..., was not a link to the past: it was her last link to the future. To kill it seemed like an act, not of murder, but of suicide: her order to stop it would be her signature under the certainty that there was no terminal for her to seek ahead. But it is not true-she thought, as she stood at the door of her cabin, on this morning of May 28-it is not true that there is no place in the future for a...
... am I lying? I can't lie to you, you always seem to see everything, it's worse than trying to lie to myself! ... I have lied to myself. I didn't know what I felt for her. The railroad? I'm a rotten hypocrite. If the railroad was all she meant to me, it wouldn't have hit me like this. I wouldn't have felt that I wanted to kill him! ... What's the matter with you tonight? Why do you look at me like...
.... You hit the ray screen. Some of the rays are the kind that kill magnetic motors. Well, that's the second time you beat me: I've never been followed, either," "Why do you keep that screen?" "Because this place is private property intended to remain as such." "What is this place?" "I'll show it to you, now that you're here, Miss Taggart. I'll answer questions after you've seen it." She remained silent...
... and was now in jail, awaiting execution for a murder committed with a gang of raiders-a way station had been closed in Kansas, and the station agent, who had wanted to be a scientist, had given up his studies and become a dishwasher-that he, James Taggart, might sit in a private barroom and pay for the alcohol pouring down Orren Boyle's throat, for the waiter who sponged Boyle's garments when he...
... were ready for the kill. These were the men who hovered over factories, waiting for the last breath of a furnace, to pounce upon the equipment-and over desolate sidings, to pounce upon the freight cars of undelivered goods-these were a new biological species, the hit-and-run businessmen, who did not stay in any line of business longer than the span of one deal, who had no payrolls to meet, no...
... bother you?" he asked. "It doesn't," snapped Eddie Willers. He reached hastily into his pocket. The bum had stopped him and asked for a dime, then had gone on talking, as if to kill that moment and postpone the problem of the next. Pleas for dimes were so frequent in the streets these days that it was not necessary to listen to explanations, and he had no desire to hear the details of this bum's...
... and never forgot that it was his. Many stories were whispered about him. It was said that in the wilderness of the Middle West, he murdered a state legislator who attempted to revoke a charter granted to him, to revoke it when his rail was laid halfway across the state; some legislators had planned to make a fortune on Taggart stock-by selling it short. Nat Taggart was indicted for the murder, but...
... instructed our Operating Department to cut the schedule on the San Sebastian Line down to a single train a day, and to remove from it our best motive power and rolling stock, as well as every piece of equipment that could be moved. The Mexican government was able to seize nothing but a few wooden cars and one superannuated locomotive. My decision has saved the company many millions of dollars-I shall have...
.... They never succeeded. When they showed him how to hit a ball with a bat, a game he had never played before, he watched them for a few minutes, then said, "I think I get the idea. Let me try." He took the bat and sent the ball flying over a line of oak trees far at the end of the field. When Jim was given a motorboat for his birthday, they all stood on the river landing, watching the lesson, while an...
... never knew where he was, in what city or on what continent, the day after she had seen him. He always came to her unexpectedly-and she liked it, because it made him a continuous presence in her life, like the ray of a hidden light that could hit her at any moment. Whenever she saw him in his office, she thought of his hands as she had seen them on the wheel of a motorboat: he drove his business HI...
... that they remove their wraps, then their evening gowns, then all the rest, in tempo with the melting of the walls. She read the accounts of the business ventures he undertook at lengthy intervals; the ventures were spectacularly successful and ruined his competitors, but he indulged in them as in an occasional sport, staging a sudden raid, then vanishing from the industrial scene for a year or two...
... they were melting. Rearden's face, with the sharp planes, the pale blue eyes, the ash-blond hair, had the firmness of ice; the uncompromising clarity of its lines made it look, among the others, as if he were moving through a fog, hit by a ray of light. Her eyes kept returning to him involuntarily. She never caught him glancing in her direction. She could not believe that he was avoiding her...
