When she opened her eyes, she saw sunlight, green leaves and a man's face. She thought: I know what this is. This was the world as she had expected to see it at sixteen-and now she had reached it-and it seemed so simple, so unastonishing, that the thing she felt was like a blessing pronounced upon the universe by means of three words: But of course.  She was looking up at the face of a man who knelt by her side, and she knew that in all the years behind her, this was what she would have given her life to see: a face that bore no mark of pain or fear or guilt. The shape of his mouth was pride, and more: it was as if he took pride in being proud. The angular planes of his cheeks made her think of arrogance, of tension, of scorn-yet the face had none of these qualities, it had their final sum: a look of serene determination and of certainty, and the look of a ruthless innocence which would not seek forgiveness or grant it. It was a face that had nothing to hide or to escape, a face with no fear of being seen, or of seeing, so that the first thing she grasped about him was the intense perceptiveness of his eyes-he looked as if his faculty of sight were his best-loved tool and its exercise were a limitless, joyous adventure, as if his eyes imparted a superlative value to himself and to the world-to himself for his ability to see, to the world for being a place so eagerly worth seeing. It seemed to her for a moment that she was in the presence of a being who was pure consciousness-yet she had never been so aware of a man's body. The light cloth of his shirt seemed to stress, rather than hide, the structure of his figure, his skin was suntanned, his body had the hardness, the gaunt, tensile strength, the clean precision of a foundry casting, he looked as if he were poured out of metal, but some dimmed, soft-lustered metal, like an aluminum-copper alloy, the color of his skin blending with the chestnut-brown of his hair, the loose strands of the hair shading from brown to gold in the sun, and his eyes completing the colors, as the one part of the casting left undimmed and harshly lustrous: his eyes were the deep, dark green of light glinting on metal.  He was looking down at her with the faint trace of a smile, it was not a look of discovery, but of familiar contemplation-as if he, too, were seeing the long-expected and the never-doubted.  This was her world, she thought, this was the way men were meant to be and to face their existence-and all the rest of it, all the years of ugliness and struggle were only someone's senseless joke. She smiled at him, as at a fellow conspirator, in relief, in deliverance, in radiant mockery of all the things she would never have to consider important again. He smiled in answer, it was the same smile as her own, as if he felt what she felt and knew what she meant.  "We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?" she whispered.  "No, we never had to."  And then, her consciousness returning fully, she realized that this man was a total stranger.  She tried to draw away from him, but it was only a faint movement of her head on the grass she felt under her hair. She tried to rise.  A shot of pain across her back threw her down again.  "Don't move, Miss Taggart. You're hurt."  "You know me?" Her voice was impersonal and hard.  "I've known you for many years."  "Have I known you?"  "Yes, I think so."  "What is your name?"  "John Galt."  She looked at him, not moving.  "Why are you frightened?" he asked.  "Because I believe it."  He smiled, as if grasping a full confession of the meaning she attached to his name; the smile held an adversary's acceptance of a challenge-and an adult's amusement at the self-deception of a child.  She felt as if she were returning to consciousness after a crash that had shattered more than an airplane. She could not reassemble the pieces now, she could not recall the things she had known about his name, she knew only that it stood for a dark vacuum which she would slowly have to fill. She could not do it now, this man was too blinding a presence, like a spotlight that would not let her see the shapes strewn hi the outer darkness.  "Was it you that I was following?" she asked.  "Yes."  She glanced slowly around her. She was lying in the grass of a field at the foot of a granite drop that came down from thousands of feet away in the blue sky. On the other edge of the field, some crags and pines and the glittering leaves of birch trees hid the space that stretched to a distant wall of encircling mountains. Her plane was not shattered-it was there, a few feet away, flat on its belly in the grass. There was no other plane in sight, no structures, no sign of human habitation.  "What is this valley?" she asked.  He smiled, "The Taggart Terminal."  "What do you mean?"  "You'll find out."  A dim impulse, like the recoil of an antagonist, made her want to check on what strength was left to her. She could move her arms and legs; she could lift her head; she felt a stabbing pain when she breathed deeply; she saw a thin thread of blood running down her stocking.  "Can one get out of this place?" she asked.  His voice seemed earnest, but the glint of the metal-green eyes was a smile: "Actually-no. Temporarily-yes."  She made a movement to rise. He bent to lift her, but she gathered her strength in a swift, sudden jolt and slipped out of his grasp, struggling to stand up. "I think I can-" she started saying, and collapsed against him the instant her feet rested on the ground, a stab of pain shooting up from an ankle that would not hold her.  He lifted her in his arms and smiled. "No, you can't, Miss Taggart," he said, and started off across the field.  She lay still, her arms about him, her head on his shoulder, and she thought: For just a few moments-while this lasts-it is all right to surrender completely-to forget everything and just permit yourself to feel. . . . When had she experienced it before?-she wondered; there had been a moment when these had been the words in her mind, but she could not remember it now. She had known it, once-this feeling of certainty, of the final, the reached, the not-to-be-questioned. But it was new to feel protected, and to feel that it was right to accept the protection, to surrender-right, because this peculiar sense of safety was not protection against the future, but against the past, not the protection of being spared from battle, but of having won it, not a protection granted to her weakness, but to her strength. . . . Aware with abnormal intensity of the pressure of his hands against her body, of the gold and copper threads of his hair, the shadows of his lashes on the skin of his face a few inches away from hers, she wondered dimly: Protected, from what? . . . it's he who was the enemy . . . was he?. . . why? . . . She did not know, she could not think of it now. It took an effort to remember that she had had a goal and a motive a few hours ago. She forced herself to recapture it.  "Did you know that I was following you?" she asked.  "No."  "Where is your plane?"  "At the landing field."  "Where is the landing field?"  "On the other side of the valley."  "There was no landing field in this valley, when I looked down, There was no meadow, either. How did it get here?"  He glanced at the sky. "Look carefully. Do you see anything up there?"  She dropped her head back, looking straight into the sky, seeing nothing but the peaceful blue of morning. After a while she distinguished a few faint strips of shimmering air.  "Heat waves," she said.  "Refractor rays," he answered. "The valley bottom that you saw is a mountain top eight thousand feet high, five miles away from here."  "A . . . what?"  "A mountain top that no flyer would ever choose for a landing.  What you saw was its reflection projected over this valley."  "How?"  "By the same method as a mirage on a desert: an image refracted from a layer of heated air."  "How?"  "By a screen of rays calculated against everything-except a courage such as yours."  "What do you mean?"  "I never thought that any plane would attempt to drop within seven hundred feet of the ground. 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. She noticed that she had asked questions about every subject, but not about him. It was as if he were a single whole, grasped by her first glance at him, like some irreducible absolute, like an axiom not to be explained any further, as if she knew everything about him by direct perception, and what awaited her now was only the process of identifying her knowledge.  He was carrying her down a narrow trail that went winding to the bottom of the valley. On the slopes around them, the tall, dark pyramids of firs stood immovably straight, in masculine simplicity, like sculpture reduced to an essential form, and they clashed with the complex, feminine, over detailed lace-work of the birch leaves trembling in the sun.  The leaves let the sunrays fall through to sweep across his hair, across both their faces. She could not see what lay below, beyond the turns of the trail.  Her eyes kept coming back to his face. He glanced down at her once in a while. At first, she looked away, as if she had been caught. Then, as if learning it from him, she held his glance whenever he chose to look down-knowing that he knew what she felt and that he did not hide from her the meaning of his glance.  She knew that his silence was the same confession as her own. He did not hold her in the impersonal manner of a man carrying a wounded woman. It was an embrace, even though she felt no suggestion of it in his bearing; she felt it only by means of her certainty that his whole body was aware of holding hers.  She heard the sound of the waterfall before she saw the fragile thread that fell in broken strips of glitter down the ledges. The sound came through some dim beat in her mind, some faint rhythm that seemed no louder than a struggling memory-but they went past and the beat remained; she listened to the sound of the water, but another sound seemed to grow clearer, rising, not in her mind, but from somewhere among the leaves. The trail turned, and in a sudden clearing she saw a small house on a ledge below, with a flash of sun on the pane of an open window. In the moment when she knew what experience had once made her want to surrender to the immediate present-it had been the night in a dusty coach of the Comet, when she had heard the. theme of Halley's Fifth Concerto for the first time-she knew that she was hearing it now, hearing it rise from the keyboard of a piano, in the clear, sharp chords of someone's powerful, confident touch.  She snapped the question at his face, as if hoping to catch him unprepared: "That's the Fifth Concerto by Richard Halley, isn't it?"  "Yes."  "When did he write it?"  "Why don't you ask him that in person?"  "Is he here?"  "It's he who's playing it. That's his house."  "Oh . . . !"  "You'll meet him, later. He'll be glad to speak to you. He knows that his works are the only records you like to play, in the evening, when you are alone."  "How does he know that?"  "I told him."  The look on her face was like a question that would have begun with "How in hell . . . ?"-but she saw the look of his eyes, and she laughed, her laughter giving sound to the meaning of his glance. She could not question anything, she thought, she could not doubt, not now-not with the sound of that music rising triumphantly through the sun-drenched leaves, the music of release, of deliverance, played as it was intended to be played, as her mind had struggled to hear it in a rocking coach through the beat of wounded wheels-it was this that her mind had seen in the sounds, that night-this valley and the morning sun and-And then she gasped, because the trail had turned and from the height of an open ledge she saw the town on the floor of the valley.  It was not a town, only a cluster of houses scattered at random from the bottom to the rising steps of the mountains that went on rising above their roofs, enclosing them within an abrupt, impassable circle.  They were homes, small and new, with naked, angular shapes and the glitter of broad windows. Far in the distance, some structures seemed taller, and the faint coils of smoke above them suggested an industrial district. But close before her, rising on a slender granite column from a ledge below to the level of her eyes, blinding her by its glare, dimming the rest, stood a dollar sign three feet tall, made of solid gold. It hung in space above the town, as its coat-of-arms, its trademark, its beacon-and it caught the sunrays, like some transmitter of energy that sent them in shining blessing to stretch horizontally through the air above the roofs, "What's that?" she gasped, pointing at the sign.  "Oh, that's Francisco's private joke."  "Francisco-who?" she whispered, knowing the answer.  "Francisco d'Anconia."  "Is he here, too?"  "He will be, any day now."  "What do you mean, his joke?"  "He gave that sign as an anniversary present to the owner of this place. And then we all adopted it as our particular emblem. We liked the idea."  "Aren't you the owner of this place?"  "I? No." He glanced down at the foot of the ledge and added, pointing, "There's the owner of this place, coming now."  A car had stopped at the end of a dirt road below, and two men were hurrying up the trail. She could not distinguish their faces; one of them was slender and tall, the other 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, distinguished figure of his companion: it was Hugh Akston.  It was Hugh Akston who spoke first, bowing to her with a courteous smile of welcome. "Miss Taggart, this is the first time anyone has ever proved me wrong, I didn't know-when I told you you'd never find him -that the next time I saw you, you would be in his arms."  "In whose arms?"  "Why, the inventor of the motor."  She gasped, closing her eyes; this was one connection she knew she should have made. When she opened her eyes, she was looking at Galt, He was smiling, finally, derisively, as if he knew fully what this meant to her.  "It would have served you right if you'd broken your neck!" the muscular man snapped at her, with the anger of concern, almost of affection. "What a stunt to pull-for a person who'd have been admitted here so eagerly, if she'd chosen to come through the front door!"  "Miss Taggart, may I present Midas Mulligan?" said Galt.  "Oh," she said weakly, and laughed; she had no capacity for astonishment any longer. "Do you suppose I was killed in that crash-and this is some other kind of existence?"  "It is another kind of existence," said Galt. "But as for being killed, doesn't it seem more like the other way around?"  "Oh yes," she whispered, "yes . . ." She smiled at Mulligan. "Where is the front door?"  "Here," he said, pointing to his forehead.  "I've lost the key," she said simply, without resentment. "I've lost all keys, right now."  "You'll find them. But what in blazes were you doing in that plane?"  "Following."  "Him?" He pointed at Galt.  "Yes."  "You're lucky to be alive! Are you badly hurt?"  "I don't think so."  "You'll have a few questions to answer, after they patch you up." He turned brusquely, leading the way down to the car, then glanced at Galt. "Well, what do we do now? There's something we hadn't provided for: the first scab."  "The first . . . what?" she asked.  "Skip it," said Mulligan, and looked at Galt. "What do we do?"  "It will be my charge," said Galt. "I will be responsible. You take Quentin Daniels."  "Oh, he's no problem at all. He needs nothing but to get acquainted with the place. He seems to know all the rest."  "Yes. He had practically gone the whole way by himself." He saw her watching him in bewilderment, and said, "There's one thing I must thank you for, Miss Taggart: you did pay me a compliment when you chose Quentin Daniels as my understudy. He was a plausible one."  "Where is he?" she asked. "Will you tell me what happened?"  "Why, Midas met us at the landing field, drove me to my house and took Daniels with him. I was going to join them for breakfast, but I saw your plane spinning and plunging for that pasture. I was the closest one to the scene."  "We got here as fast as we could," said Mulligan. "I thought he deserved to get himself killed-whoever was in that plane. I never dreamed that it was one of the only two persons in the whole world whom I'd exempt."  "Who is the other one?" she asked.  "Hank Rearden."  She winced; it was like a sudden blow from another great distance.  She wondered why it seemed to her that Galt was watching her face intently and that she saw an instant's change in his, too brief to define.  They had come to the car. It was a Hammond convertible, its top down, one of the costliest models, some years old, but kept in the shining trim of efficient handling. Galt placed her cautiously in the back seat and held her in the circle of his arm. She felt a stabbing pain once in a while, but she had no attention to spare for it. She watched the distant houses of the town, as Mulligan pressed the starter and the car moved forward, as they went past the 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 place. "Your third pupil?"  "That's right."  "The second assistant bookkeeper!" she moaned suddenly, at one more memory.  "What's that?"  "That's what Dr. Stadler called him. That's what Dr. Stadler told me he thought his third pupil had become."  "He overestimated," said Galt. "I'm much lower than that by the scale of his standards and of his world."  The car had swerved into a lane rising toward a lonely house that stood on a ridge above the valley. She saw a man walking down a path, ahead of them, hastening in the direction of the town. He wore blue denim overalls and carried a lunchbox. There was something faintly familiar in the swift abruptness of his Galt. As the car went past him, she caught a glimpse of his face-and she jerked backward, her voice rising to a scream from the pain of the movement and from the shock of the sight: "Oh, stop! Stop! Don't let him go!" It was Ellis Wyatt.  The three men laughed, but Mulligan stopped the car. "Oh . . . " she said weakly, in apology, realizing she had forgotten that this was the place from which Wyatt would not vanish.  Wyatt was running toward them: he had recognized her, too. When he seized the edge of the car, to brake his speed, she saw the face and the young, triumphant smile that she had seen but once before: on the platform of Wyatt Junction.  "Dagny! You, too, at last? One of us?"  "No," said Galt. "Miss Taggart is a castaway."  "What?"  "Miss Taggart's plane crashed. Didn't you see it?"  "Crashed-here?"  "Yes."  "I heard a plane, but I . . ." His look of bewilderment changed to a smile, regretful, amused and friendly. "I see. Oh, hell, Dagny, it's preposterous!"  She was staring at him helplessly, unable to reconnect the past to the present. And helplessly-as one would say to a dead friend, in a dream, the words one regrets having missed the chance to say in life-she said, with the memory of a telephone ringing, unanswered, almost two years ago, the words she had hoped to say if she ever caught sight of him again, "I . . . I tried to reach you."  He smiled gently. "We've been trying to reach you ever since, Dagny.. . . I'll see you tonight. Don't worry, I won't vanish-and I don't think you will, either."  He waved to the others and went off, swinging his lunchbox. She glanced up, as Mulligan started the car, and saw Galt's eyes watching her attentively. Her face hardened, as if in open admission of pain and in defiance of the satisfaction it might give him. "All right," she said. "I see what sort of show you want to put me through the shock of witnessing."  But there was neither cruelty nor pity in his face, only the level look of justice. "Our first rule here, Miss Taggart," he answered, "is that one must always see for oneself."  The car stopped in front of the lonely house. It was built of rough granite blocks, with a sheet of 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, an archway open upon a small kitchen with rough shelves, a bare wooden table and the astonishing sight of chromium glittering on an electric stove; the place had the primitive simplicity of a frontiersman's cabin, reduced to essential necessities, but reduced with a super-modern skill.  He carried her across the sunrays into a small guest room and placed her down on a bed. She noticed a window open upon a long slant of rocky steps and pines going off into the sky. She noticed small streaks that looked like inscriptions cut into the wood of the walls, a few scattered lines that seemed made by different handwritings; she could not distinguish the words. She noticed another door, left half-open; it led to his bedroom.  "Am I a guest here or a prisoner?" she asked.  "The choice will be yours, Miss Taggart."  "I can make no choice when I'm dealing with a stranger."  "But you're not. Didn't you name a railroad line after me?"  "Oh! . . . Yes . . ." It was the small jolt of another connection falling into place. "Yes, I-" She was looking at the tall figure with the sun-streaked hair, with the suppressed smile in the mercilessly perceptive eyes-she was seeing the struggle to build her Line and the summer day of the first train's run-she was thinking that if a human figure could be fashioned as an emblem of that Line, this was the figure.  "Yes . . . I did . . . " Then, remembering the rest, she added, "But I named it after an enemy."  He smiled. "That's the contradiction you had to resolve sooner or later, Miss Taggart."  "It was you . . . wasn't it? . . . who destroyed my Line. . . ."  "Why, no. It was the contradiction."  She closed her eyes; in a moment, she asked, "All those stories I heard about you-which of them were true?"  "All of them."  "Was it you who spread them?"  "No. What for? I never had any wish to be talked about."  "But you do know that you've become a legend?"  "Yes."  "The young inventor of the Twentieth Century Motor Company is the one real version of the legend, isn't it?"  "The one that's concretely real-yes."  She could not say it indifferently; there was still a breathless tone and the drop of her voice toward a whisper, when she asked, "The motor . . . the motor I found . . . it was you who made it?"  "Yes."  She could not prevent the jolt of eagerness that threw her head up.  "The secret of transforming energy-" she began, and stopped.  "I could tell it to you in fifteen minutes," he said, in answer to the desperate plea she had not uttered, "but there's no power on earth that can force me to tell it. If you understand this, you'll understand everything that's baffling you."  "That night . . . twelve years ago . . . a spring night when you walked out of a meeting of six thousand murderers-that story is true, isn't it?"  "Yes."  "You told them that you would stop the motor of the world."  "I have."  "What have you done?"  "I've done nothing, Miss Taggart. And that's the whole of my secret."  She looked at him silently for a long moment. He stood waiting, as if he could read her thoughts. "The destroyer-" she said in a tone of wonder and helplessness.  "-the most evil creature that's ever existed," he said in the tone of a quotation, and she recognized her own words, "the man who's draining the brains of the world."  "How thoroughly have you been watching me," she asked, "and for how long?"  It was only an instant's pause, his eyes did not move, but it seemed to her that his glance was stressed, as if in special awareness of seeing her, and she caught the sound of some particular intensity in his voice as he answered quietly, "For years."  She closed her eyes, relaxing and giving up. She felt an odd, lighthearted indifference, as if she suddenly wanted nothing but the comfort of surrendering to helplessness.  The doctor who arrived was a gray-haired man with a mild, thoughtful face and a firmly, unobtrusively confident manner.  "Miss Taggart, may I present Dr. Hendricks?" said Galt.  "Not Dr, Thomas Hendricks?" she gasped, with the involuntary rudeness of a child; the name belonged to a great surgeon, who had retired and vanished six years ago.  "Yes, of course," said Galt.  Dr. Hendricks smiled at her, in answer. "Midas told me that Miss Taggart has to be treated for shock," he said, "not for the one sustained, but for the ones to come."  "I'll leave you to do it," said Galt, "while I go to the market to get supplies for breakfast."  She watched the rapid efficiency of Dr. Hendricks' work, as he examined her injuries. He had brought an object she had never seen before: a portable X-ray machine. She learned that she had torn the cartilage of two ribs, that she had sprained an ankle, ripped patches of skin off one knee and one elbow, and acquired a few bruises spread in purple blotches over her body. By the time Dr. Hendricks' swift, competent hands had wound the bandages and the tight lacings of tape, she felt as if her body were an engine checked by an expert mechanic, and no further care was necessary, "I would advise you to remain in bed, Miss Taggart."  "Oh no! If I'm careful and move slowly, I'll be all right."  "You ought to rest."  "Do you think I can?"  He smiled. "I guess not."  She was dressed by the time Galt came back. Dr. Hendricks gave him an account of her condition, adding, "I'll be back to check up, tomorrow."  "Thanks," said Galt. "Send the bill to me."  "Certainly not!" she said indignantly. "I will pay it myself."  The two men glanced at each other, in amusement, as at the boast of a beggar.  "We'll discuss that later," said Galt.  Dr. Hendricks left, and she tried to stand up, limping, catching at the furniture for support. Galt lifted her in his arms, carried her to the kitchen alcove and placed her on a chair by the table set for two.  She noticed that she was hungry, at the sight of the coffee pot boiling on the stove, the two glasses of orange juice, the heavy white pottery dishes sparkling in the sun on the polished table top.  "When did you sleep or eat last?" he asked.  "I don't know . . . I had dinner on the train, with-" She shook her head in helplessly bitter amusement: with the tramp, she thought, with a desperate voice pleading for escape from an avenger who would not pursue or be found-the avenger who sat facing her across the table, drinking a glass of orange juice. "I don't know . . . it seems centuries and continents away."  "How did you happen to be following me?"  "I landed at the Alton airport just as you were taking off. The man there told me that Quentin Daniels had gone with you."  "I remember your plane circling to land. But that was the one and only time when I didn't think of you. I thought you were coming by train."  She asked, looking straight at him, "How do you want me to understand that?"  "What?"  "The one and only time when you didn't think of me."  He held her glance; she saw the faint movement she had noted as typical of him: the movement of his proudly intractable mouth curving into the hint of a smile. "In any way you wish," he answered.  She let a moment pass to underscore her choice by the severity of her face, then asked coldly, in the tone of an enemy's accusation, "You knew that I was coming for Quentin Daniels?"  "Yes."  "You got him first and fast, in order not to let me reach him? In order to beat me-knowing fully what sort of beating that would mean for me?"  "Sure."  It was she who looked away and remained silent. He rose to cook the rest of their breakfast. She watched him as he stood at the stove, toasting bread, frying eggs and bacon. There was an easy, relaxed skill about the way he worked, but it was a skill that belonged to another profession; his hands moved with the rapid precision of an engineer pulling the levers of a control board. She remembered suddenly where she had seen as expert and preposterous a performance.  "Is that what you learned from Dr. Akston?" she asked, pointing at the stove.  "That, among other things."  "Did he teach you to spend your time-your time!-" she could not keep the shudder of indignation out of her voice-"on this sort of work?"  "I've spent time on work of much lesser importance."  When he put her plate before her, she asked, "Where did you get that food? Do they have a grocery store here?"  "The best one in the world. It's run by Lawrence Hammond."  "What?"  "Lawrence Hammond, of Hammond Cars. The bacon is from the farm of Dwight Sanders-of Sanders Aircraft. The eggs and the butter from Judge Narragansett-of the Superior Court of the State of Illinois."  She looked at her plate, bitterly, almost as if she were afraid to touch it. "It's the most expensive breakfast I'll ever eat, considering the value of the cook's time and of all those others."  "Yes-from one aspect. But from another, it's the cheapest breakfast you'll ever eat-because no part of it has gone to feed the looters who'll make you pay for it through year after year and leave you to starve in the end."  After a long silence, she asked simply, almost wistfully, "What is it that you're all doing here?"  "Living."  She had never heard that word sound so real, "What is your job?" she asked. "Midas Mulligan said that you work here."  "I'm the handy man, I guess."  "The what?"  "I'm on call whenever anything goes wrong with any of the installations-with the power system, for instance."  She looked at him-and suddenly she tore forward, staring at the electric stove, but fell back on her chair, stopped by pain.  He chuckled. "Yes, that's true-but take it easy or Dr. Hendricks will order you back to bed."  "The power system . . ." she said, choking, "the power system here . . . it's run by means of your motor?"  "Yes."  "It's built? It's working? It's functioning?"  "It has cooked your breakfast."  "I want to see it!"  "Don't bother crippling yourself to look at that stove. It's just a plain electric stove like any other, only about a hundred times cheaper to run.  And that's all you'll have a chance to see, Miss Taggart."  "You promised to show me this valley."  "I'll show it to you. But not the power generator."  "Will you take me to see the place now, as soon as we finish?"  "If you wish-and if you're able to move."  "I am."  He got up, went to the telephone and dialed a number. "Hello, Midas? . . . Yes. . . . He did? Yes, she's all right. . . . Will you rent me your car for the day? . . . Thanks. At the usual rate-twenty-five cents, . . . . Can you send it over? . . . Do you happen to have some sort of cane? She'll need it. . . . Tonight? Yes, I think so. We will. Thanks."  He hung up. She was staring at him incredulously.  "Did I understand you to say that Mr. Mulligan-who's worth about two hundred million dollars, I believe-is going to charge you twenty-five cents for the use of his car?"  "That's right."  "Good heavens, couldn't he give it to you as a courtesy?"  He sat looking at her for a moment, studying her face, as if deliberately letting her see the amusement in his. "Miss Taggart," he said, "we have no laws in this valley, no rules, no formal organization of any kind. We come here because we want to rest. But we have certain customs, which we all observe, because they pertain to the things we need to rest from. So I'll warn you now that there is one word which is forbidden in this valley: the word 'give'. "  "I'm sorry," she said. "You're right."  He refilled her cup of coffee and extended a package of cigarettes.  She smiled, as she took a cigarette: it bore the sign of the dollar.  "If you're not too tired by evening," he said, "Mulligan has invited us for dinner. He'll have some guests there whom, I think, you'll want to meet."  "Oh, of course! I won't be too tired. I don't think I'll ever feel tired again."  They were finishing breakfast when she saw Mulligan's car stopping in front of the house. The driver leaped out, raced up the path and rushed into the room, not pausing to ring or knock. It took her a moment to realize that the eager, breathless, disheveled young man was Quentin Daniels.  "Miss Taggart," he gasped, "I'm sorry!" The desperate guilt in his voice clashed with the joyous excitement in his face, "I've never broken my word before! There's no excuse for it, I can't ask you to forgive me, and I know that you won't believe it, but the truth is that I-I forgot!"  