Atlas Shrugged

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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."