... from him?-he thought. What was she after? In the universe as he knew it. There was no answer. CHAPTER VII THE EXPLOITERS AND THE EXPLOITED The rails rose through the rocks to the oil derricks and the oil derricks rose to the sky. Dagny stood on the bridge, looking up at the crest of the hill where the sun hit a spot of metal on the top of the highest rigging. It looked like a white torch lighted over...
... 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...
... emotion in his voice, the uncomplicated sound of animal fear. "God help this city, if we don't!" she answered. The car turned a corner. Above the black roofs of the city, she saw the page of the calendar, hit by the white glare of a spotlight. It said: January 29. "Dan Conway is a bastard!" The words broke out suddenly, as if he could not hold them any longer. She looked at him, bewildered. "Why?" "He...
..., the color of deep gold, hit the wall behind Rearden's desk. The glow moved gently across his forehead. His face had an unmoving serenity. "The State Science Institute is a government organization, Mr. Rearden. There are certain bills pending in the Legislature, which may be passed at any moment. Businessmen are peculiarly vulnerable these days. I am sure you understand me." Rearden rose to his feet...
.... He was smiling. He looked as if all tension had left him. "No, Dr. Potter," he said, "I don't understand. If I did, I'd have to kill you." The man walked to the door, then stopped and looked at Rearden in a way which, for once, was simple human curiosity. Rearden stood motionless against the moving glow on the wall; he stood casually, his hands in his pockets. "Would you tell me," the man asked...
..., one knew that he would consider it as indecent to let his face show suffering as to remove his clothes in public. He spoke in a dry, businesslike manner. He explained that he had always dealt, as his father had, with one of the small steel companies now taken over by Orren Boyle's Associated Steel. He had waited for his last order of steel for a year. He had spent the last month struggling to obtain...
... you an extension to help you fight them." He saw Eddie wincing, as if he had hit a wound. "That's what's horrible about it!" "What?" "What they've done to you-and what you're doing in return. I mean-" He stopped. "Forgive me, Mr. Rearden. I know this is no way to talk business." Rearden smiled. "Thanks, Eddie. I know what you mean. But forget it. To hell with them." "Yes. Only ... Mr. Rearden, may I...
... minutes, but it hit them as a single whole. First, they saw the lone shapes, which were factories, rolling across their windowpanes-then the shapes fused into the blur of streets-then a delta of rails spread out before them, like the mouth of a funnel sucking them into the Taggart station, with nothing to protect them but the small green beads of lights scattered over the ground-from the height of the...
... the men of the train's crew, without words, with the seal of the grins on their faces. There were flash bulbs exploding around them, and men waving to them from the riggings of the oil wells on the slopes of the mountains. Above her head, above the heads of the crowd, the letters TT on a silver shield were hit by the last ray of a sinking sun. Ellis Wyatt had taken charge. He was leading her...
... evening ahead and no one to help him kill it. The front pages of the newspapers were screaming of the triumph of the John Galt Line, as the radios had screamed it yesterday and all through the night. The name of Taggart Transcontinental was stretched in headlines across the continent, like its track, and he had smiled in answer to the congratulations. He had smiled, seated at the bead of the long table...
... when they finished. She rose and leaned against the empty frame of the window for a touch of cool air on her forehead. The sky was dark blue. "It could have set the whole country in motion and on fire." She looked down at the motor. She looked out at the country. She moaned suddenly, hit by a single long shudder, and dropped her head on her arm, standing pressed to the frame of the window. "What's...
... quite famous in these parts two-three years ago." "Did Lawson operate the factory?" "No. He merely lent an awful lot of money on it, more than he could ever hope to get back out of the old dump. When the factory busted, that was the last straw for Gene Lawson. The bank busted three months later." He sighed. "It hit the folks pretty hard around here. They all had their life savings in the Community...
