Atlas Shrugged

by Ayn Rand

  Ever since he had moved to Philadelphia, Rearden had not visited his former home and had not heard a word from his family, whose bills he went on paying. Then, inexplicably, twice in the last few weeks, he had caught Philip wandering through the mills for no apparent reason. He had been unable to tell whether Philip was sneaking to avoid him or waiting to catch his attention; it had looked like both. He had been unable to discover any clue to Philip's purpose, only some incomprehensible solicitude, of a kind Philip had never displayed before.

  The first time, in answer to his startled "What are you doing here?" -Philip had said vaguely, "Well, I know that you don't like me to come to your office." "What do you want?" "Oh, nothing ... but ... well, Mother is worried about you." "Mother can call me any time she wishes." Philip had not answered, but had proceeded to question him, in an unconvincingly casual manner, about his work, his health, his business; the questions had kept hitting oddly beside the point, not questions about business, but more about his, Rearden.'s, feelings toward business. Rearden had cut him short and waved him away, but had been left with the small, nagging sense of an incident that remained inexplicable.

  The second time, Philip had said, as sole explanation, "We just want to know how you feel." "Who's we?" "Why ... Mother and I. These are difficult times and ... well, Mother wants to know how you feel about it all." "Tell her that I don't." The words had seemed to hit Philip in some peculiar manner, almost as if this were the one answer he dreaded. "Get out of here," Rearden had ordered wearily, "and the next time you want to see me, make an appointment and come to my office. But don't come unless you have something to say. This is not a place where one discusses feelings, mine or anybody else's."

  Philip had not called for an appointment--but now there he was again, slouching among the giant shapes of the furnaces, with an air of .guilt and snobbishness together, as if he were both snooping and slum ming.

  "But I do have something to say! I do!" he cried hastily, in answer to the angry frown on Rearden's face.

  "Why didn't you come to my office?"

  "You don't want me in your office."

  "I don't want you here, either."

  "But I'm only ... I'm only trying to be considerate and not to take your time when you're so busy and ... you are very busy, aren't you?"

  "And?"

  "And ... well, I just wanted to catch you in a spare moment ... to talk to you."

  "About what?"

  "I ... Well, I need a job."

  He said it belligerently and drew back a little. Rearden stood looking at him blankly.

  "Henry, I want a job. I mean, here, at the mills. I want you to give me something to do. I need a job, I need to earn my living, I'm tired of alms." He was groping for something to say, his voice both offended and pleading, as if the necessity to justify the plea were an unfair imposition upon him. "I want a livelihood of my own, I'm not asking you for charity, I'm asking you to give me a chance!"

  "This is a factory, Philip, not a gambling joint."

  "Uh?"

  "We don't take chances or give them."

  "I'm asking you to give me a job!"

  "Why should I?"

  "Because I need it!"

  Rearden pointed to the red spurts of flame shooting from the black shape of a furnace, shooting safely into space four hundred feet of steel-clay-and-steam-embodied thought above them. "I needed that furnace, Philip. It wasn't my need that gave it to me."

  Philip's face assumed a look of not having heard. "You're not officially supposed to hire anybody, but that's just a technicality, if you'll put me on, my friends will okay it without any trouble and--" Something about Rearden's eyes made him stop abruptly, then ask in an angrily impatient voice, "Well, what's the matter? What have I said that's wrong?"

  "What you haven't said."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "What you're squirming to leave unmentioned."

  "What?"

  "That you'd be of no use to me whatever."

  "Is that what you--" Philip started with automatic righteousness, but stopped and did not finish.

  "Yes," said Rearden, smiling, "that's what I think of first."

  Philip's eyes oozed away; when he spoke, his voice sounded as if it were darting about at random, picking stray sentences: "Everybody is entitled to a livelihood ... How am I going to get it, if nobody gives me my chance?"

  "How did I get mine?"

  "I wasn't born owning a steel plant."

  ."Was I?"

  "I can do anything you can--if you'll teach me."

  "Who taught me?"

