Atlas Shrugged Part I, Chapter 10: Wyatt's Torch (Part 2) - The Fire on the Mountain
This is it. The end of Part I. And Rand does not let you off easy.
The second half of “Wyatt’s Torch” is a detective story that turns into a horror show. Dagny is chasing the inventor of that mysterious motor across the country, every lead dumps her deeper into the wreckage of a civilization eating itself alive. Then the government drops the hammer. Then the mountain burns.
The Trail of Failure
Dagny’s quest takes her through a parade of human wreckage.
First up is Lee Hunsacker, who took over the Twentieth Century Motor Company after the Starnes heirs ran it into the ground. He sits in someone else’s kitchen, unshaven, stirring someone else’s stew, complaining that nobody ever gave him a chance. He’s forty-two and has accomplished nothing, but he’s writing his autobiography. On a typewriter that skips spaces.
Hunsacker thinks the world owes him a factory. He went to Midas Mulligan for a loan. Mulligan turned him down flat, said his failures “disqualified him for ownership of a vegetable pushcart.” So Hunsacker sued him. Under some progressive Illinois law that said you couldn’t discriminate against anyone in matters of livelihood.
The first judge, Narragansett, ruled in Mulligan’s favor. A higher court reversed the verdict and ordered Mulligan to pay up. He had three months to comply. Before those three months were up, Midas Mulligan vanished. Closed his bank, paid every depositor to the last penny, then disappeared. Judge Narragansett retired six months later. Nobody heard from either of them again.
When the law forces a man to fund his own destruction, the smart ones leave. They always leave.
The Starnes Heirs
Dagny tracks the story to Durance, Louisiana, to find the Starnes heirs. The local police chief warns her: “They’re a bad sort, Miss Taggart. Clammy and bad.”
Three heirs. Eric killed himself on his ex-girlfriend’s wedding day, in the newlyweds’ bedroom. Gerald lies in a flophouse, drunk, stealing nickels from sleeping men on neighboring cots, saying he’ll sell the Starnes name for a drink.
And then there’s Ivy. She sits in an incense-filled bungalow, talking about the “noble plan” they implemented at the factory: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Same pay for everyone. Twice a year they voted on who needed what and who owed what.
I don’t need Rand to tell me how that ends. I lived in a country built on that exact sentence. The able people stop being able. Or they leave.
When Dagny presses Ivy for the name of the factory’s chief engineer, the woman has a breakdown before coughing it up: William Hastings. He quit the day after they introduced the plan. He was the second man to quit. The first? “He wasn’t anybody important.”
Sure he wasn’t.
Hugh Akston in the Diner
Hastings is dead. Five years. Heart failure. But his widow gives Dagny one last lead: a distinguished gray-haired man she once saw with Hastings and the young inventor. She spotted the same man recently, working as a cook in a roadside diner in the Rockies.
Dagny goes to the diner. The cook is exactly as described: lean, distinguished, making the best hamburger she’s ever had. She offers him a job running the dining-car department of Taggart Transcontinental. He says no.
She pushes. He won’t budge. Then she breaks for a moment: “I’m so sick of them! I’m so hungry for any sight of anyone who’s able to do whatever it is he’s doing!” It’s the most vulnerable we’ve seen Dagny in the entire book.
She asks about the young engineer. He says: “Give it up, Miss Taggart. You won’t find him.”
Then she asks his name.
Hugh Akston. The philosopher. The last advocate of reason.
A great philosopher flipping burgers in Wyoming. He tells Dagny: if you find it inconceivable that a genius invention was abandoned and a philosopher works as a cook, check your premises. One of them is wrong.
She leaves. On the drive home, she smokes a cigarette he gave her. No brand name. Just a trademark stamped in gold: the sign of the dollar.
The Directives
Dagny arrives back at Cheyenne station. Train Number 57 is about to depart on the John Galt Line. For a moment she watches it and thinks: at least this much we built.
Then she overhears two men talking about new government directives. She grabs a newspaper.
Wesley Mouch has issued emergency directives. Trains limited to sixty miles per hour and sixty cars. Steel mills forced to cap production of any alloy to match other mills. No business can relocate without permission. A moratorium on all railroad bond payments for five years. And a special five percent tax on Colorado, “as the state best able to assist the needier states.”
Every directive targets the people who build things. Speed limits cripple the railroads. Production caps strangle Rearden Steel. The bond moratorium wipes out every investor who trusted Dagny. The Colorado tax is a direct hit on Ellis Wyatt.
Dagny screams at a passing stranger: “What are we going to do?”
The bum shrugs. “Who is John Galt?”
The Fire on the Mountain
One name fills Dagny’s mind: Ellis Wyatt. She remembers him in front of her desk: “If I go, I’ll make sure that I take all the rest of you along with me.”
She runs to a phone booth and dials Wyatt’s house. No answer. The phone rings and rings into nothing.
She boards Train Number 57 and rides through the darkness of Colorado. The John Galt Line clicks beneath her.
Then the train makes an unscheduled stop. People crowd the platform, all looking in the same direction.
In a break between mountains, lighting the sky, the hill of Wyatt Oil is a solid sheet of flame.
Ellis Wyatt has vanished. The only thing he left behind is a board nailed to a post at the foot of the burning hill. On it, in his handwriting:
“I am leaving it as I found it. Take over. It’s yours.”
And that is how Part I of Atlas Shrugged ends. With a man burning everything he built rather than let them take it from him. With a fire that will burn for years, because nobody left alive knows how to put it out.
My Take
This ending destroyed me the first time I read it.
Rand spent ten chapters building a world where the best people are systematically punished for being the best. Now the bill comes due. The talented leave. The thinkers vanish. The fire on the mountain is just the visible symbol of what’s already been happening in every lab, every factory, every office where a competent person looked around and thought: why am I still here?
I know people who left countries for exactly this reason. Not because they were starving. Because they were being punished for succeeding.
Part I is over. The world is on fire. The question is no longer “who is John Galt?” The question is: who is left?
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This is part of a chapter-by-chapter retelling of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (35th Anniversary Edition, ISBN: 978-1-101-13719-2). New posts daily.