... details. Dagny, you'll think I'm insane, but I think they're planning to kill Colorado." "I'll come back at once," she said. Cut into the granite of Manhattan, under the Taggart Terminal, there were tunnels which had once been used as sidings, at a time when traffic ran in clicking currents through every artery of the Terminal every hour of the day. The need for space had shrunk through the years, with...
.... "How-if you kill Colorado?" "It seems to me that before we worry about giving some people a chance to expand, we ought to give some consideration to the people who need a chance of bare survival." "If you kill Colorado, what is there going to be left for your damn looters to survive on?" "You have always been opposed to every progressive social measure. I seem to remember that you predicted disaster...
..., full-conscious evil that neither has nor seeks justification. But when he felt the wish to fight and kill in the rightful cause of self-defense-he saw the fat, grinning face of Mayor Bascom and heard the drawling voice saying, "... you and the charming lady who is not your wife." Then no rightful cause was left, and the pain of anger was turning into the shameful pain of submission. He had no right...
... is getting to be ominous, isn't it? If they pass those laws they're talking about, it will hit you pretty hard, won't it?" "Yes. It will. But that is a subject which is of no interest to you, Lillian, is it?" "Oh, but it is!" She raised her head and looked straight at him; her eyes had the blank, veiled look he had seen before, a look of deliberate mystery and of confidence in his inability to...
... with their time?" "They certainly don't spend it on manufacturing plumbing pipes." "Tell me, why do you keep making those cracks? I know that you feel contempt for the plumbing pipes. You've made that clear long ago. Your contempt means nothing to me. Why keep repeating it?" He wondered why this hit her; he did not know in what manner, but he knew that it did. He wondered why he felt with absolute...
... industrial town. Bare tree branches cut across the bright, cold blue of the sky, on the top of the rise that led to the house. The walls of the living room were silver-gray; sunlight hit the crystal stand of a lamp with a white shade; beyond an open door, a breakfast nook was papered in red-dotted white. "Were you acquainted with my husband in business, Miss Taggart?" "No. I have never met Mr. Hastings...
..., except that it was the look of some special attentiveness. "Yes, I did," he answered. "Could you give me his name and address?" "What for?" "It's crucially important that I find him." "That man? Of what importance is he?" "He is the most important man in the world." "Really? Why?" "Did you know anything about his work?" "Yes." "Did you know that he hit upon an idea of the most tremendous consequence...
... or malice; but the absence of any such emotion, the casual ease of the voice, an ease suggesting a chuckle, hit him like a moment's glimpse of a realm that could not be taken as part of reality; the thing spreading down to his stomach was cold terror. "Did you observe the reactions to my book, Dr. Stadler? It was received with considerable favor." "Yes-and that is what I find impossible to believe...
... open." "But why?" "Listen," said Rearden slowly, "there might be some sort of justification for the savage societies in which a man had to expect that enemies could murder him at any moment and had to defend himself as best he could. But there can be no justification for a society in which a man is expected to manufacture the weapons for his own murderers." "I don't think it's advisable to use such...
... unadmitted knowledge that that which he had called her depravity was her highest virtue-this capacity of hers to feel the joy of being, as he felt it. CHAPTER II THE ARISTOCRACY OF PULL The calendar in the sky beyond the window of her office said: September 2. Dagny leaned wearily across her desk. The first light to snap on at the approach of dusk was always the ray that hit the calendar; when the white...
... a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money? "Money will always remain an effect and...
... there's ever been anything-or anyone-that meant a damn to me, and ... and how much he did mean." Rearden frowned: he had remembered something. "I wouldn't deal with your company. Didn't you call them the men of the double standard? Aren't you one of the looters who is growing rich right now by means of directives?" Inexplicably, the words did not hit Francisco as an insult, but cleared his face back...
..., purposeless, rudderless movement of objects bumping down a hill by the blind mercy of gravitation and of every rock they hit on the way. People were running out, running to telephones, running to one another, clutching or pushing the bodies around them at random. These men, the most powerful men in the country, those who held, unanswerable to any power, the power over every man's food and every man's...
