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On the night the Gulch heard the first rumors that the strike was ending at last,Hank Reardon stood at the window watching Ellis Wyatt walk down the path, the new motion-sensing lights dancing around him as he headed home through the darkness; and Francisco d’Anconia, still sprawled on the cabin floor amidst his smelter drawings, watched Reardon. There was tension in all the long lines of Hank’s body, a contrast to the deliberate relaxed ease of earlier in the evening when he bantered with them both about the new world they would build, now that the time for return was approaching. Hank had been late coming home from his meeting with the Constitution revision working group, and they hadn’t had time to talk before Ellis had come by, but Francisco had an idea of what was troubling his partner: likely, he thought, the same thing that was troubling him.
“Was I wrong?” Hank said, swinging abruptly from the window to face him. “It’s a night for rejoicing, I couldn’t bring myself to spoil it for a friend.” There was a weight in Hank’s voice, a note of harsh control that Francisco had not heard from him since the night they’d rescued John from the destroyers. Beautiful, in the way all of Hank’s self-possession was beautiful, but it was not a kind of beauty Francisco had missed.
Francisco smiled as if this were an ordinary invitation to philosophical debate. “Check your premises,” he said. “And your facts. Do you find a contradiction?”
“No,” Hank said. “I suppose I was hoping you’d find one for me. But then, I haven’t told you what happened today.” He reached for the desk where his diagrams and formulae lay, as he’d shown them to Wyatt, and came up with a document buried under them, thick with notes. “You’ll have heard the news: it leaked before the meeting was over.”
“I was out earlier, yes. No one will say anything about where they heard it, but somehow everyone assumes the decision’s been made. It’s Christmas Eve. Joy to the Gulch, we’ve won the long strike. May every tongue rejoice, proclaim the word, and heaven and nature sing to welcome the returning competent people.”
“Accurate up to a point,” Hank agreed, and the harshness was still there in his voice. “John’s making his official decision tonight — wants to announce it to Dagny first, I assume — but we’re ending the strike. We’re going back to the world.
“And we’re not ready.”
“Our people are,” Francisco told him. “John’s right about that. We like each other, the Gulch is as functional a community as I can imagine, and the creative and scientific output is a new Renaissance. Happening faster than the first one, actually. But it was always a community oriented toward our return to a bigger world, and people are getting restless. I don’t know how much longer we can wait, before there’s trouble.”
Hank had begun to pace, the sheaf of papers still in his hands. At Francisco’s words he paused, looked up, and came to join Francisco where he stretched out on the largest of the couches, the one that had room for both of them. “I take your point. But it doesn’t change the facts.”
Hank was right, of course. Francisco had seen it too, though perhaps not in the form it had shown itself to Hank. Still, best to be certain. “Why not move now, then?” he asked. Not an argument, but a request for explication. “It’s not this, is it?” he added, draping his arm around Reardon’s shoulders and drawing him close.
Hank laughed then, lighthearted as a boy for that moment. “God, no,” he answered. “I thought we’d settled that long ago, when we talked about virtue and the loose women you weren’t sleeping with back in the old days, in my rooms at the Wayne Falkland. Our love should be given only to those worthy of it, the highest and best people in the world; and when we find them it’s a kind of viciousness not to choose them as lovers, to not do all we can to attain them. True, at the time we were thinking only of women, and the same woman at that. But if we take our own ideals seriously, we can hardly restrict it to women. You are the highest and the best, and I said that I loved you long before we shared a bed. Do you think I’d ever be ashamed of being your lover, whatever the mob might say?”
Francisco raised a glass, saluting him. “Bravo, and exactly what I’d have said. As you know, because it’s what I did say. What, then?”
Hank freed himself from the embrace: reluctantly, he thought. “Here, have a look at this.” The document he shoved into Francisco’s hands was Judge Narragansett's draft Constitution. “This draft has Professor Akston’s notes, and Midas’s notes, and John’s notes, and it’s honorable and aspirational and it doesn’t work. We have to be prepared to govern when we go back, at least on a small scale. We need to know how we’re going to do it, and this doesn’t tell us. It’s all vague principles and lofty rhetoric and nothing concrete, nothing definable. I’m a metallurgist and an engineer; I can’t build working plans from this. No one could. There are holes and internal contradictions all over it. Hell, John’s an engineer. I don’t understand why he doesn’t see it.
