Atlas Shrugged Part II, Chapter 9: The Face Without Pain or Fear or Guilt - Chasing the Destroyer
This is the final chapter of Part II. And it hits like a freight train. Three separate emotional collisions happen in this chapter, and by the end Rand has lit every fuse she’s been laying for hundreds of pages.
Francisco Makes His Case
Dagny is back at her apartment, back at Taggart Transcontinental, back in the fight. But there’s no joy in it. She stands at her window looking out at Manhattan disappearing into fog, and she thinks of Atlantis, the lost city. She talks silently to an idealized man she’s never met, the person she always believed was out there somewhere, the kind of person who makes the world worth building for. It’s a prayer to a god she can’t name.
Then Francisco shows up.
He’s not here to play games. No playboy mask, no clever deflections. He’s direct and serious. He tells Dagny he wants to stop her from going back to the railroad. She tells him there’s no stopping her. She can’t abandon the work. She can’t accept the world’s slide into helplessness. As long as there’s a railroad left to run, she’ll run it.
Francisco listens. And then he says something that stopped me cold. He tells her: “You will stop on the day when you’ll discover that your work has been placed in the service, not of that man’s life, but of his destruction.”
He’s saying her work is being used against the very people it’s meant to serve. And Dagny can’t see it yet. But Francisco can. He’s not cruel about it. He’s sad. He tells her that they are enemies now. That while she fights to save Taggart Transcontinental, he will be working to destroy it. And he means it.
She asks if he’s part of the mysterious group that’s been pulling the world’s best minds away. He doesn’t deny it. He says the road they’re all on leads “to Atlantis.” And then he leaves.
The Triangle Explodes
This is where things get ugly. Because Hank Rearden walks in.
He has a key to Dagny’s apartment. He finds Francisco there. And whatever composure these three people had been maintaining for months falls apart in about sixty seconds.
Rearden goes after Francisco. Not physically, at first. Verbally. He assumes the worst. He demands answers. Francisco tries to stay dignified, tries to leave, tries to keep things from getting worse. But Rearden is beyond reason. The man he admired more than anyone, the man who once made him believe in human greatness, is standing in his lover’s apartment.
And then Rearden makes a mistake. He mentions Francisco’s “oath by the only woman you ever loved.” And everyone in the room understands at the same moment what that means. Rearden asks the question directly: “Is this the woman you love?” Francisco, looking at Dagny, says, “Yes.”
Rearden slaps him.
What follows is one of Rand’s best-written scenes. Francisco doesn’t hit back. He grabs the edge of a table so hard that it seems like either the wood or his bones will break. The effort of restraint is almost unbearable to read. He stands there, blood on his lip, and his expression is not anger or humiliation. It’s something like a dedication, an offering. He absorbs it. And then, quietly, he says: “Within the extent of your knowledge, you are right.” And he leaves.
The moment he’s gone, Rearden knows he would give his life to undo what he just did.
And Dagny, pushed past the limit of what she can watch in silence, throws the truth at Rearden like a weapon: Francisco was her first lover. Years before Rearden. The blow lands harder than any slap.
I grew up around men who believed that showing vulnerability was weakness, that emotion was something you compressed until it became invisible. This scene understands that pressure. Every character here is in agony, and every single one of them is trying to bear it without breaking. The tragedy is that they’re hurting each other precisely because they value each other.
The Letter and the Race
But Rand doesn’t let anyone rest. A letter arrives from Quentin Daniels, the physicist Dagny has secretly been funding to rebuild a revolutionary motor. He’s quitting. Not because he can’t do the work. Because he won’t. He refuses to produce something great in a world that would treat him as a criminal for creating it. He’d rather everyone starve, himself included, than hand over one more thing to the looters.
Dagny panics. She calls Utah. No answer. She’s sure the “destroyer,” whoever is pulling talented people out of the world, has already gotten to Daniels.
Then Daniels picks up the phone. He’s alive. He’s still there. He was in the back lot, growing carrots.
She makes him promise to wait for her. She’s leaving tonight, on the Comet, right now. She has to get to him before whoever else is coming does. Rearden understands. He says he’ll meet her in Colorado in a week.
And Dagny is gone, racing across the country to save the last great mind she can still reach.
The Face Without Pain or Fear or Guilt
The chapter ends with Eddie Willers alone in the Terminal cafeteria, sitting across from the anonymous worker he always talks to. Eddie is shattered. He discovered Dagny’s secret relationship with Rearden earlier that evening, and it broke something in him he didn’t even know existed.
He pours everything out. And then, at the very end, he says something that matters: the worker’s face looks like it has never known pain or fear or guilt. That’s the chapter title. That’s the face we’ve been looking for this whole book.
And then Eddie, desperate and hurting and not thinking about what he’s saying, tells this anonymous worker everything: that Dagny is leaving tonight, on the Comet, heading to Utah, to see Quentin Daniels, the physicist working on the motor.
The worker stands up and leaves without a word.
Think about what just happened. Eddie just handed the destroyer a complete roadmap. Destination, timeline, target. And the person he told is the one person in the world who should never have had that information.
The chapter title makes complete sense now. The face without pain or fear or guilt belongs to a man who has been hiding in plain sight, in the basement cafeteria of Taggart Terminal, the whole time. A man whose name is the most famous question in the book. A man Eddie has been confiding in for hundreds of pages without ever realizing who he was talking to.
Part II ends here. The fuse is lit. Dagny is heading west, not knowing that the destroyer is about to move, because a loyal friend just told him everything.
And that’s how Rand closes the second act. Not with a speech. With a betrayal so gentle and so devastating that the person committing it doesn’t even know he’s done it.
Previous: Part II, Chapter 8: By Our Love
Next: Part II, Chapter 10: The Sign of the Dollar (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.