Atlas Shrugged Part II, Chapter 10: The Sign of the Dollar (Part 2) - Dagny's Choice
Part II ends with one of the most intense sequences in the entire novel. Dagny and Owen Kellogg are walking along the tracks in the dead of night, the Comet abandoned behind them, and what starts as a simple hike to a phone turns into something much bigger. This is where the dollar sign cigarettes finally get their explanation. And this is where Dagny makes a choice that sends her flying, literally, into Part III.
Walking Into Nothing
After Dagny leaves Jeff Allen in charge of the frozen train, she and Kellogg start walking along the Kansas Western tracks looking for a working phone. The first one they find is dead. The instrument is busted, even though the line has current. Nobody maintained it. Nobody cared enough to check. So they keep going. Five more miles.
What Rand does with this walk is remarkable. She turns a simple physical task into a philosophical experience. The prairie is empty, the moonlight makes everything look like it barely exists, and Dagny starts thinking about what holds a railroad together. It is not the steel. It is not the wire. It is the minds of the people who understood that their jobs mattered, that a working phone was not optional, that existence is real and must be dealt with. When those minds vanish, a two-thousand-ton train ends up at the mercy of someone’s legs.
I grew up in a country where infrastructure decayed exactly like this. Not from bombs or natural disasters, but from people who stopped caring. Phone lines that nobody fixed. Roads that nobody maintained. Equipment that rusted because the guy in charge figured it was someone else’s problem. Rand’s description of that walk hit differently for me than it probably does for most readers. That slow evaporation of competence is not fiction. I’ve seen it.
The Dollar Sign
Then comes the scene that gives the chapter its name. Walking in silence, Kellogg absently offers Dagny a cigarette. She reaches for one and stops. The package is plain white with a single gold marking: the sign of the dollar.
She grabs the whole package out of his hand. These are the same mysterious cigarettes she got from Hugh Akston at the roadside diner, the ones that aren’t made anywhere on earth. Kellogg knows she recognizes them, and he’s amused.
He won’t tell her where they come from. But he tells her what the dollar sign means. It stands, he says, for achievement, success, ability, the creative power of the human mind. And it is used as a brand of shame. Stamped on every cartoon villain. Treated as proof of corruption. The United States, he says, is the only country in history that used its own monogram as a symbol of depravity.
“If this is evil,” Kellogg tells her, “then we accept it and choose to be damned by that world. We choose to wear the sign of the dollar on our foreheads, proudly, as our badge of nobility.”
This is peak Rand. You can agree with it or argue with it, but you cannot deny the rhetorical power. She takes a symbol that everyone uses casually as a shorthand for greed and says: actually, this stands for the best things humanity ever produced. And the fact that you use it as an insult tells you everything about what’s gone wrong.
Kellogg gives her the cigarettes as a gift. They cost five cents. In gold. No amount of government paper can buy them. The scene ends with the two of them walking through the fog, each with a lit cigarette, two small fires moving through nothing.
The Dispatcher
They find a working phone at the next milepost. And then comes one of the most frustrating and funny scenes in the book.
Dagny calls the night dispatcher at Bradshaw and tells him the Comet is stranded, crew gone, passengers abandoned. His response: “Well, what do you want me to do about it?”
He is not being hostile. He genuinely does not know what to do. The rules don’t cover this situation. Nobody told him. The chief dispatcher is on vacation. The superintendent is out of town. He is in charge, technically, but the concept of taking initiative terrifies him. What if he gets in trouble? What if it’s not his responsibility?
This scene is both comedy and horror. Dagny asks for a crew. He says the rules don’t mention that. She asks him to think. He says it’s not his job to think. She finally pulls rank, threatens his job, and he folds. But then he comes back with another problem: they have no engine. One is gone with the superintendent, one is in the shop, the switch engine jumped a rail. The wrecker’s engine is up north.
