Atlas Shrugged

"Muscles, Miss Taggart," Ben Nealy, the contractor, had said to her, "muscles—that's all it takes to build anything in the world."

No contractor equal to McNamara seemed to exist anywhere. She had taken the best she could find. No engineer on the Taggart staff could be trusted to supervise the job; all of them were skeptical about the new metal. "Frankly, Miss Taggart," her chief engineer had said, "since it is an experiment that nobody has ever attempted before, I do not think it's fair that it should be my responsibility." 'It's mine," she had answered. He was a man in his forties, who still preserved the breezy manner of the college from which he had graduated. Once, Taggart Transcontinental had had a chief engineer, a silent, gray-haired, self educated man, who could not be matched on any railroad. He had resigned, five years ago.

She glanced down over the bridge. She was standing on a slender beam of steel above a gorge that had cracked the mountains to a depth of fifteen hundred feet. Far at the bottom, she could distinguish the dim outlines of a dry river bed, of piled boulders, of trees contorted by centuries. She wondered whether boulders, tree trunks and muscles could ever bridge that canyon. She wondered why she found herself thinking suddenly that cave-dwellers had lived naked on the bottom of that canyon for ages.

She looked up at the Wyatt oil fields. The track broke into sidings among the wells. She saw the small disks of switches dotted against the snow. They were metal switches, of the kind that were scattered in thousands, unnoticed, throughout the country—but these were sparkling in the sun and the sparks were greenish-blue. What they meant to her was hour upon hour of speaking quietly, evenly, patiently, trying to hit the center less target that was the person of Mr. Mowen, president of the Amalgamated Switch and Signal Company, Inc., of Connecticut. "But, Miss Taggart, my dear Miss Taggart! My company has served your company for generations, why, your grandfather was the first customer of my grandfather, so you cannot doubt our eagerness to do anything you ask, but—did you say switches made of Rearden Metal?"

"Yes."

"But, Miss Taggart! Consider what it would mean, having to work with that metal. Do you know that the stuff won't melt under less than four thousand degrees? . . . Great? Well, maybe that's great for motor manufacturers, but what I'm thinking of is that it means a new type of furnace, a new process entirely, men to be trained, schedules upset, work rules shot, everything balled up and then God only knows whether it will come out right or not! . . . How do you know, Miss Taggart? How can you know, when it's never been done before? . . .

Well, I can't say that that metal is good and I can't say that it isn't.

. . . Well, no, I can't tell whether it's a product of genius, as you say, or just another fraud as a great many people are saying, Miss Taggart, a great many. . . . Well, no, I can't say that it does matter one way or the other, because who am I to take a chance on a job of this kind?"

She had doubled the price of her order. Rearden had sent two metallurgists to train Mowen's men, to teach, to show, to explain every step of the process, and had paid the salaries of Mowen's men while they were being trained.

She looked at the spikes in the rail at her feet. They meant the night when she had heard that Summit Casting of Illinois, the only company willing to make spikes of Rearden Metal, had gone bankrupt, with half of her order undelivered. She had flown to Chicago, that night, she had got three lawyers, a judge and a state legislator out of bed, she had bribed two of them and threatened the others, she had obtained a paper that was an emergency permit of a legality no one would ever be able to untangle, she had had the padlocked doors of the Summit Casting plant unlocked and a random, half-dressed crew working at the smelters before the windows had turned gray with daylight. The crews had remained at work, under a Taggart engineer and a Rearden metallurgist. The rebuilding of the Rio Norte Line was not held up.

She listened to the sound of the drills. The work had been held up once, when the drilling for the bridge abutments was stepped. "I couldn't help it, Miss Taggart," Ben Nealy had said, offended. "You know how fast drill heads wear out. I had them on order, but Incorporated Tool ran into a little trouble, they couldn't help it either, Associated Steel was delayed in delivering the steel to them, so there's nothing we can do but wait. It's no use getting upset, Miss Taggart, I'm doing my best."

"I've hired you to do a job, not to do your best—whatever that is."

"That's a funny thing to say. That's an unpopular attitude, Miss Taggart, mighty unpopular."

"Forget Incorporated Tool. Forget the steel. Order the doll heads made of Rearden Metal."

"Not me. I've had enough trouble with the damn stuff in that rail of yours. I'm not going to mess up my own equipment."