... moment-it was the fact that he had to remove his evening clothes-but farther beyond the edge there was the feeling of reluctance to undress in the presence of a strange woman in his bedroom, and he forgot it again in the next moment. Lillian came out, as trimly groomed as she had arrived, the beige traveling suit outlining her figure with efficient tightness, the hat tilted over half a head of hair set...
... impropriety at finding himself out in the morning streets, dressed in evening clothes. He felt no desire to return from the world he had left to the world he saw drizzling past the windows of the taxi. He turned the key in the door of his hotel suite, hoping to get back to a desk as fast as possible and have to see nothing around him. They hit his consciousness together: the breakfast table-the door to his...
... except of withstanding the revulsion, for the length of the next moment and of the next. When she stopped speaking, he asked, "Have you finished?" "Yes, I believe so." "Then you had better take the train home now." When he undertook the motions necessary to remove his evening clothes, he discovered that his muscles felt as if he were at the end of a long day of physical labor. His starched shirt was...
... you'd slip sooner or later-and this is just what we wanted." "You seem to be pleased about it." "Don't I have good reason to be?" "But, after all, I did break one of your laws." "Well, what do you think they're for?" Dr. Ferris did not notice the sudden look on Rearden's face, the look of a man hit by the first vision of that which he had sought to see. Dr. Ferris was past the stage of seeing; he was...
... the hands of men like Boyle or Larkin? And there's no one left in the coal industry who amounts to much, except Ken Danagger. So she says that she feels almost as if he's a marked man, as if he's hit by a spotlight right now, waiting to be cut down... . What are you laughing at? It might sound preposterous, but I think it's true... . What? ... Oh yes, you bet she's a smart woman! ... And then...
..., his shudder of anger told him that he would murder the man who'd attempt to approach him, he would murder before he could hear the words of the secret that would take him away from his mills. It was late, his staff had gone, but he dreaded the road to his house and the emptiness of the evening ahead. He felt as if the enemy who had wiped out Ken Danagger, were waiting for him in the darkness beyond...
... it's much more and much worse than that. Did you ask me to name man's motive power? Man's motive power is his moral code. Ask yourself where their code is leading you and what it offers you as your final goal. A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. A viler evil than to throw a man into a sacrificial furnace, is to demand that he leap in, of his own will, and...
... window and shot like a rocket in a long, thin line to the sky. It held for an instant, then fell, then went on in rising, falling spirals of sound, as if fighting for breath against terror to scream louder. It was the shriek of agony, the call for help, the voice of the mills as of a wounded body crying to hold its soul. Rearden thought that he leaped for the door the instant the scream hit his...
...?" "Don't know." The boy had stood, glumly avoiding Rearden's eyes, as if trying to avoid something incomprehensible within himself. Rearden had laughed. "Listen, Non-Absolute, you're playing with fire. Better go and murder somebody fast, before you let it get you-that reason that stopped you from turning informer-or else it will blast your career to hell." The boy had not answered. This morning, Rearden...
... would, too. Playboy? I've never loved but one woman in my life and still do and always will!" It was an involuntary break, and he added, his voice low, "I've never confessed that to anyone ... not even to her." "Have you lost her?" Francisco sat looking off into space; in a moment, he answered tonelessly, "I hope not." The light of the lamp hit his face from below, and Rearden could not see his eyes...
... every word I said ... I swear to you-by the woman I love-that I am your friend." The memory of Francisco's face as it looked in that moment, came back to Rearden three days later, through a blinding shock of loss and hatred-it came back, even though, standing by the radio in his office, he thought that he must now keep away from the Wayne-Falkland or he would kill Francisco d'Anconia on sight-it kept...
... the last act of a long-drawn-out murder. I cannot conceive what it is you think you can accomplish by a pretense of this kind, and I will not help you to stage it. The final blow will be delivered by you, as were all the others." She turned to go. The chairman half-rose, asking helplessly, "But, Miss Taggart-" "Please remain seated. Please continue the discussion-and take the vote in which I shall...
