Atlas Shrugged

"I think I've always known that you would find him. I knew what you felt for me, I knew how much it was, but I knew that I was not your final choice. What you'll give him is not taken away from me, it's what I've never had. I can't rebel against it. What I've had means too much to me—and that I've had it, can never be changed."

"Do you want me to say it, Hank? Will you understand it, if I say that I'll always love you?"

"I think I've understood it before you did."

"I've always seen you as you are now. That greatness of yours which you are just beginning to allow yourself to know—I've always known it and I've watched your struggle to discover it. Don't speak of atonement, you have not hurt me, your mistakes came from your magnificent integrity under the torture of an impossible code—and your fight against it did not bring me suffering, it brought me the feeling I've found too seldom: admiration. If you will accept it, it will always be yours. What you meant to me can never be changed. But the man I met—he is the love I had wanted to reach long before I knew that he existed, and I think he will remain beyond my reach, but that I love him will be enough to keep me living."

He took her hand and pressed it to his lips. "Then you know what I feel," he said, "and why I am still happy."

Looking up at his face, she realized that for the first time he was what she had always thought him intended to be: a man with an immense capacity for the enjoyment of existence. The taut look of endurance, of fiercely unadmitted pain, was gone; now, in the midst of the wreckage and of his hardest hour, his face had the serenity of pure strength; it had the look she had seen in the faces of the men in the valley.

"Hank," she whispered, "I don't think I can explain it, but I feel that I have committed no treason, either to you or to him."

"You haven't."

Her eyes seemed abnormally alive in a face drained of color, as if her consciousness remained untouched in a body broken by exhaustion. He made her sit down and slipped his arm along the back of the couch, not touching her, yet holding her in a protective embrace.

"Now tell me," he asked, "where were you?"

"I can't tell you that. I've given my word never to reveal anything about it. I can say only that it's a place I found by accident, when I crashed, and I left it blindfolded—and I wouldn't be able to find it again."

"Couldn't you trace your way back to it?"

"I won't try."

"And the man?"

"I won't look for him."

"He remained there?"

"I don't know."

"Why did you leave him?"

"I can't tell you."

"Who is he?"

Her chuckle of desperate amusement was involuntary. "Who is John Galt?"

He glanced at her, astonished—but realized that she was not joking.

"So there is a John Galt?" he asked slowly, "Yes."

"That slang phrase refers to him?"

"Yes."

"And it has some special meaning?"

"Oh yes! . . . There's one thing I can tell you about him, because I discovered it earlier, without promise of secrecy: he is the man who invented the motor we found."

"Oh!" He smiled, as if he should have known it. Then he said softly, with a glance that was almost compassion, "He's the destroyer, isn't he?" He saw her look of shock, and added, "No, don't answer me, if you can't. I think I know where you were. It was Quentin Daniels that you wanted to save from the destroyer, and you were following Daniels when you crashed, weren't you?"

"Yes."

"Good God, Dagny!—does such a place really exist? Are they all alive? Is there . . . ? I'm sorry. Don't answer."

She smiled. "It does exist."

He remained silent for a long time.

"Hank, could you give up Rearden Steel?"

"No!" The answer was fiercely immediate, but he added, with the first sound of hopelessness in his voice, "Not yet."

Then he looked at her, as if, in the transition of his three words, he had lived the course of her agony of the past month. "I see," he said. He ran his hand over her forehead, with a gesture of understanding, of compassion, of an almost incredulous wonder. "What hell you've now undertaken to endure!" he said, his voice low.

She nodded.

She slipped down, to lie stretched, her face on his knees. He stroked her hair; he said, "We'll fight the looters as long as we can. I don't know what future is possible to us, but we'll win or we'll learn that it's hopeless. Until we do, we'll fight for our world. We're all that's left of it."

She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek.

CHAPTER IV ANTI-LIFE

James Taggart reached into the pocket of his dinner jacket, pulled out the first wad of paper he found, which was a hundred-dollar bill, and dropped it into the beggar's hand.

He noticed that the beggar pocketed the money in a manner as indifferent as his own. "Thanks, bud." said the beggar contemptuously, and walked away.