Atlas Shrugged

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 . . . To bring you down to things you can't conceive—and to know that it's I who have done it. To
reduce you to a body, to teach you an animal's pleasure, to see you need it, to see you asking me for it,
to see your wonderful spirit dependent upon the obscenity of your need. To watch you as you are, as
you face the world with your clean, proud strength—then to see you, in my bed, submitting to any
infamous whim I may devise, to any act which I'll perform for the sole purpose of watching your dishonor
and to which you'll submit for the sake of an unspeakable sensation . . . I want you—and may I be
damned for it! . . .
She was reading the papers, leaning back in the darkness—he saw the reflection of the fire touching her
hair, moving to her shoulder, down her arm, to the naked skin of her wrist.
. . . Do you know what I'm thinking now, in this moment? . . .
Your gray suit and your open collar . . . you look so young, so austere, so sure of yourself . . . What
would you be like if I knocked your head back, if I threw you down in that formal suit of yours, if I raised
your skirt—
She glanced up at him. He looked down at the papers on his desk.
In a moment, he said, "The actual cost of the bridge is less than our original estimate. You will note that
the strength of the bridge allows for the eventual addition of a second track, which, I think, that section of
the country will justify in a very few years. If you spread the cost over a period of—"
He spoke, and she looked at his face in the lamplight, against the black emptiness of the office. The lamp
was outside her field of vision, and she felt as if it were his face that illuminated the papers on the desk.
His face, she thought, and the cold, radiant clarity of his voice, of his mind, of Ms drive to a single
purpose. The face was like his words—as if the line of a single theme ran from the steady glance of the
eyes, through the gaunt muscles of the cheeks, to the faintly scornful, downward curve of the mouth—the
line of a ruthless asceticism.
The day began with the news of a disaster: a freight train of the Atlantic Southern had crashed head-on
into a passenger train, in New Mexico, on a sharp curve in the mountains, scattering freight cars all over
the slopes. The cars carried five thousand tons of copper, bound from a mine in Arizona to the Rearden
mills, Rearden telephoned the general manager of the Atlantic Southern, but the answer he received was:
"Oh God, Mr. Rearden, how can we tell? How can anybody tell how long it will take to clear that
wreck?
One of the worst we've ever had . . . I don't know, Mr. Rearden.
There are no other lines anywhere in that section. The track is torn for twelve hundred feet. There's been
a rockslide. Our wrecking train can't get through. I don't know how we'll ever get those freight cars back
on rails, or when. Can't expect it sooner than two weeks . . .
Three days? Impossible, Mr. Rearden! . . . But we can't help it!
. . . But surely you can tell your customers that it's an act of God!
What if you do hold them up? Nobody can blame you in a case of this kind!"
In the next two hours, with the assistance of his secretary, two young engineers from his shipping
department, a road map, and the long-distance telephone, Rearden arranged for a fleet of trucks to