From the first catch-phrases flung at a child to the last, it is like a series of shocks to freeze his motor, to undercut the power of his consciousness. "Don't ask so many questions, children should be seen and not heard!"—"Who are you to think? It's so, because I say so!"—"Don't argue, obey!"—"Don't try to understand, believe!"-—"Don't rebel, adjust!"—"Don't stand out, belong!"—"Don't struggle, compromise!"—"Your heart is more important than your mind!"—"Who are you to know? Your parents know best!"—"Who are you to know? Society knows best!"—"Who are you to know? The bureaucrats know best!"—"Who are you to object? All values are relative!"—"Who are you to want to escape a thug's bullet? That's only a personal prejudice!"
Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival—yet that was what they did to their children.
Armed with nothing but meaningless phrases, this boy had been thrown to fight for existence, he had hobbled and groped through a brief, doomed effort, he had screamed his indignant, bewildered protest —and had perished in his first attempt to soar on his mangled wings.
But a different breed of teachers had once existed, he thought, and had reared the men who created this country; he thought that mothers should set out on their knees to look for men like Hugh Akston, to find them and beg them to return.
He went through the gate of the mills, barely noticing the guards who let him enter, who stared at his face and his burden; he did not pause to listen to their words, as they pointed to the fighting in the distance; he went on walking slowly toward the wedge of light which was the open door of the hospital building.
He stepped into a lighted room full of men, bloody bandages and the odor of antiseptics; he deposited his burden on a bench, with no word of explanation to anyone, and walked out, not glancing behind him.
He walked in the direction of the front gate, toward the glare of fire and the bursts of guns. He saw, once in a while, a few figures running through the cracks between structures or darting behind black corners, pursued by groups of guards and workers; he was astonished to notice that his workers were well armed. They seemed to have subdued the hoodlums inside the mills, and only the siege at the front gate remained to be beaten. He saw a lout scurrying across a patch of lamplight, swinging a length of pipe at a wall of glass panes, battering them down with an animal relish, dancing like a gorilla to the sound of crashing glass, until three husky human figures descended upon him, carrying him writhing to the ground.
The siege of the gate appeared to be ebbing, as if the spine of the mob had been broken. He heard the distant screeches of their cries—but the shots from the road were growing rarer, the fire set to the gatekeeper's office was put out, there were armed men on the ledges and at windows, posted in well-planned defense.
On the roof of a structure above the gate, he saw, as he came closer, the slim silhouette of a man who held a gun in each hand and, from behind the protection of a chimney, kept firing at intervals down into the mob, firing swiftly and, it seemed, in two directions at once, like a sentinel protecting the approaches to the gate. The confident skill of his movements, his manner of firing, with no time wasted to take aim, but with the kind of casual abruptness that never misses a target, made him look like a hero of Western legend—and Rearden watched him with detached, impersonal pleasure, as if the battle of the mills were not his any longer, but he could still enjoy the sight of the competence and certainty with which men of that distant age had once combatted evil.
The beam of a roving searchlight struck Rearden's face, and when the light swept past he saw the man on the roof leaning down, as if peering in his direction. The man waved to someone to replace him, then vanished abruptly from his post.
Rearden hurried on through the short stretch of darkness ahead —but then, from the side, from the crack of an alley, he heard a drunken voice yell, "There he is!" and whirled to see two beefy figures advancing upon him. He saw a leering, mindless face with a mouth hung loose in a joyless chuckle, and a club in a rising fist—he heard the sound of running steps approaching from another direction, he attempted to turn his head, then the club crashed down on his skull from behind—and in the moment of splitting darkness, when he wavered, refusing to believe it, then felt himself going down, he felt a strong, protective arm seizing him and breaking his fall, he heard a gun exploding an inch above his ear, then another explosion from the same gun in the same second, but it seemed faint and distant, as if he had fallen down a shaft.
His first awareness, when he opened his eyes, was a sense of profound serenity. Then he saw that he was lying on a couch in a modern, sternly gracious room—then, he realized that it was his office and that the two men standing beside him were the mills' doctor and the superintendent. He felt a distant pain in his head, which would have been violent had he cared to notice it, and he felt a strip of tape across his hair, on the side of his head. The sense of serenity was the knowledge that he was free.
The meaning of his bandage and the meaning of his office were not to be accepted or to exist, together—it was not a combination for men to live with—this was not his battle any longer, nor his job, nor his business.
"I think I'll be all right, Doctor," he said, raising his head.
"Yes, Mr. Rearden, fortunately." The doctor was looking at him as if still unable to believe that this had happened to Hank Rearden inside his own mills; the doctor's voice was tense with angry loyalty and indignation. "Nothing serious, just a scalp wound and a slight concussion.
But you must take it easy and allow yourself to rest."
"I will," said Rearden firmly.
"It's all over," said the superintendent, waving at the mills beyond the window. "We've got the bastards beaten and on the run. You don't have to worry, Mr. Rearden. It's all over."
"It is," said Rearden. "There must be a lot of work left for you to do, Doctor."
"Oh yes! I never thought I’d live to see the day when—"
"I know. Go ahead, take care of it. I'll be all right."
"Yes, Mr. Rearden."
