Atlas Shrugged

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 Then she turned away from him.
She noticed that she, too, was being stared at, that there were people around her, that she was laughing
and answering questions.
She had not expected such a large crowd. They filled the platform, the tracks, the square beyond the
station; they were on the roofs of the boxcars on the sidings, at the windows of every house in sight.
Something had drawn them here, something in the air which, at the last moment, had made James Taggart
want to attend the opening of the John Galt Line. She had forbidden it. "If you come, Jim," she had said,
"I'll have you thrown out of your own Taggart station. This is one event you're not going to see." Then she
had chosen Eddie Willers to represent Taggart Transcontinental at the opening.
She looked at the crowd and she felt, simultaneously, astonishment that they should stare at her, when
this event was so personally her own that no communication about it was possible, and a sense of fitness
that they should be here, that they should want to see it, because the sight of an achievement was the
greatest gift a human being could offer to others.
She felt no anger toward anyone on earth. The things she had endured had now receded into some outer
fog, like pain that still exists, but has no power to hurt. Those things could not stand in the face of this
moment's reality, the meaning of this day was as brilliantly, violently clear as the splashes of sun on the
silver of the engine, all men had to perceive it now, no one could doubt it and she had no one to hate.
Eddie Willers was watching her. He stood on the platform, surrounded by Taggart executives, division
heads, civic leaders, and the various local officials who had been out argued, bribed or threatened, to
obtain permits to run a train through town zones at a hundred miles an hour. For once, for this day and
event, his title of Vice-president was real to him and he carried it well. But while he spoke to those
around him, his eyes kept following Dagny through the crowd. She was dressed in blue slacks and shirt,
she was unconscious of official duties, she had left them to him, the train was now her sole concern, as if
she were only a member of its crew.
She saw him, she approached, and she shook his hand; her smile was like a summation of all the things
they did not have to say. "Well, Eddie, you're Taggart Transcontinental now."
"Yes," he said solemnly, his voice low.
There were reporters asking questions, and they dragged her away from him. They were asking him
questions, too. "Mr. Willers, what is the policy of Taggart Transcontinental in regard to this line?" "So
Taggart Transcontinental is just a disinterested observer, is it, Mr. Willers?"
He answered as best he could. He was looking at the sun on a Diesel engine. But what he was seeing
was the sun in a clearing of the woods and a twelve-year-old girl telling him that he would help her run
the railroad some day.
He watched from a distance while the train's crew was lined up in front of the engine, to face a firing
squad of cameras. Dagny and Rearden were smiling, as if posing for snapshots of a summer vacation. Pat
Logan, the engineer, a short, sinewy man with graying hair and a contemptuously inscrutable face, posed
in a manner of amused indifference.
Ray McKim, the fireman, a husky young giant, grinned with an air of embarrassment and superiority
together. The rest of the crew looked as if they were about to wink at the cameras. A photographer said,