“But the short answer is, the Gulch doesn’t scale. Look at all the micro-payments that go back and forth here every day. I have an arrangement to pay for my use of the roads. In gold. You have an individual arrangement. John and Dagny and Ragnar all have their individual, negotiated prices. It’s workable among a few thousand idealists with a single bank, barely. It’s going to be impossible at the scale of a major city, let along a nation. A few weeks and we’re going to be reinventing taxation, or else ruining entrepreneurs with the expense of toll roads, or else wrecking the economy with choke points on transportation. No one’s thought about how to handle things like that, and there are a thousand of them.
“And that’s just a start. Look at this, they’re determined to add this language: ‘The rights of property are not to be infringed.’ Sounds like precisely what we need to keep things from going wrong in the same old ways, right? But what are the “rights of property,” exactly? What about shareholder rights? What prevents looters from taking over a majority of any company traded on the exchanges, and starting the whole rotten old system up again? How do you prevent a descendant of Nat Taggart who’d run the road well and profitably in his own time from leaving it to his worthless son to destroy? It was his property, why not his right? We need to know what we mean, not just put slogans into writing!”
Francisco had begun to laugh, in sheer admiration, not mockery. “I love you,” he said.
“And that’s another thing,” Hank told him. If you look at Article 6, you’ll see that Professor Akston thought about that. There’s a clause conferring a right to civil marriage between any committed couple that isn’t too closely related, regardless of sex, religion, or race. I didn’t say a word, he did it on his own. He could see that. But he isn’t seeing the need to know what “the rights of property” means.”
Francisco was looking at Article 3. “Here’s a good one,” he said. “Hank, you’re the great metallurgist of our age. Could you turn lead into gold, if the future of mankind depended on it?”
“No.” Hank’s answer came immediately: he’d been thinking about it too. “That is, theoretically maybe I could. With the right machinery — machinery we don’t have, mind you, though maybe with John’s machine it could be possible to make it — I might be able to use radiation to change the composition of the atoms themselves. Probably be better off starting with mercury, not lead. But practically you couldn’t make enough to be useful, and what you did have would be too radioactive to use at all. So, no.”
It was a relief to be talking about it, in a way. At least he no longer had to hide the uneasiness that he’d been feeling these past few months. “So we men and women of genius, aided by the competent and well-meaning of the world, use our hands and minds to create wealth. Which pursuant to Article 3 we measure in gold, having found that paper burns. But then —“
“— We run out of gold to measure our wealth with,” Hank concluded. “How quickly? We don’t know. We don’t know exactly how much gold there is in the world, or how much it will cost to extract it. Say the cost is zero, which it isn’t: we still eventually run out. What then, with laws that say gold is the measure of all value?”
Hank shook his head. “I don’t know. That one at least we can put off for a while: we won’t run out of gold soon. But ‘put off’ isn’t the same thing as ‘fix.’ We know where pretending there isn’t a problem leads.”
They were both silent, while Francisco read through the full draft. “I assume,” he said finally, “that you raised all of these points with the working group. Did they have anything to say?”
“Yes,” Hank said, and the grimness was back in his voice. “Judge Narragansett said I should be the first Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court, and everyone else just nodded.”
Hank was silent again, but at last he spoke again. “We didn’t lie to Elias tonight. We just spent a little time invoking the world we want, the one we’ve struggled for. The world where we bring power from the air, where we coax dreams of speed from iron and copper and fire, where we spend our spare moments plotting to make every work of our hands and minds better than what came before, and our nights in joy with our beloveds. Damn it, Francisco, I want to go back. I want to be a metallurgist and industrialist again, and not play at being a ruler or a philosopher-king. I wasn’t looking for another fight, but here it is. One is one, your teacher says. We can’t pretend the world is other than it is.”
He had no good answer, Francisco thought. But as he considered it, he felt the weight of his thoughts shift, a lightening of the new burden. It was a fight, and a worthy ambition, to build a new world in the face of mankind’s incomprehension and error. And he had the best possible companion at his side. “We’ll talk to John in the morning,” he said at last. “We’re going to be the loyal opposition, and we’re going to have a worthy and honorable opponent. And Hank: We’re going to win.”