... have you done to Hank Rearden?" He looked startled that she should think of that name at that moment "Why?" he asked. "He told me once that you were the only man he'd ever liked. But last time I saw him, he said that he would kill you on sight." "He did not tell you why?" "No." “He told you nothing about it?" "No." She saw him smiling strangely, a smile of sadness, gratitude and longing. "I warned...
... young moron's enjoyment-and she saw the tall, dry stem of a single weed rising from the steps of the main entrance. Hit by a sudden, blinding hatred, in rebellion against the weed's impertinence, knowing of what enemy this was the scout, she ran forward, she fell on her knees and jerked the weed up by its roots. Then, kneeling on the steps of a closed factory, looking at the vast silence of mountains...
... doling his sentences out with cautious slowness, balancing himself between word and intonation to hit the right degree of semi clarity. He wanted her to understand, but he did not want her to understand fully, explicitly, down to the root-since the essence of that modern language, which he had learned to speak expertly, was never to let oneself or others understand anything down to the root. He had not...
... expression, but the steadiness of his eyes hit her as his most dangerous answer. "You'll give it up, you'll leave her, you'll never see her again!" "Lillian, if you wish to discuss it, there's one thing you'd better understand; nothing on earth will make me give it up." "But I demand it!" "I told you that you could demand anything but that." He saw the look of a peculiar panic growing in her eyes: it was...
..., hit by a ray of sun: it was a tall, white obelisk, erected to the memory of the man Dr. Ferris was quoting, the man in whose honor this city had been named. James Taggart looked away. "I don't like the professor's remarks," said Lawson loudly and sullenly. "Keep still," said Wesley Mouch. "Dr. Ferris is not talking theory, but practice." "Well, if you want to talk practice," said Fred Kinnan, "then...
... that made it suddenly real to the room that Ferris had proposed murder. "Don't let me hear you talk about any death penalties in industry." Dr. Ferris shrugged. "We don't have to go to extremes," said Mouch hastily. "We don't want to frighten people. We want to have them on our side. Our top problem is, will they ... will they accept it at all?" "They will," said Dr. Ferris. "I'm a little worried...
... exception to one commodity, we won't be able to hold the others in line and we won't be able to make anything stick." "Yes, that's true. But-" "Don't be a chump, Gene," said Dr. Ferris. "You don't want some recalcitrant hacks to come out with treatises that will wreck our entire program, do you? If you breathe the word 'censorship' now, they'll all scream bloody murder. They're not ready for it-as yet...
... single goal. She did not know that the thing which seemed so violent, yet felt like such a still, unfamiliar calm within her, was the power of full certainty-and that the anger shaking her body, the anger which made her ready, with the same passionate indifference, either to kill or to die, was her love of rectitude, the only love to which all the years of her life had been given. Holding the newspaper...
... suspected or knew how to use. Therefore, the announcement that you have signed will remove the last hopes of resistance and, by midnight, will bring in the last signatures, thus completing the program on schedule." Rearden knew that of all possible speeches, this was the last Dr. Ferris would make if any doubt of his surrender remained in the man's mind. "Go on," said Rearden evenly. "You haven't finished...
... has brought us to a world where the more a man produces, the closer he comes to the loss of all his rights, until, if his ability is great enough, he becomes a rightless creature delivered as prey to any claimant-while in order to be placed above rights, above principles, above morality, placed where anything is permitted to him, even plunder and murder, all a man has to do is to be in need. Do you...
... me, but-" A beam of light hit them with the violence of a physical blow. The clangor of the train had swallowed the noise of the motor and they had not heard the approach of the car that swept out of the side road, from behind the farmhouse. They were not in the car's path, yet they heard the screech of brakes behind the two headlights, pulling an invisible shape to a stop. It was Rearden who...
... achieved collectively, and that it's masses that count, not men. The man in Roomette 7, Car No. 2, was a journalist who wrote that it is proper and moral to use compulsion "for a good cause," who believed that he had the right to unleash physical force upon others-to wreck lives, throttle ambitions, strangle desires, violate convictions, to imprison, to despoil, to murder-for the sake of whatever he...
