"It wasn't real, was it?" said Mr. Thompson.  They stood in front of the radio, as the last sound of Galt's voice had left them. No one had moved through the span of silence; they had stood, looking at the radio, as if waiting. But the radio was now only a wooden box with some knobs and a circle of cloth stretched over an empty loud-speaker.  "We seem to have heard it," said Tinky Holloway.  "We couldn't help it," said Chick Morrison.  Mr. Thompson was sitting on a crate. The pale, oblong smear at the level of his elbow was the face of Wesley Mouch, who was seated on the floor. Far behind them, like an island in the vast semi-darkness of the studio space, the drawing room prepared for their broadcast stood deserted and fully lighted, a semicircle of empty armchairs under a cobweb of dead microphones in the glare of the floodlights which no one had taken the initiative to turn off.  Mr. Thompson's eyes were darting over the faces around him, as if in search of some special vibrations known only to him. The rest of them were trying to do it surreptitiously, each attempting to catch a glimpse of the others without letting them catch his own glance.  "Let me out of here!" screamed a young third-rate assistant, suddenly and to no one in particular.  "Stay put!" snapped Mr. Thompson.  The sound of his own order and the hiccough-moan of the figure immobilized somewhere in the darkness, seemed to help him recapture a familiar version of reality. His head emerged an inch higher from his shoulders.  "Who permitted it to hap-" he began in a rising voice, but stopped; the vibrations he caught were the dangerous panic of the cornered.  "What do you make of it?" he asked, instead. There was no answer.  "Well?" He waited. "Well, say something, somebody!"  "We don't have to believe it, do we?" cried James Taggart, thrusting his face toward Mr. Thompson, in a manner that was almost a threat.  "Do we?" Taggart's face was distorted; his features seemed shapeless; a mustache of small beads sparkled between his nose and mouth.  "Pipe down," said Mr. Thompson uncertainly, drawing a little away from him.  "We don't have to believe it!" Taggart's voice had the flat, insistent sound of an effort to maintain a trance. "Nobody's ever said it before! It's just one man! We don't have to believe it!"  "Take it easy," said Mr. Thompson.  "Why is he so sure he's right? Who is he to go against the whole world, against everything ever said for centuries and centuries? Who is he to know? Nobody can be sure! Nobody can know what's right! There isn't any right!"  "Shut up!" yelled Mr. Thompson. "What are you trying to-"  The blast that stopped him was a military march leaping suddenly forth from the radio receiver-the military march interrupted three hours ago, played by the familiar screeches of a studio record. It took them a few stunned seconds to grasp it, while the cheerful, thumping chords went goose-stepping through the silence, sounding grotesquely irrelevant, like the mirth of a half-wit. The station's program director was blindly obeying the absolute that no radio time was ever to be left blank.  "Tell them to cut it off!" screamed Wesley Mouch, leaping to his feet. "It will make the public think that we authorized that speech!"  "You damn fool!" cried Mr. Thompson. "Would you rather have the public think that we didn't?"  Mouch stopped short and his eyes shot to Mr. Thompson with the appreciative glance of an amateur at a master.  "Broadcasts as usual!" ordered Mr. Thompson. "Tell them to go on with whatever programs they'd scheduled for this hour! No special announcements, no explanations! Tell them to go on as if nothing had happened!"  Half a dozen of Chick Morrison's morale conditioners went scurrying off toward telephones.  "Muzzle the commentators! Don't allow them to comment! Send word to every station in the country! Let the public wonder! Don't let them think that we're worried! Don't let them think that it's important!"  "No!" screamed Eugene Lawson. "No, no, no! We can't give people the impression that we're endorsing that speech! It's horrible, horrible, horrible!" Lawson was not in tears, but his voice had the undignified sound of an adult sobbing with helpless rage.  "Who's said anything about endorsing it?" snapped Mr. Thompson.  "It's horrible! It's immoral! It's selfish, heartless, ruthless! It's the most vicious speech ever made! It . . . it will make people demand to be happy!"  "It's only a speech," said Mr. Thompson, not too firmly.  "It seems to me," said Chick Morrison, his voice tentatively helpful, '"that people of nobler spiritual nature, you know what I mean, people of . . . of . . . well, of mystical insight"-he paused, as if waiting to be slapped, but no one moved, so he repeated firmly-"yes, of mystical insight, won't go for that speech. Logic isn't everything, after all."  "The workingmen won't go for it," said Tinky Holloway, a bit more helpfully. "He didn't sound like a friend of labor."  "The women of the country won't go for it," declared Ma Chalmers.  "It is, I believe, an established fact that women don't go for that stuff about the mind. Women have finer feelings. You can count on the women."  "You can count on the scientists," said Dr. Simon Pritchett. They were all pressing forward, suddenly eager to speak, as if they had found a subject they could handle with assurance. "Scientists know better than to believe in reason. He's no friend of the scientists."  "He's no friend of anybody," said Wesley Mouch, recapturing a shade of confidence at the sudden realization, "except maybe of big business."  "No!" cried Mr. Mowen in terror. "No! Don't accuse us! Don't say it! I won't have you say it!"  "What?"  "That . . . that . . . that anybody is a friend of business!"  "Don't let's make a fuss about that speech," said Dr. Floyd Ferris.  "It was too intellectual. Much too intellectual for the common man. It will have no effect. People are too dumb to understand it."  "Yeah," said Mouch hopefully, "that's so."  "In the first place," said Dr. Ferris, encouraged, "people can't think. In the second place, they don't want to."  "In the third place," said Fred Kinnan, "they don't want to starve. And what do you propose to do about that?"  It was as if he had pronounced the question which all of the preceding utterances had been intended to stave off. No one answered him, but heads drew faintly deeper into shoulders, and figures drew faintly closer to one another, like a small cluster under the weight of the studio's empty space. The military march boomed through the silence with the inflexible gaiety of a grinning skull.  "Turn it off!" yelled Mr. Thompson, waving at the radio. "Turn that damn thing off!"  Someone obeyed him. But the sudden silence was worse.  "Well?" said Mr. Thompson at last, raising his eyes reluctantly to Fred Kinnan. "What do you think we ought to do?"  "Who, me?" chuckled Kinnan. "I don't run this show."  Mr. Thompson slammed his fist down on his knee. "Say something -" he ordered, but seeing Kinnan turn away, added, "somebody!"  There were no volunteers. "What are we to do?" he yelled, knowing that the man who answered would, thereafter, be the man in power.  "What are we to do? Can't somebody tell us what to do?"  "I can!"  It was a woman's voice, but it had the quality of the voice they had heard on the radio. They whirled to Dagny before she had time to step forward from the darkness beyond the group. As she stepped forward, her face frightened them-because it was devoid of fear.  "I can," she said, addressing Mr. Thompson. "You're to give up."  "Give up?" he repeated blankly.  "You're through. Don't you see that you're through? What else do you need, after what you've heard? Give up and get out of the way. Leave men free to exist." He was looking at her, neither objecting nor moving. "You're still alive, you're using a human language, you're asking for answers, you're counting on reason-you're still counting on reason, God damn you! You're able to understand. It isn't possible that you haven't understood. There's nothing you can now pretend to hope, to want or gain or grab or reach. There's nothing but destruction ahead, the world's and your own. Give up and get out."  They were listening intently, but as if they did not hear her words, as if they were clinging blindly to a quality she was alone among them to possess: the quality of being alive. There was a sound of exultant laughter under the angry violence of her voice, her face was lifted, her eyes seemed to be greeting some spectacle at an incalculable distance, so that the glowing patch on her forehead did not look like the reflection of a studio spotlight, but of a sunrise.  "You wish to live, don't you? Get out of the way, if you want a chance. Let those who can, take over. He knows what to do. You don't. He is able to create the means of human survival. You aren't."  "Don't listen to her!"  It was so savage a cry of hatred that they drew away from Dr. Robert Stadler, as if he had given voice to the unconfessed within them. His face looked as they feared theirs would look in the privacy of darkness.  "Don't listen to her!" he cried, his eyes avoiding hers, while hers paused on him for a brief, level glance that began as a shock of astonishment and ended as an obituary. "It's your life or his!"  "Keep quiet, Professor," said Mr. Thompson, brushing him off with the jerk of one hand. Mr. Thompson's eyes were watching Dagny, as if some thought were struggling to take shape inside his skull.  "You know the truth, all of you," she said, "and so do I, and so does every man who's heard John Galt! What else are you waiting for? For proof? He's given it to you. For facts? They're all around you. How many corpses do you intend to pile up before you renounce it-your guns, your power, your controls and the whole of your miserable altruistic creed? Give it up, if you want to live. Give it up, if there's anything left in your mind that's still able to want human beings to remain alive on this earth!"  "But it's treason!" cried Eugene Lawson. "She's talking pure treason!"  "Now, now," said Mr. Thompson. "You don't have to go to extremes."  "Huh?" asked Tinky Holloway.  "But . . . but surely it's outrageous?" asked Chick Morrison.  "You're not agreeing with her, are you?" asked Wesley Mouch.  "Who's said anything about agreeing?" said Mr. Thompson, his tone surprisingly placid. "Don't be premature. Just don't you be premature, any of you. There's no harm in listening to any argument, is there?"  "That kind of argument?" asked Wesley Mouch, his finger stabbing again and again in Dagny's direction.  "Any kind," said Mr. Thompson placidly. "We mustn't be intolerant,"  "But it's treason, ruin, disloyalty, selfishness and big-business propaganda!"  "Oh, I don't know," said Mr. Thompson. "We've got to keep an open mind. We've got to give consideration to every one's viewpoint. She might have something there. He knows what to do. We've got to be flexible."  "Do you mean that you're willing to quit?" gasped Mouch.  "Now don't jump to conclusions," snapped Mr. Thompson angrily.  "If there's one thing I can't stand, it's people who jump to conclusions. And another thing is ivory-tower intellectuals who stick to some pet theory and haven't any sense of practical reality. At a time like this, we've got to be flexible above all."  He saw a look of bewilderment on all the faces around him, on Dagny's and on the others, though not for the same reasons. He smiled, rose to his feet and turned to Dagny.  "Thank you, Miss Taggart," he said. "Thank you for speaking your mind. That's what I want you to know-that you can trust me and speak to me with full frankness. We're not your enemies, Miss Taggart. Don't pay any attention to the boys-they're upset, but they'll come down to earth. We're not your enemies, nor the country's. Sure, we've made mistakes, we're only human, but we're trying to do our best for the people-that is, I mean, for everybody-in these difficult times. We can't make snap judgments and reach momentous decisions on the spur of the moment, can we? We've got to consider it, and mull it over, and weigh it carefully. I just want you to remember that we're not anybody's enemies-you realize that, don't you?"  "I've said everything I had to say," she answered, turning away from him, with no clue to the meaning of his words and no strength to attempt to find it. She turned to Eddie Willers, who had watched the men around them with a look of so great an indignation that he seemed paralyzed -as if his brain were crying, "It's evil!" and could not move to any further thought. She jerked her head, indicating the door; he followed her obediently.  Dr. Robert Stadler waited until the door had closed after them, then whirled on Mr. Thompson. "You bloody fool! Do you know what you're playing with? Don't you understand that it's life or death? That it's you or him?"  The thin tremor that ran along Mr. Thompson's lips was a smile of contempt. "It's a funny way for a professor to behave. I didn't think professors ever went to pieces."  "Don't you understand? Don't you see that it's one or the other?"  "And what is it that you want me to do?"  "You must kill him."  It was the fact that Dr. Stadler had not cried it, but had said it in a flat, cold, suddenly and fully conscious voice, that brought a chill moment of silence as the whole room's answer.  "You must find him," said Dr. Stadler, his voice cracking and rising once more. "You must leave no stone unturned till you find him and destroy him! If he lives, he'll destroy all of us! If he lives, we can't!"  "How am I to find him?" asked Mr. Thompson, speaking slowly and carefully.  "I . . . I can tell you. I can give you a lead. Watch that Taggart woman. Set your men to watch every move she makes. She'll lead you to him, sooner or later."  "How do you know that?"  "Isn't it obvious? Isn't it sheer chance that she hasn't deserted you long ago? Don't you have the wits to see that she's one of his kind?"  He did not state what kind.  "Yeah," said Mr. Thompson thoughtfully, "yeah, that's true." He jerked his head up with a smile of satisfaction. "The professor's got something there. Put a tail on Miss Taggart," he ordered, snapping his fingers at Mouch. "Have her tailed day and night. We've got to find him."  "Yes, sir," said Mouch blankly.  "And when you find him," Dr. Stadler asked tensely, "you'll kill him?"  "Kill him, you damn fool? We need him!" cried Mr. Thompson.  Mouch waited, but no one ventured the question that was on everyone's mind, so he made the effort to utter stiffly, "I don't understand you, Mr. Thompson."  "Oh, you theoretical intellectuals!" said Mr. Thompson with exasperation. "What are you all gaping at? It's simple. Whoever he is, he's a man of action. Besides, he's got a pressure group: he's cornered all the men of brains. He knows what to do. We'll find him and he'll tell us. He'll tell us what to do. He'll make things work. He'll pull us out of the hole."  "Us, Mr. Thompson?"  "Sure. Never mind your theories. We'll make a deal with him."  "With him?"  "Sure. Oh, we'll have to compromise, we'll have to make a few concessions to big business, and the welfare boys won't like it, but what the hell!-do you know any other way out?"  "But his ideas-"  "Who cares about ideas?"  "Mr. Thompson," said Mouch, choking, "I . . . I'm afraid he's a man who's not open to a deal."  "There's no such thing," said Mr. Thompson.  A cold wind rattled the broken signs over the windows of abandoned shops, in the street outside the radio station. The city seemed abnormally quiet. The distant rumble of the traffic sounded lower than usual and made the wind sound louder. Empty sidewalks stretched off into the darkness; a few lone figures stood in whispering clusters under the rare lights.  Eddie Willers did not speak until they were many blocks away from the station. He stopped abruptly, when they reached a deserted square where the public loud-speakers, which no one had thought of turning off, were now broadcasting a domestic comedy-the shrill voices of a husband and wife quarreling over Junior's dates-to an empty stretch of pavement enclosed by unlighted house fronts. Beyond the square, a few dots of light, scattered Vertically above the twenty fifth-floor limit of the city, suggested a distant, rising form, which was the Taggart Building.  Eddie stopped and pointed at the building, his finger shaking.  "Dagny!" he cried, then lowered his voice involuntarily. "Dagny," he whispered, "I know him. He . . . he works there . . . there . . ."  He kept pointing at the building with incredulous helplessness. "He works for Taggart Transcontinental . . ."  "I know," she answered; her voice was a lifeless monotone.  "As a track laborer . . . as the lowest of track laborers . . ."  "I know."  "I've talked to him . . . I've been talking to him for years . . .in the Terminal cafeteria. . . . He used to ask questions . . . all sorts of questions about the railroad, and I-God, Dagny! was I protecting the railroad or was I helping to destroy it?"  "Both. Neither. It doesn't matter now."  "I could have staked my life that he loved the railroad!"  "He does."  "But he's destroyed it."  "Yes."  She tightened the collar of her coat and walked on, against a gust of wind.  "I used to talk to him," he said, after a while. "His face . . . Dagny, it didn't look like any of the others, it . . . it showed that he understood so much. . . . I was glad, whenever I saw him there, in the cafeteria . . . I just talked . . . I don't think I knew that he was asking questions . . . but he was . . . so many questions about the railroad and . . . and about you."  "Did he ever ask you what I look like, when I'm asleep?"  "Yes . . . Yes, he did . . . I'd found you once, asleep in the office, and when I mentioned it, he-" He stopped, as a sudden connection crashed into place in his mind.  She turned to him, in the ray of a street lamp, raising and holding her face in full light for a silent, deliberate moment, as if in answer and confirmation of his thought.  He closed his eyes. "Oh God, Dagny!" he whispered.  They walked on in silence.  "He's gone by now, isn't he?" he asked. "From the Taggart Terminal, I mean."  "Eddie," she said, her voice suddenly grim, "if you value his life, don't ever ask that question. You don't want them to find him, do you? Don't give them any leads. Don't ever breathe a word to anyone about having known him. Don't try to find out whether he's still working in the Terminal."  "You don't mean that he's still there?"  "I don't know. I know only that he might be."  "Now?"  "Yes."  "Still?"  "Yes. Keep quiet about it, if you don't want to destroy him."  "I think he's gone. He won't be back. I haven't seen him since . . .since . . ."  "Since when?" she asked sharply.  "The end of May. The night when you left for Utah, remember?" He paused, as the memory of that night's encounter and the full understanding of its meaning struck him together. He said with effort, "1 saw him that night. Not since . . . I've waited for him, in the cafeteria . . . He never came back."  "I don't think he'll let you see him now, he'll keep out of your way. But don't look for him. Don't inquire."  "It's funny. I don't even know what name he used. It was Johnny something or-"  "It was John Galt," she said, with a faint, mirthless chuckle. "Don't look at the Terminal payroll. The name is still there."  "Just like that? All these years?"  "For twelve years. Just like that."  "And it's still there now?"  "Yes."  After a moment, he said, "It proves nothing, I know. The personnel office hasn't taken a single name off the payroll list since Directive 10-289. If a man quits, they give his name and job to a starving friend of their own, rather than report it to the Unification Board."  "Don't question the personnel office or anyone. Don't call attention to his name. If you or I make any inquiries about him, somebody might begin to wonder. Don't look for him. Don't make any move in his direction. And if you ever catch sight of him by chance, act as if you didn't know him."  He nodded. After a while, he said, his voice tense and low, "I wouldn't turn him over to them, not even to save the railroad."  "Eddie-"  "Yes?"  "If you ever catch sight of him, tell me."  He nodded.  Two blocks later, he asked quietly, "You're going to quit, one of these days, and vanish, aren't you?"  "Why do you say that?" It was almost a cry.  "Aren't you?"  She did not answer at once; when she did, the sound of despair was present in her voice only in the form of too tight a monotone: "Eddie, if I quit, what would happen to the Taggart trains?"  "There would be no Taggart trains within a week. Maybe less."  "There will be no looters' government within ten days. Then men like Cuffy Meigs will devour the last of our rails and engines. Should I lose the battle by failing to wait one more moment? How can I let it go-Taggart Transcontinental, Eddie-go forever, when one last effort can still keep it in existence? If I've stood things this long, I can stand them a little longer. Just a little longer. I'm not helping the looters. Nothing can help them now."  "What are they going to do?"  "I don't know. What can they do? They're finished."  "I suppose so."  "Didn't you see them? They're miserable, panic-stricken rats, running for their lives."  "Does it mean anything to them?"  "What?"  "Their lives."  "They're still struggling, aren't they? But they're through and they know it."  "Have they ever acted on what they know?"  "They'll have to. They'll give up. It won't be long. And we'll be here to save whatever's left."  "Mr. Thompson wishes it to be known," said official broadcasts on the morning of November 23, "that there is no cause for alarm. He urges the public not to draw any hasty conclusions. We must preserve our discipline, our morale, our unity and our sense of broad-minded tolerance. The unconventional speech, which some of you might have heard on the radio last night, was a thought-provoking contribution to our pool of ideas on world problems. We must consider it soberly, avoiding the extremes of total condemnation or of reckless agreement. We must regard it as one viewpoint out of many in our democratic forum of public opinion, which, as last night has proved, is open to all. The truth, says Mr. Thompson, has many facets. We must remain impartial."  "They're silent," wrote Chick Morrison, as a summary of its content, across the report from one of the field agents he had sent out on a mission entitled Public Pulse Taking. "They're silent," he wrote across the next report, then across another and another. "Silence," he wrote, with a frown of uneasiness, summing up his report to Mr. Thompson. "People seem to be silent."  The flames that went up to the sky of a winter night and devoured a home in Wyoming were not seen by the people of Kansas, who watched a trembling red glow on the prairie horizon, made by the flames that went up to devour a farm, and the glow was not reflected by the windows of a street in Pennsylvania, where the twisting red tongues were reflections of the flames that went up to devour a factory. Nobody mentioned, next morning, that those flames had not been set off by chance and that the owners of the three places had vanished. Neighbors observed it without comment-and without astonishment. A few homes were found abandoned in random corners across the nation, some left locked, shuttered and empty, others open and gutted of all movable goods-but people watched it in silence and, through the snowdrifts of untended streets in the haze of pre-morning darkness, went on trudging to their jobs, a little slower than usual.  Then, on November 27, a speaker at a political meeting in Cleveland was beaten up and had to escape by scurrying down dark alleys. His silent audience had come to sudden life when he had shouted that the cause of all their troubles was their selfish concern with their own troubles.  On the morning of November 29, the workers of a shoe factory in Massachusetts were astonished, on entering their workshop, to find that the foreman was late. But they went to their usual posts and went on with their habitual routine, pulling levers, pressing buttons, feeding leather into automatic cutters, piling boxes on a moving belt, wondering, as the hours went by, why they did not catch sight of the foreman, or the superintendent, or the general manager, or the company president. It was noon before they discovered that the front offices of the plant were empty.  "You goddamn cannibals!" screamed a woman in the midst of a crowded movie theater, breaking into sudden, hysterical sobs-and the audience showed no sign of astonishment, as if she were screaming for them all.  "There is no cause for alarm," said official broadcasts on December 5. "Mr. Thompson wishes it to be known that he is willing to negotiate with John Galt for the purpose of devising ways and means to achieve a speedy solution of our problems. Mr. Thompson urges the people to be patient. We must not worry, we must not doubt, we must not lose heart."  The attendants of a hospital in Illinois showed no astonishment when a man was brought in, beaten up by his elder brother, who had supported him all his life: the younger man had screamed at the elder, accusing him of selfishness and greed-just as the attendants of a hospital in New York City showed no astonishment at the case of a woman who came in with a fractured jaw: she had been slapped in the face by a total stranger, who had heard her ordering her five-year old son to give his best toy to the children of neighbors.  Chick Morrison attempted a whistle-stop tour to buttress the country's morale by speeches on self-sacrifice for the general welfare. He was stoned at the first of his stops and had to return to Washington.  Nobody had ever granted them the title of "the better men" or, granting it, had paused to grasp that title's meaning, but everybody knew, each in his own community, neighborhood, office or shop and in his own unidentified terms, who would be the men that would now fail to appear at their posts on some coming morning and would silently vanish in search of unknown frontiers-the men whose faces were tighter than the faces around them, whose eyes were more direct, whose energy was more conscientiously enduring-the men who were now slipping away, one by one, from every corner of the country-of the country which was now like the descendant of what had once been regal glory, prostrated by the scourge of hemophilia, losing the best of its blood from a wound not to be healed.  "But we're willing to negotiate!" yelled Mr. Thompson to his assistants, ordering the special announcement to be repeated by all radio stations three times a day. "We're willing to negotiate! He'll hear it! He'll answer!"  Special listeners were ordered to keep watch, day and night, at radio receivers tuned to every known frequency of sound, waiting for an answer from an unknown transmitter. There was no answer.  Empty, hopeless, unfocused faces were becoming more apparent in the streets of the cities, but no one could read their meaning. As some men were escaping with their bodies into the underground of uninhabited regions, so others could only save their souls and were escaping into the underground of their minds-and no power on earth could tell whether their blankly indifferent eyes were shutters protecting hidden treasures at the bottom of shafts no longer to be mined, or were merely gaping holes of the parasite's emptiness never to be filled.  "I don't know what to do," said the assistant superintendent of an oil refinery, refusing to accept the job of the superintendent who had vanished-and the agents of the Unification Board were unable to tell whether he lied or not. It was only an edge of precision in the tone of his voice, an absence of apology or shame, that made them wonder whether he was a rebel or a fool. It was dangerous to force the job on either.  "Give us men!" The plea began to hammer progressively louder upon the desk of the Unification Board, from all parts of a country ravaged by unemployment, and neither the pleaders nor the Board dared to add the dangerous words which the cry was implying: "Give us men of ability!" There were waiting lines years' long for the jobs of janitors, greasers, porters and bus boys; there was no one to apply for the jobs of executives, managers, superintendents, engineers.  The explosions of oil refineries, the crashes of defective airplanes, the break-outs of blast furnaces, the wrecks of colliding trains, and the rumors of drunken orgies in the offices of newly created executives, made the members of the Board fear the kind of men who did apply for the positions of responsibility.  "Don't despair! Don't give up!" said official broadcasts on December 15, and on every day thereafter, "We will reach an agreement with John Galt. We will get him to lead us. He will solve all our problems. He will make things work. Don't give up! We will get John Galt!"  Rewards and honors were offered to applicants for managerial jobs -then to foremen-then to skilled mechanics-then to any man who would make an effort to deserve a promotion in rank: wage raises, bonuses, tax exemptions and a medal devised by Wesley Mouch, to be known as "The Order of Public Benefactors." It brought no results. Ragged people listened to the offers of material comforts and turned away with lethargic indifference, as if they had lost the concept of "Value." These, thought the public-pulse-takers with terror, were men who did not care to live-or men who did not care to live on present terms.  "Don't despair! Don't give up! John Galt will solve our problems!" said the radio voices of official broadcasts, traveling through the silence of falling snow into the silence of unheated homes.  "Don't tell them that we haven't got him!" cried Mr. Thompson to his assistants, "But for God's sake tell them to find him!" Squads of Chick Morrison's boys were assigned to the task of manufacturing rumors: half of them went spreading the story that John Galt was in Washington and in conference with government officials-while the other half went spreading the story that the government would give five hundred thousand dollars as reward for information that would help to find John Galt.  "No, not a clue," said Wesley Mouch to Mr. Thompson, summing up the reports of the special agents who had been sent to check on every man by the name of John Galt throughout the country. "They're a shabby lot. There's a John Galt who's a professor of ornithology, eighty years old -there's a retired greengrocer with a wife and nine children-there's an unskilled railroad laborer who's held the same job for twelve years-and other such trash."  "Don't despair! We will get John Galt!" said official broadcasts in the daytime-but at night, every hour on the hour, by a secret, official order, an appeal was sent from short-wave transmitters into the empty reaches of space: "Calling John Galt! . . . Calling John Galt! . . .Are you listening, John Galt? . . . We wish to negotiate. We wish to confer with you. Give us word on where you can be reached. . . .Do you hear us, John Galt?" There was no answer.  The wads of worthless paper money were growing heavier in the pockets of the nation, but there was less and less for that money to buy. In September, a bushel of wheat had cost eleven dollars; it had cost thirty dollars in November; it had cost one hundred in December; it was now approaching the price of two hundred-while the printing presses of the government treasury were running a race with starvation, and losing.  When the workers of a factory beat up their foreman and wrecked the machinery in a fit of despair- no action could be taken against them. Arrests were futile, the jails were full, the arresting officers winked at their prisoners and let them escape on their way to prison-men were going through the motions prescribed for the moment, with no thought of the moment to follow. No action could be taken when mobs of starving people attacked warehouses on the outskirts of cities. No action could be taken when punitive squadrons joined the people they had been sent to punish.  "Are you listening, John Galt? . . . We wish to negotiate. We might meet your terms. . . . Are you listening?"  There were whispered rumors of covered wagons traveling by night through abandoned trails, and of secret settlements armed to resist the attacks of those whom they called the "Indians"-the attacks of any looting savages, be they homeless mobs or government agents. Lights were seen, once in a while, on the distant horizon of a prairie, in the hills, on the ledges of mountains, where no buildings had been known to exist. But no soldiers could be persuaded to investigate the sources of those lights.  On the doors of abandoned houses, on the gates of crumbling factories, on the walls of government buildings, there appeared, once in a while, traced in chalk, in paint, in blood, the curving mark which was the sign of the dollar.  "Can you hear us, John Galt? . . . Send us word. Name your terms. We will meet any terms you set. Can you hear us?" There was no answer.  The shaft of red smoke that shot to the sky on the night of January 22 and stood abnormally still for a while, like a solemn memorial obelisk, then wavered and swept back and forth across the sky, like a searchlight sending some undecipherable message, then went out as abruptly as it had come, marked the end of Rearden Steel-but the inhabitants of the area did not know it. They learned it only on subsequent nights, when they-who had cursed the mills for the smoke, the fumes, the soot and the noise-looked out and, instead of the glow pulsating with life on their familiar horizon, they saw a black void.  The mills had been nationalized, as the property of a deserter. The first bearer of the title of "People's Manager," appointed to run the mills, had been a man of the Orren Boyle faction, a pudgy hanger-on of the metallurgical industry, who had wanted nothing but to follow his employees while going through the motions of leading. But at the end of a month, after too many clashes with the workers, too many occasions when his only answer had been that he couldn't help it, too many undelivered orders, too many telephonic pressures from his buddies, he had begged to be transferred to some other position. The Orren Boyle faction had been falling apart, since Mr. Boyle had been confined to a rest home, where his doctor had forbidden him any contact with business and had put him to the job of weaving baskets, as a means of occupational therapy. The second "People's Manager" sent to Rearden Steel had belonged to the faction of Cuffy Meigs. He had worn leather leggings and perfumed hair lotions, he had come to work with a gun on his hip, he had kept snapping that discipline was his primary goal and that by God he'd get it or else. The only discernible rule of the discipline had been his order forbidding all questions.  After weeks of frantic activity on the part of insurance companies, of firemen, of ambulances and of first-aid units, attending to a series of inexplicable accidents-the "People's Manager" had vanished one morning, having sold and shipped to sundry racketeers of Europe and Latin America most of the cranes, the automatic conveyors, the supplies of refractory brick, the emergency power generator, and the carpet from what had once been Rearden's office.  No one had been able to untangle the issues in the violent chaos of the next few days-the issues had never been named, the sides had remained unacknowledged, but everyone had known that the bloody encounters between the older workers and the newer had not been driven to such ferocious intensity by the trivial causes that kept setting them off-neither guards nor policemen nor state troopers had been able to keep order for the length of a day-nor could any faction muster a candidate willing to accept the post of "People's Manager."  On January 22, the operations of Rearden Steel had been ordered temporarily suspended.  The shaft of red smoke, that night, had been caused by a sixty-year old worker, who had set fire to one of the structures and had been caught in the act, laughing dazedly and staring at the flames. "To avenge Hank Rearden!" he had cried defiantly, tears running down his furnace-tanned face.  