was not a sound of amusement. “I looked at my motor for the last tune, before I left. I thought of the men who claim that wealth is a matter of natural resources—and of the men who claim that wealth is a matter of seizing the factories—and of the men who claim that machines condition their brains. Well, there was the motor to condition them, and there it remained as just exactly what it is without man’s mind—as a pile of metal scraps and wires, going to rust. You have been thinking of the great service which that motor could have rendered to mankind, if it had been put into production. I think that on the day when men understand the meaning of its fate in that factory’s junk heap—it will have rendered a greater one.”
“Did you expect to see that day, when you left it?”
“No.”
“Did you expect a chance to rebuild it elsewhere?”
“No.”
“And you were willing to let it remain in a junk heap?”
“For the sake of what that motor meant to me,” he said slowly, “I had to be willing to let it crumble and vanish forever”—he looked straight at her and she heard the steady, unhesitant, uninflected ruthlessness of his voice—”just as you will have to be willing to let the rail of Taggart Transcontinental crumble and vanish.”
She held his eyes, her head was lifted, and she said softly, in the tone of a proudly open plea, “Don’t make me answer you now.”
“I won’t. We’ll tell you whatever you wish to know. We won’t urge you to make a decision.” He added, and she was shocked by the sudden gentleness of his voice, “I said that that kind of indifference toward a world which should have been ours was the hardest thing to attain. I know. We’ve all gone through it.”
She looked at the quiet, impregnable room, and at the light—the light that came from his motor—on the faces of men who were the most serene and confident gathering she had ever attended.
“What did you do, when you walked out of the Twentieth Century?” she asked.
“I went out to become a flame-spotter. I made it my job to watch for those bright flares in the growing night of savagery, which were the men of ability, the men of the mind—to watch their course, their struggle and their agony—and to pull them out, when I knew that they had seen enough.”
“What did you tell them to make them abandon everything?”
“I told them that they were right.”
In answer to the silent question of her glance, he added, “I gave them the pride they did not know they had. I gave them the words to identify it. I gave them that priceless possession which they had missed, had longed for, yet had not known they needed: a moral sanction. Did you call me the destroyer and the hunter of men? I was the walking delegate of this strike, the leader of the victims’ rebellion, the defender of the oppressed, the disinherited, the exploited—and when I use these words, they have, for once, a literal meaning.”
“Who were the first to follow you?”
He let a moment pass, in deliberate emphasis, then answered, “My two best friends. You know one of them. You know, perhaps better than anyone else, what price he paid for it. Our own teacher, Dr.
Akston, was next. He joined us within one evening’s conversation. William Hastings, who had been my boss in the research laboratory of Twentieth Century Motors, had a hard time, fighting it out with himself. It took him a year. But he joined. Then Richard Halley. Then Midas Mulligan.”
“—who took fifteen minutes,” said Mulligan.
She turned to him. “It was you who established this valley?”
“Yes,” said Mulligan. “It was just my own private retreat, at first. I bought it years ago, I bought miles of these mountains, section by section, from ranchers and cattlemen who didn’t know what they owned. The valley is not listed on any map. I built this house, when I decided to quit. I cut off all possible avenues of approach, except one road—and it’s camouflaged beyond anyone’s power to discover—and I stocked this place to be self-supporting, so that I could live here for the rest of my life and never have to see the face of a looter. When I heard that John had got Judge Narragansett, too, I invited the Judge to come here. Then we asked Richard Halley to join us. The others remained outside, at first.”
“We had no rules of any kind,” said Galt, “except one. When a man took our oath, it meant a single commitment: not to work in his own profession, not to give to the world the benefit of his mind. Each of us carried it out in any manner he chose. Those who had money, retired to live on their savings. Those who had to work, took the lowest jobs they could find. Some of us had been famous; others—like that young brakeman of yours, whom Halley discovered—were stopped by us before they had set out to get tortured. But we did not give up our minds or the work we loved. Each of us continued in his real profession, in whatever manner and spare time he could manage—but he did it secretly, for his own sole benefit, giving nothing to men, sharing nothing. We were scattered all over the country, as the outcasts we had always been, only now we accepted our parts with conscious intention.
Our sole relief were the rare occasions when we could see one another.
We found that we liked to meet—in order to be reminded that human beings still existed. So we came to set aside one month a year to spend in this valley—to rest, to live in a rational world, to bring our real work out of hiding, to trade our achievements—here, where achievements meant payment, not expropriation. Each of us built his own house here, at his own expense—for one month of life out of twelve.
It made the eleven easier to bear.”
“You see, Miss Taggart,” said Hugh Akston, “man is a social being, but not in the way the looters preach.”
“It’s the destruction of Colorado that started the growth of this valley,” said Midas Mulligan. “Ellis Wyatt and the others came to live here permanently, because they had to hide. Whatever part of their wealth they could salvage, they converted into gold or machines, as I had, and they brought it here. There were enough of us to develop the place and to create jobs for those who had had to earn their living outside. We have now reached the stage where most of us can live here full time. The valley is almost self-supporting—and as to the goods that we can’t yet produce, I purchase them from the outside through a pipe line of my own. It’s a special agent, a man who does not let my money reach the looters. We are not a state here, not a society of any kind—we’re just a voluntary association of men held together by nothing but every man’s self-interest. I own the valley and I sell the land to the others, when they want it. Judge Narragansett is to act as our arbiter, hi case of disagreements. He hasn’t had to be called upon, as yet. They say that it’s hard for men to agree. You’d be surprised how easy it is—when both parties hold as their moral absolute that neither exists for the sake of the other and that reason is their only means of trade. The time is approaching when all of us will have to be called to live here—because the world is falling apart so fast that it will soon be starving.