  "Why do you keep saying that? I'm not talking about you!"

  "I am."

  In a moment, Philip muttered, "What do you have to worry about? It's not your livelihood that's in question!"

  Rearden pointed to the figures of men in the steaming rays of the furnace. "Can you do what they're doing?"

  "I don't see what you.'re--"

  "What will happen if I put you there and you ruin a heat of steel for .me?"

  "What's more important, that your damn steel gets poured or that I .eat?"

  "How do you propose to eat if the steel doesn't get poured?"

  Philip's face assumed a look of reproach. "I'm not in a position to argue with you right now, since you hold the upper hand."

  "Then don't argue."

  "Uh?"

  "Keep your mouth shut and get out of here."

  "But I meant--" He stopped.

  Rearden chuckled. "You meant that it's I who should keep my mouth shut, because I hold the upper hand, and should give in to you, because you hold no hand at all?"

  "That's a peculiarly crude way of stating a moral principle."

  "But that's what your moral principle amounts to, doesn't it?"

  "You can't discuss morality in materialistic terms."

  "We're discussing a job in a steel plant--and, boy! is that a materialistic place!"

  Philip's body drew a shade tighter together and his eyes became a shade more glazed, as if in fear of the place around him, in resentment of its sight, in an effort not to concede its reality. He said, in the soft, stubborn whine of a voodoo incantation, "It's a moral imperative, universally conceded in our day and age, that every man is entitled to a job." His voice rose: "I'm entitled to it!"

  "You are? Go on, then, collect your claim."

  "Uh?"

  "Collect your job. Pick it off the bush where you think it grows."

  "I mean--"

  "You mean that it doesn't? You mean that you need it, but can't create it? You mean that you're entitled to a job which I must create for you?"

  "Yes!"

  "And if I don't?"

  The silence went stretching through second after second. "I don't understand you," said Philip; his voice had the angry bewilderment of a man who recites the formulas of a well-tested role, but keeps getting the wrong cues in answer. "I don't understand why one can't talk to you any more. I don't understand what sort of theory you're propounding and--"

  "Oh yes, you do."

  As if refusing to believe that the formulas could fail, Philip burst out with: "Since when did you take to abstract philosophy? You're only a businessman, you're not qualified to deal with questions of principle, you ought to leave it to the experts who have conceded for centuries--"

  "Cut it, Philip. What's the gimmick?"

  "Gimmick?"

  "Why the sudden ambition?"

  "Well, at a time like this ..."

  "Like what?"

  "Well, every man has the right to have some means of support and ... and not be left to be tossed aside ... When things are so uncertain, a man's got to have some security ... some foothold ... I mean, at a time like this, if anything happened to you, I'd have no--"

  "What do you expect to happen to me?"

  "Oh, I don't! I don'.t!" The cry was oddly, incomprehensibly genuine. "I don't expect anything to happen! ... Do you?"

  "Such as what?"

  "How do I know?
... But I've got nothing except the pittance you give me and ... and you might change your mind any time."

  "I might."

  "And I haven't any hold on you at all."

  "Why did it take you that many years to realize it and start worrying? Why now?"

  "Because ... because you've changed. You ... you used to have a sense of duty and moral responsibility, but ... you're losing it. You're losing it, aren't you?"

  Rearden stood studying him silently; there was something peculiar in Philip's manner of sliding toward questions, as if his words were accidental, but the too casual, the faintly insistent questions were the key to his purpose.

  "Well, I'll be glad to take the burden off your shoulders, if I'm a burden to you!" Philip snapped suddenly. "Just give me a job, and your conscience won't have to bother you about me any longer!"

  "It doesn't."

  "That's what I mean! You don't care. You don't care what becomes of any of us, do you?"

  "Of whom?"

  "Why ... Mother and me and ... and mankind in general. But I'm not going to appeal to your better self. I know that you're ready to ditch me at a moment's notice, so--"

  "You're lying, Philip. That's not what you're worried about. If it were, you'd be angling for a chunk of cash, not for a job, not--"

  "No! I want a job!" The cry was immediate and almost frantic. "Don't try to buy me off with cash! I want a job!"

