Atlas Shrugged Part III, Chapter 10: In the Name of the Best Within Us - The End
This is the last chapter. After a thousand pages and change, after every bridge burned and every generator stopped, we get the ending. And it’s both exactly what you expect and somehow still hits hard.
The Rescue
Dagny walks up to the guard at the door of “Project F” and tells him she’s there on orders from Mr. Thompson. The guard is the perfect product of the system. He can’t decide. He literally says, “Who am I to choose?” He’s been trained to never think for himself, never take responsibility, never make a judgment call. Dagny counts to three and shoots him.
It’s cold. Rand writes it with clinical calm. The guard wanted to exist without the responsibility of consciousness. And she lets that sentence sit there on the page like a verdict.
Francisco, Rearden, and Ragnar Danneskjold are right behind her. They’ve already taken care of the other outside guards. They move through the building like a well-rehearsed team. Francisco handles the guards downstairs with his usual flair, giving his full name when asked: “Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d’Anconia.” Even in the middle of a commando raid, he’s got style.
Then Rearden goes upstairs alone. Eight guards are playing poker in the lab, surrounded by caged rats and guinea pigs. Rearden walks in with his hands in his pockets like he’s attending a board meeting. He tells the chief he’s here to take charge of the prisoner. The chief tries to call headquarters. The phone is dead. The wires are cut.
What follows is a scene that mirrors every encounter we’ve seen in the book between the people who know what they’re doing and the people who only know how to follow orders. The chief can’t think. He can’t choose. He can’t process a situation that doesn’t come with instructions from above. He panics and shoots Rearden in the shoulder.
Francisco appears in the doorway and disarms the chief with one shot. Danneskjold crashes through the window from a tree branch. The guards melt. One of them shoots the chief himself. It’s over in minutes.
They find Galt in the cellar, strapped down among the electric wires from the torture machine. When he sees them, he smiles and says: “We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?”
Dagny falls to her knees beside him, tears on her face but smiling. “No, we never had to.”
Francisco holds a flask of brandy to his lips. Galt asks for a cigarette, a dollar-sign cigarette, naturally. His hand shakes a little. Francisco’s hand shakes much more. Danneskjold, meanwhile, quietly and methodically destroys the torture machine into splinters. No drama. Just careful demolition.
The Flight Back
They fly out in Francisco’s hidden airplane. Danneskjold is at the controls. Behind them, half the male population of the valley is following in every plane they could find. Ellis Wyatt is flying Galt’s personal plane.
Danneskjold gets on the radio, cheerful as ever: “Yes, he’s unhurt, just shaken a little. Hank Rearden got a flesh wound, but he’s grinning at me right now. Losses? I think we lost our temper for a few minutes back there, but we’re recovering.”
Rearden and Galt exchange a moment that says everything about their relationship. Galt says, “Thank you, Hank.” Rearden quotes Galt’s own words back to him about not needing gratitude. Galt quotes Rearden’s answer back: “That is why I thank you.” Two men who understand each other completely, and the acknowledgment itself is the bond.
Danneskjold says the night was his last act of violence. His pirate ship will be converted into a passenger liner. He’s going to teach philosophy at a university. Rearden laughs and says he’d love to see how Danneskjold’s students manage to concentrate on the lecture.
Then they fly over New York.
The Lights Go Out
The city is in its death throes below them. Cars are jammed on bridges, sirens are screaming faintly up to the plane’s altitude. People are deserting their posts, trying to flee a city where all roads are cut off. And then, with the abruptness of a shudder, the lights of New York go out.
“Don’t look down!” Galt orders sharply.
Dagny lifts her eyes to his face. She remembers what Francisco once told her about Galt’s prophecy: that when the lights of New York went out, their job would be done. And now it has happened. The three of them, Galt, Francisco, Danneskjold, look at each other in silence.
“It’s the end,” Dagny says. “It’s the beginning,” Galt answers.
That exchange is basically the thesis of the entire book in six words.
When Dr. Akston reaches Galt on the radio, Galt responds like a student turning in his homework: “Of course I am all right, Professor. I had to be. A is A.”
Eddie Willers and the Comet
And then Rand does something that, honestly, I didn’t expect the first time I read the book.
She cuts to Eddie Willers. Alone. Stranded in the Arizona desert on a broken-down Taggart Comet. The engine died. Division Headquarters doesn’t answer the phone. Not because the line is dead, but because nobody is there anymore. Or nobody cares to pick up.
Eddie crawls through the engine, bleeding hands, sweat-soaked shirt, trying to fix what he doesn’t understand. He’s not an engineer. He never was. He’s a loyal, competent administrator who kept the railroad running through sheer determination and love. And now he’s alone with a dead machine in the dark.
A caravan of covered wagons appears out of the desert. Covered wagons. With horses. A barker offers the passengers a ride. The passengers and crew of the Taggart Comet, the greatest train in the country, abandon ship and climb into wagons. The barker calls the Comet “a dead caterpillar.”
Eddie refuses to leave. He stays on the engine, pulling levers, jerking the throttle, crying out in his mind: “Dagny, in the name of the best within us, I must now start this train!”
He can’t. He collapses across the rail at the foot of the engine, sobbing, with the letters TT above him and the headlight beam going off into nowhere.
This scene wrecked me. Eddie is the everyman of the book. He’s not a genius. He’s not a striker. He’s the one who stayed behind because staying was all he knew how to do. And the book doesn’t rescue him. It just leaves him there, in the desert, crying at the foot of a dead machine.
Growing up in a country where the old system collapsed and a lot of decent, hardworking people were simply left behind, I found Eddie’s scene the most honest thing in the entire novel. Not everyone gets to fly to the valley. Some people just love their work and their world too much to leave, and when the world falls apart, they fall apart with it.
The Valley Prepares
The final pages bring us back to the valley. Richard Halley plays his Fifth Concerto, a symphony of triumph. Midas Mulligan works on his investment plan: “New York, Cleveland, Chicago… New York, New York, New York.” Judge Narragansett edits the Constitution, adding one clause: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade.”
In Francisco’s cabin, Rearden sits by the fire and says: “John will design the new locomotives, and Dagny will run the first railroad between New York and Philadelphia. She will probably try to take the shirt off my back with the freight rates she’s going to charge, but I’ll be able to meet them.”
Francisco laughs. And that laughter carries everything: sunlight on open lawns, the sparkle of motors, the glow of steel in rising skyscrapers, the eyes of youth looking at the future without fear.
The Road Is Cleared
On the highest ledge of the mountain, Galt and Dagny stand together looking at the darkness beyond the valley walls. The continent is in ruins. Roofless homes, rusting tractors, lightless streets, abandoned rail. But far away, at the edge of the earth, Wyatt’s Torch is still burning, twisting in the wind, refusing to go out.
“The road is cleared,” says Galt. “We are going back to the world.”
He raises his hand and traces the sign of the dollar over the desolate earth.
THE END.
After 1,168 pages, that is how Ayn Rand ends it. With a hand gesture and a symbol. Whether you find that inspiring or absurd probably says more about you than about the book. But after spending months with these characters, I’ll admit: the image stuck with me. A man standing above a broken world, deciding it was time to rebuild.
That’s the whole thing. The whole book. The road is cleared.
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Next: Closing Thoughts
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.