Atlas Shrugged

by Ayn Rand

  The newspapers did not mention it. The editorials went on speaking of self-denial as the road to future progress, of self-sacrifice as the moral imperative, of greed as the enemy, of love as the solution--their threadbare phrases as sickeningly sweet as the odor of ether in a hospital.

  Rumors went spreading through the country in whispers of cynical terror--yet people read the newspapers and acted as if they believed what they read, each competing with the others on who would keep most blindly silent, each pretending that he did not know what he knew, each striving to believe that the unnamed was the unreal. It was as if a volcano were cracking open, yet the people at the foot of the mountain ignored the sudden fissures, the black fumes, the boiling trickles, and went on believing that their only danger was to acknowledge the reality of these signs.

  "Listen to Mr. Thompson's report on the world crisis, November 22!"

  It was the first acknowledgment of the unacknowledged. The announcements began to appear a week in advance and went ringing across the country. "Mr. Thompson will give the people a report on the world crisis! Listen to Mr. Thompson on every radio station and television channel at 8 P.M., on November 22!"

  First, the front pages of the newspapers and the shouts of the radio voices had explained it: "To counteract the fears and rumors spread by the enemies of the people, Mr. Thompson will address the country on November 22 and will give us a full report on the state of the world in this solemn moment of global crisis. Mr. Thompson will put an end to those sinister forces whose purpose is to keep us in terror and despair. He will bring light into the darkness of the world and will show us the way out of our tragic problems--a stern way, as befits the gravity of this hour, but a way of glory, as granted by the rebirth of light. Mr. Thompson's address will be carried by every radio station in this country and in all countries throughout the world, wherever radio waves may still be heard."

  Then the chorus broke loose and went growing day by day. "Listen to Mr. Thompson on November 22!" said daily headlines. "Don't forget Mr. Thompson on November 22!" cried radio stations at the end of every program. "Mr. Thompson will tell you the truth!" said placards in subways and buses--then posters on the walls of buildings -then billboards on deserted highways.

  "Don't despair! Listen to Mr. Thompson!" said pennants on government cars. "Don't give up! Listen to Mr. Thompson!" said banners in offices and shops. "Have faith! Listen to Mr. Thompson!" said voices in churches. "Mr. Thompson will give you the answer!" wrote army airplanes across the sky, the letters dissolving in space, and only the last two words remaining by the time the sentence was completed.

  Public loud-speakers were built in the squares of New York for the day of the speech, and came to rasping life once an hour, in time with the ringing of distant clocks, to send over the worn rattle of the traffic, over the heads of the shabby crowds, the sonorous, mechanical cry of an alarm-toned voice: "Listen to Mr. Thompson's report on the world crisis, November 22!"--a cry rolling through the frosted air and vanishing among the foggy roof tops, under the blank page of a calendar that bore no date.

  On the afternoon of November 22, James Taggart told Dagny that Mr. Thompson wished to meet her for a conference before the broadcast. .

  "In Washington?" she asked incredulously, glancing at her watch.

  "Well, I must say that you haven't been reading the newspapers or keeping track of important events. Don't you know that Mr. Thompson is to broadcast from New York? He has come here to confer with the leaders of industry, as well as of labor, science, the professions, and the best of the country's leadership in general. He has requested that I bring you to the conference."

  "Where is it to be held?"

  "At the broadcasting studio."

  "They don't expect me to speak on the air in support of their policies, do they?"

  "Don't worry, they wouldn't let you near a microphone! They just want to hear your opinion, and you can't refuse, not in a national emergency, not when it's an invitation from Mr. Thompson in person!" He spoke impatiently, avoiding her eyes.

  "When is that conference to be held?"

  "At seven-thirty."

  "Not much time to give to a conference about a national emergency, is it?"

  "Mr. Thompson is a very busy man. Now please don't argue, don't start being difficult, I don't see what you.'re--"

  "All right," she said indifferently, "I'll come," and added, prompted by the kind of feeling that would have made her reluctant to venture without a witness into a conference of gangsters, "but I'll bring Eddie Willers along with me."

  He frowned, considering it for a moment, with a look of annoyance more than anxiety. "Oh, all right, if you wish," he snapped, shrugging.

  She came to the broadcasting studio with James Taggart as a policeman at one side of her and Eddie Willers as a bodyguard at the other. Taggart's face was resentful and tense, Eddie.'s--resigned, yet wondering and curious. A stage set of pasteboard walls had been erected in a corner of the vast, dim space, representing a stiffly traditional suggestion of a cross between a stately drawing room and a modest study. A semicircle of empty armchairs filled the set, suggesting a grouping from a family album, with microphones dangling like bait at the end of long poles extended for fishing among the chairs.

