"Where have you been all this time?" Eddie Willers asked the worker in the underground cafeteria, and added, with a smile that was an appeal, an apology and a confession of despair, "Oh, I know it's I who've stayed away from here for weeks." The smile looked like the effort of a crippled child groping for a gesture that he could not perform any longer. "I did come here once, about two weeks ago, but you weren't here that night. I was afraid you'd gone . . . so many people are vanishing without notice. I hear there's hundreds of them roving around the country. The police have been arresting them for leaving their jobs-they're called deserters-but there's too many of them and no food to feed them in jail, so nobody gives a damn any more, one way or another. I hear the deserters are just wandering about, doing odd jobs or worse-who's got any odd jobs to offer these days? . . . It's our best men that we're losing, the kind who've been with the company for twenty years or more. Why did they have to chain them to their jobs? Those men never intended to quit-but now they're quitting at the slightest disagreement, just dropping their tools and walking off, any hour of the day or night, leaving us in all sorts of jams-the men who used to leap out of bed and come running if the railroad needed them. . . . You should see the kind of human driftwood we're getting to fill the vacancies. Some of them mean well, but they're scared of their own shadows. Others are the kind of scum I didn't think existed-they get the jobs and they know that we can't throw them out once they're in, so they make it clear that they don't intend to work for their pay and never did intend. They're the kind of men who like it-who like the way things are now. Can you imagine that there are human beings who like it? Well, there are. . . . You know, I don't think that I really believe it-all that's happening to us these days. It's happening all right, but I don't believe it. I keep thinking that insanity is a state where a person can't tell what's real.  “Well, what's real now is insane-and if I accepted it as real, I'd have to lose my mind, wouldn't I? . . . I go on working and I keep telling myself that this is Taggart Transcontinental. I keep waiting for her to come back-for the door to open at any moment and-oh God, I'm not supposed to say that! . . . What? You knew it? You knew that she's gone? . . . They're keeping it secret. But I guess everybody knows it, only nobody is supposed to say it. They're telling people that she's away on a leave of absence. She's still listed as our Vice-President in Charge of Operation. I think Jim and I are the only ones who know that she has resigned for good. Jim is scared to death that his friends in Washington will take it out on him, if it becomes known that she's quit. It's supposed to be disastrous for public morale, if any prominent person quits, and Jim doesn't want them to know that he's got a deserter right in his own family. . . . But that's not all. Jim is scared that the stockholders, the employees and whoever we do business with, will lose the last of their confidence in Taggart Transcontinental if they learn that she's gone. Confidence! You'd think that it wouldn't matter now, since there's nothing any of them can do about it. And yet, Jim knows that we have to preserve some semblance of the greatness that Taggart Transcontinental once stood for. And he knows that the last of it went with her. . . . No, they don't know where she is. . . . Yes, I do, but I won't tell them. I'm the only one who knows. . . . Oh yes, they've been trying to find out. They've tried to pump me in every way they could think of, but it's no use.  “I won't tell anyone. . . . You should see the trained seal that we now have in her place-our new Operating Vice-President. Oh sure, we have one-that is, we have and we haven't. It's like everything they do today-it is and it ain't, at the same tune. His name is Clifton Locey-he's from Jim's personal staff-a bright, progressive young man of forty-seven and a friend of Jim's. He's only supposed to be pinch-hitting for her, but he sits in her office and we all know that that's the new Operating Vice-President. He gives the orders-that is, he sees to it that he's never caught actually giving an order. He works very hard at making sure that no decision can ever be pinned down on him, so that he won't be blamed for anything. You see, his purpose is not to operate a railroad, but to hold a job. He doesn't want to run trains-he wants to please Jim. He doesn't give a damn whether there's a single train moving or not, so long as he can make a good impression on Jim and on the boys in Washington. So far, Mr. Clifton Locey has managed to frame up two men: a young third assistant, for not relaying an order which Mr. Locey had never given-and the freight manager, for issuing an order which Mr. Locey did give, only the freight manager couldn't prove it. Both men were fired, officially, by ruling of the Unification Board. . . . When things go well-which is never longer than half an hour-Mr. Locey makes it a point to remind us that 'these are not the days of Miss Taggart.' At the first sign of trouble, he calls me into his office and asks me-casually, in the midst of the most irrelevant drivel-what Miss Taggart used to do in such an emergency. I tell him, whenever I can. I tell myself that it's Taggart Transcontinental, and . . . and there's thousands of lives on dozens of trains that hang on our decisions. Between emergencies, Mr. Locey goes out of his way to be rude to me-that's so I wouldn't think that he needs me. He's made it a point to change everything she used to do, in every respect that doesn't matter, but he's damn cautious not to change anything that matters. The only trouble is that he can't always tell which is which. . . . On his first day in her office, he told me that it wasn't a good idea to have a picture of Nat Taggart on the wall- 'Nat Taggart,' he said, 'belongs to a dark past, to the age of selfish greed, he is not exactly a symbol of our modern, progressive policies, so it could make a bad impression, people could identify me with him.' 