Atlas Shrugged

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laughing, "Can't you people look doomed, please? I know that's what the editor wants."
Dagny and Rearden were answering questions for the press. There was no mockery in their answers
now, no bitterness. They were enjoying it. They spoke as if the questions were asked in good faith.
Irresistibly, at some point which no one noticed, this became true, "What do you expect to happen on
this run?" a reporter asked one of the brakemen. "Do you think you'll get there?"
"I think we'll get there," said the brakeman, "and so do you, brother."
"Mr. Logan, do you have any children? Did you take out any extra insurance? I'm just thinking of the
bridge, you know."
"Don't cross that bridge till I come to it," Pat Logan answered contemptuously.
"Mr. Rearden, how do you know that your rail will hold?"
"The man who taught people to make a printing press," said Rearden, "how did he know it?"
"Tell me, Miss Taggart, what's going to support a seven-thousand-ton train on a three-thousand-ton
bridge?"
"My judgment," she answered.
The men of the press, who despised their own profession, did not know why they were enjoying it
today. One of them, a young man with years of notorious success behind him and a cynical look of twice
his age, said suddenly, "I know what I'd like to be: I wish I could be a man who covers news!"
The hands of the clock on the station building stood at 3:45. The crew started off toward the caboose at
the distant end of the train. The movement and noise of the crowd were subsiding. Without conscious
intention, people were beginning to stand still.
The dispatcher had received word from every local operator along the line of rail that wound through the
mountains to the Wyatt oil fields three hundred miles away. He came out of the station building and,
looking at Dagny, gave the signal for clear track ahead. Standing by the engine, Dagny raised her hand,
repeating his gesture in sign of an order received and understood.
The long line of boxcars stretched off into the distance, in spaced, rectangular links, like a spinal cord.
When the conductor's arm swept through the air, far at the end, she moved her arm in answering signal.
Rearden, Logan and McKim stood silently, as if at attention, letting her be first to get aboard. As she
started up the rungs on the side of the engine, a reporter thought of a question he had not asked.
"Miss Taggart," he called after her, "who is John Galt?"
She turned, hanging onto a metal bar with one hand, suspended for an instant above the heads of the
crowd.
"We are!" she answered.
Logan followed her into the cab, then McKim; Rearden went last, then the door of the engine was shut,
with the tight finality of sealed metal.