  "Pull yourself together, you poor louse. Do you hear what you're saying?"

  Philip spit out his answer with impotent hatred: "You can't talk to me that way!"

  "Can you?"

  "I only--"

  "To buy you off? Why should 1 try to buy you off--instead of kicking you out, as I should have, years ago?"

  "Well, after all, I'm your brother!"

  "What is that supposed to mean?"

  "One's supposed to have some sort of feeling for one's brother."

  "Do you?"

  Philip's mouth swelled petulantly; he did not answer; he waited; Rearden let him wait. Philip muttered, "You're supposed ... at least ... to have some consideration for my feelings ... but you haven't."

  "Have you for mine?"

  "Yours? Your feelings?" It was not malice in Philip's voice, but worse: it was a genuine, indignant astonishment. "You haven't any feelings. You've never felt anything at all. You've never suffered!"

  It was as if a sum of years hit Rearden in the face, by means of a sensation and a sight: the exact sensation of what he had felt in the cab of the first train's engine on the John Gait Line--and the sight of Philip's eyes, the pale, half-liquid eyes presenting the uttermost of human degradation : an uncontested pain, and, with the obscene insolence of a skeleton toward a living being, demanding that this pain be held as the highest of values. You've never suffered, the eyes were saying to him accusingly--while he was seeing the night in his office when his ore mines were taken away from him--the moment when he had signed the Gift Certificate surrendering Rearden Metal--the month of days inside a plane that searched for the remains of Dagny's body. You've never suffered, the eyes were saying with self-righteous scorn--while he remembered the sensation of proud chastity with which he had fought through those moments, refusing to surrender to pain, a sensation made of his love, of his loyalty, of his knowledge that joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture. You've never suffered, the dead stare of the eyes was saying, you've never felt anything, because only to suffer is to feel--there's no such thing as joy, there's only pain and the absence of pain, only pain and the zero, when one feels nothing--I suffer, I'm twisted by suffering, I'm made of undiluted suffering, that's my purity, that's my virtue--and yours, you the untwisted one, you the uncomplaining, yours is to relieve me of my pain--cut your unsuffering body to patch up mine, cut your unfeeling soul to stop mine from feeling--and we'll achieve the ultimate ideal, the triumph over life, the zero! He was seeing the nature of those who, for centuries, had not recoiled from the preachers of annihilation--he was seeing the nature of the enemies he had been fighting all his life.

  "Philip," he said, "get out of here." His voice was like a ray of sunlight in a morgue, it was the plain, dry, daily voice of a businessman, the sound of health, addressed to an enemy one could not honor by anger, nor even by horror. "And don't ever try to enter these mills again, because there will be orders at every gate to throw you out, if you try it."

  "Well, after all," said Philip, in the angry and cautious tone of a tentative threat, "I could have my friends assign me to a job here and compel you to accept it!"

  Rearden had started to go, but he stopped and turned to look at his brother.

  Philip's moment of grasping a sudden revelation was not accomplished by means of thought, but by means of that dark sensation which was his only mode of consciousness: he felt a sensation of terror, squeezing his throat, shivering down into his stomach--he was seeing the spread of the mills, with the roving streamers of flame, with the ladles of molten metal sailing through space on delicate cables, with open pits the color of glowing coal, with cranes coming at his head, pounding past, holding tons of steel by the invisible power of magnets--and he knew that he was afraid of this place, afraid to the death, that he dared not move without the protection and guidance of the man before him--then he looked at the tall, straight figure standing casually still, the figure with the unflinching eyes whose sight had cut through rock and flame to build this place--and then he knew how easily the man he was proposing to compel could let a single bucket of metal tilt over a second ahead of its time or let a single crane drop its load a foot short of its goal, and there would be nothing left of him, of Philip the claimant--and his only protection lay in the fact that his mind would think of such actions, but the mind of Hank Rearden would not.

