They’ve tried to, but... Nobody knows how it got out, but it went through the mills like one of those furnace break-outs, the word that he’d gone, and then... before anyone could stop it, a whole bunch of them vanished! The superintendent, the chief metallurgist, the chief engineer, Rearden’s secretary, even the hospital doctor! And God knows how many others! Deserting, the bastards! Deserting us, in spite of all the penalties we’ve set up! He’s quit and the rest are quitting and those mills are just left there, standing still! Do you understand what that means?”
“Do you?” she asked.
He had thrown his story at her, sentence by sentence, as if trying to knock the smile off her face, an odd, unmoving smile of bitterness and triumph; he had failed. “It’s a national catastrophe! What’s the matter with you? Don’t you see that it’s a fatal blow? It will break the last of the country’s morale and economy! We can’t let him vanish! You’ve got to bring him back!”
Her smile disappeared.
“You can!” he cried. “You’re the only one who can! He’s your lover, isn’t he?... Oh, don’t look like that! It’s no time for squeamishness!
It’s no time for anything except that we’ve got to have him! You must know where he is! You can find him! You must reach him and bring him back!”
The way she now looked at him was worse than her smile—she looked as if she were seeing him naked and would not endure the sight much longer. “I can’t bring him back,” she said, not raising her voice.
“And I wouldn’t, if I could. Now get out of here.”
“But the national catastrophe—”
“Get out.”
She did not notice his exit. She stood alone in the middle of her living room, her head dropping, her shoulders sagging, while she was smiling, a smile of pain, of tenderness, of greeting to Hank Rearden. She wondered dimly why she should feel so glad that he had found liberation, so certain that he was right, and yet refuse herself the same deliverance. Two sentences were beating in her mind; one was the triumphant sweep of: He’s free, he’s out of their reach!—the other was like a prayer of dedication: There’s still a chance to win, but let me be the only victim...
It was strange—she thought, in the days that followed, looking at the men around her—that catastrophe had made them aware of Hank Rearden with an intensity that his achievements had not aroused, as if the paths of their consciousness were open to disaster, but not to value.
Some spoke of him in shrill curses—others whispered, with a look of guilt and terror, as if a nameless retribution were now to descend upon them—some tried, with hysterical evasiveness, to act as if nothing had happened.
The newspapers, like puppets on tangled strings, were shouting with the same belligerence and on the same dates: “It is social treason to ascribe too much importance to Hank Rearden’s desertion and to undermine public morale by the old-fashioned belief that an individual can be of any significance to society.” “It is social treason to spread rumors about the disappearance of Hank Rearden. Mr. Rearden has not disappeared, he is in his office, running his mills, as usual, and there has been no trouble at Rearden Steel, except a minor disturbance, a private scuffle among some workers.” “It is social treason to cast an unpatriotic light upon the tragic loss of Hank Rearden. Mr. Rearden has not deserted, he was killed in an automobile accident on his way to work, and his grief-stricken family has insisted on a private funeral.”
It was strange, she thought, to obtain news by means of nothing but denials, as if existence had ceased, facts had vanished and only the frantic negatives uttered by officials and columnists gave any clue to the reality they were denying. “It is not true that the Miller Steel Foundry of New Jersey has gone out of business.” “It is not true that the Jansen Motor Company of Michigan has closed its doors.” “It is a vicious, anti-social lie that manufacturers of steel products are collapsing under the threat of a steel shortage. There is no reason to expect a steel shortage.” “It is a slanderous, unfounded rumor that a Steel Unification Plan had been in the making and that it had been favored by Mr. Orren Boyle. Mr. Boyle’s attorney has issued an emphatic denial and has assured the press that Mr. Boyle is now vehemently opposed to any such plan. Mr. Boyle, at the moment, is suffering from a nervous breakdown.”
But some news could be witnessed in the streets of New York, in the cold, dank twilight of autumn evenings: a crowd gathered in front of a hardware store, where the owner had thrown the doors open, inviting people to help themselves to the last of his meager stock, while he laughed in shrieking sobs and went smashing his plate-glass windows—a crowd gathered at the door of a run-down apartment house, where a police ambulance stood waiting, while the bodies of a man, his wife and their three children were being removed from a gas-filled room; the man had been a small manufacturer of steel castings.
If they see Hank Rearden’s value now—she thought—why didn’t they see it sooner? Why hadn’t they averted their own doom and spared him his years of thankless torture? She found no answer.
In the silence of sleepless nights, she thought that Hank Rearden and she had now changed places: he was in Atlantis and she was locked out by a screen of light—he was, perhaps, calling to her as she had called to his struggling airplane, but no signal could reach her through that screen.
Yet the screen split open for one brief break—for the length of a letter she received a week after he vanished. The envelope bore no return address, only the postmark of some hamlet in Colorado. The letter contained two sentences:
I have met him. I don’t blame you.
H.R.
She sat still for a long time, looking at the letter, as if unable to move or to feel. She felt nothing, she thought, then noticed that her shoulders were trembling in a faint, continuous shudder, then grasped that the tearing violence within her was made of an exultant tribute, of gratitude and of despair—her tribute to the victory that the meeting of these two men implied, the final victory of both—her gratitude that those in Atlantis still regarded her as one of them and had granted her the exception of receiving a message—the despair of the knowledge that her blankness was a struggle not to hear the questions she was now hearing. Had Galt abandoned her? Had he gone to the valley to meet his greatest conquest? Would he come back? Had he given her up? The unendurable was not that these questions had no answer, but that the answer was so simply, so easily within her reach and that she had no right to take a step to reach it.
She had made no attempt to see him. Every morning, for a month, on entering her office, she had been conscious, not of the room around her, but of the tunnels below, under the floors of the building—and she had worked, feeling as if some marginal part of her brain was computing figures, reading reports, making decisions in a rush of lifeless activity, while her living mind was inactive and still, frozen in contemplation, forbidden to move beyond the sentence: He’s down there. The only inquiry she had permitted herself had been a glance at the payroll list of the Terminal workers. She had seen the name: Galt, John. The list had carried it, openly, for over twelve years. She had seen an address next to the name—and, for a month, had struggled to forget it.
It had seemed hard to live through that month—yet now, as she looked at the letter, the thought that Galt had gone was still harder to bear. Even the struggle of resisting his proximity had been a link to him, a price to pay, a victory achieved in his name. Now there was nothing, except a question that was not to be asked. His presence in the tunnels had been her motor through those days—just as his presence in the city had been her motor through the months of that summer—just as his presence somewhere in the world had been her motor through the years before she ever heard his name. Now she felt as if her motor, too, had stopped.