'No, they couldn't,' I said-but I took the picture off his wall. . . . What?. . . No, she doesn't know any of it. I haven't communicated with her. Not once. She told me not to. . . . Last week, I almost quit. It was over Chick's Special. Mr. Chick Morrison of Washington, whoever the hell he is, has gone on a speaking tour of the whole country-to speak about the directive and build up the people's morale, as things are getting to be pretty wild everywhere. He demanded a special train, for himself and party-a sleeper, a parlor car and a diner with barroom and lounge. The Unification Board gave him permission to travel at a hundred miles an hour-by reason, the ruling said, of this being a non-profit journey. Well, so it is. It's just a journey to talk people into continuing to break their backs at making profits in order to support men who are superior by reason of not making any. Well, our trouble came when Mr. Chick Morrison demanded a Diesel engine for his train. We had none to give him. Every Diesel we own is out on the road, pulling the Comet and the transcontinental freights, and there wasn't a spare one anywhere on the system, except-well, that was an exception I wasn't going to mention to Mr. Clifton Locey.  Mr. Locey raised the roof, screaming that come hell or high water we couldn't refuse a demand of Mr. Chick Morrison. I don't know what damn fool finally told him about the extra Diesel that was kept at Winston, Colorado, at the mouth of the tunnel. You know the way our Diesels break down nowadays, they're all breathing their last-so you can understand why that extra Diesel had to be kept at the tunnel. I explained it to Mr. Locey, I threatened him, I pleaded, I told him that she had made it our strictest rule that Winston Station was never to be left without an extra Diesel. He told me to remember that he was not Miss Taggart-as if I could ever forget it!-and that the rule was nonsense, because nothing had happened all these years, so Winston could do without a Diesel for a couple of months, and he wasn't going to worry about some theoretical disaster in the future when we were up against the very real, practical, immediate disaster of getting Mr. Chick Morrison angry at us. Well, Chick's Special got the Diesel. The superintendent of the Colorado Division quit. Mr. Locey gave that job to a friend of his own. I wanted to quit. I had never wanted to so badly. But I didn't. . . . No, I haven't heard from her. I haven't heard a word since she left. Why do you keep questioning me about her? Forget it. She won't be back, . . . I don't know what it is that I'm hoping for. Nothing, I guess. I just go day by day, and I try not to look ahead. At first, I hoped that somebody would save us. I thought maybe it would be Hank Rearden. But he gave in. I don't know what they did to him to make him sign, but I know that it must have been something terrible. Everybody thinks so. Everybody's whispering about it, wondering what sort of pressure was used on him. . . . No, nobody knows. He's made no public statements and he's refused to see anyone, . . . But, listen, I'll tell you something else that everybody's whispering about. Lean closer, will you?-I don't want to speak too loudly. They say that Orren Boyle seems to have known about that directive long ago, weeks or months in advance, because he had started, quietly and secretly, to reconstruct his furnaces for the production of Rearden Metal, in one of his lesser steel plants, an obscure little place way out on the coast of Maine, He was ready to start pouring the Metal the moment Rearden's extortion paper-I mean, Gift Certificate-was signed. But-listen-the night before they were to start, Boyle's men were heating the furnaces in that place on the coast, when they heard a voice, they didn't know whether it came from a plane or a radio or some sort of loud-speaker, but it was a man's voice and it said that he would give them ten minutes to get out of the place.  “They got out. They started going and they kept on going-because the man's voice had said that he was Ragnar Danneskjold. In the next half-hour, Boyle's mills were razed to the ground. Razed, wiped out, not a brick of them left standing. They say it was done by long-range naval guns, from somewhere way out on the Atlantic. Nobody saw Danneskjold's ship. . . . That's what people are whispering. The newspapers haven't printed a word about it. The boys in Washington say that it's only a rumor spread by panic-mongers. . . . I don't know whether the story is true. I think it is. I hope it is. . . . You know, when I was fifteen years old, I used to wonder how any man could become a criminal, I couldn't understand what would make it possible.  Now-now I'm glad that Ragnar Danneskjold has blown up those mills. May God bless him and never let them find him, whatever and wherever he is! . . . Yes, that's what I've come to feel. Well, how much do they think people can take? . . . It's not so bad for me in the daytime, because I can keep busy and not think, but it gets me at night. I can't sleep any more, I lie awake for hours. . . . Yes!-if you want to know it-yes, it's because I'm worried about her! I'm scared to death for her. Woodstock is just a miserable little hole of a place, miles away from everything, and the Taggart lodge is twenty miles farther, twenty miles of a twisting trail in a godforsaken forest. How do I know what might happen to her there, alone, and with the kind of gangs that are roving all through the country these nights-just through such desolate parts of the country as the Berkshires? . . . I know I shouldn't think about it. I know that she can take care of herself. Only I wish she'd drop me a line. I wish I could go there. But she told me not to.  “I told her I'd wait. . . . You know, I'm glad you're here tonight. It helps me-talking to you and . . . just seeing you here. You won't vanish, like all the others, will you? . . . What? Next week? . . . Oh, on your vacation. For how long? . . . How do you rate a whole month's vacation? . . . I wish I could do that, to take a month off at my own expense. But they wouldn't let me. . . . Really? I envy you. . . . I wouldn't have envied you a few years ago. But now-now I'd like to get away. Now I envy you-if you've been able to take a month off every summer for twelve years."  It was a dark road, but it led in a new direction. Rearden walked from his mills, not toward his house, but toward the city of Philadelphia.  It was a great distance to walk, but he had wanted to do it tonight, as he had done it every evening of the past week. He felt at peace in the empty darkness of the countryside, with nothing but the black shapes of trees around him, with no motion but that of his own body and of branches stirring in the wind, with no lights but the slow sparks of the fireflies flickering through the hedges. The two hours between mills and city were his span of rest.  He had moved out of his home to an apartment in Philadelphia. He had given no explanation to his mother and Philip, he had said nothing except that they could remain in the house if they wished and that Miss Ives would take care of their bills. He had asked them to tell Lillian, when she returned, that she was not to attempt to see him.  