Ray McKim, the fireman, a husky young giant, grinned with an air of embarrassment and superiority together. The rest of the crew looked as if they were about to wink at the cameras. A photographer said, laughing, “Can’t you people look doomed, please? I know that’s what the editor wants.”
Dagny and Rearden were answering questions for the press. There was no mockery in their answers now, no bitterness. They were enjoying it. They spoke as if the questions were asked in good faith. Irresistibly, at some point which no one noticed, this became true, “What do you expect to happen on this run?” a reporter asked one of the brakemen. “Do you think you’ll get there?”
“I think we’ll get there,” said the brakeman, “and so do you, brother.”
“Mr. Logan, do you have any children? Did you take out any extra insurance? I’m just thinking of the bridge, you know.”
“Don’t cross that bridge till I come to it,” Pat Logan answered contemptuously.
“Mr. Rearden, how do you know that your rail will hold?”
“The man who taught people to make a printing press,” said Rearden, “how did he know it?”
“Tell me, Miss Taggart, what’s going to support a seven-thousand-ton train on a three-thousand-ton bridge?”
“My judgment,” she answered.
The men of the press, who despised their own profession, did not know why they were enjoying it today. One of them, a young man with years of notorious success behind him and a cynical look of twice his age, said suddenly, “I know what I’d like to be: I wish I could be a man who covers news!”
The hands of the clock on the station building stood at 3:45. The crew started off toward the caboose at the distant end of the train. The movement and noise of the crowd were subsiding. Without conscious intention, people were beginning to stand still.
The dispatcher had received word from every local operator along the line of rail that wound through the mountains to the Wyatt oil fields three hundred miles away. He came out of the station building and, looking at Dagny, gave the signal for clear track ahead. Standing by the engine, Dagny raised her hand, repeating his gesture in sign of an order received and understood.
The long line of boxcars stretched off into the distance, in spaced, rectangular links, like a spinal cord. When the conductor’s arm swept through the air, far at the end, she moved her arm in answering signal.
Rearden, Logan and McKim stood silently, as if at attention, letting her be first to get aboard. As she started up the rungs on the side of the engine, a reporter thought of a question he had not asked.
“Miss Taggart,” he called after her, “who is John Galt?”
She turned, hanging onto a metal bar with one hand, suspended for an instant above the heads of the crowd.
“We are!” she answered.
Logan followed her into the cab, then McKim; Rearden went last, then the door of the engine was shut, with the tight finality of sealed metal.
The lights, hanging on a signal bridge against the sky, were green.
There were green lights between the tracks, low over the ground, dropping off into the distance where the rails turned and a green light stood at the curve, against leaves of a summer green that looked as if they, too, were lights.
Two men held a white silk ribbon stretched across the track in front of the engine. They were the superintendent of the Colorado Division and Nealy’s chief engineer, who had remained on the job. Eddie Willers was to cut the ribbon they held and thus to open the new line.
The photographers posed him carefully, scissors in hand, his back to the engine. He would repeat the ceremony two or three times, they explained, to give them a choice of shots; they had a fresh bolt of ribbon ready. He was about to comply, then stopped. “No,” he said suddenly.
“It’s not going to be a phony.”
In a voice of quiet authority, the voice of a vice-President, he ordered, pointing at the cameras, “Stand back—way back. Take one shot when I cut it, then get out of the way, fast.”
They obeyed, moving hastily farther down the track. There was only one minute left. Eddie turned his back to the cameras and stood between the rails, facing the engine. He held the scissors ready over the white ribbon. He took his hat off and tossed it aside. He was looking up at the engine. A faint wind stirred his blond hair. The engine was a great silver shield bearing the emblem of Nat Taggart.
Eddie Willers raised his hand as the hand of the station clock reached the instant of four.
“Open her up, Pat!” he called.
In the moment when the engine started forward, he cut the white ribbon and leaped out of the way.
From the side track, he saw the window of the cab go by and Dagny waving to him in an answering salute. Then the engine was gone, and he stood looking across at the crowded platform that kept appearing and vanishing as the freight cars clicked past him.
The green-blue rails ran to meet them, like two jets shot out of a single point beyond the curve of the earth. The crossties melted, as they approached, into a smooth stream rolling down under the wheels. A blurred streak clung to the side of the engine, low over the ground. Trees and telegraph poles sprang into sight abruptly and went by as if jerked back. The green plains stretched past, in a leisurely flow. At the edge of the sky, a long wave of mountains reversed the movement and seemed to follow the train.
She felt no wheels under the floor. The motion was a smooth flight on a sustained impulse, as if the engine hung above the rails, riding a current. She felt no speed. It seemed strange that the green lights of the signals kept coming at them and past, every few seconds. She knew that the signal lights were spaced two miles apart.
The needle on the speedometer in front of Pat Logan stood at one hundred.
She sat in the fireman’s chair and glanced across at Logan once in a while. He sat slumped forward a little, relaxed, one hand resting lightly on the throttle as if by chance; but his eyes were fixed on the track ahead. He had the ease of an expert, so confident that it seemed casual, but it was the ease of a tremendous concentration, the concentration on one’s task that has the ruthlessness of an absolute. Ray McKim sat on a bench behind them. Rearden stood in the middle of the cab.
He stood, hands in pockets, feet apart, braced against the motion, looking ahead. There was nothing he could now care to see by the side of the track: he was looking at the rail.
Ownership—she thought, glancing back at him—weren’t there those who knew nothing of its nature and doubted its reality? No, it was not made of papers, seals, grants and permissions. There it was—in his eyes.
The sound filling the cab seemed part of the space they were crossing. It held the low drone of the motors—the sharper clicking of the many parts that rang in varied cries of metal—and the high, thin chimes of trembling glass panes.
Things streaked past—a water tank, a tree, a shanty, a grain silo.
They had a windshield-wiper motion: they were rising, describing a curve and dropping back. The telegraph wires ran a race with the train, rising and falling from pole to pole, in an even rhythm, like the cardiograph record of a steady heartbeat written across the sky.
She looked ahead, at the haze that melted rail and distance, a haze that could rip apart at any moment to some shape of disaster. She wondered why she felt safer than she had ever felt in a car behind the engine, safer here, where it seemed as if, should an obstacle rise, her breast and the glass shield would be first to smash against it. She smiled, grasping the answer: it was the security of being first, with full sight and full knowledge of one’s course—not the blind sense of being pulled into the unknown by some unknown power ahead. It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust, but to know.