  The best leadership of the country, that stood about in nervous clusters, had the look of a remnant sale in a bankrupt store: she saw Wesley Mouch, Eugene Lawson, Chick Morrison, Tinky Holloway, Dr. Floyd Ferris, Dr. Simon Pritchett, Ma Chalmers, Fred Kinnan, and a seedy handful of businessmen among whom the half-scared, half-flattered figure of Mr. Mowen of the Amalgamated Switch and Signal Company was, incredibly, intended to represent an industrial tycoon.

  But the figure that gave her an instant's shock was Dr. Robert Stadler. She had not known that a face could age so greatly within the brief space of one year: the look of timeless energy, of boyish eagerness, was gone, and nothing remained of the face except the lines of contemptuous bitterness. He stood alone, apart from the others, and she saw the moment when his eyes saw her enter; he looked like a man in a whorehouse who had accepted the nature of his surroundings until suddenly caught there by his wife: it was a look of guilt in the process of becoming hatred. Then she saw Robert Stadler, the scientist, turn away as if he had not seen her--as if his refusal to see could wipe a fact out of existence.

  Mr. Thompson was pacing among the groups, snapping at random bystanders, in the restless manner of a man of action who feels contempt for the duty of making speeches. He was clutching a sheaf of typewritten pages, as if it were a bundle of old clothing about to be discarded.

  James Taggart caught him in mid-step, to say uncertainly and loudly, "Mr. Thompson, may I present my sister, Miss Dagny Taggart?"

  "So nice of you to come, Miss Taggart," said Mr. Thompson, shaking her hand as if she were another voter from back home whose name he had never heard before; then he marched briskly off.

  "Where's the conference, Jim?" she asked, and glanced at the clock: it was a huge white dial with a black hand slicing the minutes, like a knife moving toward the hour of eight.

  "I can't help it! I don't run this show!" he snapped.

  Eddie Willers glanced at her with a look of bitterly patient astonishment, and stepped closer to her side.

  A radio receiver was playing a program of military marches broadcast from another studio, half-drowning the fragments of nervous voices, of hastily aimless steps, of screeching machinery being pulled to focus upon the drawing-room set.

  "Stay tuned to hear Mr. Thompson's report on the world crisis at eight P.M.!" cried the martial voice of an announcer, from the radio receiver--when the hand on the dial reached the hour of 7:45.

  "Step on it, boys, step on it!" snapped Mr. Thompson, while the radio burst into another march.

  It was 7:50 when Chick Morrison, the Morale Conditioner, who seemed to be in charge, cried, "All right, boys and girls, all right, let's take our places!" waving a bunch of notepaper, like a baton, toward the light-flooded
circle of armchairs.

  Mr. Thompson thudded down upon the central chair, in the manner of grabbing a vacant seat in a subway.

  Chick Morrison's assistants were herding the crowd toward the circle of light.

  "A happy family," Chick Morrison explained, "the country must see us as a big, united, happy--What's the matter with that thing?" The radio music had gone off abruptly, choking on an odd little gasp of static, cut in the middle of a ringing phrase. It was 7:51. He shrugged and went on: "--happy family. Hurry up, boys. Take close-ups of Mr. Thompson, first."

  The hand of the clock went slicing off the minutes, while press photographers clicked their cameras at Mr. Thompson's sourly impatient face.

  "Mr. Thompson will sit between science and industry!" Chick Morrison announced. "Dr. Stadler, please--the chair on Mr. Thompson's left. Miss Taggart--this way, please--on Mr. Thompson's right."

  Dr. Stadler obeyed. She did not move.

  "It's not just for the press, it's for the television audiences," Chick Morrison explained to her, in the tone of an inducement.

  She made a step forward. "I will not take part in this program," she said evenly, addressing Mr. Thompson.

  "You won't?" he asked blankly, with the kind of look he would have worn if one of the flower vases had suddenly refused to perform its part.

  "Dagny, for Christ's sake!" cried James Taggart in panic.

  "What's the matter with her?" asked Mr. Thompson.

  "But, Miss Taggart! Why?" cried Chick Morrison.

  "You all know why," she said to the faces around her. "You should have known better than to try that again."

  "Miss Taggart!" yelled Chick Morrison, as she turned to go. "It's a national emer--"

  Then a man came rushing toward Mr. Thompson, and she stopped, as did everyone else--and the look on the man's face swept the crowd into an abruptly total silence. He was the station's chief engineer, and it was odd to see a look of primitive terror struggling against his remnant of civilized control.

  "Mr. Thompson," he said, "we . . . we might have to delay the broadcast."

  "What?" cried Mr. Thompson.

  The hand of the dial stood at 7:58.

  "We're trying to fix it, Mr. Thompson, we're trying to find out what it is ... but we might not be on time and--"

  "What are you talking about? What happened?"

  "We're trying to locate the--"

  "What happened?"

  "I don't know! But ... We .. we can't get on the air, Mr. Thompson."

  There was a moment of silence, then Mr. Thompson asked, his voice unnaturally low, "Are you crazy?"

  "I must be. I wish I were. I can't make it out. The station is dead."

