“It’s a sound, practical Plan!” snapped James Taggart unexpectedly, with an angry edge of sudden animation in his voice. “It will work!
It has to work! We want it to work!”
No one answered him.
“Mr. Rearden . . . ?” said Holloway timidly.
“Well, let me see,” said Rearden. “Orren Boyle’s Associated Steel owns 60 open-hearth furnaces, one-third of them standing idle and the rest producing an average of 300 tons of steel per furnace per day.
I own 20 open-hearth furnaces, working at capacity, producing tons of Rearden Metal per furnace per day. So we own SO ‘pooled’ furnaces with a ‘pooled’ output of 27,000 tons, which makes an average of 337.5 tons per furnace. Each day of the year, I, producing 15,000 tons, will be paid for 6,750 tons. Boyle, producing 12,000 tons, will be paid for 20,250 tons. Never mind the other members of the pool, they won’t change the scale, except to bring the average still lower, most of them doing worse than Boyle, none of them producing as much as I. Now how long do you expect me to last under your Plan?”
There was no answer, then Lawson cried suddenly, blindly, righteously, “In time of national peril, it is your duty to serve, suffer and work for the salvation of the country!”
“I don’t see why pumping my earnings into Orren Boyle’s pocket is going to save the country.”
“You have to make certain sacrifices to the public welfare!”
“I don’t see why Orren Boyle is more ‘the public’ than I am.”
“Oh, it’s not a question of Mr. Boyle at all! It’s much wider than any one person. It’s a matter of preserving the country’s natural resources—such as factories—and saving the whole of the nation’s industrial plant. We cannot permit the ruin of an establishment as vast as Mr. Boyle’s. The country needs it.”
“I think,” said Rearden slowly, “that the country needs me much more than it needs Orren Boyle.”
“But of course!” cried Lawson with startled enthusiasm. “The country needs you, Mr. Rearden! You do realize that, don’t you?”
But Lawson’s avid pleasure at the familiar formula of self-immolation, vanished abruptly at the sound of Rearden’s voice, a cold, trader’s voice answering: “I do.”
“It’s not Boyle alone who’s involved,” said Holloway pleadingly.
“The country’s economy would not be able to stand a major dislocation at the present moment. There are thousands of Boyle’s workers, suppliers and customers. What would happen to them if Associated Steel went bankrupt?”
“What will happen to the thousands of my workers, suppliers and customers when I go bankrupt?”
“You, Mr. Rearden?” said Holloway incredulously. “But you’re the richest, safest and strongest industrialist in the country at this moment!”
“What about the moment after next?”
“Uh?”
“How long do you expect me to be able to produce at a loss?”
“Oh, Mr. Rearden, I have complete faith in you!”
“To hell with your faith! How do you expect me to do it?”
“You’ll manage!”
“How?”
There was no answer.
“We can’t theorize about the future,” cried Wesley Mouch, “when here’s an immediate national collapse to avoid! We’ve got to save the country’s economy! We’ve got to do something!” Rearden’s imperturbible glance of curiosity drove him to heedlessness. “If you don’t like it, do you have a better solution to offer?”
“Sure,” said Rearden easily. “If it’s production that you want, then get out of the way, junk all of your damn regulations, let Orren Boyle go broke, let me buy the plant of Associated Steel—and it will be pouring a thousand tons a day from every one of its sixty furnaces.”
“Oh, but . . . but we couldn’t!” gasped Mouch. “That would be monopoly!”
Rearden chuckled. “Okay,” he said indifferently, “then let my mills superintendent buy it. Hell do a better job than Boyle.”
“Oh, but that would be letting the strong have an advantage over the weak! We couldn’t do that!”
“Then don’t talk about saving the country’s economy.”
“All we want is—” He stopped.
“All you want is production without men who’re able to produce, isn’t it?”
“That . . . that’s theory. That’s just a theoretical extreme. All we want is a temporary adjustment.”
“You’ve been making those temporary adjustments for years. Don’t you see that you’ve run out of time?”
