Atlas Shrugged

"I would have been disappointed if you hadn't come."

"Do you know what it was like, waiting, fighting it, delaying it one more day, then one more, then—"

He chuckled. "Do I?" he said softly.

Her hand dropped in a helpless gesture: she thought of his ten years. "When I heard your voice on the radio," she said, "when I heard the greatest statement I ever . . . No, I have no right to tell you what I thought of it,"

"Why not?"

"You think that I haven't accepted it."

"You will."

"Were you speaking from here?"

"No, from the valley."

"And then you returned to New York?"

"The next morning."

"And you've been here ever since?"

"Yes."

"Have you heard the kind of appeals they're sending out to you every night?"

"Sure."

She glanced slowly about the room, her eyes moving from the towers of the city in the window to the wooden rafters of his ceiling, to the cracked plaster of his walls, to the iron posts of his bed. "You've been here all that time," she said. "You've lived here for twelve years . . . here . . . like this . . ."

"Like this," he said, throwing open the door at the end of the room.

She gasped: the long, light-flooded, windowless space beyond the threshold, enclosed in a shell of softly lustrous metal, like a small ballroom aboard a submarine, was the most efficiently modern laboratory she had ever seen.

"Come in," he said, grinning. "I don't have to keep secrets from you any longer."

It was like crossing the border into a different universe. She looked at the complex equipment sparkling in a bright, diffused glow, at the mesh of glittering wires, at the blackboard chalked with mathematical formulas, at the long counters of objects shaped by the ruthless discipline of a purpose—then at the sagging boards and crumbling plaster of the garret. Either-or, she thought; this was the choice confronting the world: a human soul in the image of one or of the other.

"You wanted to know where I worked for eleven months out of the year," he said, "All this," she asked, pointing at the laboratory, "on the salary of—she pointed at the garret—"of an unskilled laborer?"

"Oh, no! On the royalties Midas Mulligan pays me for his powerhouse, for the ray screen, for the radio transmitter and a few other jobs of that kind."

"Then . . . then why did you have to work as a track laborer?"

"Because no money earned in the valley is ever to be spent outside."

"Where did you get this equipment?"

"I designed it. Andrew Stockton's foundry made it." He pointed to an unobtrusive object the size of a radio cabinet in a corner of the room: "There's the motor you wanted," and chuckled at her gasp, at the involuntary jolt that threw her forward, "Don't bother studying it, you won't give it away to them now."

She was staring at the shining metal cylinders and the glistening coils of wire that suggested the rusted shape resting, like a sacred relic, in a glass coffin in a vault of the Taggart Terminal.

"It supplies my own electric power for the laboratory," he said. "No one has had to wonder why a track laborer is using such exorbitant amounts of electricity."

"But if they ever found this place—"

He gave an odd, brief chuckle. "They won't."

"How long have you been—?"

She stopped; this time, she did not gasp; the sight confronting her could not be greeted by anything except a moment of total inner stillness: on the wall, behind a row of machinery, she saw a' picture cut out of a newspaper—a picture of her, in slacks and shirt, standing by the side of the engine at the opening of the John Galt Line, her head lifted, her smile holding the context, the meaning and the sunlight of that day.

A moan was her only answer, as she turned to him, but the look on his face matched hers in the picture.

"I was the symbol of what you wanted to destroy in the world," he said, "But you were my symbol of what I wanted to achieve." He pointed at the picture. "This is how men expect to feel about their life once or twice, as an exception, in the course of their lifetime. But I—this is what I chose as the constant and normal."

The look on his face, the serene intensity of his eyes and of his mind made it real to her, now, in this moment, in this moment's full context, in this city.

When he kissed her, she knew that their arms, holding each other, were holding their greatest triumph, that this was the reality untouched by pain or fear, the reality of Halley's Fifth Concerto, this was the reward they had wanted, fought for and won.

The doorbell rang.

Her first reaction was to draw back, his—to hold her closer and longer.

When he raised his head, he was smiling. He said only, "Now is the time not to be afraid."

She followed him back to the garret. She heard the door of the laboratory clicking locked behind them.

He held her coat for her silently, he waited until she had tied its belt and had put on her hat—then he walked to the entrance door and opened it.