Don't let it hurt you like this-thought Dagny, slumped across her desk, over the page of the newspaper where a single brief paragraph announced the "temporary" end of Rearden Steel-don't let it hurt you so much. . . . She kept seeing the face of Hank Rearden, as he had stood at the window of his office, watching a crane move against the sky with a load of green-blue rail. . . . Don't let it hurt him like this -was the plea in her mind, addressed to no one-don't let him hear of it, don't let him know. . . . Then she saw another face, a face with unflinching green eyes, saying to her, in a voice made implacable by the quality of respect for facts: "You'll have to hear about it. . . . You'll hear about every wreck. You'll hear about every discontinued train. . . . Nobody stays in this valley by faking reality in any manner whatever. . . ." Then she sat still, with no sight and no sound in her mind, with nothing but that enormous presence which was pain -until she heard the familiar cry that had become a drug killing all sensations except the capacity to act: "Miss Taggart, we don't know what to do!"-and she shot to her feet to answer.  "The People's State of Guatemala," said the newspapers on January 26, "declines the request of the United States for the loan of a thousand tons of steel."  On the night of February 3, a young pilot was flying his usual route, a weekly-flight from Dallas to New York City. When he reached the empty darkness beyond Philadelphia-in the place where the flames of Rearden Steel had for years been his favorite landmark, his greeting in the loneliness of night, the beacon of a living earth-he saw a snow-covered spread, dead-white and phosphorescent in the starlight, a spread of peaks and craters that looked like the surface of the moon. He quit his job, next morning.  Through the frozen nights, over dying cities, knocking in vain at unanswering windows, beating on unechoing walls, rising above the roofs of lightless buildings and the skeletal girders of ruins, the plea went on crying through space, crying to the stationary motion of the stars, to the heatless fire of their twinkling: "Can you hear us, John Galt? Can you hear us?"  "Miss Taggart, we don't know what to do," said Mr. Thompson; he had summoned her to a personal conference on one of his scurrying trips to New York. "We're ready to give in, to meet his terms, to let him take over-but where is he?"  "For the third time," she said, her face and voice shut tight against any fissure of emotion, "I do not know where he is. What made you think I did?"  "Well, I didn't know, I had to try . . . I thought, just in case . . .I thought, maybe if you had a way to reach him-"  "I haven't."  "You see, we can't announce, not even by short-wave radio, that we're willing to surrender altogether. People might hear it. But if you had some way to reach him, to let him know that we're ready to give in, to scrap our policies, to do anything he tells us to-"  "I said I haven't."  "If he'd only agree to a conference, just a conference, it wouldn't commit him to anything, would it? We're willing to turn the whole economy over to him-if he'd only tell us when, where, how. If he'd give us some word or sign . . . if he'd answer us . . . Why doesn't he answer?"  "You've heard his speech."  "But what are we to do? We can't just quit and leave the country without any government at all. I shudder to think what would happen. With the kind of social elements now on the loose-why, Miss Taggart, it's all I can do to keep them in line or we'd have plunder and bloody murder in broad daylight. I don't know what's got into people, but they just don't seem to be civilized any more. We can't quit at a time like this. We can neither quit nor run things any longer. What are we to do, Miss Taggart?"  "Start decontrolling."  "Huh?"  "Start lifting taxes and removing controls."  "Oh, no, no, no! That's out of the question!"  "Out of whose question?"  "I mean, not at this time, Miss Taggart, not at this time. The country isn't ready for it. Personally, I'd agree with you, I'm a freedom loving man, Miss Taggart, I'm not after power-but this is an emergency. People aren't ready for freedom. We've got to keep a strong hand. We can't adopt an idealistic theory, which-"  "Then don't ask me what to do," she said, and rose to her feet.  "But, Miss Taggart-"  "I didn't come here to argue."  She was at the door when he sighed and said, "I hope he's still alive." She stopped. "I hope they haven't done anything rash."  A moment passed before she was able to ask, "Who?" and to make it a word, not a scream.  He shrugged, spreading his arms and letting them drop helplessly. "I can't hold my own boys in line any longer. I can't tell what they might attempt to do. There's one clique-the Ferris-Lawson-Meigs faction-that's been after me for over a year to adopt stronger measures. A tougher policy, they mean. Frankly, what they mean is: to resort to terror. Introduce the death penalty for civilian crimes, for critics, dissenters and the like. Their argument is that since people won't co-operate, won't act for the public interest voluntarily, we've got to force them to. Nothing will make our system work, they say, but terror. And they may be right, from the look of things nowadays. But Wesley won't go for strong-arm methods; Wesley is a peaceful man, a liberal, and so am I. We're trying to keep the Ferris boys in check, but . . .You see, they're set against any surrender to John Galt. They don't want us to deal with him. They don't want us to find him. I wouldn't put anything past them. If they found him first, they'd-there's no telling what they might do. . . . That's what worries me. Why doesn't he answer? Why hasn't he answered us at all? What if they've found him and killed him? I wouldn't know. . . . So I hoped that perhaps you had some way . . . some means of knowing that he's still alive . . ." His voice trailed off into a question mark.  The whole of her resistance against a rush of liquefying terror went into the effort to keep her voice as stiff as her knees, long enough to say, "I do not know," and her knees stiff enough to carry her out of the room.  From behind the rotted posts of what had once been a corner vegetable stand, Dagny glanced furtively back at the street: the rare lamp posts broke the street into separate islands, she could see a pawnshop in the first patch of light, a saloon in the next, a church in the farthest, and black gaps between them; the sidewalks were deserted; it was hard to tell, but the street seemed empty.  She turned the corner, with deliberately resonant steps, then stopped abruptly to listen: it was hard to tell whether the abnormal tightness inside her chest was the sound of her own heartbeats, and hard to distinguish it from the sound of distant wheels and from the glassy rustle which was the East River somewhere close by; but she heard no sound of human steps behind her. She jerked her shoulders, it was part-shrug, part-shudder, and she walked faster. A rusty clock in some unlighted cavern coughed out the hour of four A.M.  The fear of being followed did not seem fully real, as no fear could be real to her now. She wondered whether the unnatural lightness of her body was a state of tension or relaxation; her body seemed drawn so tightly that she felt as if it were reduced to a single attribute: to the power of motion; her mind seemed inaccessibly relaxed, like a motor set to the automatic control of an absolute no longer to be questioned.  If a naked bullet could feel in mid-flight, this is what it would feel, she thought; just the motion and the goal, nothing else. She thought it vaguely, distantly, as if her own person were unreal; only the word "naked" seemed to reach her: naked . . . stripped of all concern but for the target . . . for the number "367," the number of a house on the East River, which her mind kept repeating, the number it had so long been forbidden to consider.  Three-sixty-seven-she thought, looking for an invisible shape ahead, among the angular forms of tenements-three-sixty-seven . . .that is where he lives . . . if he lives at all. . . . Her calm, her detachment and the confidence of her steps came from the certainty that this was an if with which she could not exist any longer.  She had existed with it for ten days-and the nights behind her were a single progression that had brought her to this night, as if the momentum now driving her steps were the sound of her own steps still ringing, unanswered, in the tunnels of the Terminal. She had searched for him through the tunnels, she had walked for hours, night after night-the hours of the shift he had once worked-through the underground passages and platforms and shops and every twist of abandoned tracks, asking no questions of anyone, offering no explanations of her presence. She had walked, with no sense of fear or hope, moved by a feeling of desperate loyalty that was almost a feeling of pride.  