Atlas Shrugged – Day 036 – pp. 349-358
It’s Dagny Taggart.
She’d like a meeting.
Monday?
Why he can be there this afternoon. . .
Dag and the Doc didn’t leave things on good terms after the SSI put out that paper or Rearden Metal less than a year before. Wonder why he’s so excited to see her.
Cut to Dagny’s office where she’s cutting yet another train line. This one servicing Hammondsville CO. With the Hammond Motor Company out of biz, Lawrence Hammond having gone the way of Ellis Wyatt, there’s no more business.
When Wyatt Oil went out of business, the small producers tried banding together to make up the difference. But unable to produce together as much as Wyatt could alone, eventually they lost their business to the coal market. Had to raise prices. Received subsidies from the G.
Actually it was good news for Andrew Stockton of Stockton Coal. His plants were running day and night. Until, that is, he retired and disappeared.
Lets see. Mulligan, Wyatt, Hammond, Stockton. Who we missing? Oh yeah, Dan Conway. Francicso’s “still in” but out. Owen Kellogg doesn’t really count because he was only bright and talented — not yet super industrious and rich.
They’re dropping like flies.
What’s happening?
“No Miss Taggart, I can’t explain it,” the sister of Andrew Stockton had told her on her last trip to Colorado, two months ago. “. . .I remember only that some man came to see him on that last evening. A stranger I’d never seen before. They talked late into the night– when I went to sleep, the light was still burning in Andrew’s study.”
“A strange man”. . .
Anyway, Colorado’s going under but Taggart Trans is booming or so it would appear.
“..on its balance sheets of Taggart Transcontinental, the checks of Jim’s subsidies for empty trains bore larger figures than the profit brought by the best freight train of the busiest industrial division.”
He told Dagny:
“You have always considered money-making as such an important virtue. . . Well it seems to me that I’m better at it that you are.”
(What an ass.)
And check this out. The Strange case of the Frozen Railroad bonds:
After initially freezing the railroad bonds, Wesley Mouch issued a directive that you could get your bonds un-froze. If you could show proof of “essential need,” the G would buy your bonds.
There were three questions no one answered or asked” “What constituted proof?” “What constituted need?” “Essential — to whom?”
But there’s always a market somewhere.
“One was not supposed to speak about the men who, having been refused dole their bonds for one-third of the value to other men who possessed needs which, miraculously, made thirty three frozen cents melt into a whole dollar; or about a new profession practiced by bright young boys just out of college, who called themselves “defreeezers” and offered their services ” to help you draft your application in the proper modern terms.” The boys had friends in Washington.
Let’s see, I dump my bonds to a third party for 30 cents on the dollar and the G buys them from them for 100 cents. Sounds a little like the AIG thing.
Anyway, again, while the rest of the world is screwing itself royally economically, Dagny is still busy solving her mysteries. First there’s the issue of that cigarette Hugh Akston gave her. She showed it to the old gentleman at the cigar stand who observed it cautiously. He’d never seen it but promised to get to the bottom of the mystery.
In search of the motor’s inventor, she’s having less luck. The engineers she sent to WI came up empty. Nothing at TCM, nothing at the patent office. She’s interviewed scientists for hire to recreate the motor. Each time met with a different yet equally unacceptable response.
That led her back to Dr S for possibly some help. Didn’t want to. Felt she had to. While waiting for him to show up, she ponders the number 93 that jut got he axe.
“A train has the two great attributes of life, she thought, motion and purpose. . .”
I seem to recall Francisco being described that way too. . .
The Dr arrives. They exchange some pleasantries — his more pleasant than hers — and they get down to it. She tells him about the motor and shows him what’s left of the documents.
He’s stunned. First that it could be done at all. And second that someone would do it in the lab of a motor company instead of under his tutelage at the institute. (Dagny sneers).
Question 1: Does he know anyone who may have been capable of creating something like this.? No. No idea.
Question 2: Does he know anyone he could recommend capable of reconstructing it. No again.
As he’s ready to leave, he asks if he could see the motor. They head down to the vault beneath the station.
As he stares at the wonder of the motor before him he says to her,
“Miss Taggart, to you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It’s resentment of another man’s achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someones work prove greater than their own – they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal. . . They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferior. They don’t know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire?”
“I’ve felt it all my life,” she said. It was an answer she could not refuse him.
And Dr S pauses. . .
“Miss Taggart, I know a man who might be able to undertake the reconstruction of that motor. . .”