“Look, boys,” he said wearily. “I know what you want. You want to eat my mills and have them, too. And all I want to know is this: what makes you think it’s possible?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Mouch in an injured tone of voice. “We said we didn’t want your mills.”
“All right, I’ll say it more precisely: You want to eat me and have me, too. How do you propose to do it?”
“I don’t know how you can say that, after we’ve given you every assurance that we consider you of invaluable importance to the country, to the steel industry, to—”
“I believe you. That’s what makes the riddle Harder. You consider me of invaluable importance to the country? Hell, you consider me of invaluable importance even to your own necks. You sit there trembling, because you know that I’m the last one left to save your lives—and you know that time is as short as that. Yet you propose a plan to destroy me, a plan which demands, with an idiot’s crudeness, without loopholes, detours or escape, that I work at a loss—that I work, with every ton I pour costing me more than I’ll get for it—that I feed the last of my wealth away until we all starve together. That much irrationality is not possible to any man or any looter. For your own sake—never mind the country’s or mine—you must be counting on something. What?”
He saw the getting-away-with-it look on their faces, a peculiar look that seemed secretive, yet resentful, as if, incredibly, it were he who was hiding some secret from them.
“I don’t see why you should choose to take such a defeatist view of the situation,” said Mouch sullenly.
“Defeatist? Do you really expect me to be able to remain in business under your Plan?”
“But it’s only temporary!”
“There’s no such thing as a temporary suicide.”
“But it’s only for the duration of the emergency! Only until the country recovers!”
“How do you expect it to recover?”
There was no answer.
“How do you expect me to produce after I go bankrupt?”
“You won’t go bankrupt. You’ll always produce,” said Dr. Ferris indifferently, neither in praise nor in blame, merely in the tone of stating a fact of nature, as he would have said to another man: You’ll always be a bum, “You can’t help it. It’s in your blood. Or, to be more scientific: you’re conditioned that way.”
Rearden sat up: it was as if he had been struggling to find the secret combination of a lock and felt, at those words, a faint click within, as of the first tumbrel falling into place.
“It’s only a matter of weathering this crisis,” said Mouch, “of giving people a reprieve, a chance to catch up.”
“And then?”
“Then things will improve.”
“How?”
There was no answer.
“What will improve them?”
There was no answer.
“Who will improve them?”
“Christ, Mr. Rearden, people don’t just stand still!” cried Holloway, “They do things, they grow, they move forward!”
“What people?”
Holloway waved his hand vaguely. “People,” he said.
“What people? The people to whom you’re going to feed the last of Rearden Steel, without getting anything in return? The people who’ll go on consuming more than they produce?”
“Conditions will change.”
“Who’ll change them?”
There was no answer.
“Have you anything left to loot? If you didn’t see the nature of your policy before—it’s not possible that you don’t see it now. Look around you. All those damned People’s States all over the earth have been existing only on the handouts which you squeezed for them out of this country. But you—you have no place left to sponge on or mooch from. No country on the face of the globe. This was the greatest and last. You’ve drained it. You’ve milked it dry. Of all that irretrievable splendor, I’m only one remnant, the last, What will you do, you and your People’s Globe, after you’ve finished me? What are you hoping for? What do you see ahead—except plain, stark, animal starvation?”
They did not answer. They did not look at him. Their faces wore expressions of stubborn resentment, as if his were the plea of a liar.
Then Lawson said softly, half in reproach, half in scorn, “Well, after all, you businessmen have kept predicting disasters for years, you’ve cried catastrophe at every progressive measure and told us that we’ll perish—but we haven’t.” He started a smile, but drew back from the sudden intensity of Rearden’s eyes.
Rearden had felt another click in his mind, the sharper click of the second tumbrel connecting the circuits of the lock. He leaned forward.
“What are you counting on?” he asked; his tone had changed, it was low, it had the steady, pressing, droning sound of a drill.
“It’s only a matter of gaining time!” cried Mouch.
“There isn’t any time left to gain.”
“All we need is a chance!” cried Lawson.
“There are no chances left.”
“It’s only until we recover!” cried Holloway.
“There is no way to recover.”
“Only until our policies begin to work!” cried Dr. Ferris.
“There’s no way to make the irrational work.’1 There was no answer.
“What can save you now?”
“Oh, you’ll do something!” cried James Taggart.
Then—even though it was only a sentence he had heard all his life—he felt a deafening crash within him, as of a steel door dropping open at the touch of the final tumbrel, the one small number completing the sum and releasing the intricate lock, the answer uniting all the pieces, the questions and the unsolved wounds of his life.
In the moment of silence after the crash, it seemed to him that he heard Francisco’s voice, asking him quietly in the ballroom of this building, yet asking it also here and now: “Who is the guiltiest man in this room?” He heard his own answer of the past: “I suppose—James Taggart?” and Francisco’s voice saying without reproach: “No, Mr. Rearden, it’s not James Taggart,”—but here, in this room and this moment, his mind answered: “I am.”
He had cursed these looters for their stubborn blindness? It was he who had made it possible. From the first extortion he had accepted, from the first directive he had obeyed, he had given them cause to believe that reality was a thing to be cheated, that one could demand the irrational and someone somehow would provide it. If he had accepted the Equalization of Opportunity Bill, if he had accepted Directive 10-289, if he had accepted the law that those who could not equal his ability had the right to dispose of it, that those who had not earned were to profit, but he who had was to lose, that those who could not think were to command, but he who could was to obey them—then were they illogical in believing that they existed in an irrational universe? He had made it for them, he had provided it.
Were they illogical in believing that theirs was only to wish, to wish with no concern for the possible—and that his was to fulfill their wishes, by means they did not have to know or name? They, the impotent mystics, struggling to escape the responsibility of reason, had known that he, the rationalist, had undertaken to serve their whims.
They had known that he had given them a blank check on reality—his was not to ask why?—theirs was not to ask how?—let them demand that he give them a share of his wealth, then all that he owns, then more than he owns—impossible?—no, he’ll do something!
He did not know that he had leaped to his feet, that he stood staring down at James Taggart, seeing in the unbridled shapelessness of Taggart’s features the answer to all the devastation he had witnessed through the years of his life.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Rearden? What have I said?” Taggart was asking with rising anxiety—but he was out of the reach of Taggart’s voice.
He was seeing the progression of the years, the monstrous extortions, the impossible demands, the inexplicable victories of evil, the preposterous plans and unintelligible goals proclaimed in volumes of muddy philosophy, the desperate wonder of the victims who thought that some complex, malevolent wisdom was moving the powers destroying the world—and all of it had rested on one tenet behind the shifty eyes of the victors: he’ll do something! . . . We’ll get away with it—he’ll let us—he’ll do something! . . .
You businessmen kept predicting that we’d perish, but we haven’t.
. . . It was true, he thought. They had not been blind to reality, he had—blind to the reality he himself had created. No, they had not perished, but who had? Who had perished to pay for their manner of survival? Ellis Wyatt . . . Ken Danagger . . . Francisco d’Anconia.
He was reaching for his hat and coat, when he noticed that the men in the room were trying to stop him, that their faces had a look of panic and their voices were crying in bewilderment: “What’s the matter, Mr.