The root of that feeling was the moments when she had stopped in sudden astonishment in some dark subterranean corner and had heard the words half-stated in her mind: This is my railroad-as she looked at a vault vibrating to the sound of distant wheels; this is my life-as she felt the clot of tension, which was the stopped and the suspended within herself; this is my love-as she thought of the man who, perhaps, was somewhere in those tunnels. There can be no conflict among these three . . . what am I doubting? . . . what can keep us apart, here, where only he and I belong? . . . Then, recapturing the context of the present, she had walked steadily on, with the sense of the same unbroken loyalty, but the sound of different words: You have forbidden me to look for you, you may damn me, you may choose to discard me . . . but by the right of the fact that I am alive, I must know that you are . . . I must see you this once . . . not to stop, not to speak, not to touch you, only to see. . . . She had not seen him. She had abandoned her search, when she had noticed the curious, wondering glances of the underground workers, following her steps.  She had called a meeting of the Terminal track laborers for the alleged purpose of boosting their morale, she had held the meeting twice, to face all the men in turn-she had repeated the same unintelligible speech, feeling a stab of shame at the empty generalities she uttered and, together, a stab of pride that it did not matter to her any longer-she had looked at the exhausted, brutalized faces of men who did not care whether they were ordered to work or to listen to meaningless sounds. She had not seen his face among them. "Was everyone present?" she had asked the foreman. "Yeah, I guess so," he had answered indifferently.  She had loitered at the Terminal entrances, watching the men as they came to work. But there were too many entrances to cover and no place where she could watch while remaining unseen-she had stood in the soggy twilight on a sidewalk glittering with rain, pressed to the wall of a warehouse, her coat collar raised to her cheekbones, raindrops falling off the brim of her hat-she had stood exposed to the sight of the street, knowing that the glances of the men who passed her were glances of recognition and astonishment, knowing that her vigil was too dangerously obvious. If there was a John Galt among them, someone could guess the nature of her quest . . . if there was no John Galt among them . . . if there was no John Galt in the world, she thought, then no danger existed-and no world.  No danger and no world, she thought-as she walked through the streets of the slums toward a house with the number "367," which was or was not his home. She wondered whether this was what one felt while awaiting a verdict of death: no fear, no anger, no concern, nothing but the icy detachment of light without heat or of cognition without values.  A tin can clattered from under her toes, and the sound went beating too loudly and too long, as if against the walls of an abandoned city. The streets seemed razed by exhaustion, not by rest, as if the men inside the walls were not asleep, but had collapsed. He would be home from work at this hour, she thought . . . if he worked . . . if he still had a home. . . . She looked at the shapes of the slums, at the crumbling plaster, the peeling paint, the fading signboards of failing shops with unwanted goods in unwashed windows, the sagging steps unsafe to climb, the clotheslines of garments unfit to wear, the undone, the unattended, the given up, the incomplete, all the twisted monuments of a losing race against two enemies: "no time" and "no strength" -and she thought that this was the place where he had lived for twelve years, he who possessed such extravagant power to lighten the job of human existence.  Some memory kept struggling to reach her, then came back: its name was Starnesville. She felt the sensation of a shudder. But this is New York City!-she cried to herself in defense of the greatness she had loved; then she faced with unmoving austerity the verdict pronounced by her mind: a city that had left him in these slums for twelve years was damned and doomed to the future of Starnesville.  Then, abruptly, it ceased to matter; she felt a peculiar shock, like the shock of sudden silence, a sense of stillness within her, which she took for a sense of calm: she saw the number "367" above the door of an ancient tenement.  She was calm, she thought, it was only time that had suddenly lost its continuity and had broken her perception into separate snatches: she knew the moment when she saw the number-then the moment when she looked at a list on a board in the moldy half-light of a doorway and saw the words "John Galt, 5th, rear" scrawled in pencil by some illiterate hand-then the moment when she stopped at the foot of a stairway, glanced up at the vanishing angles of the railing and suddenly leaned against the wall, trembling with terror, preferring not to know-then the moment when she felt the movement of her foot coming to rest on the first of the steps-then a single, unbroken progression of lightness, of rising without effort or doubt or fear, of feeling the twisting installments of stairway dropping down beneath her unhesitant feet, as if the momentum of her irresistible rise were coming from the straightness of her body, the poise of her shoulders, the lift of her head and the solemnly exultant certainty that in the moment of ultimate decision, it was not disaster she expected of her life, at the end of a rising stairway she had needed thirty-seven years to climb.  At the top, she saw a narrow hallway, its walls converging to an unlighted door. She heard the floorboards creaking in the silence, under her steps. She felt the pressure of her finger on a doorbell and heard the sound of ringing in the unknown space beyond. She waited. She heard the brief crack of a board, but it came from the floor below. She heard the sliding wail of a tugboat somewhere on the river. Then she knew that she had missed some span of time, because her next awareness was not like a moment of awakening, but like a moment of birth: as if two sounds were pulling her out of a void, the sound of a step behind the door and the sound of a lock being turned-but she was not present until the moment when suddenly there was no door before her and the figure standing on the threshold was John Galt, standing casually in his own doorway, dressed in slacks and shirt, the angle of his waistline slanting faintly against the light behind him.  She knew that his eyes were grasping this moment, then sweeping over its past and its future, that a lightning process of calculation was bringing it into his conscious control-and by the time a fold of his shirt moved with the motion of his breath, he knew the sum-and the sum was a smile of radiant greeting.  She was now unable to move. He seized her arm, he jerked her inside the room, she felt the clinging pressure of his mouth, she felt the slenderness of his body through the suddenly alien stiffness of her coat. She saw the laughter in his eyes, she felt the touch of his mouth again and again, she was sagging in his arms, she was breathing in gasps, as if she had not breathed for five flights of stairs, her face was pressed to the angle between his neck and shoulder, to hold him, to hold him with her arms, her hands and the skin of her cheek.  "John . . . you're alive . . ." was all she could say.  He nodded, as if he knew what the words were intended to explain.  Then he picked up her hat that had fallen to the floor, he took off her coat and put it aside, he looked at her slender, trembling figure, a sparkle of approval in his eyes, his hand moving over the tight, high collared, dark blue sweater that gave to her body the fragility of a schoolgirl and the tension of a fighter.  "The next time I see you," he said, "wear a white one. It will look wonderful, too."  She realized that she was dressed as she never appeared in public as she had been dressed at home through the sleepless hours of that night. She laughed, rediscovering the ability to laugh: she had expected his first words to be anything but that.  "If there is a next time," he added calmly.  "What . . . do you mean?"  He went to the door and locked it. "Sit down," he said.  She remained standing, but she took the time to glance at the room she had not noticed: a long, bare garret with a bed in one corner and a gas stove in another, a few pieces of wooden furniture, naked boards stressing the length of the floor, a single lamp burning on a desk, a closed door in the shadows beyond the lamp's circle-and New York City beyond an enormous window, the spread of angular structures and scattered lights, and the shaft of the Taggart Building far in the distance.  "Now listen carefully," he said. "We have about half an hour, I think. I know why you came here. I told you that it would be hard to stand and that you would be likely to break. Don't regret it. You see?-I can't regret it, either. But now, we have to know how to act, from here on. In about half an hour, the looters' agents, who followed you, will be here to arrest me."  "Oh no!" she gasped.  "Dagny, whoever among them had any remnant of human perceptiveness would know that you're not one of them, that you're their last link to me, and would not let you out of his sight-or the sight of his spies."  "I wasn't followed! I watched, I-"  "You wouldn't know how to notice it. Sneaking is one art they're expert at. Whoever followed you is reporting to his bosses right now. Your presence in this district, at this hour, my name on the board downstairs, the fact that I work for your railroad-it's enough even for them to connect."  "Then let's get out of here!"  He shook his head. "They've surrounded the block by now. Your follower would have every policeman in the district at his immediate call. Now I want you to know what you'll have to do when they come here. Dagny, you have only one chance to save me. If you did not quite understand what I said on the radio about the man in the middle, you'll understand it now. There is no middle for you to take. And you cannot take my side, not so long as we're in their hands. Now you must take their side."  "What?"  "You must take their side, as fully, consistently and loudly as your capacity for deception will permit. You must act as one of them. You must act as my worst enemy. If you do, I'll have a chance to come out of it alive. They need me too much, they'll go to any extreme before they bring themselves to kill me. Whatever they extort from people, they can extort it only through their victims' values - and they have no value of mine to hold over my head, nothing to threaten me with. But if they get the slightest suspicion of what we are to each other, they will have you on a torture rack - I mean, physical torture - before my eyes, in less than a week. I am not going to wait for that. At the first mention of a threat to you, I will kill myself and stop them right there."  He said it without emphasis, in the same impersonal tone of practical calculation as the rest. She knew that he meant it and that he was right to mean it: she saw in what manner she alone had the power to succeed at destroying him, where all the power of his enemies would fail. He saw the look of stillness in her eyes, a look of understanding and of horror. He nodded, with a faint smile.  "I don't have to tell you," he said, "that if I do it, it won't be an act of self-sacrifice. I do not care to live on their terms, I do not care to obey them and I do not care to see you enduring a drawn-out murder. There will be no values for me to seek after that - and I do not care to exist without values. I don't have to tell you that we owe no morality to those who hold us under a gun. So use every power of deceit you can command, but convince them that you hate me. Then we'll have a chance to remain alive and to escape - I don't know when or how, but I'll know that I'm free to act. Is this understood?"  She forced herself to lift her head, to look straight at him and to nod.  "When they come," he said, "tell them that you had been trying to find me for them, that you became suspicious when you saw my name on your payroll list and that you came here to investigate."  She nodded.  "I will stall about admitting my identity - they might recognize my voice, but I'll attempt to deny it - so that it will be you who'll tell them that I am the John Galt they're seeking."  It took her a few seconds longer, but she nodded, "Afterwards, you'll claim - and accept - that five-hundred-thousand dollar reward they've offered for my capture."  She closed her eyes, then nodded.  "Dagny," he said slowly, "there is no way to serve your own values under their system. Sooner or later, whether you intended it or not, they had to bring you to the point where the only thing you can do for me is to turn against me. Gather your strength and do it - then we'll earn this one half-hour and, perhaps, the future."  I'll do it," she said firmly, and added, "if that is what happens, if ...”  "It will happen. Don't regret it. I won't. You haven't seen the nature of our enemies. You'll see it now. If I have to be the pawn in the demonstration that will convince you, I'm willing to be-and to win you from them, once and for all. You didn't want to wait any longer? Oh, Dagny, Dagny, neither did I!"  It was the way he held her, the way he kissed her mouth that made her feel as if every step she had taken, every danger, every doubt, even her treason against him, if it was treason, all of it were giving her an exultant right to this moment. He saw the struggle in her face, the tension of an incredulous protest against herself-and she heard the sound of his voice through the strands of her hair pressed to his lips: "Don't think of them now. Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them. You're here. It's our time and our life, not theirs. Don't struggle not to be happy. You are."  "At the risk of destroying you?" she whispered.  "You won't. But-yes, even that. You don't think it's indifference, do you? Was it indifference that broke you and brought you here?"  "I-" And then the violence of the truth made her pull his mouth down to hers, then throw the words at his face: "I didn't care whether either one of us lived afterwards, just to see you this once!"  "I would have been disappointed if you hadn't come."  "Do you know what it was like, waiting, fighting it, delaying it one more day, then one more, then-"  He chuckled. "Do I?" he said softly.  Her hand dropped in a helpless gesture: she thought of his ten years. "When I heard your voice on the radio," she said, "when I heard the greatest statement I ever . . . No, I have no right to tell you what I thought of it."  "Why not?"  "You think that I haven't accepted it."  "You will."  "Were you speaking from here?"  "No, from the valley."  "And then you returned to New York?"  "The next morning."  "And you've been here ever since?"  "Yes."  "Have you heard the kind of appeals they're sending out to you every night?"  "Sure."  She glanced slowly about the room, her eyes moving from the towers of the city in the window to the wooden rafters of his ceiling, to the cracked plaster of his walls, to the iron posts of his bed. "You've been here all that time," she said. "You've lived here for twelve years . . .here . . . like this . . ."  "Like this," he said, throwing open the door at the end of the room.  She gasped: the long, light-flooded, windowless space beyond the threshold, enclosed in a shell of softly lustrous metal, like a small ballroom aboard a submarine, was the most efficiently modern laboratory she had ever seen.  "Come in," he said, grinning. "I don't have to keep secrets from you any longer."  It was like crossing the border into a different universe. She looked at the complex equipment sparkling in a bright, diffused glow, at the mesh of glittering wires, at the blackboard chalked with mathematical formulas, at the long counters of objects shaped by the ruthless discipline of a purpose-then at the sagging boards and crumbling plaster of the garret. Either-or, she thought; this was the choice confronting the world: a human soul in the image of one or of the other.  "You wanted to know where I worked for eleven months out of the year," he said.  "All this," she asked, pointing at the laboratory, "on the salary of”-she pointed at the garret-"of an unskilled laborer?"  "Oh, no! On the royalties Midas Mulligan pays me for his powerhouse, for the ray screen, for the radio transmitter and a few other jobs of that kind."  "Then . . . then why did you have to work as a track laborer?"  "Because no money earned in the valley is ever to be spent outside."  "Where did you get this equipment?"  "I designed it. Andrew Stockton's foundry made it." He pointed to an unobtrusive object the size of a radio cabinet in a corner of the room: "There's the motor you wanted," and chuckled at her gasp, at the involuntary jolt that threw her forward, "Don't bother studying it, you won't give it away to them now."  She was staring at the shining metal cylinders and the glistening coils of wire that suggested the rusted shape resting, like a sacred relic, in a glass coffin in a vault of the Taggart Terminal.  "It supplies my own electric power for the laboratory," he said. "No one has had to wonder why a track laborer is using such exorbitant amounts of electricity."  "But if they ever found this place-"  He gave an odd, brief chuckle. "They won't."  "How long have you been-?"  She stopped; this time, she did not gasp; the sight confronting her could not be greeted by anything except a moment of total inner stillness: on the wall, behind a row of machinery, she saw a picture cut out of a newspaper-a picture of her, in slacks and shirt, standing by the side of the engine at the opening of the John Galt Line, her head lifted, her smile holding the context, the meaning and the sunlight of that day. A moan was her only answer, as she turned to him, but the look on his face matched hers in the picture.  "I was the symbol of what you wanted to destroy in the world," he said, "But you were my symbol of what I wanted to achieve." He pointed at the picture. "This is how men expect to feel about their life once or twice, as an exception, in the course of their lifetime. But I-this is what I chose as the constant and normal."  The look on his face, the serene intensity of his eyes and of his mind made it real to her, now, in this moment, in this moment's full context, in this city. When he kissed her, she knew that their arms, holding each other, were holding their greatest triumph, that this was the reality untouched by pain or fear, the reality of Halley's Fifth Concerto, this was the reward they had wanted, fought for and won.  The doorbell rang.  