  "But we'd better keep it on a friendly basis," said Philip.

  "You'd better," said Rearden and walked away.

  Men who worship pain--thought Rearden, staring at the image of the enemies he had never been able to understand--they're men who worship pain. It seemed monstrous, yet peculiarly devoid of importance. He felt nothing. It was like trying to summon emotion toward inanimate objects, toward refuse sliding down a mountainside to crush him. One could flee from the slide or build retaining walls against it or be crushed -but one could not grant any anger, indignation or moral concern to the senseless motions of the un-living; no, worse, he thought--the anti-living.

  The same sense of detached unconcern remained with him while he sat in a Philadelphia courtroom and watched men perform the motions which were to grant him his divorce. He watched them utter mechanical generalities, recite vague phrases of fraudulent evidence, play an intricate game of stretching words to convey no facts and no meaning. He had paid them to do it--he whom the law permitted no other way to gain his freedom, no right to state the facts and plead the truth--the law which delivered his fate, not to objective rules objectively defined, but to the arbitrary mercy of a judge with a wizened face and a look of empty cunning.

  Lillian was not present in the courtroom; her attorney made gestures once in a while, with the energy of letting water run through his fingers. They all knew the verdict in advance and they knew its reason; no other reason had existed for years, where no standards, save whim, had existed. They seemed to regard it as their rightful prerogative; they acted as if the purpose of the procedure were not to try a case, but to give them jobs, as if their jobs were to recite the appropriate formulas with no responsibility to know what the formulas accomplished, as if a courtroom were the one place where questions of right and wrong were irrelevant and they, the men in charge of dispensing justice, were safely wise enough to know that no justice existed. They acted like savages performing a ritual devised to set them free of objective reality.

  But the ten years of his marriage had been real, he thought--and these were the men who assumed the power to dispose of it
, to decide whether he would have a chance of contentment on earth or be condemned to torture for the rest of his lifetime. He remembered the austerely pitiless respect he had felt for his contract of marriage, for all his contracts and all his legal obligations--and he saw what sort of legality his scrupulous observance was expected to serve.

  He noticed that the puppets of the courtroom had started by glancing at him in the sly, wise manner of fellow conspirators sharing a common guilt, mutually safe from moral condemnation. Then, when they observed that he was the only man in the room who looked steadily straight at anyone's face, he saw resentment growing in their eyes. Incredulously, he realized what it was that had been expected of him: he, the victim, chained, bound, gagged and left with no recourse save to bribery, had been expected to believe that the farce he had purchased was a process of law, that the edicts enslaving him had moral validity, that he was guilty of corrupting the integrity of the guardians of justice, and that the blame was his, not theirs. It was like blaming the victim of a holdup for corrupting the integrity of the thug. And yet--he thought -through all the generations of political extortion, it was not the looting bureaucrats who had taken the blame, but the chained industrialists, not the men who peddled legal favors, but the men who were forced to buy them; and through all those generations of crusades against corruption, the remedy had always been, not the liberating of the victims, but the granting of wider powers for extortion to the extortionists. The only guilt of the victims, he thought, had been that they accepted it as guilt.

  When he walked out of the courtroom into the chilly drizzle of a gray afternoon, he felt as if he had been divorced, not only from Lillian, but from the whole of the human society that supported the procedure he had witnessed.

  The face of his attorney, an elderly man of the old-fashioned school, wore an expression that made it look as if he longed to take a bath. "Say, Hank," he asked as sole comment, "is there something the looters are anxious to get from you right now?" "Not that I know of. Why?" "The thing went too smoothly. There were a few points at which I expected pressure and hints for some extras, but the boys sailed past and took no advantage of it. Looks to me as if orders had come from on high to treat you gently and let you have your way. Are they planning something new against your mills?" "Not that I know of," said Rearden -and was astonished to hear in his mind: Not that I care.

  It was on the same afternoon, at the mills, that he saw the Wet Nurse hurrying toward him--a gangling, coltish figure with a peculiar mixture of brusqueness, awkwardness and decisiveness.