... believed that men are evil by nature and unfit for freedom, that their basic instincts, if left unchecked, are to lie, to rob and to murder one another-and, therefore, men must be ruled by means of lies, robbery and murder, which must be made the exclusive privilege of the rulers, for the purpose of forcing men to work, teaching them to be moral and keeping them within the bounds of order and justice...
... and miles of forest spread under her feet. The leaves went down from silver to green to the smoky blue of the shadows on the road below. The light trickled down through the branches and shot upward in sudden spurts when it hit a clump of ferns that became a fountain of green rays. It gave her pleasure to watch the motion of the light over a stillness where nothing else could move. She had marked the...
... resist. She saw the protection of control dropping from his face, but he did not care whether he let her see his face alive and naked, because there now was nothing to read in it except an unrevealing violence, some part of which resembled hatred. He seized her shoulders, and she felt prepared to accept that he would now kill her or beat her into unconsciousness, and in the moment when she felt certain...
... it?" She extended the letter, not looking at him, her eyes fixed on the telephone, as if she could force it to answer. The letter said: Dear Miss Taggart: I have fought it out for three weeks, I did not want to do it, I know how this will hit you and I know every argument you could offer me, because I have used them all against myself-but this is to tell you that I am quitting. I cannot work under...
... last of her world. She felt nothing but the emptiness left by a fire that had been hatred and anger and the desperate impulse of a fight to the kill; these had fused into a single icy streak, the single resolve to follow the stranger, whoever he was, wherever he took her, to follow and ... she added nothing in her mind, but, unstated, what lay at the bottom of the emptiness was: and give her life, if...
... she were dropping down a well with a bottom never to be reached. The needle moved to 9,500-to 9,300-to 9,000-to 8,700. The flash of light that hit her had no source. It was as if the air within and beyond the plane became an explosion of blinding cold fire, sudden and soundless. The shock threw her back, her hands off the wheel and over her eyes. In the break of an instant, when she seized the wheel...
... shorter, more muscular. She lost sight of them behind the twists of the trail, as he went on carrying her down to meet them. She met them when they emerged suddenly from behind a rocky corner a few feet away. The sight of their faces hit her with the abruptness of a collision. "Well, I'll be goddamned!" said the muscular man, whom she did not know, staring at her. She was staring at the tall...
... sign of the dollar and a golden ray hit her eyes, sweeping over her forehead. "Who is the owner of this place?" she asked. "I am," said Mulligan. "What is he?" She pointed to Galt. Mulligan chuckled. "He just works here." "And you, Dr. Akston?" she asked. He glanced at Galt, "I'm one of his two fathers, Miss Taggart. The one who didn't betray him." "Oh!" she said, as another connection fell into...
... glass for most of its front wall. "I'll send the doctor over," said Mulligan, driving off, while Galt carried her up the path. "Your house?" she asked. "Mine," he answered, kicking the door open. He carried her across the threshold into the glistening space of his living room, where shafts of sunlight hit walls of polished pine. She saw a few pieces of furniture made by hand, a ceiling of bare rafters...
... have leaped off a skyscraper just to follow him-and to hear his formula before we hit the pavement!" "I don't blame you," she said; she looked at him with a tinge of wistfulness that was almost envy. "Besides, you've fulfilled your contract. You've led me to the secret of the motor." "I'm going to be a janitor here, too," said Daniels, grinning happily. "Mr. Mulligan said he'd give me the job of...
... yes," he answered quietly, almost lightly. The first shop to rise by the side of the valley's single street was like the sudden sight of an open theater: a frame box without front wall, its stage set in the bright colors of a musical comedy-with red cubes, green circles, gold triangles, which were bins of tomatoes, barrels of lettuce, pyramids of oranges, and a spangled backdrop where the sun hit...