"I'll take care of the place," said the superintendent, as the doctor hurried out. "Everything's under control, Mr. Rearden. But it was the dirtiest—"
"I know," said Rearden. "Who was it that saved my life? Somebody grabbed me as I fell, and fired at the thugs."
"Did he! Straight at their faces. Blew their heads off. That was that new furnace foreman of ours. Been here two months. Best man I've ever had. He's the one who got wise to what the gravy boys were planning and warned me, this afternoon. Told me to arm our men, as many as we could. We got no help from the police or the state troopers, they dodged all over the place with the fanciest delays and excuses I ever heard of, it was all fixed in advance, the goons weren't expecting any armed resistance. It was that furnace foreman—Frank Adams is his name—who organized our defense, ran the whole battle, and stood on a roof, picking off the scum that came too close to the gate. Boy, what a marksman! I shudder to think how many of our lives he saved tonight.
Those bastards were out for blood, Mr. Rearden."
"I'd like to see him."
"He's waiting somewhere outside. It's he who brought you here, and he asked permission to speak to you, when possible."
"Send him in. Then go back out there, take charge, finish the job."
"Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Rearden?"
"No, nothing else."
He lay still, alone in the silence of his office. He knew that the meaning of his mills had ceased to exist, and the fullness of the knowledge left no room for the pain of regretting an illusion. He had seen, in a final image, the soul and essence of his enemies: the mindless face of the thug with the club. It was not the face itself that made him draw back in horror, but the professors, the philosophers, the moralists, the mystics who had released that face upon the world.
He felt a peculiar cleanliness. It was made of pride and of love for this earth, this earth which was his, not theirs. It was the feeling which had moved him through his life, the feeling which some among men know in their youth, then betray, but which he had never betrayed and had carried within him as a battered, attacked, unidentified, but living motor—the feeling which he could now experience in its full, uncontested purity: the sense of his own superlative value and the superlative value of his life. It was the final certainty that his life was his, to be lived with no bondage to evil, and that that bondage had never been necessary. It was the radiant serenity of knowing that he was free of fear, of pain, of guilt.
If it's true, he thought, that there are avengers who are working for the deliverance of men like me, let them see me now, let them tell me their secret, let them claim me, let them—"Come in!" he said aloud, in answer to the knock on his door.
The door opened and he lay still. The man standing on the threshold, with disheveled hair, a soot-streaked face and furnace-smudged arms, dressed in scorched overalls and bloodstained shirt, standing as if he wore a cape waving behind him in the wind, was Francisco d'Anconia.
It seemed to Rearden that his consciousness shot forward ahead of his body, it was his body that refused to move, stunned by shock, while his mind was laughing, telling him that this was the most natural, the most-to-have-been-expected event in the world.
Francisco smiled, a smile of greeting to a childhood friend on a summer morning, as if nothing else had ever been possible between them—and Rearden found himself smiling in answer, some part of him feeling an incredulous wonder, yet knowing that it was irresistibly right.
"You've been torturing yourself for months," said Francisco, approaching him, "wondering what words you'd use to ask my forgiveness and whether you had the right to ask it, if you ever saw me again —but now you see that it isn't necessary, that there's nothing to ask or to forgive."
"Yes," said Rearden, the word coming as an astonished whisper, but by the time he finished his sentence he knew that this was the greatest tribute he could offer, "yes, I know it."
Francisco sat down on the couch beside him, and slowly moved his hand over Rearden's forehead. It was like a healing touch that closed the past.
"There's only one thing I want to tell you," said Rearden. "I want you to hear it from me: you kept your oath, you were my friend."
"I knew that you knew it. You knew it from the first. You knew it, no matter what you thought of my actions. You slapped me because you could not force yourself to doubt it."
"That . . ." whispered Rearden, staring at him, "that was the thing I had no right to tell you . . . no right to claim as my excuse . . ."
"Didn't you suppose I'd understand it?"
"I wanted to find you . . . I had no right to look for you . . . And all that time, you were—" He pointed at Francisco's clothes, then his hand dropped helplessly and he closed his eyes.
"I was your furnace foreman," said Francisco, grinning. "I didn't think you'd mind that. You offered me the job yourself."
"You've been here, as my bodyguard, for two months?"
"Yes."
"You've been here, ever since—" He stopped.
"That's right. On the morning of the day when you were reading my farewell message over the roofs of New York, I was reporting here for my first shift as your furnace foreman."
"Tell me," said Rearden slowly, "that night, at James Taggart's wedding, when you said that you were after your greatest conquest . . . you meant me, didn't you?"
"Of course."
Francisco drew himself up a little, as if for a solemn task, his face earnest, the smile remaining only in his eyes. "I have a great deal to tell you," he said, "But first, will you repeat a word you once offered me and I . . . I had to reject, because I knew that I was not free to accept it?"
Rearden smiled. "What word, Francisco?"
Francisco inclined his head in acceptance, and answered, "Thank you, Hank." Then he raised his head. "Now I'll tell you the things I had come to say, but did not finish, that night when I came here for the first time. I think you're ready to hear it,"
"I am."
The glare of steel being poured from a furnace shot to the sky beyond the window. A red glow went sweeping slowly over the walls of the office, over the empty desk, over Rearden's face, as if in salute and farewell.
