"Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rand Ayn)

come? But why didnтАЩt you let us know?"
She smiled easily. "Had no time to be formal. Had my own car attached to
Number 22 out of Chicago, but got off at Clevelandand Number 22 was running
late, so I let the car go. The Comet came next and I took it. There was no
sleeping-car space left."
The conductor shook his head. "Your brotherhe wouldnтАЩt have taken a coach."
She laughed. "No, he wouldnтАЩt have."
The men by the engine watched her walking away. The young brakeman was among
them. He asked, pointing after her, "Who is that?"
"ThatтАЩs who runs Taggart Transcontinental," said the engineer; the respect in
his voice was genuine. "ThatтАЩs the Vice-president in Charge of Operation."
When the train jolted forward, the blast of its whistle dying over the
fields, she sat by the window, lighting another cigarette. She thought: ItтАЩs
cracking to pieces, like this, all over the country, you can expect it
anywhere, at any moment. But she felt no anger or anxiety; she had no time to
feel.
This would be just one more issue, to be settled along with the others. She
knew that the superintendent of the Ohio Division was no good and that he was
a friend of James Taggart. She had not insisted on throwing him out long ago
only because she had no better man to put in his place. Good men were so
strangely hard to find. But she would have to get rid of him, she thought,
Ryn Rand - ATLAS SHRUGGED
CHAPTER ITHE THEME 14
and she would give his post to Owen Kellogg, the young engineer who was doing
a brilliant job as one of the assistants to the manager of the Taggart
Terminal in New York; it was Owen Kellogg who ran the Terminal. She had
watched his work for some time; she had always looked for sparks of
competence, like a diamond prospector in an unpromising wasteland. Kellogg
was still too young to be made superintendent of a division; she had wanted
to give him another year, but there was no time to wait. She would have to
speak to him as soon as she returned.
The strip of earth, faintly visible outside the window, was running faster
now, blending into a gray stream. Through the dry phrases of calculations in
her mind, she noticed that she did have time to feel something: it was the
hard, exhilarating pleasure of action.
With the first whistling rush of air, as the Comet plunged into the tunnels
of the Taggart Terminal under the city of New York, Dagny Taggart sat up
straight. She always felt it when the train went undergroundthis sense of
eagerness, of hope and of secret excitement. It was as if normal existence
were a photograph of shapeless things in badly printed colors, but this was a
sketch done in a few sharp strokes that made things seem clean, importantand
worth doing.
She watched the tunnels as they flowed past: bare walls of concrete, a net of
pipes and wires, a web of rails that went off into black holes where green
and red lights hung as distant drops of color. There was nothing else,
nothing to dilute it, so that one could admire naked purpose and the
ingenuity that had achieved it. She thought of the Taggart Building standing
above her head at this moment, growing straight to the sky, and she thought:
These are the roots of the building, hollow roots twisting under the ground,
feeding the city.