  "Mechanical trouble?" yelled Mr. Thompson, leaping to his feet. "Mechanical trouble, God damn you, at a time like this? If that's how you run this station--"

  The chief engineer shook his head slowly, in the manner of an adult who is reluctant to frighten a child. "It's not this station, Mr. Thompson," he said softly. "It's every station in the country, as far as we've been able to check. And there is no mechanical trouble. Neither here nor elsewhere. The equipment is in order, in perfect order, and they all report the same, but ... but all radio stations went off the air at seven-fifty-one, and ... and nobody can discover why."

  "But--" cried Mr. Thompson, stopped, glanced about him and screamed, "Not tonight! You can't let it happen tonight! You've got to get me on the air!"

  "Mr. Thompson," the man said slowly, "we've called the electronic laboratory of the State Science Institute. They ... they've never seen anything like it. They said it might be a natural phenomenon, some sort of cosmic disturbance of an unprecedented kind, only--"

  "Well?"

  "Only they don't think it is. We don.'t, either. They said it looks like radio waves, but of a frequency never produced before, never observed anywhere, never discovered by anybody."

  No one answered him. In a moment, he went on, his voice oddly solemn: "It looks like a wall of radio waves jamming the air, and we can't get through it, we can't touch it, we can't break it.... What's more, we can't locate its source, not by any of our usual methods.... Those waves seem to come from a transmitter that ... that makes any known to us look like a child's toy!"

  "But that's not possible!" The cry came from behind Mr. Thompson and they all whirled in its direction, startled by its note of peculiar terror; it came from Dr. Stadler. "There's no such thing! There's nobody on earth to make it!"

  The chief engineer spread his hands out. "That's it, Dr. Stadler," he said wearily. "It can't be possible. It shouldn't be possible. But there it is."

  "Well, do something about it!" cried Mr. Thompson to the crowd at large.

  No one answered or moved.

  "I won't permit this!" cried Mr. Thompson. "I won't permit it! Tonight of all nights! I've got to make that speech! Do something! Solve it, whatever it is! I order you to solve it!"

  The chief engineer was looking at him blankly.

  "I'll fire the lot of you for this! I'll fire every electronic engineer in the country! I'll put the whole profession on trial for sabotage, desertion and treason! Do you hear me? Now do something, God damn you! Do something!"

  The chief engineer was looking at him impassively, as if words were not conveying anything any longer.

  "Isn't there anybody around to obey an order?" cried Mr. Thompson. "Isn't there a brain left in this country?"

  The hand of the clock reached the dot of 8:00.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," said a voice that came from the radio receiver--a man's clear, calm, implacable voice, the kind of voice that had not been heard on the airwaves for years--"Mr. Thompson will not speak to you tonight. His time is up. I have taken it over. You were to hear a report on the world crisis. That is what you are going to hear."

  Three gasps of recognition greeted the voice, but nobody had the power to notice them among the sounds of the crowd, which were beyond the stage of cries. One was a gasp of triumph, another--of terror, the third--of bewilderment. Three persons had recognized the speaker: Dagny, Dr. Stadler, Eddie Willers. Nobody glanced at Eddie Willers; but Dagny and Dr. Stadler glanced at each other. She saw that his face was distorted by as evil a terror as one could ever bear to see; he saw that she knew and that the way she looked at him was as if the speaker had slapped his face.

  "For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing--you who dread knowledge--I am the man who will now tell you."

  The chief engineer was the only one able to move; he ran to a television set and struggled frantically with its dials. But the screen remained empty; the speaker had not chosen to be seen. Only his voice filled the airways of the country--of the world, thought the chief engineer--sounding as if he were speaking here, in this room, not to a group, but to one man; it was not the tone of addressing a meeting, but the tone of addressing a mind.

  "You have heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis. You have said it yourself, half in fear, half in hope that the words had no meaning. You have cried that man's sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster. In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.

  "You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins,
it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, you have wished it, and I -I am the man who has granted you your wish.

  "Your ideal had an implacable enemy, which your code of morality was designed to destroy. I have withdrawn that enemy. I have taken it out of your way and out of your reach. I have removed the source of all those evils you were sacrificing one by one. I have ended your battle. I have stopped your motor. I have deprived your world of man's mind.

  "Men do not live by the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those who do. The mind is impotent, you say? I have withdrawn those whose mind isn't. There are values higher than the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those for whom there aren't.

  "While you were dragging to your sacrificial altars the men of justice, of independence, of reason, of wealth, of self-esteem--I beat you to it, I reached them first. I told them the nature of the game you were playing and the nature of that moral code of yours, which they had been too innocently generous to grasp. I showed them the way to live by another morality-mine. It is mine that they chose to follow.

  "All the men who have vanished, the men you hated, yet dreaded to lose, it is I who have taken them away from you. Do not attempt to find us. We do not choose to be found. Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don't. Do not beg us to return. We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.