Atlas Shrugged

She had laughed exultantly, in the ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland, when she had heard him say it; she had laughed, her hand pressed to her mouth, so that the laughter was only in her eyes—and in his, when he had looked straight at her and she had known that he heard it. They had looked at each other for the span of a second, above the heads of the gasping, screaming crowd—above the crash of the microphones being shattered, though all stations had been instantly cut off—above the bursts of breaking glass on falling tables, as some people went stampeding to the doors.

Then she had heard Mr. Thompson cry, waving his arm at Galt, "Take him back to his room, but guard him with your lives!"—and the crowd had parted as three men led him out. Mr. Thompson seemed to collapse for a moment, dropping his forehead on his arm, but he rallied, jumped to his feet, waved vaguely at his henchmen to follow and rushed out, through a private side exit. No one addressed or instructed the guests: some were running blindly to escape, others sat still, not daring to move. The ballroom was like a ship without captain. She cut through the crowd and followed the clique. No one tried to stop her.

She found them huddled in a small, private study: Mr. Thompson was slumped in an armchair, clutching his head with both hands, Wesley Mouch was moaning, Eugene Lawson was sobbing with the sound of a nasty child's rage, Jim was watching the others with an oddly expectant intensity. "I told you so!" Dr. Ferris was shouting. "I told you so, didn't I? That's where you get with your 'peaceful persuasion'!"

She remained standing by the door. They seemed to notice her presence, but they did not seem to care.

"I resign!" yelled Chick Morrison. "I resign! I'm through! I don't know what to say to the country! I can't think! I won't try! It's no use!

I couldn't help it! You're not going to blame me! I've resigned!" He waved his arms in some shapeless gesture of futility or farewell, and ran out of the room, "He has a hide-out all stocked for himself in Tennessee," said Tinky Holloway reflectively, as if he, too, had taken a similar precaution and were now wondering whether the time had come.

"He won't keep it for long, if he gets there at all," said Mouch. "With the gangs of raiders and the state of transportation—" He spread his hands and did not finish.

She knew what thoughts were filling the pause; she knew that no matter what private escapes these men had once provided for themselves, they were now grasping the fact that all of them were trapped.

She observed that there was no terror in their faces; she saw hints of it, but it looked like a perfunctory terror. Their expressions ranged from blank apathy to the relieved look of cheats who had believed that the game could end no other way and were making no effort to contest it or regret it—to the petulant blindness of Lawson, who refused to be conscious of anything—to the peculiar intensity of Jim, whose face suggested a secret smile.

"Well? Well?" Dr. Ferris was asking impatiently, with the crackling energy of a man who feels at home in a world of hysteria. "What are you now going to do with him? Argue? Debate? Make speeches?"

No one answered.

"He . . . has . . . to . . . save . . . us," said Mouch slowly, as if straining the last of his mind into blankness and delivering an ultimatum to reality. "He has to . . . take over . . . and save the system."

"Why don't you write him a love letter about it?" said Ferris.

"We've got to . . . make him . . . take over . . . We've got to force him to rule," said Mouch in the tone of a sleepwalker.

"Now," said Ferris, suddenly dropping his voice, "do you see what a valuable establishment the State Science Institute really is?"

Mouch did not answer him, but she observed that they all seemed to know what he meant.

"You objected to that private research project of mine as 'impractical,' " said Ferris softly. "But what did I tell you?"

Mouch did not answer; he was cracking his knuckles.

"This is no time for squeamishness," James Taggart spoke up with unexpected vigor, but his voice, too, was oddly low. "We don't have to be sissies about it."

"It seems to me . . ." said Mouch dully, "that . . . that the end justifies the means . . ."

"It's too late for any scruples or any principles," said Ferris. "Only direct action can work now."

No one answered; they were acting as if they wished that their pauses, not their words, would state what they were discussing.

"It won't work," said Tinky Holloway, "He won't give in."

"That's what you think!" said Ferris, and chuckled, "You haven't seen our experimental model in action. Last month, we got three confessions in three unsolved murder cases."

"If . . ." started Mr. Thompson, and his voice cracked suddenly into a moan, "if he dies, we all perish!"

"Don't worry," said Ferris. "He won't. The Ferris Persuader is safely calculated against that possibility."

Mr. Thompson did not answer.