So Dagny tells him to send the crew on a track motor car. Problem solved, but only because she solved it. Without her, that train sits on the prairie until the day shift dispatcher shows up in the morning. Maybe.
I’ve had conversations exactly like this. With support staff, with bureaucrats, with people whose entire operating system is “the rules don’t say.” The rules never say. That is the whole point. Rules are a framework for routine situations. When something breaks, you need a person who can think. And the world Rand is describing is one where thinking has been systematically punished until nobody dares to try.
The Airfield and the Choice
But here is where the chapter takes its turn. While dealing with the dispatcher, Dagny notices a beacon nearby. It turns out to be an emergency landing field. And sitting there, forgotten by a dissolving airline company, is a brand-new Dwight Sanders monoplane.
Dagny’s mind has been pulling her west the whole time. Quentin Daniels is working on her motor, the motor she found in the ruins of the Twentieth Century factory. She has been terrified that the mysterious destroyer will get to Daniels before she does. And now there is a plane.
Kellogg sees it immediately. He tells Dagny to go. He will stay, handle the crew, deliver the Comet to Laurel. She hesitates. He says: “I just want you to see what it’s like to do something you want, for once.”
That line is a knife. Dagny has spent the entire book doing things she has to do, managing crises, covering for incompetent people, holding together a railroad that the world keeps trying to destroy. And here is someone saying: just this once, go where your heart is pulling you.
She takes the plane. Before she leaves, she and Kellogg share one of the dollar-sign cigarettes as a farewell. It is their handshake.
The Chase
Dagny flies through the night, over the Rockies, past Wyatt’s Torch still burning on its mountain. She lands in Afton, Utah, at the airfield near the institute where Daniels works.
She’s too late. Daniels left. A man flew in for him two or three hours ago. She can see the plane’s taillights disappearing into the eastern sky.
And Dagny loses it. She is back in the air in seconds, chasing that plane, repeating: “Oh no, they don’t. They don’t. They don’t.”
This is not a rational decision. She knows it. She is exhausted, low on fuel, chasing a stranger over the most dangerous stretch of the Colorado Rockies, in a plane she’s never flown before. But the motor, the last thing she was holding onto, is being carried away by the destroyer. She will not let him win.
The sunrise comes as she chases him. The stranger’s plane is hit by the first sunray and flashes white. Then something impossible happens. The plane ahead starts spiraling down into a valley surrounded by granite walls. No landing is possible. There is no flat ground. But the plane descends smoothly, deliberately, and vanishes behind the ridges.
Dagny flies over the valley. There is no plane. There is no wreck. The valley floor is just rocks and twisted pines. It makes no sense.
She drops lower, circling. The altimeter says she is descending, but the ground never gets closer. Something is wrong with the physics. She passes through a flash of blinding light, soundless and sourceless. Her engine dies.
And below her, where rocks should be, she sees green grass.
She fights the dead plane into a belly landing. In the final seconds, as the earth spins toward her, she feels “the fiercely proud certainty that she would survive.” And the last words of Part II come out of her mouth as a battle cry and a joke at the same time:
“Oh hell! Who is John Galt?”
My Take
This ending is Rand at her most cinematic. The walk, the cigarettes, the dispatcher, the plane chase, the impossible valley. She is building a mystery that has been accumulating for 600 pages and she drops the final hint by literally dropping her main character out of the sky.
What gets me is the choice. Dagny could have stayed with the Comet. She could have done the responsible thing. Instead, she went after the motor, after the thing that mattered to her. And Kellogg, who is one of the strikers, helped her do it. He did not recruit her. He did not argue philosophy. He just said: go do what you actually want.
That is Part II done. Dagny is falling into a hidden valley. The destroyer has a face she has not yet seen. And the question that started as a hopeless catchphrase is about to become a very literal answer.
Part III is called “A Is A.” We are about to meet John Galt.
Previous: Part II, Chapter 10: The Sign of the Dollar (Part 1)
Next: Part III, Chapter 1: Atlantis (Part 1)
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.