They had stared at him in terrified silence.  He had handed to his attorney a signed blank check and said, "Get me a divorce. On any grounds and at any cost. I don't care what means you use, how many of their judges you purchase or whether you find it necessary to stage a frame-up of my wife. Do whatever you wish. But there is to be no alimony and no property settlement." The attorney had looked at him with the hint of a wise, sad smile, as if this were an event he had expected to happen long ago. He had answered, "Okay, Hank. It can be done. But it will take some time." "Make it as fast as you can."  No one had questioned him about his signature on the Gift Certificate. But he had noticed that the men at the mills looked at him with a kind of searching curiosity, almost as if they expected to find the scars of some physical torture on his body.  He felt nothing-nothing but the sense of an even, restful twilight, like a spread of slag over a molten metal, when it crusts and swallows the last brilliant spurt of the white glow within. He felt nothing at the thought of the looters who were now going to manufacture Rearden Metal. His desire to hold his right to it and proudly to be the only one to sell it, had been his form of respect for his fellow men, his belief that to trade with them was an act of honor. The belief, the respect and the desire were gone. He did not care what men made, what they sold, where they bought his Metal or whether any of them would know that it had been his. The human shapes moving past him in the streets of the city were physical objects without any meaning. The countryside -with the darkness washing away all traces of human activity, leaving only an untouched earth which he had once been able to handle-was real.  He carried a gun in his pocket, as advised by the policemen of the radio car that patrolled the roads; they had warned him that no road was safe after dark, these days. He felt, with a touch of mirthless amusement, that the gun had been needed at the mills, not in the peaceful safety of loneliness and night; what could some starving vagrant take from him, compared to what had been taken by men who claimed to be his protectors?  He walked with an effortless speed, feeling relaxed by a form of activity that was natural to him. This was his period of training for solitude, he thought; he had to learn to live without any awareness of people, the awareness that now paralyzed him with revulsion. He had once built his fortune, starting out with empty hands; now he had to rebuild his life, starting out with an empty spirit.  He would give himself a short span of time for the training, he thought, and then he would claim the one incomparable value still left to him, the one desire that had remained pure and whole: he would go to Dagny. Two commandments had grown in his mind; one was a duty, the other a passionate wish. The first was never to let her learn the reason of his surrender to the looters; the second was to say to her the words which he should have known at their first meeting and should have said on the gallery of Ellis Wyatt's house.  There was nothing but the strong summer starlight to guide him, as he walked, but he could distinguish the highway and the remnant of a stone fence ahead, at the corner of a country crossroad. The fence had nothing to protect any longer, only a spread of weeds, a willow tree bending over the road and, farther in the distance, the ruin of a farmhouse with the starlight showing through its roof.  He walked, thinking that even this sight still retained the power to be of value: it gave him the promise of a long stretch of space undisturbed by human intrusion.  The man who stepped suddenly out into the road must have come from behind the willow tree, but so swiftly that it seemed as if he had sprung up from the middle of the highway. Rearden's hand went to the gun in his pocket, but stopped: he knew-by the proud posture of the body standing in the open, by the straight line of the shoulders against the starlit sky-that the man was not a bandit. When he heard the voice, he knew that the man was not a beggar.  "I should like to speak to you, Mr. Rearden."  The voice had the firmness, the clarity and the special courtesy peculiar to men who are accustomed to giving orders.  "Go ahead," said Rearden, "provided you don't intend to ask me for help or money."  The man's garments were rough, but efficiently trim. He wore dark trousers and a dark blue windbreaker closed tight at his throat, prolonging the lines of his long, slender figure. He wore a dark blue cap, and all that could be seen of him in the night were his hands, his face and a patch of gold-blond hair on his temple. The hands held no weapon, only a package wrapped in burlap, the size of a carton of cigarettes.  "No, Mr. Rearden," he said, "I don't intend to ask you for money, but to return it to you."  "To return money?"  "Yes."  "What money?"  "A small refund on a very large debt."  "Owed by you?"  "No, not by me. It is only a token payment, but I want you to accept it as proof that if we live long enough, you and I, every dollar of that debt will be returned to you."  "What debt?"  "The money that was taken from you by force."  He extended the package to Rearden, flipping the burlap open.  Rearden saw the starlight run like fire along a mirror-smooth surface.  He knew, by its weight and texture, that what he held was a bar of solid gold.  He looked from the bar to the man's face, but the face seemed harder and less revealing than the surface of the metal.  "Who are you?" asked Rearden.  "The friend of the friendless."  "Did you come here to give this to me?"  "Yes."  "Do you mean that you had to stalk me at night, on a lonely road, in order, not to rob me, but to hand me a bar of gold?"  "Yes."  "Why?"  "When robbery is done in open daylight by sanction of the law, as it is done today, then any act of honor or restitution has to be hidden underground."  "What made you think that I'd accept a gift of this kind?"  "It is not a gift, Mr. Rearden. It is your own money. But I have one favor to ask of you. It is a request, not a condition, because there can be no such thing as conditional property. The gold is yours, so you are free to use it as you please. But I risked my life to bring it to you tonight, so I am asking, as a favor, that you save it for the future or spend it on yourself. On nothing but your own comfort and pleasure. Do not give it away and, above all, do not put it into your business."  "Why?"  "Because I don't want it to be of any benefit to anybody but you. Otherwise, I will have broken an oath taken long ago-as I am breaking every rule I had set for myself by speaking to you tonight."  "What do you mean?"  "I have been collecting this money for you for a long time. But I did not intend to see you or tell you about it or give it to you until much later."  "Then why did you?"  "Because I couldn't stand it any longer."  "Stand what?"  "I thought that I had seen everything one could see and that there was nothing I could not stand seeing. But when they took Rearden Metal away from you, it was too much, even for me. I know that you don't need this gold at present. What you need is the justice which it represents, and the knowledge that there are men who care for justice."  Struggling not to give in to an emotion which he felt rising through his bewilderment, past all his doubts, Rearden tried to study the man's face, searching for some clue to help him understand. But the face had no expression; it had not changed once while speaking; it looked as if the man had lost the capacity to feel long ago, and what remained of him were only features that seemed implacable and dead. With a shudder of astonishment, Rearden found himself thinking that it was not the face of a man, but of an avenging angel.  "Why did you care?" asked Rearden. "What do I mean to you?"  "Much more than you have reason to suspect. And I have a friend to whom you mean much more than you will ever learn. He would have given anything to stand by you today. But he can't come to you. So I came in his place."  "What friend?"  "I prefer not to name him."  "Did you say that you've spent a long time collecting this money for me?"  "I have collected much more than this." He pointed at the gold. "I am holding it in your name and I will turn it over to you when the time comes. This is only a sample, as proof that it does exist. And if you reach the day when you find yourself robbed of the last of your fortune, I want you to remember that you have a large bank account waiting for you."  "What account?"  "If you try to think of all the money that has been taken from you by force, you will know that your account represents a considerable sum."  "How did you collect it? Where did this gold come from?"  "It was taken from those who robbed you."  "Taken by whom?"  "By me."  "Who are you?"  "Ragnar Danneskjold."  Rearden looked at him for a long, still moment, then let the gold fall out of his hands.  Danneskjold's eyes did not follow it to the ground, but remained fixed on Rearden with no change of expression. "Would you rather I were a law-abiding citizen, Mr. Rearden? If so, which law should I abide by? Directive 10-289?"  "Ragnar Danneskjold . . ." said Rearden, as if he were seeing the whole of the past decade, as if he were looking at the enormity of a crime spread through ten years and held within two words.  "Look more carefully, Mr. Rearden. There are only two modes of living left to us today: to be a looter who robs disarmed victims or to be a victim who works for the benefit of his own despoilers. I did not choose to be either."  "You chose to live by means of force, like the rest of them,"  "Yes-openly. Honestly, if you will. I do not rob men who are tied and gagged, I do not demand that my victims help me, I do not tell them that I am acting for their own good. I stake my life in every encounter with men, and they have a chance to match their guns and their brains against mine in fair battle. Fair? It's I against the organized strength, the guns, the planes, the battleships of five continents. If it's a moral judgment that you wish to pronounce, Mr. Rearden, then who is the man of higher morality: I or Wesley Mouch?"  "I have no answer to give you," said Rearden, his voice low.  "Why should you be shocked, Mr. Rearden? I am merely complying with the system which my fellow men have established. If they believe that force is the proper means to deal with one another, I am giving them what they ask for. If they believe that the purpose of my life is to serve them, let them try to enforce their creed. If they believe that my mind is their property-let them come and get it."  "But what sort of life have you chosen? To what purpose are you giving your mind?"  "To the cause of my love."  "Which is what?"  "Justice."  "Served by being a pirate?"  "By working for the day when I won't have to be a pirate any longer."  "Which day is that?"  "The day when you'll be free to make a profit on Rearden Metal."  "Oh God!" said Rearden, laughing, his voice desperate. "Is that your ambition?"  Danneskjold's face did not change. "It is."  "Do you expect to live to see that day?"  "Yes. Don't you?"  "No."  "Then what are you looking forward to, Mr. Rearden?"  "Nothing."  "What are you working for?"  Rearden glanced at him. "Why do you ask that?"  "To make you understand why I'm not."  "Don't expect me ever to approve of a criminal."  "I don't expect it. But there are a few things I want to help you to see."  "Even if they're true, the things you said, why did you choose to be a bandit? Why didn't you simply step out, like-" He stopped.  "Like Ellis Wyatt, Mr. Rearden? Like Andrew Stockton? Like your friend Ken Danagger?"  "Yes!"  "Would you approve of that?"  "I-" He stopped, shocked by his own words.  The shock that came next was to see Danneskjold smile: it was like seeing the first green of spring on the sculptured planes of an iceberg. Rearden realized suddenly, for the first time, that Danneskjold's face was more than handsome, that it had the startling beauty of physical perfection-the hard, proud features, the scornful mouth of a Viking's statue-yet he had not been aware of it, almost as if the dead sternness of the face had forbidden the impertinence of an appraisal.  But the smile was brilliantly alive.  "I do approve of it, Mr. Rearden. But I've chosen a special mission of my own. I'm after a man whom I want to destroy. He died many centuries ago, but until the last trace of him is wiped out of men's minds, we will not have a decent world to live in."  "What man?"  "Robin Hood."  Rearden looked at him blankly, not understanding.  "He was the man who robbed the rich and gave to the poor. Well, I'm the man who robs the poor and gives to the rich-or, to be exact, the man who robs the thieving poor and gives back to the productive rich."  "What in blazes do you mean?"  "If you remember the stories you've read about me in the newspapers, before they stopped printing them, you know that I have never robbed a private ship and never taken any private property. Nor have I ever robbed a military vessel-because the purpose of a military fleet is to protect from violence the citizens who paid for it, which is the proper function of a government. But I have seized every loot carrier that came within range of my guns, every government relief ship, subsidy ship, loan ship, gift ship, every vessel with a cargo of goods taken by force from some men for the unpaid, unearned benefit of others. I seized the boats that sailed under the flag of the idea which I am fighting: the idea that need is a sacred idol requiring human sacrifices-that the need of some men is the knife of a guillotine hanging over others-that all of us must live with our work, our hopes, our plans, our efforts at the mercy of the moment when that knife will descend upon us-and that the extent of our ability is the extent of our danger, so that success will bring our heads down on the block, while failure will give us the right to pull the cord. This is the horror which Robin Hood immortalized as an ideal of righteousness. It is said that he fought against the looting rulers and returned the loot to those who had been robbed, but that is not the meaning of the legend which has survived. He is remembered, not as a champion of property, but as a champion of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor. He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became the symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don't have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does. He became a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, has demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors at the price of robbing his superiors. It is this foulest of creatures-the double-parasite who lives on the sores, of the poor and the blood of the rich-whom men have come to regard as a moral ideal. And this 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 wonder why the world is collapsing around us? That is what I am fighting, Mr. Rearden. Until men learn that of all human symbols, Robin Hood is the most immoral and the most contemptible, there will be no justice on earth and no way for mankind to survive."  Rearden listened, feeling numb. But under the numbness, like the first thrust of a seed breaking through, he felt an emotion he could not identify except that it seemed familiar and very distant, like something experienced and renounced long ago.  "What I actually am, Mr. Rearden, is a policeman. It is a policeman's duty to protect men from criminals-criminals being those who seize wealth by force. It is a policeman's duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman's duty becomes, not the protection, but the plunder of property-then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman. I have been selling the cargoes I retrieved to some special customers of mine in this country, who pay me in gold. Also, I have been selling my cargoes to the smugglers and the black-market traders of the People's States of Europe. Do you know the conditions of existence in those People's States? Since production and trade-not violence-were decreed to be crimes, the best men of Europe had no choice but to become criminals. The slave-drivers of those States are kept in power by the handouts from their fellow looters in countries not yet fully drained, such as this country. I do not let the handouts reach them. I sell the goods to Europe's law-breakers, at the highest prices I can get, and I make them pay me in gold. Gold is the objective value, the means of preserving one's wealth and one's future. Nobody is permitted to have gold in Europe, except the whip-wielding friends of humanity, who claim that they spend it for the welfare of their victims. That is the gold which my smuggler-customers obtain to pay me. How? By the same method I use to obtain the goods. And then I return the gold to those from whom the goods were stolen-to you, Mr. Rearden, and to other men like you."  Rearden grasped the nature of the emotion he had forgotten. It was the emotion he had felt when, at the age of fourteen, he had looked at his first pay check-when, at the age of twenty-four, he had been made superintendent of the ore mines-when, as the owner of the mines, he had placed, in his own name, his first order for new equipment from the best concern of the time, Twentieth Century Motors-an emotion of solemn, joyous excitement, the sense of winning his place in a world he respected and earning the recognition of men he admired. For almost two decades, that emotion had been buried under a mount of wreckage, as the years had added layer upon gray layer of contempt, of indignation, of his struggle not to look around him, not to see those he dealt with, not to expect anything from men and to keep, as a private vision within the four walls of his office, the sense of that world into which he had hoped to rise. Yet there it was again, breaking through from under the wreckage, that feeling of quickened interest, of listening to the luminous voice of reason, with which one could communicate and deal and live. But it was the voice of a pirate speaking about acts of violence, offering him this substitute for his world of reason and justice. He could not accept it; he could not lose whatever remnant of his vision he still retained. He listened, wishing he could escape, yet knowing that he would not miss a word of it.  "I deposit the gold in a bank-in a gold-standard bank, Mr. Rearden -to the account of men who are its rightful owners. They are the men of superlative ability who made their fortunes by personal effort, in free trade, using no compulsion, no help from the government. They are the great victims who have contributed the most and suffered the worst injustice in return. Their names are written in my book of restitution. Every load of gold which I bring back is divided among them and deposited to their accounts."  "Who are they?"  "You're one of them, Mr. Rearden. I cannot compute all the money that has been extorted from you-in hidden taxes, in regulations, in wasted time, in lost effort, in energy spent to overcome artificial obstacles. I cannot compute the sum, but if you wish to see its magnitude -look around you. The extent of the misery now spreading through this once prosperous country is the extent of the injustice which you have suffered. If men refuse to pay the debt they owe you, this is the manner in which they will pay for it. But there is one part of the debt which is computed and on record. That is the part which I have made it my purpose to collect and return to you."  "What is that?"  "Your income tax, Mr. Rearden."  "What?"  "Your income tax for the last twelve years."  "You intend to refund that?"  "In full and in gold, Mr. Rearden."  Rearden burst out laughing; he laughed like a young boy, in simple amusement, in enjoyment of the incredible. "Good God! You're a policeman and a collector of Internal Revenue, too?"  "Yes," said Danneskjold gravely.  "You're not serious about this, are you?"  "Do I look as if I'm joking?"  "But this is preposterous!"  "Any more preposterous than Directive 10-289?"  "It's not real or possible!"  "Is only evil real and possible?"  "But-"  "Are you thinking that death and taxes are our only certainty, Mr. Rearden? Well, there's nothing I can do about the first, but if I lift the burden of the second, men might learn to see the connection between the two and what a longer, happier life they have the power to achieve. They might learn to hold, not death and taxes, but life and production as their two absolutes and as the base of their moral code."  Rearden looked at him, not smiling. The tall, slim figure, with the windbreaker stressing its trained muscular agility, was that of a highwayman; the stern marble face was that of a judge; the dry, clear voice was that of an efficient bookkeeper.  "The looters are not the only ones who have kept records on you, Mr. Rearden. So have I. I have, in my files, copies of all your income tax returns for the last twelve years, as well as the returns of all my other clients. I have friends in some astonishing places, who obtain the copies I need. I divide the money among my clients in proportion to the sums extorted from them. Most of my accounts have now been paid to their owners. Yours is the largest one left to settle. On the day when you will be ready to claim it-the day when I'll know that no penny of it will go back to support the looters-I will turn your account over to you. Until then-" He glanced down at the gold on the ground. "Pick it up, Mr. Rearden. It's not stolen. It's yours."  Rearden would not move or answer or look down.  "Much more than that lies in the bank, in your name."  "What bank?"  "Do you remember Midas Mulligan of Chicago?"  "Yes, of course."  "All my accounts are deposited at the Mulligan Bank."  "There is no Mulligan Bank in Chicago."  "It is not in Chicago."  Rearden let a moment pass. "Where is it?"  "I think that you will know it before long, Mr. Rearden. But I cannot tell you now." He added, "I must tell you, however, that I am the only one responsible for this undertaking. It is my own personal mission. No one is involved in it but me and the men of my ship's crew. Even my banker has no part in it, except for keeping the money I deposit. Many of my friends do not approve of the course I've chosen. But we all choose different ways to fight the same battle-and this is mine."  Rearden smiled contemptuously, "Aren't you one of those damn altruists who spends his time on a non-profit venture and risks his life merely to serve others?"  "No, Mr. Rearden. I am investing my time in my own future. When we are free and have to start rebuilding from out of the ruins, I want to see the world reborn as fast as possible. If there is, then, some working capital in the right hands-in the hands of our best, our most productive men-it will save years for the rest of us and, incidentally, centuries for the history of the country. Did you ask what you meant to me? Everything I admire, everything I want to be on the day when the earth will have a place for such state of being, everything I want to deal with-even if this is the only way I can deal with you and be of use to you at present."  "Why?" whispered Rearden.  "Because my only love, the only value I care to live for, is that which has never been loved by the world, has never won recognition or friends or defenders: human ability. That is the love I am serving-and if I should lose my life, to what better purpose could I give it?"  The man who had lost the capacity to feel?-thought Rearden, and knew that the austerity of the marble face was the form of a disciplined capacity to feel too deeply. The even voice was continuing dispassionately: "I wanted you to know this. I wanted you to know it now, when it most seem to you that you're abandoned at the bottom of a pit among subhuman creatures who are all that's left of mankind. I wanted you to know, in your most hopeless hour, that the day of deliverance is much closer than you think. And there was one special reason why I had to speak to you and tell you my secret ahead of the proper time. Have you heard of what happened to Orren Boyle's steel mills on the coast of Maine?"  "Yes," said Rearden-and was shocked to hear that the word came as a gasp out of the sudden jolt of eagerness within him. "I didn't know whether it was true."  "It's true. I did it. Mr. Boyle is not going to manufacture Rearden Metal on the coast of Maine. He is not going to manufacture it anywhere. Neither is any other looting louse who thinks that a directive can give him a right to your brain. Whoever attempts to produce that Metal, will find his furnaces blown up, his machinery blasted, his shipments wrecked, his plant set on fire-so many things will happen to any man who tries it, that people will say there's a curse on it, and there will soon be no worker in the country willing to enter the plant of any new producer of Rearden Metal. If men like Boyle think that force is all they need to rob their betters-let them see what happens when one of their betters chooses to resort to force. I wanted you to know, Mr. Rearden, that none of them will produce your Metal nor make a penny on it."  Because he felt an exultant desire to laugh-as he had laughed at the news of Wyatt's fire, as he had laughed at the crash of d'Anconia Copper-and knew that if he did, the thing he feared would hold him, would not release him this time, and he would never see his mills again-Rearden drew back and, for a moment, kept his lips closed tight to utter no sound. When the moment was over, he said quietly, his voice firm and dead, "Take that gold of yours and get away from here. I won't accept the help of a criminal."  Danneskjold's face showed no reaction. "I cannot force you to accept the gold, Mr. Rearden. But I will not take it back. You may leave it lying where it is, if you wish."  "I don't want your help and I don't intend to protect you. If I were within reach of a phone, I would call the police. I would and I will, if you ever attempt to approach me again. I'll do it-in self-protection."  "I understand exactly what you mean."  "You know-because I've listened to you, because you've seen me eager to hear it-that I haven't damned you as I should. I can't damn you or anyone else. There are no standards left for men to live by, so I don't care to judge anything they do today or in what manner they attempt to endure the unendurable. If this is your manner, I will let you go to hell in your own way, but I want no part of it. Neither as your inspiration nor as your accomplice. Don't expect me ever to accept your bank account, if it does exist. Spend it on some extra armor plate for yourself-because I'm going to report this to the police and give them every clue I can to set them on your trail."  