... jerked her head away. Above the door, hit by a ray of sun, its design blurred and worn, battered smooth by the winds of centuries, hung the silver coat of-arms of Sebastian d'Anconia. As if in deliberate answer to her involuntary movement of escape, Galt stopped the car in front of the house. For a moment, they held each other's eyes: her glance was a question, his a command, her face had a defiant...
... you mean them the way I intended them to be meant." She inclined her head. "I won't." She followed him down to the car, slowly, feeling suddenly too exhausted to move. She fell back against the seat, closing her eyes, barely hearing the sound of the starter. The accumulated strain and shock of her sleepless hours hit her at once, breaking through the barrier of the tension her nerves had held to...
... Taggart, it will not be published outside. Not a note of it will be heard beyond these mountains." "No, Miss Taggart, I have not given up medicine," said Dr. Hendricks, in answer to her question. "I have spent the last six years on research. I have discovered a method to protect the blood vessels of the brain from that fatal rupture which is known as a brain stroke. It will remove from human existence...
... to know my own value. Ever since I can remember, I had felt that I would kill the man who'd claim that I exist for the sake of his need-and I had known that this was the highest moral feeling. That night, at the Twentieth Century meeting, when I heard an unspeakable evil being spoken in a tone of moral righteousness, I saw the root of the world's tragedy, the key to it and the solution. I saw what...
... violence she had not foreseen. It was only an explosion of laughter on his part-but he laughed as if he were hit beyond his defenses, much beyond the immediate meaning of her words; she felt that she had struck his past, tearing loose some memory and meaning of his own which she could not know. He laughed as if he were seeing some distant image, as if he were laughing in its face, as if this were his...
... somewhere in the Rocky Mountains." She nodded slowly, grasping the events she had not thought of considering. "I heard it aboard the Comet," he said. "At a small station in the middle of New Mexico, The conductor held us there for an hour, while I helped him to check the story on long-distance phones. He was hit by the news just as I was. They all were-the train crew, the station agent, the switchmen...
..., not to be uttered about him, that he wished to remove himself from her path and let its emptiness force her back to the man who was his best-loved friend. Days passed before she spoke of it. Then, at dinner, on an evening when he was to leave, she became suddenly aware of the peculiar pleasure she experienced while watching him eat the food she had prepared-and suddenly, involuntarily, as if that...
... that the purpose of the world's trend was to destroy these children, that these three sons of mine were marked for immolation. Oh yes, I would have killed-but whom was there to kill? It was everyone and no one, there was no single enemy, no center and no villain, it was not the simpering social worker incapable of earning a penny or the thieving bureaucrat scared of his own shadow, it was the whole...
... courageous than these. Ragnar intended to be a philosopher. An abstract, theoretical, academic, cloistered, ivory-tower philosopher... . Yes, Robert Stadler loved them. And yet-I have said that I would have killed to protect them, only there was no one to kill. If that were the solution-which, of course, it isn't-the man to kill was Robert Stadler. Of any one person, of any single guilt for the evil which...
... to Francisco, "Then-no." The defiance toward an adversary who was the sternest of teachers, was all that Francisco had read in her face. He shrugged, regretfully, but gaily. "You're probably right. If you can't prevent her from going back-nobody can." She was not hearing Francisco's words. She was stunned by the magnitude of the relief that hit her at the sound of Galt's answer, a relief that told...
... detail? Have you allowed yourself to visualize it? I want you to see the exact picture of what it is that you propose to enter-before you decide whether anything can justify your entering it. You know that the cities will be hit worst of all. The cities were made by the railroads and will go with them." "That's right." "When the rails are cut, the city of New York will starve in two days. That's all...
... of seven goats in convulsions. By the time Dr. Stadler believed it, the pile was motionless, except for one beast's leg sticking out of the mass, stiff as a rod and shaking as in a strong wind. The farmhouse tore into strips of clapboard and went down, followed by a geyser of the bricks of its chimney. The tractor vanished into a pancake. The water tower cracked and its shreds hit the ground white...