Her first reaction was to draw back, his-to hold her closer and longer.  When he raised his head, he was smiling. He said only, "Now is the time not to be afraid."  She followed him back to the garret. She heard the door of the laboratory clicking locked behind them.  He held her coat for her silently, he waited until she had tied its belt and had put on her hat-then he walked to the entrance door and opened it.  Three of the four men who entered were muscular figures in military uniforms, each with two guns on his hips, with broad faces devoid of shape and eyes untouched by perception. The fourth, their leader, was a frail civilian with an expensive overcoat, a neat mustache, pale blue eyes and the manner of an intellectual of the public-relations species.  He blinked at Galt, at the room, made a step forward, stopped, made another step and stopped.  "Yes?" said Galt.  "Are . . . are you John Galt?" he asked too loudly.  "That's my name."  "Are you the John Galt?"  "Which one?"  "Did you speak on the radio?"  "When?"  "Don't let him fool you." The metallic voice was Dagny's and it was addressed to the leader. "He-is-John-Galt. I shall report the proof to headquarters. You may proceed."  Galt turned to her as to a stranger. "Will you tell me now just who you are and what it was that you wanted here?"  Her face was as blank as the faces of the soldiers. "My name is Dagny Taggart. I wanted to convince myself that you are the man whom the country is seeking."  He turned to the leader. "All right," he said. "I am John Galt-but if you want me to answer you at all, keep your stool pigeon"-he pointed at Dagny-"away from me."  "Mr. Galt!" cried the leader with the sound of an enormous joviality.  "It is an honor to meet you, an honor and a privilege! Please, Mr. Galt, don't misunderstand us-we're ready to grant you your wishes-no, of course, you don't have to deal with Miss Taggart, if you prefer not to -Miss Taggart was only trying to do her patriotic duty, but-"  "I said keep her away from me."  "We're not your enemies, Mr. Galt, I assure you we're not your enemies." He turned to Dagny. "Miss Taggart, you have performed an invaluable service to the people. You have earned the highest form of public gratitude. Permit us to take over from here on." The soothing motions of his hands were urging her to stand back, to keep out of Galt's sight.  "Now what do you want?" asked Galt.  "The nation is waiting for you, Mr. Galt. All we want is a chance to dispel misapprehensions. Just a chance to co-operate with you." His gloved hand was waving a signal to his three men; the floorboards creaked, as the men proceeded silently to the task of opening drawers and closets; they were searching the room. "The spirit of the nation will revive tomorrow morning, Mr. Galt, when they hear that you have been found."  "What do you want?"  "Just to greet you in the name of the people."  "Am I under arrest?"  "Why think in such old-fashioned terms? Our job is only to escort you safely to the top councils of the national leadership, where your presence is urgently needed." He paused, but got no answer. "The country's top leaders desire to confer with you-just to confer and to reach a friendly understanding."  The soldiers were finding nothing but garments and kitchen utensils; there were no letters, no books, not even a newspaper, as if the room were the habitation of an illiterate.  "Our objective is only to assist you to assume your rightful place in society, Mr. Galt. You do not seem to realize your own public value."  "I do."  "We are here only to protect you."  "Locked!" declared a soldier, banging his fist against the laboratory door.  The leader assumed an ingratiating smile. "What is behind that door, Mr. Galt?"  "Private property."  "Would you open it, please?"  "No."  The leader spread his hands out in a gesture of pained helplessness.  "Unfortunately, my hands are tied. Orders, you know. We have to enter that room."  "Enter it."  "It's only a formality, a mere formality. There's no reason why things should not be handled amicably. Won't you please co-operate?"  "I said, no."  "I'm sure you wouldn't want us to resort to any . . . unnecessary means." He got no answer. "We have the authority to break that door down, you know-but, of course, we wouldn't want to do it." He waited, but got no answer. "Force that lock!" he snapped to the soldier.  Dagny glanced at Galt's face. He stood impassively, his head held level, she saw the undisturbed lines of his profile, his eyes directed at the door. The lock was a small, square plate of polished copper, without keyhole or fixtures.  The silence and the sudden immobility of the three brutes were involuntary, while the burglar's tools in the hands of the fourth went grating cautiously against the wood of the door.  The wood gave way easily, and small chips fell down, their thuds magnified by the silence into the rattle of a distant gun. When the burglar's jimmy attacked the copper plate, they heard a faint rustle behind the door, no louder than the sigh of a weary mind. In another minute, the lock fell out and the door shuddered forward the width of an inch.  The soldier jumped back. The leader approached, his steps irregular like hiccoughs, and threw the door open. They faced a black hole of unknown content and unrelieved darkness.  They glanced at one another and at Galt; he did not move; he stood looking at the darkness.  Dagny followed them, when they stepped over the threshold, preceded by the beams of their flashlights. The space beyond was a long shell of metal, empty but for heavy drifts of dust on the floor, an odd, grayish-white dust that seemed to belong among ruins undisturbed for centuries. The room looked dead like an empty skull.  She turned away, not to let them see in her face the scream of the knowledge of what that dust had been a few minutes ago. Don't try to open that door, he had said to her at the entrance to the powerhouse of Atlantis . . . if you tried to break it down, the machinery inside would collapse into rubble long before the door would give way. . . . Don't try to open that door-she was thinking, but knew that what she was now seeing was the visual form of the statement: Don't try to force a mind.  The men backed out in silence and went on backing toward the exit door, then stopped uncertainly, one after another, at random points of the garret, as if abandoned by a receding tide.  "Well," said Galt, reaching for his overcoat and turning to the leader, "let's go."  Three floors of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel had been evacuated and transformed into an armed camp. Guards with machine guns stood at every turn of the long, velvet-carpeted corridors. Sentinels with bayonets stood on the landings of the fire-stairways. The elevator doors of the fifty-ninth, sixtieth and sixty-first floors were padlocked; a single door and one elevator were left as sole means of access, guarded by soldiers in full battle regalia. Peculiar-looking men loitered in the lobbies, restaurants and shops of the ground floor: their clothes were too new and too expensive, in unsuccessful imitation of the hotel's usual patrons, a camouflage impaired by the fact that the clothes were badly fitted to their wearers' husky figures and were further distorted by bulges in places where the garments of businessmen have no cause to bulge, but the garments of gunmen have. Groups of guards with Tommy guns were posted at every entrance and exit of the hotel, as well as at strategic windows of the adjoining streets.  In the center of this camp, on the sixtieth floor, in what was known as the royal suite of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, amidst satin drapes, crystal candelabra and sculptured garlands of flowers, John Galt, dressed in slacks and shirt, sat in a brocaded armchair, one leg stretched out on a velvet hassock, his hands crossed behind his head, looking at the ceiling.  This was the posture in which Mr. Thompson found him, when the four guards, who had stood outside the door of the royal suite since five A.M., opened it at eleven A.M. to admit Mr. Thompson, and locked it again.  Mr. Thompson experienced a brief flash of uneasiness when the click of the lock cut off his escape and left him alone with the prisoner. But he remembered the newspaper headlines and the radio voices, which had been announcing to the country since dawn: "John Galt is found!-John Galt is in New York!-John Galt has joined the people's cause!-John Galt is in conference with the country's leaders, working for a speedy solution of all our problems!"-and he made himself feel that he believed it.  "Well, well, well!" he said brightly, marching up to the armchair.  "So you're the young fellow who's started all the trouble-Oh," he said suddenly, as he got a closer look at the dark green eyes watching him. "Well, I . . . I'm tickled pink to meet you, Mr. Galt, just tickled pink." He added, "I'm Mr. Thompson, you know."  "How do you do," said Galt.  Mr. Thompson thudded down on a chair, the brusqueness of the movement suggesting a cheerily businesslike attitude. "Now don't go imagining that you're under arrest or some such nonsense." He pointed at the............