Danneskjold did not move or answer. A freight train was rolling by, somewhere in the distance and darkness; they could not see it, but they heard the pounding beat of wheels filling the silence, and it seemed close, as if a disembodied train, reduced to a long string of sound, were going past them in the night.  "You wanted to help me in my most hopeless hour?" said Rearden. "If I am brought to where my only defender is a pirate, then I don't care to be defended any longer. You speak some remnant of a human language, so in the name of that, I'll tell you that I have no hope left, but I have the knowledge that when the end comes, I will have lived by my own standards, even while I was the only one to whom they remained valid. I will have lived in the world in which I started and I will go down with the last of it. I don't think you'll want to understand 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 jumped back involuntarily and had time to marvel at his companion: the swiftness of Danneskjold's self-control was that he did not move.  It was a police car and it stopped beside them.  The driver leaned out. "Oh, it's you, Mr. Rearden!" he said, touching his fingers to his cap. "Good evening, sir."  "Hello," said Rearden, fighting to control the unnatural abruptness of his voice.  There were two patrolmen in the front seat of the car and their faces had a tight look of purpose, not the look of their usual friendly intention to stop for a chat.  "Mr. Rearden, did you walk from the mills by way of Edgewood Road, past Blacksmith Cove?"  "Yes. Why?"  "Did you happen to see a man anywhere around these parts, a stranger moving along in a hurry?"  "Where?"  "He'd be either on foot or in a battered wreck of a car that's got a million-dollar motor."  "What man?"  "A tall man with blond hair."  "Who is he?"  "You wouldn't believe it if I told you, Mr. Rearden. Did you see him?"  Rearden was not aware of his own questions, only of the astonishing fact that he was able to force sounds past some beating barrier inside his throat. He was looking straight at the policeman, but he felt as if the focus of his eyes had switched to his side vision, and what he saw most clearly was Danneskjold's face watching him with no expression, with no line's, no muscle's worth of feeling. He saw Danneskjold's arms hanging idly by his sides, the hands relaxed, with no sign of intention to reach for a weapon, leaving the tall, straight body defenseless and open-open as to a firing squad. He saw, in the light, that the face looked younger than he had thought and that the eyes were sky-blue.  He felt that his one danger would be to glance directly at Danneskjold-and he kept his eyes on the policeman, on the brass buttons of a blue uniform, but the object filling his consciousness, more forcefully than a visual perception, was Danneskjold's body, the naked body under the clothes, the body that would be wiped out of existence. He did not hear his own words, because he kept hearing a single sentence in his mind, without context except the feeling that it was the only thing that mattered to him in the world: "If I should lose my life, to what better purpose could I give it?"  "Did you see him, Mr. Rearden?"  "No," said Rearden. "I didn't."  The policeman shrugged regretfully and closed his hands about the steering wheel. "You didn't see any man that looked suspicious?"  "No."  "Nor any strange car passing you on the road?"  "No."  The policeman reached for the starter. "They got word that he was seen ashore in these parts tonight, and they've thrown a dragnet over five counties. We're not supposed to mention his name, not to scare the folks, but he's a man whose head is worth three million dollars in rewards from all over the world."  He had pressed the starter and the motor was churning the air with bright cracks of sound, when the second policeman leaned forward.  He had been looking at the blond hair under Danneskjold's cap.  "Who is that, Mr. Rearden?" he asked.  "My new bodyguard," said Rearden.  "Oh . . . ! A sensible precaution, Mr. Rearden, in times like these. Good night, sir."  The motor jerked forward. The red taillights of the car went shrinking down the road. Danneskjold watched it go, then glanced pointedly at Rearden's right hand. Rearden realized that he had stood facing the policemen with his hand clutching the gun in his pocket and that he had been prepared to use it.  He opened his fingers and drew his hand out hastily. Danneskjold smiled. It was a smile of radiant amusement, the silent laughter of a clear, young spirit greeting a moment it was glad to have lived.  And although the two did not resemble each other, the smile made Rearden think of Francisco d'Anconia.  "You haven't told a lie," said Ragnar Danneskjold. "Your bodyguard-that's what I am and what I'll deserve to be, in many more ways than you can know at present. Thanks, Mr. Rearden, and so long-we'll meet again much sooner than I had hoped."  He was gone before Rearden could answer. He vanished beyond the stone fence, as abruptly and soundlessly as he had come. When Rearden turned to look through the farm field, there was no trace of him and no sign of movement anywhere in the darkness.  Rearden stood on the edge of an empty road in a spread of loneliness vaster than it had seemed before. Then he saw, lying at his feet, an object wrapped in burlap, with one corner exposed and glistening in the moonlight, the color of the pirate's hair. He bent, picked it up and walked on.  Kip Chalmers swore as the train lurched and spilled his cocktail over the table top. He slumped forward, his elbow in the puddle, and said: "God damn these railroads! What's the matter with their track?  You'd think with all the money they've got they'd disgorge a little, so we wouldn't have to bump like farmers on a hay cart!"  His three companions did not take the trouble to answer. It was late, and they remained in the lounge merely because an effort was needed to retire to their compartments. The lights of the lounge looked like feeble portholes in a fog of cigarette smoke dank with the odor of alcohol. It was a private car, which Chalmers had demanded and obtained for his journey; it was attached to the end of the Comet and it swung like the tail of a nervous animal as the Comet coiled through the curves of the mountains.  "I'm going to campaign for the nationalization of the railroads," said Kip Chalmers, glaring defiantly at a small, gray man who looked at him without interest. 