Atlas Shrugged

"We don't have to believe it!" Taggart's voice had the flat, insistent sound of an effort to maintain a trance. "Nobody's ever said it before!

It's just one man! We don't have to believe it!"

"Take it easy," said Mr. Thompson.

"Why is he so sure he's right? Who is he to go against the whole world, against everything ever said for centuries and centuries? Who is he to know? Nobody can be sure! Nobody can know what's right!

There isn't any right!"

"Shut up!" yelled Mr. Thompson. "What are you trying to—"

The blast that stopped him was a military march leaping suddenly forth from the radio receiver—the military march interrupted three hours ago, played by the familiar screeches of a studio record. It took them a few stunned seconds to grasp it, while the cheerful, thumping chords went goose-stepping through the silence, sounding grotesquely irrelevant, like the mirth of a half-wit. The station's program director was blindly obeying the absolute that no radio time was ever to be left blank.

"Tell them to cut it off!" screamed Wesley Mouch, leaping to his feet. "It will make the public think that we authorized that speech!"

"You damn fool!" cried Mr. Thompson. "Would you rather have the public think that we didn't?"

Mouch stopped short and his eyes shot to Mr. Thompson with the appreciative glance of an amateur at a master.

"Broadcasts as usual!" ordered Mr. Thompson. "Tell them to go on with whatever programs they'd scheduled for this hour! No special announcements, no explanations! Tell them to go on as if nothing had happened!"

Half a dozen of Chick Morrison's morale conditioners went scurrying off toward telephones.

"Muzzle the commentators! Don't allow them to comment! Send word to every station in the country! Let the public wonder! Don't let them think that we're worried! Don't let them think that it's important!"

"No!" screamed Eugene Lawson. "No, no, no! We can't give people the impression that we're endorsing that speech! It's horrible, horrible, horrible!" Lawson was not in tears, but his voice had the undignified sound of an adult sobbing with helpless rage.

"Who's said anything about endorsing it?" snapped Mr. Thompson.

"It's horrible! It's immoral! It's selfish, heartless, ruthless! It's the most vicious speech ever made! It . . . it will make people demand to be happy!"

"It's only a speech," said Mr. Thompson, not too firmly.

"It seems to me," said Chick Morrison, his voice tentatively helpful, '"that people of nobler spiritual nature, you know what I mean, people of . . . of . . . well, of mystical insight"—he paused, as if waiting to be slapped, but no one moved, so he repeated firmly—"yes, of mystical insight, won't go for that speech. Logic isn't everything, after all."

"The workingmen won't go for it," said Tinky Holloway, a bit more helpfully. "He didn't sound like a friend of labor."

"The women of the country won't go for it," declared Ma Chalmers.

"It is, I believe, an established fact that women don't go for that stuff about the mind. Women have finer feelings. You can count on the women."

"You can count on the scientists," said Dr. Simon Pritchett. They were all pressing forward, suddenly eager to speak, as if they had found a subject they could handle with assurance. "Scientists know better than to believe in reason. He's no friend of the scientists."

"He's no friend of anybody," said Wesley Mouch, recapturing a shade of confidence at the sudden realization, "except maybe of big business."

"No!" cried Mr. Mowen in terror. "No! Don't accuse us! Don't say it! I won't have you say it!"

"What?"

"That . . . that . . . that anybody is a friend of business!"

"Don't let's make a fuss about that speech," said Dr. Floyd Ferris.

"It was too intellectual. Much too intellectual for the common man. It will have no effect. People are too dumb to understand it."

"Yeah," said Mouch hopefully, "that's so."

"In the first place," said Dr. Ferris, encouraged, "people can't think. In the second place, they don't want to."

"In the third place," said Fred Kinnan, "they don't want to starve.

And what do you propose to do about that?"

It was as if he had pronounced the question which all of the preceding utterances had been intended to stave off. No one answered him, but heads drew faintly deeper into shoulders, and figures drew faintly closer to one another, like a small cluster under the weight of the studio's empty space. The military march boomed through the silence with the inflexible gaiety of a grinning skull.

"Turn it off!" yelled Mr. Thompson, waving at the radio. "Turn that damn thing off!"

Someone obeyed him. But the sudden silence was worse.

"Well?" said Mr. Thompson at last, raising his eyes reluctantly to Fred Kinnan. "What do you think we ought to do?"

"Who, me?" chuckled Kinnan. "I don't run this show."

Mr. Thompson slammed his fist down on his knee. "Say something —" he ordered, but seeing Kinnan turn away, added, "somebody!"