Atlas Shrugged

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rubble long before the door would give way. But reach the thought which it requires—and the secret of
the motor will be yours, as well as"—it was the first break she had heard in his voice—"as well as any
other secret you might wish to know."
He faced her for a moment, as if leaving himself open to her full understanding, then smiled oddly, quietly
at some thought of his own, and added, "I'll show you how it's done."
He stepped back. Then, standing still, his face raised to the words carved in the stone, he repeated them
slowly, evenly, as if taking that oath once more. There was no emotion in his voice, nothing but the
spaced clarity of the sounds he pronounced with full knowledge of their meaning—but she knew that she
was witnessing the most solemn moment it would ever be given her to witness, she was seeing a man's
naked soul and the cost it had paid to utter these words, she was hearing an echo of the day when he had
pronounced that oath for the first time and with full knowledge of the years ahead—she knew what
manner of man had stood up to face six thousand others on a dark spring night and why they had been
afraid of him, she knew that this was the birth and the core of all the things that had happened to the
world in the twelve years since, she knew that this was of far greater import than the motor hidden inside
the structure—she knew it, to the sound of a man's voice pronouncing in self-reminder and rededication:
"I swear by my life . . . and my love of it . . . that I will never live for the sake of another man . . . nor ask
another man . . . to live . . . for mine."
It did not startle her, it seemed unastonishing and almost unimportant, that at the end of the last sound,
she saw the door opening slowly, without human touch, moving inward upon a growing strip of darkness.
In the moment when an electric light went on inside the structure, he seized the knob and pulled the door
shut, its lock clicking sealed once more.
"It's a sound lock," he said; his face was serene. "That sentence is the combination of sounds needed to
open it. I don't mind telling you this secret—because I know that you won't pronounce those words until
you mean them the way I intended them to be meant."
She inclined her head. "I won't."
She followed him down to the car, slowly, feeling suddenly too exhausted to move. She fell back against
the seat, closing her eyes, barely hearing the sound of the starter. The accumulated strain and shock of
her sleepless hours hit her at once, breaking through the barrier of the tension her nerves had held to
delay it. She lay still, unable to think, to react or to struggle, drained of all emotions but one.
She did not speak. She did not open her eyes until the car stopped in front of his house.
"You'd better rest," he said, "and go to sleep right now, if you want to attend Mulligan's dinner tonight."
She nodded obediently. She staggered to the house, avoiding his help. She made an effort to tell him, "I'll
be all right," then to escape to the safety of her room and last long enough to close the door.
She collapsed, face down, on the bed. It was not the mere fact of physical exhaustion. It was the sudden
monomania of a sensation too complete to endure. While the strength of her body was gone, while her
mind had lost the faculty of consciousness, a single emotion drew on her remnants of energy, of
understanding, of judgment, of control, leaving her nothing to resist it with or to direct it, making her
unable to desire, only to feel, reducing her to a mere sensation—a static sensation without start or goal.
She kept seeing his figure in her mind—his figure as he had stood at the door of the structure—she felt
nothing else, no wish, no hope, no estimate of her feeling, no name for it, no relation to herself—there