... into a miserable East Coast local?" Her two words seemed to have hit him worse than any indignant objection; he seemed to be shaking with terror at that which the quiet "I see” had acknowledged seeing. "I couldn't help it! We had to have a transcontinental track! There was no way to get around the tunnel! We had no money to pay for any extra costs! Something had to be done! We had to have a track...
... allowing it into words, he knew from what knowledge that sound had come. He got out. She glanced at Eddie; he looked like a man worn by fighting one more of the attacks of disgust which he was learning to endure as a chronic condition. After a moment, he asked, "Dagny, what became of Quentin Daniels? You were flying after him, weren't you?" "Yes," she said. "He's gone." "To the destroyer?" The word hit...
... Dagny's face were hit by a spotlight. She could detect no particular expression, it was simply a face in natural repose-and the clarity seemed to come from its structure, from the precision of its sharp planes, the firmness of the mouth, the steadiness of the eyes. She could not decipher the expression of the eyes, it seemed incongruous, it resembled the calm, not of a woman, but of a scholar, it had...
... a time when he had felt some measure of guilt-in no clearer a form than a touch of irritation-at the thought that he shared the sin of greed, which he spent his time denouncing. Now he was hit by the chill realization that, in fact, he had never been a hypocrite: in full truth, he had never cared for money. This left another hole gaping open before him, leading into another blind alley which he...
... accept the gutter, inside or out, that I was struggling to rise and would go on struggling-didn't you?" "Yes!" he cried. Then the headlight she had felt rushing upon her, hit its goal-and she screamed in the bright explosion of the impact-she screamed in physical terror, backing away from him. "What's the matter with you?" he cried, shaking, not daring to see in her eyes the thing she had seen. She...
... into every land, they go on, encircling the earth. And the earth is littered with mangled cripples, who don't know what has hit them or why, who crawl as best they can on their crushed limbs through their lightless days, with no answer save that pain is the core of existence-and the traffic cops of morality chortle and tell them that man, by his nature, is unable to walk. These were not words in her...
... were permissible when observing the awesome power of logic. She was seeing-in the chaos of a perishing continent -the precise, mathematical execution of all the ideas men had held. They had not wanted to know that this was what they wanted, they had not wanted to see that they had the power to wish, but not the power to fake-and they had achieved their wish to the letter, to the last bloodstained...
... 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...
... 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...
... gleam of her stockings, she felt his mouth pressed to her ankle, then rising in a tortured motion up the line of her leg, as if he wished to own its shape by means of his lips, then she felt her teeth sinking into the flesh of his arm, she felt the sweep of his elbow knocking her head aside and his mouth seizing her lips with a pressure more viciously painful than hers-then she felt, when it hit her...
... kind had been able to afford the luxury of murder and expropriation, the safety of pretending to themselves and their victims that material loot was their only objective. But their time was running out and his fellow victims had gone, gone sooner than any historical schedule had promised, and they, the looters, were now left to face the undisguised reality of their own goal. "Look, boys," he said...
... chemicals. He walked, as if this were his form of last tribute and funeral procession for the young life that had ended in his arms. He felt an anger too intense to identify except as a pressure within him: it was a desire to kill. The desire was not directed at the unknown thug who had sent a bullet through the boy's body, or at the looting bureaucrats who had hired the thug to do it, but at the boy's...
... the explosions of local gangs; some spread wider. There were districts that rose in blind rebellion, arrested the local officials, expelled the agents of Washington, killed the tax collectors-then, announcing their secession from the country, went on to the final extreme of the very evil that had destroyed them, as if fighting murder with suicide: went on to seize all property within their reach, to...
... negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man's capacity to live. "Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of...
... moral degenerate who grants to others the right to force his mind. That is the moral absolute one does not leave open to debate. I do not grant the terms of reason to men who propose to deprive me of reason. I do not enter discussions with neighbors who think they can forbid me to think. I do not place my moral sanction upon a murderer's wish to kill me. When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I...