Atlas Shrugged

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 It was not Taggart Transcontinental that stood as the focus of terror in her mind, it was not the thought of
Hank Rearden tied to a rack pulled in opposite directions—it was Ellis Wyatt. Wiping out the rest, filling
her consciousness, leaving no room for words, no time for wonder, as a glaring answer to the questions
she had not begun to ask, stood two pictures: Ellis Wyatt's implacable figure in front of her desk, saying,
"It is now in your power to destroy me; I may have to go; but if I go, I'll make sure that I take all the rest
of you along with me"—and the circling violence of Ellis Wyatt's body when he flung a glass to shatter
against the wall.
The only consciousness the pictures left her was the feeling of the approach of some unthinkable
disaster, and the feeling that she had to outrun it. She had to reach Ellis Wyatt and stop him. She did not
know what it was that she had to prevent. She knew only that she had to stop him.
And because, were she lying crushed under the ruins of a building, were she torn by the bomb of an air
raid, so long as she was still in existence she would know that action is man's foremost obligation,
regardless of anything he feels—she was able to run down the platform and to see the face of the
stationmaster when she found him—she was able to order: "Hold Number 57 for me!"—then to run to
the privacy of a telephone booth in the darkness beyond the end of the platform, and to give the
long-distance operator the number of Ellis Wyatt's house.
She stood, propped up by the walls of the booth, her eyes closed, and listened to the dead whirl of
metal which was the sound of a bell ringing somewhere. It brought no answer. The bell kept coming in
sudden spasms, like a drill going through her ear, through her body.
She clutched the receiver as if, unheeded, it were still a form of contact.
She wished the bell were louder. She forgot that the sound she heard was not the one ringing in his
house. She did not know that she was screaming, "Ellis, don't! Don't! Don't I"—until she heard the cold,
reproving voice of the operator say, "Your party does not answer."
She sat at the window of a coach of Train Number 57, and listened to the clicking of the wheels on the
rails of Rearden Metal, She sat, unresisting, swaying with the motion of the train. The black luster of the
window hid the countryside she did not want to see. It was her second run on the John Galt Line, and
she tried not to think of the first.
The bondholders, she thought, the bondholders of the John Galt Line—it was to her honor that they had
entrusted their money, the saving and achievement of years, it was on her ability that they had staked it, it
was on her work that they had relied and on their own—and she had been made to betray them into a
looters' trap: there would be no trains and no life-blood of freight, the John Galt Line had been only a
drainpipe that had permitted Jim Taggart to make a deal and to drain their wealth, unearned, into his
pocket, in exchange for letting others drain his railroad—the bonds of the John Galt Line, which, this
morning, had been the proud guardians of their owners' security and future, had become in the space of
an hour, scraps of paper that no one would buy, with no value, no future, no power, save the power to
close the doors and stop the wheels of the last hope of the country—and Taggart Transcontinental was
not a living plant, fed by blood it had worked to produce, but a cannibal of the moment, devouring the
unborn children of greatness.
The tax on Colorado, she thought, the tax collected from Ellis Wyatt to pay for the livelihood of those
whose job was to tie him and make him unable to live, those who would stand on guard to see that he
got no trains, no tank cars, no pipeline of Rearden Metal—Ellis Wyatt, stripped of the right of
serf-defense, left without voice, without weapons, and worse: made to be the tool of his own destruction,