Atlas Shrugged

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 "The Twentieth Century Motor Company."
"Oh, of course! That was one of the best motor firms in my youth, perhaps the best. I seem to remember
that there was something odd about the way it went out of business . . . can't recall what it was.'1
It took them three days of inquiries, but they found the bleached, abandoned road—and now they were
driving through the yellow leaves that glittered like a sea of gold coins, to the Twentieth Century Motor
Company.
"Hank, what if anything happens to Ted Nielsen?" she asked suddenly, as they drove in silence.
"Why should anything happen to him?"
"I don't know, but . . . well, there was Dwight Sanders. He vanished. United Locomotives is done for
now. And the other plants are in no condition to produce Diesels. I've stopped listening to promises. And
. . . and of what use is a railroad without motive power?"
"Of what use is anything, for that matter, without it?"
The leaves sparkled, swaying in the wind. They spread for miles, from grass to brush to trees, with the
motion and all the colors of fire; they seemed to celebrate an accomplished purpose, burning in
unchecked, untouched abundance.
Rearden smiled. "There's something to be said for the wilderness.
I'm beginning to like it. New country that nobody's discovered." She nodded gaily. "It's good soil—look
at the way things grow. I'd clear that brush and I'd build a—"
And then they stopped smiling. The corpse they saw in the weeds by the roadside was a rusty cylinder
with bits of glass—the remnant of a gas-station pump.
It was the only thing left visible. The few charred posts, the slab of concrete and the sparkle of glass
dust—which had been a gas station—were swallowed in the brush, not to be noticed except by a careful
glance, not to be seen at all in another year.
They looked away. They drove on, not wanting to know what else lay hidden under the miles of weeds.
They felt the same wonder like a weight in the silence between them: wonder as to how much the weeds
had swallowed and how fast.
The road ended abruptly behind the turn of a hill. What remained was a few chunks of concrete sticking
out of a long, pitted stretch of tar and mud. The concrete had been smashed by someone and carted
away; even weeds could not grow in the strip of earth left behind. On the crest of a distant hill, a single
telegraph pole stood slanted against the sky, like a cross over a vast grave.
It took them three hours and a punctured tire to crawl in low gear through trackless soft, through gullies,
then down ruts left by cart wheels—to reach the settlement that lay in the valley beyond the hill with the
telegraph pole.
A few houses still stood within the skeleton of what had once been an industrial town. Everything that
could move, had moved away; but some human beings had remained. The empty structures were vertical
rubble; they had been eaten, not by time, but by men: boards torn out at random, missing patches of