Rearden answered quietly, “I’ll tell you. You won’t understand. You see, it’s because Rearden Metal is good.”
Dagny could not understand Mr. Mowen’s motive. The Amalgamated Switch and Signal Company had suddenly given notice that they would not complete her order. Nothing had happened, she could find no cause for it and they would give no explanation.
She had hurried to Connecticut, to see Mr. Mowen in person, but the sole result of the interview was a heavier, grayer weight of bewilderment in her mind. Mr. Mowen stated that he would not continue to make switches of Rearden Metal. For sole explanation, he said, avoiding her eyes, “Too many people don’t like it.”
“What? Rearden Metal or your making the switches?”
“Both, I guess . . . People don’t like it . . . I don’t want any trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Any kind.”
“Have you heard a single thing against Rearden Metal that’s true?”
“Aw, who knows what’s true? . . . That resolution of the National Council of Metal Industries said—”
“Look, you’ve worked with metals all your life. For the last four months, you’ve worked with Rearden Metal. Don’t you know that it’s the greatest thing you’ve ever handled?” He did not answer. “Don’t you know it?” He looked away. “Don’t you know what’s true?”
“Hell, Miss Taggart, I’m in business, I’m only a little guy. I just want to make money.”
“How do you think one makes it?”
But she knew that it was useless. Looking at Mr. Mowen’s face, at the eyes which she could not catch, she felt as she had felt once on a lonely section of track, when a storm blew down the telephone wires: that communications were cut and that words had become sounds which transmitted nothing.
It was useless to argue, she thought, and to wonder about people who would neither refute an argument nor accept it. Sitting restlessly in the train, on her way back to New York, she told herself that Mr.
Mowen did not matter, that nothing mattered now, except finding somebody else to manufacture the switches. She was wrestling with a list of names in her mind, wondering who would be easiest to convince, to beg or to bribe.
She knew, the moment she entered the anteroom of her office, that something had happened. She saw the unnatural stillness, with the faces of her staff turned to her as if her entrance were the moment they had all waited for, hoped for and dreaded.
Eddie Willers rose to his feet and started toward the door of her office, as if knowing that she would understand and follow. She had seen his face. No matter what it was, she thought, she wished it had not hurt him quite so badly.
“The State Science Institute,” he said quietly, when they were alone in her office, “has issued a statement warning people against the use of Rearden Metal.” He added, “It was on the radio. It’s in the afternoon papers.”
“What did they say?”
“Dagny, they didn’t say it! . . . They haven’t really said it, yet it’s there—and it isn’t. That’s what’s monstrous about it.”
His effort was focused on keeping his voice quiet; he could not control his words. The words were forced out of him by the unbelieving. bewildered indignation of a child screaming in denial at his first encounter with evil.
“What did they say, Eddie?”
“They . . . You’d have to read it.” He pointed to the newspaper he had left on her desk. “They haven’t said that Rearden Metal is bad.
They haven’t said that it’s unsafe. What they’ve done is . . .” His hands spread and dropped in a gesture of futility.
She saw at a glance what they had done. She saw the sentences: “It may be possible that after a period of heavy usage, a sudden fissure may appear, though the length of this period cannot be predicted. . . . The possibility of a molecular reaction, at present unknown, cannot be entirely discounted. . . . Although the tensile strength of the metal is obviously demonstrable, certain questions in regard to its behavior under unusual stress are not to be ruled out.
. . . Although there is no evidence to support the contention that the use of the metal should be prohibited, a further study of its properties would be of value.”
“We can’t fight it. It can’t be answered,” Eddie was saying slowly.
“We can’t demand a retraction. We can’t show them our tests or prove anything. They’ve said nothing. They haven’t said a thing that could be refuted and embarrass them professionally. It’s the job of a coward.
You’d expect it from some con-man or blackmailer. But, Dagny! It’s the State Science Institute!”
She nodded silently. She stood, her eyes fixed on some point beyond the window. At the end of a dark street, the bulbs of an electric sign kept going on and off, as if winking at her maliciously.
Eddie gathered his strength and said in the tone of a military report, “Taggart stock has crashed. Ben Nealy quit. The National Brotherhood of Road and Track Workers has forbidden its members to work on the Rio Norte Line. Jim has left town.”
She took her hat and coat off, walked across the room and slowly, very deliberately sat down at her desk.
She noticed a large brown envelope lying before her; it bore the letterhead of Rearden Steel.
“That came by special messenger, right after you left,” said Eddie.
She put her hand on the envelope, but did not open it. She knew what it was: the drawings of the bridge.
After a while, she asked, “Who issued that statement?”
Eddie glanced at her and smiled briefly, bitterly, shaking his head.
“No,” he said. “I thought of that, too. I called the Institute long distance and asked them. No, it was issued by the office of Dr. Floyd Ferris, their co-ordinator.”
She said nothing.
“But still! Dr. Stadler is the head of that Institute. He is the Institute. He must have known about it. He permitted it. If it’s done, it’s done in his name . . . Dr. Robert Stadler . . . Do you remember . . . when we were in college . . . how we used to talk about the great names in the world . . . the men of pure intellect . . . and we always chose his name as one of them, and—” He stopped. “I’m sorry, Dagny. I know it’s no use saying anything. Only—”
She sat, her hand pressed to the brown envelope.
“Dagny,” he asked, his voice low, “what is happening to people?
Why did that statement succeed? It’s such an obvious smear-job, so obvious and so rotten. You’d think a decent person would throw it in the gutter. How could”—his voice was breaking in gentle, desperate, rebellious anger—”how could they accept it? Didn’t they read it?
Didn’t they see? Don’t they think? Dagny! What is it in people that lets them do this—and how can we live with it?”
“Quiet, Eddie,” she said, “quiet. Don’t be afraid.”
The building of the State Science Institute stood over a river of New Hampshire, on a lonely hillside, halfway between the river and the sky. From a distance, it looked like a solitary monument in a virgin forest. The trees were carefully planted, the roads were laid out as a park, the roof tops of a small town could be seen in a valley some miles away. But nothing had been allowed to come too close and detract from the building’s austerity.
The white marble of the walls gave it a classical grandeur; the composition of its rectangular masses gave it the cleanliness and beauty of a modern plant. It was an inspired structure. From across the river, people looked at it with reverence and thought of it as a monument to a living man whose character had the nobility of the building’s lines.
Over the entrance, a dedication was cut into the marble: “To the fearless mind. To the inviolate truth.” In a quiet aisle, in a bare corridor, a small brass plate, such as dozens of other name plates on other doors, said: Dr. Robert Stadler.
At the age of twenty-seven, Dr. Robert Stadler had written a treatise on cosmic rays, which demolished most of the theories held by the scientists who preceded him. Those who followed, found his achievement somewhere at the base of any line of inquiry they undertook.
At the age of thirty, he was recognized as the greatest physicist of his time. At thirty-two, he became head of the Department of Physics of the Patrick Henry University, in the days when the great University still deserved its glory. It was of Dr. Robert Stadler that a writer had said: “Perhaps, among the phenomena of the universe which he is studying, none is so miraculous as the brain of Dr. Robert Stadler himself.” It was Dr. Robert Stadler who had once corrected a student: “Free scientific inquiry? The first adjective is redundant.”