She glanced at Galt, "I believe you."  "I forgot that I promised to wait, I forgot everything-until a few minutes ago, when Mr. Mulligan told me that you'd crashed here in a plane, and then I knew it was my fault, and if anything had happened to you-oh God, are you all right?"  "Yes. Don't worry. Sit down."  "I don't know how one can forget one's word of honor. I don't know what happened to me."  "I do."  "Miss Taggart, I had been working on it for months, on that one particular hypothesis, and the more I worked, the more hopeless it seemed to become. I'd been in my laboratory for the last two days, trying to solve a mathematical equation that looked impossible. I felt I'd die at that blackboard, but wouldn't give up. It was late at night when he came in. I don't think I even noticed him, not really. He said he wanted to speak to me and I asked him to wait and went right on. I think I forgot his presence. I don't know how long he stood there, watching me, but what I remember is that suddenly his hand reached over, swept all my figures off the blackboard and wrote one brief equation. And then I noticed him! Then I screamed-because it wasn't the full answer to the motor, but it was the way to it, a way I hadn't seen, hadn't suspected, but I knew where it led! I remember I cried, 'How could you know it?'-and he answered, pointing at a photograph of your motor, 'I'm the man who made it in the first place.' And that's the last I remember, Miss Taggart-I mean, the last I remember of my own existence, because after that we talked about static electricity and the conversion of energy and the motor."  "We talked physics all the way down here," said Galt.  "Oh, I remember when you asked me whether I'd go with you," said Daniels, "whether I'd be willing to go and never come back and give up everything . . . Everything? Give up a dead Institute that's crumbling back into the jungle, give up my future as a janitor-slave-by-law, give up Wesley Mouch and Directive 10-289 and sub-animal creatures who crawl on their bellies, grunting that there is no mind! . . . Miss Taggart"-he laughed exultantly-"he was asking me whether I'd give that up to go with him! He had to ask it twice, I couldn't believe it at first, I couldn't believe that any human being would need to be asked or would think of it as a choice. To go? I would 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 janitor-at the power plant. And when I learn, I'll rise to electrician. Isn't he great-Midas Mulligan? That's what I want to be when I reach his age. I want to make money. I want to make millions. I want to make as much as he did!"  "Daniels!" She laughed, remembering the quiet self-control, the strict precision, the stern logic of the young scientist she had known. "What's the matter with you? Where are you? Do you know what you're saying?"  "I'm here, Miss Taggart-and there's no limit to what's possible here! I'm going to be the greatest electrician in the world and the richest! I'm going to-"  "You're going to go back to Mulligan's house," said Galt, "and sleep for twenty-four hours-or I won't let you near the power plant."  "Yes, sir," said Daniels meekly.  The sun had trickled down the peaks and drawn a circle of shining granite and glittering snow to enclose the valley-when they stepped out of the house. She felt suddenly as if nothing existed beyond that circle, and she wondered at the joyous, proud comfort to be found in a sense of the finite, in the knowledge that the field of one's concern lay within the realm of one's sight. She wanted to stretch out her arms over the roofs of the town below, feeling that her fingertips would touch the peaks across. But she could not raise her arms; leaning on a cane with one hand and on Galt's arm with the other, moving her feet by a slow, conscientious effort, she walked down to the car like a child learning to walk for the first time.  She sat by Galt's side as he drove, skirting the town, to Midas Mulligan's house. It stood on a ridge, the largest house of the valley, the only one built two stories high, an odd combination of fortress and pleasure resort, with stout granite walls and broad, open terraces. He stopped to let Daniels off, then drove on up a winding road rising slowly into the mountains.  It was the thought of Mulligan's wealth, the luxurious car and the sight of Galt's hands on the wheel that made her wonder for the first time whether Galt, too, was wealthy. She glanced at his clothes: the gray slacks and white shirt seemed of a quality intended for long wear; the leather of the narrow belt about his waistline was cracked; the watch on his wrist was a precision instrument, but made of plain stainless steel. The sole suggestion of luxury was the color of his hair-the strands stirring in the wind like liquid gold and copper.  Abruptly, behind a turn of the road, she saw the green acres of pastures stretching to a distant farmhouse. There were herds of sheep, some horses, the fenced squares of pigpens under the sprawling shapes of wooden barns and, farther away, a metal hangar of a type that did not belong on a farm, A man in a bright cowboy shirt was hurrying toward them. Galt stopped the car and waved to him, but said nothing in answer to her questioning glance. He let her discover for herself, when the man came closer, that it was Dwight Sanders, "Hello, Miss Taggart," he said, smiling.  She looked silently at his rolled shirt sleeves, at his heavy boots, at the herds of cattle. "So that's all that's left of Sanders Aircraft," she said.  "Why, no. There's that excellent monoplane, my best model, which you flattened up in the foothills."  "Oh, you know about that? Yes, it was one of yours. It was a wonderful ship. But I'm afraid I've damaged it pretty badly."  "You ought to have it fixed."  "I think I've ripped the bottom. Nobody can fix it."  "I can."  These were the words and the tone of confidence that she had not heard for years, this was the manner she had given up expecting-but the start of her smile ended in a bitter chuckle. "How?" she asked. "On a hog farm?"  "Why, no. At Sanders Aircraft."  "Where is it?"  "Where did you think it was? In that building in New Jersey, which Tinky Holloway's cousin bought from my bankrupt successors by means of a government loan and a tax suspension? In that building where he produced six planes that never left the ground and eight that did, but crashed with forty passengers each?"  "Where is it, then?"  "Wherever I am."  He pointed across the road. Glancing down through the tops of the pine trees, she saw the concrete rectangle of an airfield on the bottom of the valley.  "We have a few planes here and it's my job to take care of them," he said. "I'm the hog farmer and the airfield attendant. I'm doing quite well at producing ham and bacon, without the men from whom I used to buy it. But those men cannot produce airplanes without me-and, without me, they cannot even produce their ham and bacon."  "But you-you have not been designing airplanes, either."  "No, I haven't. And I haven't been manufacturing the Diesel engines I once promised you. Since the time I saw you last, I have designed and manufactured just one new tractor. I mean, one-I tooled it by hand-no mass production was necessary. But that tractor has cut an eight-hour workday down to four hours on"-the straight line of his arm, extended to point across the valley, moved like a royal scepter; her eyes followed it and she saw the terraced green of hanging gardens on a distant mountainside-"the chicken and dairy farm of Judge Narragansett"-his arm moved slowly to a long, flat stretch of greenish gold at the foot of a canyon, then to a band of violent green-"in the wheat fields and tobacco patch of Midas Mulligan"-his arm rose to a granite flank striped by glistening tiers of leaves-"in the orchards of Richard Halley."  Her eyes went slowly over the curve his arm had traveled, over and over again, long after the arm had dropped; but she said only, "I see."  "Now do you believe that I can fix your plane?" he asked.  "Yes. But have you seen it?"  "Sure. Midas called two doctors immediately-Hendricks for you, and me for your plane. It can be fixed. But it will be an expensive job."  "How much?"  "Two hundred dollars."  "Two hundred dollars?" she repeated incredulously; the price seemed much too low.  "In gold, Miss Taggart."  "Oh . . . ! Well, where can I buy the gold?"  "You can't," said Galt.  She jerked her head to face him defiantly. "No?"  "No. Not where you come from. Your laws forbid it."  "Yours don't?"  "No."  "Then sell it to me. Choose your own rate of exchange. Name any sum you want-in my money."  "What money? You're penniless, Miss Taggart."  "What?" It was a word that a Taggart heiress could not ever expect to hear.  "You're penniless in this valley. You own millions of dollars in Taggart Transcontinental stock-but it will not buy one pound of bacon from the Sanders hog farm."  "I see."  Galt smiled and turned to Sanders. "Go ahead and fix that plane. Miss Taggart will pay for it eventually."  He pressed the starter and drove on, while she sat stiffly straight, asking no questions.  A stretch of violent turquoise blue split the cliffs ahead, ending the road; it took her a second to realize that it was a lake. The motionless water seemed to condense the blue of the sky and the green of the pine-covered mountains into so brilliantly pure a color that it made the sky look a dimmed pale gray. A streak of boiling foam came from among the pines and went crashing down the rocky steps to vanish in the placid water. A small granite structure stood by the stream.  Galt stopped the car just as a husky man in overalls stepped out to the threshold of the open doorway. It was Dick McNamara, who had once been her best contractor.  "Good day, Miss Taggart!" he said happily. "I'm glad to see that you weren't hurt badly."  She inclined her head in silent greeting-it was like a greeting to the loss and the pain of the past, to a desolate evening and the desperate face of Eddie Willers telling her the news of this man's disappearance- hurt badly? she thought-I was, but not in the plane crash-on that evening, in an empty office. . . . Aloud, she asked, "What are you doing here? What was it that you betrayed me for, at the worst time possible?"  He smiled, pointing at the stone structure and down at the rocky drop where the tube of a water main went vanishing into the underbrush. "I'm the utilities man," he said. "I take care of the water lines, the power lines and the telephone service."  "Alone?"  "Used to. But we've grown so much in the past year that I've had to hire three men to help me."  "What men? From where?"  "Well, one of them is a professor of economics who couldn't get a job outside, because he taught that you can't consume more than you have produced-one is a professor of history who couldn't get a job because he taught that the inhabitants of slums were not the men who made this country-and one is a professor of psychology who couldn't get a job because he taught that men are capable of thinking."  "They work for you as plumbers and linesmen?"  "You'd be surprised how good they are at it."  "And to whom have they abandoned our colleges?"  "To those who're wanted there." He chuckled, "How long ago was it that I betrayed you, Miss Taggart? Not quite three years ago, wasn't it? It's the John Galt Line that I refused to build for you. Where is your Line now? But my lines have grown, in that time, from the couple of miles that Mulligan had built when I took over, to hundreds of miles of pipe and wire, all within the space of this valley."  He saw the swift, involuntary look of eagerness on her face, the look of a competent person's appreciation; he smiled, glanced at her companion and said softly, "You know, Miss Taggart, when it comes to the John Galt Line-maybe it's I who've followed it and you who're betraying it."  She glanced at Galt. He was watching her face, but she could read nothing in his.  As they drove on along the edge of the lake, she asked, "You've mapped this route deliberately, haven't you? You're showing me all the men whom"-she stopped, feeling inexplicably reluctant to say it, and said, instead-"whom I have lost?"  "I'm showing you all the men whom I have taken away from you," he answered firmly.  This was the root, she thought, of the guiltlessness of his face: he had guessed and named the words she had wanted to spare him, he had rejected a good will that was not based on his values-and in proud certainty of being right, he had made a boast of that which she had intended as an accusation.  Ahead of them, she saw a wooden pier projecting into the water of the lake. A young woman lay stretched on the sun-flooded planks, watching a battery of fishing rods. She glanced up at the sound of the car, then leaped to her feet in a single swift movement, a shade too swift, and ran to the road. She wore slacks, rolled above the knees of her bare legs, she had dark, disheveled hair and large eyes. Galt waved to her.  "Hello, John! When did you get in?" she called.  "This morning," he answered, smiling and driving on.  Dagny jerked her head to look back and saw the glance with which the young woman stood looking after Galt. And even though hopelessness, serenely accepted, was part of the worship in that glance, she experienced a feeling she had never known before: a stab of jealousy.  "Who is that?" she asked.  "Our best fishwife. She provides the fish for Hammond's grocery market."  "What else is she?"  "You've noticed that there's a 'what else' for every one of us here?  She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside.  She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind."  The car turned into a narrow path, climbing steeply into a wilderness of brush and pine trees. She knew what to expect when she saw a handmade sign nailed to a tree, with an arrow pointing the way: The Buena Esperanza Pass.  It was not a pass, it was a wall of laminated rock with a complex chain of pipes, pumps and valves climbing like a vine up its narrow ledges, but it bore, on its crest, a huge wooden sign-and the proud violence of the letters announcing their message to an impassable tangle of ferns and pine branches, was more characteristic, more familiar than the words: Wyatt Oil.  It was oil that ran in a glittering curve from the mouth of a pipe into a tank at the foot of the wall, as the only confession of the tremendous secret struggle inside the stone, as the unobtrusive purpose of all the intricate machinery-but the machinery did not resemble the installations of an oil derrick, and she knew that she was looking at the unborn secret of the Buena Esperanza Pass, she knew that this was oil drawn out of shale by some method men had considered impossible.  Ellis Wyatt stood on a ridge, watching the glass dial of a gauge imbedded in the rock. He saw the car stopping below, and called, "Hi, Dagny! Be with you in a minute!"  There were two other men working with him: a big, muscular roughneck, at a pump halfway up the wall, and a young boy, by the tank on the ground. The young boy had blond hair and a face with an unusual purity of form. She felt certain that she knew this face, but she could not recall where she had seen it. The boy caught her puzzled glance, grinned and, as if to help her, whistled softly, almost inaudibly the first notes of Halley's Fifth Concerto. It was the young brakeman of the Comet.  She laughed. "It was the Fifth Concerto by Richard Halley, wasn't it?"  "Sure," he answered. "But do you think I'd tell that to a scab?"  "A what?"  "What am I paying you for?" asked Ellis Wyatt, approaching; the boy chuckled, darting back to seize the lever he had abandoned for a moment. "It's Miss Taggart who couldn't fire you, if you loafed on the job. I can."  "That's one of the reasons why I quit the railroad, Miss Taggart," said the boy.  "Did you know that I stole him from you?" said Wyatt. "He used to be your best brakeman and now he's my best grease-monkey, but neither one of us is going to hold him permanently."  "Who is?"  "Richard Halley. Music. He's Halley's best pupil."  She smiled, "I know, this is a place where one employs nothing but aristocrats for the lousiest kinds of jobs."  "They're all aristocrats, that's true," said Wyatt, "because they know that there's no such thing as a lousy job-only lousy men who don't care to do it."  The roughneck was watching them from above, listening with curiosity. She glanced up at him, he looked like a truck driver, so she asked, "What were you outside? A professor of comparative philology, I suppose?"  "No, ma'am," he answered. "I was a truck driver." He added, "But that's not what I wanted to remain."  Ellis Wyatt was looking at the place around them with a kind of youthful pride eager for acknowledgment: it was the pride of a host at a formal reception in a drawing room, and the eagerness of an artist at the opening of his show in a gallery. She smiled and asked, pointing at the machinery, "Shale oil?"  "Uh-huh."  "That's the process which you were working to develop while you were on earth?" She said it involuntarily and she gasped a little at her own words.  He laughed. "While I was in hell-yes. I'm on earth now."  "How much do you produce?"  "Two hundred barrels a day."  A note of sadness came back into her voice: "It's the process by which you once intended to fill five tank-trains a day."  "Dagny," he said earnestly, pointing at his tank, "one gallon of it is worth more than a trainful back there in hell-because this is mine, all of it, every single drop of it, to be spent on nothing but myself." He raised his smudged hand, displaying the greasy stains as a treasure, and a black drop on the tip of his finger flashed like a gem in the sun.  "Mine," he said. "Have you let them beat you into forgetting what that word means, what it feels like? You should give yourself a chance to relearn it."  "You're hidden in a hole in the wilderness," she said bleakly, "and you're producing two hundred barrels of oil, when you could have flooded the world with it."  "What for? To feed the looters?"  "No! To earn the fortune you deserve."  "But I'm richer now than I was in the world. What's wealth but the means of expanding one's life? There's two ways one can do it: either by producing more or by producing it faster. And that's what I'm doing: I'm manufacturing time."  "What do you mean?"  "I'm producing everything I need, I'm working to improve my methods, and every hour I save is an hour added to my life. It used to take me five hours to fill that tank. It now takes three. The two I saved are mine-as pricelessly mine as if I moved my grave two further hours away for every five I've got. It's two hours released from one task, to be invested in another-two more hours in which to work, to grow, to move forward. That's the savings account I'm -hoarding. Is there any sort of safety vault that could protect this account in the outside world?"  "But what space do you have for moving forward? Where's your market?"  He chuckled. "Market? I now work for use, not for profit-my use, not the looters' profit. Only those who add to my life, not those who devour it, are my market. Only those who produce, not those who consume, can ever be anybody's market. I deal with the life-givers, not with the cannibals. If my oil takes less effort to produce, I ask less of the men to whom I trade it for the things I need. I add an extra span of time to their lives with every gallon of my oil that they burn. And since they're men like me, they keep inventing faster ways to make the things they make-so every one of them grants me an added minute, hour or day with the bread I buy from them, with the clothes, the lumber, the metal"-he glanced at Galt-"an added year with every month of electricity I purchase. That's our market and that's how it works for us-but that was not the way it worked in the outer world. Down what drain were they poured out there, our days, our lives and our energy?  Into what bottomless, futureless sewer of the unpaid-for? Here, we trade achievements, not failures-values, not needs. We're free of one another, yet we all grow together. Wealth, Dagny? What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish. Look-" He pointed at a plant fighting upward from under the weight of a rock-a long, gnarled stem, contorted by an unnatural struggle, with drooping, yellow remnants of unformed leaves and a single green shoot thrust upward to the sun with the desperation of a last, spent, inadequate effort. "That's what they're doing to us back there in hell. Do you see me submitting to it?"  "No," she whispered.  "Do you see him submitting?" He pointed at Galt.  "God, no!"  "Then don't be astonished by anything you see in this valley."  She remained silent when they drove on. Galt said nothing.  On a distant mountainside, in the dense green of a forest, she saw a pine tree slanting down suddenly, tracing a curve, like the hand of a clock, then crashing abruptly out of sight. She knew that it was a manmade motion.  "Who's the lumberjack around here?" she asked.  "Ted Nielsen."  The road was relaxing into wider curves and gentler grades, among the softer shapes of hillsides. She saw a rust-brown slope patched by two squares of unmatching green: the dark, dusty green of potato plants, and the pale, greenish-silver of cabbages, A man in a red shirt was riding a small tractor, cutting weeds, "Who's the cabbage tycoon?" she asked.  "Roger Marsh."  She closed her eyes. She thought of the weeds that were climbing up the steps of a closed factory, over its lustrous tile front, a few hundred miles away, beyond the mountains.  The road was descending to the bottom of the valley. She saw the roofs of the town straight below, and the small, shining spot of the dollar sign in the distance at the other end. Galt stopped the car in front of the first structure on a ledge above the roofs, a brick building with a faint tinge of red trembling over its smokestack. It almost shocked her to see so logical a sign as "Stockton Foundry" above its door.  When she walked, leaning on her cane, out of the sunlight into the dank gloom of the building, the shock she felt was part sense of anachronism, part homesickness. This was the industrial East which, in the last few hours, had seemed to be centuries behind her. This was the old, the familiar, the loved sight of reddish billows rising to steel rafters, of sparks shooting in sunbursts from invisible sources, of sudden flames streaking through a black fog, of sand molds glowing with white metal. The fog hid the walls of the structure, dissolving its size-and for a moment, this was the great, dead foundry at Stockton, Colorado, it was Nielsen Motors . . . it was Rearden Steel.  "Hi, Dagny!"  The smiling face that approached her out of the fog was Andrew Stockton's, and she saw a grimy hand extended to her with a gesture of confident pride, as if it held all of her moment's vision on its palm.  She clasped the hand. "Hello," she said softly, not knowing whether she was greeting the past or the future. Then she shook her head and added, "How come you're not planting potatoes or making shoes around here? You've actually remained in your own profession."  "Oh, Calvin Atwood of the Atwood Light and Power Company of New York City is making the shoes. Besides, my profession is one of the oldest and most immediately needed anywhere. Still, I had to fight for it. I had to ruin a competitor, first."  "What?"  He grinned and pointed to the glass door of a sun-flooded room.  "There's my ruined competitor," he said.  She saw a young man bent over a long table, working on a complex model for the mold of a drill head. He had the slender, powerful hands of a concert pianist and the grim face of a surgeon concentrating on his task.  "He's a sculptor," said Stockton. "When I came here, he and his partner had a sort of combination hand-forge and repair shop. I opened a real foundry, and took all their customers away from them. The boy couldn't do the kind of job I did, it was only a part-time business for him, anyway-sculpture is his real business-so he came to work for me. He's making more money now, in shorter hours, than he used to make in his own foundry. His partner was a chemist, so he went into agriculture and he's produced a chemical fertilizer that's doubled some of the crops around here-did you mention potatoes?-potatoes, in particular."  "Then somebody could put you out of business, too?"  "Sure. Any time. I know one man who could and probably will, when he gets here. But, boy!-I'd work for him as a cinder sweeper. He'd blast through this valley like a rocket. He'd triple everybody's production."  "Who's that?"  "Hank Rearden."  "Yes . . ." she whispered, "Oh yes!"  She wondered what had made her say it with such immediate certainty. She felt, simultaneously, that Hank Rearden's presence in this valley was impossible-and that this was his place, peculiarly his, this was the place of his youth, of his start, and, together, the place he had been seeking all his life, the land he had struggled to reach, the goal of his tortured battle. . . . It seemed to her that the spirals of flame tinged fog were drawing time into an odd circle-and while a dim thought went floating through her mind like the streamer of an unfollowed sentence: To hold an unchanging youth is to reach, at the end, the vision with which one started-she heard the voice of a tramp in a diner, saying, "John Galt found the fountain of youth which he wanted to bring down to men. Only he never came back . . . because he found that it couldn't be brought down."  A sheaf of sparks went up in the depth of the fog-and she saw the broad back of a foreman whose arm made the sweeping gesture of a signal, directing some invisible task. He jerked his head to snap an order-she caught a glimpse of his profile-and she caught her breath.  Stockton saw it, chuckled and called into the fog: "Hey, Ken! Come here! Here's an old friend of yours!"  She looked at Ken Danagger as he approached them. The great industrialist, whom she had tried so desperately to hold to his desk, was now dressed in smudged overalls.  "Hello, Miss Taggart. I told you we'd soon meet again."  Her head dropped, as if in assent and in greeting, but her hand bore down heavily upon her cane, for a moment, while she stood reliving their last encounter: the tortured hour of waiting, then the gently distant face at the desk and the tinkling of a glass-paneled door closing upon a stranger.  It was so brief a moment that two of the men before her could take it only as a greeting-but it was at Galt that she looked when she raised her head, and she saw him looking at her as if he knew what she felt-she saw him seeing in her face the realization that it was he who had walked out of Danagger's office, that day. His face gave her nothing in answer: it had that look of respectful severity with which a man stands before the fact that the truth is the truth.  "I didn't expect it," she said softly, to Danagger. "I never expected to see you again."  Danagger was watching her as if she were a promising child he had once discovered and was now affectionately amused to watch. "I know," he said. "But why are you so shocked?"  "I . . . oh, it's just that it's preposterous!" She pointed at his clothes.  "What's wrong with it?"  "Is this, then, the end of your road?"  "Hell, no! The beginning."  "What are you aiming at?"  "Mining. Not coal, though. Iron."  "Where?"  He pointed toward the mountains. "Right here. Did you ever know Midas Mulligan to make a bad investment? You'd be surprised what one can find in that stretch of rock, if one knows how to look. That's what I've been doing-looking."  "And if you don't find any iron ore?"  He shrugged. "There's other things to do. I've always been short on time in my life, never on what to use it for."  She glanced at Stockton with curiosity. "Aren't you training a man who could become your most dangerous competitor?"  "That's the only sort of men I like to hire. Dagny, have you lived too long among the looters? Have you come to think that one man's ability is a threat to another?"  "Oh no! But I thought I was almost the only one left who didn't think that."  "Any man who's afraid of hiring the best ability he can find, is a cheat who's in a business where he doesn't belong. To me-the foulest man on earth, more contemptible than a criminal, is the employer who rejects men for being too good. That's what I've always thought and-say, what are you laughing at?"  She was listening to him with an eager, incredulous smile. "It's so startling to hear," she said, "because it's so right!"  "What else can one think?"  She chuckled softly. "You know, when I was a child, I expected every businessman to think it."  "And since then?"  "Since then, I've learned not to expect it."  "But it's right, isn't it?"  "I've learned not to expect the right."  "But it stands to reason, doesn't it?"  "I've given up expecting reason."  "That's what one must never give up," said Ken Danagger.  They had returned to the car and had started down the last, descending curves of the road, when she glanced at Galt and he turned to her at once, as if he had expected it.  "It was you in Danagger's office that day, wasn't it?" she asked.  "Yes."  "Did you know, then, that I was waiting outside?"  "Yes."  "Did you know what it was like, to wait behind that closed door?"  She could not name the nature of the glance with which he looked at her. It was not pity, because she did not seem to be its object; it was the kind of glance with which one looks at suffering, but it was not her suffering that he seemed to be seeing.  "Oh 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 shelves of metal containers. The name on the marquee said; Hammond Grocery Market. A distinguished man in shirt sleeves, with a stern profile and gray temples, was weighing a chunk of butter for an attractive young woman who stood at the counter, her posture light as a show girl's, the skirt of her cotton dress swelling faintly in the wind, like a dance costume. Dagny smiled involuntarily, even though the man was Lawrence Hammond.  The shops were small one-story structures, and as they moved past her, she caught familiar names on their signs, like headings on the pages of a book riffled by the car's motion: Mulligan General Store-Atwood Leather Goods-Nielsen Lumber-then the sign of the dollar above the door of a small brick factory with the inscription: Mulligan Tobacco Company. "Who's the Company, besides Midas Mulligan?" she asked. "Dr. Akston," he answered.  There were few passers-by, some men, fewer women, and they walked with purposeful swiftness, as if bound on specific errands. One after another, they stopped at the sight of the car, they waved to Galt and they looked at her with the unastonished curiosity of recognition.  "Have I been expected here for a long time?" she asked, "You still are," he answered.  On the edge of the road, she saw a structure made of glass sheets held together by a wooden framework, but for one instant it seemed to her that it was only a frame for the painting of a woman-a tall, fragile woman with pale blond hair and a face of such beauty that it seemed veiled by distance, as if the artist had been merely able to suggest it, not to make it quite real. In the next instant the woman moved her head-and Dagny realized that there were people at the tables inside the structure, that it was a cafeteria, that the woman stood behind the counter, and that she was Kay Ludlow, the movie star who, once seen, could never be forgotten; the star who had retired and vanished five years ago, to be replaced by girls of indistinguishable names and interchangeable faces. But at the shock of the realization, Dagny thought of the sort of movies that were now being made-and then she felt that the glass cafeteria was a cleaner use for Kay Ludlow's beauty than a role in a picture glorifying the commonplace for possessing no glory.  The building that came next was a small, squat block of ............