“That’s just theo . . .” His voice trailed off and stopped.
“Well, now, look here,” said Holloway cautiously, “it’s not as if Mr.
Boyle were actually . . . weak. Mr. Boyle is an extremely able man.
It’s just that he’s suffered some unfortunate reverses, quite beyond his control. He had invested large sums in a public-spirited project to assist the undeveloped peoples of South America, and that copper crash of theirs has dealt him a severe financial blow. So it’s only a matter of giving him a chance to recover, a helping hand to bridge the gap, a bit of temporary assistance, nothing more. All we have to do is just equalize the sacrifice—then everybody will recover and prosper.”
“You’ve been equalizing sacrifice for over a hundred”—he stopped —”for thousands of years,” said Rearden slowly. “Don’t you see that you’re at the end of the road?”
“That’s just theory!” snapped Wesley Mouch.
Rearden smiled. “I know your practice,” he said softly. “It’s your theory that I’m trying to understand.”
He knew that the specific reason behind the Plan was Orren Boyle; he knew that the working of an intricate mechanism, operated by pull, threat, pressure, blackmail—a mechanism like an irrational adding machine run amuck and throwing up any chance sum at the whim of any moment—had happened to add up to Boyle’s pressure upon these men to extort for him this last piece of plunder. He knew also that Boyle was not the cause of it or the essential to consider, that Boyle was only a chance rider, not the builder, of the infernal machine that had destroyed the world, that it was not Boyle who had made it possible, nor any of the men in this room. They, too, were only riders on a machine without a driver, they were trembling hitchhikers who knew that their vehicle was about to crash into its final abyss—and it was not love or fear of Boyle that made them cling to their course and press on toward their end, it was something else, it was some one nameless element which they knew and evaded knowing, something which was neither thought nor hope, something he identified only as a certain look in their faces, a furtive look saying: I can get away with it. Why?—he thought. Why do they think they can?
“We can’t afford any theories!” cried Wesley Mouch. “We’ve got to act!”
“Well, then, I’ll offer you another solution. Why don’t you take over my mills and be done with it?”
The jolt that shook them was genuine terror.
“Oh no!” gasped Mouch.
“We wouldn’t think of it!” cried Holloway.
“We stand for free enterprise!” cried Dr. Ferris.
“We don’t want to harm you!” cried Lawson. “We’re your friends, Mr.
Rearden. Can’t we all work together? We’re your friends.”
There, across the room, stood a table with a telephone, the same table, most likely, and the same instrument—and suddenly Rearden felt as if he were seeing the convulsed figure of a man bent over that telephone, a man who had then known what he, Rearden, was now beginning to learn, a man fighting to refuse him the same request which he was now refusing to the present tenants of this room—he saw the finish of that fight, a man’s tortured face lifted to confront him and a desperate voice saying steadily: “Mr. Rearden, I swear to you . . . by the woman I love . . . that I am your friend.”
This was the act he had then called treason, and this was the man he had rejected in order to go on serving the men confronting him now.
Who, then, had been the traitor?—he thought; he thought it almost without feeling, without right to feel, conscious of nothing but a solemnly reverent clarity. Who had chosen to give its present tenants the means to acquire this room? Whom had he sacrificed and to whose profit?
“Mr. Rearden!” moaned Lawson. “What’s the matter?”
He turned his head, saw Lawson’s eyes watching him fearfully and guessed what look Lawson had caught in his face.
“We don’t want to seize your mills!” cried Mouch.
“We don’t want to deprive you of your property!” cried Dr. Ferris.
“You don’t understand us!”
“I’m beginning to.”
A year ago, he thought, they would have shot him; two years ago, they would have confiscated his property; generations ago, men of their kind had been able to afford the luxury of murder and expropriation, the safety of pretending to themselves and their victims that material loot was their only objective. But their time was running out and his fellow victims had gone, gone sooner than any historical schedule had promised, and they, the looters, were now left to face the undisguised reality of their own goal.