'That's going to be my platform plank. I've got to have a platform plank. I don't like Jim Taggart. He looks like a soft-boiled clam. To hell with the railroads! It's time we took them over."  "Go to bed," said the man, "if you expect to look like anything human at the big rally tomorrow."  "Do you think we'll make it?"  "You've got to make it."  "I know I've got to. But I don't think we'll get there on time. This goddamn snail of a super-special is hours late."  "You've got to get there, Kip," said the man ominously, in that stubborn monotone of the unthinking which asserts an end without concern for the means.  "God damn you, don't you suppose I know it?"  Kip Chalmers had curly blond hair and a shapeless mouth. He came from a semi-wealthy, semi-distinguished family, but he sneered at wealth and distinction in a manner which implied that only a top rank aristocrat could permit himself such a degree of cynical indifference. He had graduated from a college which specialized in breeding that kind of aristocracy. The college had taught him that the purpose of ideas is to fool those who are stupid enough to think. He had made his way in Washington with the grace of a cat-burglar, climbing from bureau to bureau as from ledge to ledge of a crumbling structure. He was ranked as semi-powerful, but his manner made laymen mistake him for nothing less than Wesley Mouch.  For reasons of his own particular strategy, Kip Chalmers had decided to enter popular politics and to run for election as Legislator from California, though he knew nothing about that state except the movie industry and the beach clubs. His campaign manager had done the preliminary work, and Chalmers was now on his way to face his future constituents for the first time at an over publicized rally in San Francisco tomorrow night. The manager had wanted him to start a day earlier, but Charmers had stayed in Washington to attend a cocktail party and had taken the last train possible. He had shown no concern about the rally until this evening, when he noticed that the Comet was running six hours late.  His three companions did not mind his mood: they liked his liquor. Lester Tuck, his campaign manager, was a small, aging man with a face that looked as if it had once been punched in and had never rebounded. He was an attorney who, some generations earlier, would have represented shoplifters and people who stage accidents on the premises of rich corporations; now he found that he could do better by representing men like Kip Chalmers.  Laura Bradford was Chalmers' current mistress; he liked her because his predecessor had been Wesley Mouch. She was a movie actress who had forced her way from competent featured player to incompetent star, not by means of sleeping with studio executives, but by taking the long-distance short cut of sleeping with bureaucrats. She talked economics, instead of glamor, for press interviews, in the belligerently righteous style of a third-rate tabloid; her economics consisted of the assertion that "we've got to help the poor."  Gilbert Keith-Worthing was Chalmers' guest, for no reason that either of them could discover. He was a British novelist of world fame, who had been popular thirty years ago; since then, nobody bothered to read what he wrote, but everybody accepted him as a walking classic.  He had been considered profound for uttering such things as: "Freedom? Do let's stop talking about freedom. Freedom is impossible. Man can never be free of hunger, of cold, of disease, of physical accidents. He can never be free of the tyranny of nature. So why should he object to the tyranny of a political dictatorship?" When all of Europe put into practice the ideas which he bad preached, he came to live in America. Through the years, his style of writing and his body had grown flabby. At seventy, he was an obese old man with retouched hair and a manner of scornful cynicism retouched by quotations from the yogis about the futility of all human endeavor. Kip Chalmers had invited him, because it seemed to look distinguished. Gilbert Keith Worthing had come along, because he had no particular place to go.  "God damn these railroad people!" said Kip Chalmers. "They're doing it on purpose. They want to ruin my campaign. I can't miss that rally! For Christ's sake, Lester, do something!"  "I've tried," said Lester Tuck. At the train's last stop, he had tried, by long-distance telephone, to find air transportation to complete their journey; but there were no commercial flights scheduled for the next two days.  "If they don't get me there on time, I'll have their scalps and their railroad! Can't we tell that damn conductor to hurry?"  "You've told him three times."  "I'll get him fired. He's given me nothing but a lot of alibis about all their messy technical troubles. I expect transportation, not alibis. They can't treat me like one of their day-coach passengers. I expect them to get me where I want to go when I want it. Don't they know that I'm on this train?"  "They know it by now," said Laura Bradford. "Shut up, Kip. You bore me."  Chalmers refilled his glass. The car was rocking and the glassware tinkled faintly on the shelves of the bar. The patches of starlit sky in the windows kept swaying jerkily, and it seemed as if the stars were tinkling against one another. They could see nothing beyond the glass bay of the observation window at the end of the car, except the small halos of red and green lanterns marking the rear of the train, and a brief stretch of rail running away from them into the darkness. A wall of rock was racing the train, and the stars dipped occasionally into a sudden break that outlined, high above them, the peaks of the mountains of Colorado.  "Mountains . . ." said Gilbert Keith-Worthing, with satisfaction.  "It is a spectacle of this kind that makes one feel the insignificance of man.' What is this presumptuous little bit of rail, which crude materialists are so proud of building-compared to that eternal grandeur? No more than the basting thread of a seamstress on the hem of the garment of nature. If a single one of those granite giants chose to crumble, it would annihilate this train."  "Why should it choose to crumble?" asked Laura Bradford, without any particular interest.  "I think this damn train is going slower," said Kip Chalmers. "Those bastards are slowing down, in spite of what I told them!"  "Well . . . it's the mountains, you know . . ." said Lester Tuck.  "Mountains be damned! Lester, what day is this? With all those damn changes of time, I can't tell which-"  "It's May twenty-seventh," sighed Lester Tuck.  "It's May twenty-eighth," said Gilbert Keith-Worthing, glancing at his watch. "It is now twelve minutes past midnight."  "Jesus!" cried Chalmers. "Then the rally is today?"  &qu............