Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand Page B

matter with your train service down on the San Sebastián Line?”
    “Why, what do you mean? What is the matter with it?”
    “Well, I don’t know, but running just one passenger train a day is—”
    “One train?”
    “—is pretty measly service, it seems to me, and what a train! You must have inherited those coaches from your great-grandfather, and he must have used them pretty hard. And where on earth did you get that wood-burning locomotive?”
    “ Wood -burning?”
    “That’s what I said, wood-burning. I never saw one before, except in photographs. What museum did you drag it out of? Now don’t act as if you didn’t know it, just tell me what’s the gag?”
    “Yes, of course I knew it,” said Taggart hastily. “It was just ... You just happened to choose the one week when we had a little trouble with our motive power—our new engines are on order, but there’s been a slight delay—you know what a problem we’re having with the manufacturers of locomotives—but it’s only temporary.”
    “Of course,” said Boyle. “Delays can’t be helped. It’s the strangest train I ever rode on, though. Nearly shook my guts out.”
    Within a few minutes, they noticed that Taggart had become silent. He seemed preoccupied with a problem of his own. When he rose abruptly, without apology, they rose, too, accepting it as a command.
    Larkin muttered, smiling too strenuously, “It was a pleasure, Jim. A pleasure. That’s how great projects are born—over a drink with friends.”
    “Social reforms are slow,” said Taggart coldly. “It is advisable to be patient and cautious.” For the first time, he turned to Wesley Mouch. “What I like about you, Mouch, is that you don’t talk too much.”
    Wesley Mouch was Rearden’s Washington man.
    There was still a remnant of sunset light in the sky, when Taggart and Boyle emerged together into the street below. The transition was faintly shocking to them—the enclosed barroom led one to expect midnight darkness. A tall building stood outlined against the sky, sharp and straight like a raised sword. In the distance beyond it, there hung the calendar.
    Taggart fumbled irritably with his coat collar, buttoning it against the chill of the streets. He had not intended to go back to the office tonight, but he had to go back. He had to see his sister.
    “... a difficult undertaking ahead of us, Jim,” Boyle was saying, “a difficult undertaking, with so many dangers and complications and so much at stake ...”
    “It all depends,” James Taggart answered slowly, “on knowing the people who make it possible.... That’s what has to be known—who makes it possible.”

    Dagny Taggart was nine years old when she decided that she would run the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad some day. She stated it to herself when she stood alone between the rails, looking at the two straight lines of steel that went off into the distance and met in a single point. What she felt was an arrogant pleasure at the way the track cut through the woods: it did not belong in the midst of ancient trees, among green branches that hung down to meet green brush and the lonely spears of wild nowers—but there it was. The two steel lines were brilliant in the sun, and the black ties were like the rungs of a ladder which she had to climb.
    It was not a sudden decision, but only the final seal of words upon something she had known long ago. In unspoken understanding, as if bound by a vow it had never been necessary to take, she and Eddie Willers had given themselves to the railroad from the first conscious days of their childhood.
    She felt a bored indifference toward the immediate world around her, toward other children and adults alike. She took it as a regrettable accident, to be borne patiently for a while, that she happened to be imprisoned among people who were dull. She had caught a glimpse of another world and she knew that it existed somewhere, the world that had created trains, bridges,