Atlas Shrugged Part III, Chapter 5: Their Brothers' Keepers (Part 2) - The Last Competent People Leave
This second half of the chapter is where everything starts breaking in a way that can’t be patched. Not metaphorically. Literally. The infrastructure fails, the last capable people are either leaving or hiding, and Dagny finds something in the tunnels under her railroad that changes everything.
The Kid Who Woke Up
One of the quieter moments here is the young deputy director of distribution, the “Non-Absolute” kid, showing up at Rearden’s office and asking for a real job. He says he’s tired of being a “bedbug.” His words, not mine. He wants to quit his government-created position and actually work in steel, even if it means starting as a sweeper or scrap man.
Rearden almost teases him with his old collectivist slogans but stops when he sees the kid is serious. The boy has figured it out. He knows his role is to sit around and make it harder for productive people to produce. And he can’t stomach it anymore.
I found this small scene surprisingly moving. Growing up in an ex-Soviet country, I saw this exact type of person. The junior bureaucrat who gets a title and a salary for doing nothing useful, who watches real workers carry the load, and who one day just snaps and says: I’d rather dig ditches than be part of this. Not everyone in a broken system is broken by it. Some people wake up. The kid wakes up.
Rearden hires him. It’s a small act of defiance in a world where every hiring decision needs a pile of permits.
The Wayne-Falkland Dinner
Meanwhile, Dagny attends a dinner at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel. It’s a social event, but the real action is political. The looters and planners are there, circling, scheming. The atmosphere is heavy. These are people who sense things are falling apart but have no intention of changing course. They just want to tighten the controls.
Dagny leaves the hotel in her evening gown. She can’t find a cab. Taxis are rare now. She starts walking and catches her own reflection in a florist’s window: a woman in black satin and diamonds, hurrying through empty streets. For one moment, she sees beauty, and it hits her like a punch. Because the beauty doesn’t match the world anymore. The world has rotted around the things she values.
There’s a line here where she asks herself: “You who believed you must live for your happiness, what do you now have left of it?” That question sits heavy on the page. It’s the kind of question you ask at 3 AM when you’re tired and honest.
The Terminal Breaks Down
Then the signal system at Taggart Terminal fails. The interlocking control system, the automated brain that routes ninety trains per hour through a maze of switches and tracks, just dies. And there’s nobody left who can fix it.
Let that sink in. Nobody. The chief engineer is gone. The terminal manager is absent. The assistant manager’s biggest contribution was calling Dagny. The signal engineer keeps repeating “this has never happened before” like that’s useful information.
Dagny calls a competitor’s signal engineer in Chicago and offers to pay three thousand dollars for one day of his time. She says, out loud on the phone: “Not a single mind left on Taggart Transcontinental.” That sentence is the tombstone of a railroad empire.
But she doesn’t sit there and wait. She does something I found both brilliant and heartbreaking. She orders men with lanterns to stand at every signal post and operate the switches by hand. She’s going back to the 1800s. Manual signals. Written orders carried by runners. Men as lampposts.
When the signal engineer protests, she snaps: “Man is only muscles, isn’t he? You’ve advocated it long enough. Now you’re going to see the kind of tools your ideas have determined.”
As someone who’s worked in IT for over two decades, this scene resonates. I’ve watched systems degrade after every competent engineer left. The pattern is always the same. Things work fine on autopilot until one day they don’t. And then there’s nobody who understands the architecture, nobody who can debug the failure, nobody who even knows what questions to ask. You end up doing things by hand that machines were supposed to handle. You end up being the machine.
The Reunion Underground
Dagny stands on the iron stairs above the assembled workers and gives her orders. She’s in her evening gown, diamond brooch flashing, standing above track laborers in greasy overalls. And then she sees him.
John Galt. Standing among the workers. Copper-gold hair. Green eyes. Watching her with a look she recognizes immediately.
He’s been a track laborer at Taggart Terminal for twelve years. Twelve years. Since the day he walked out of the Twentieth Century Motor Company. The inventor of the motor that could have changed the world has been shoveling gravel under Dagny’s feet this entire time. While she searched the whole country for the mind behind that motor, he was right below her office.
She finishes giving her orders somehow. She doesn’t remember her own words. Then she slips away from the crowd, into the abandoned tunnels. She doesn’t look back. She just walks. And she thinks, with a certainty she can’t explain: you will follow me.
He does.
What follows is the most emotionally raw scene in the entire novel. Galt tells her he watched her for ten years from the dark platforms below, catching glimpses of her legs hurrying down the ramp when she boarded trains. He says he could have sculpted her legs from memory, not with his eyes but with the palms of his hands. He tells her about the night he almost broke his oath, when he saw her slumped across her desk, carrying the weight of a dying railroad alone.
He tells her about the night he learned about her and Rearden. How he went to stand in the rain outside a hotel, among vagrants, just to see Rearden once. To see the man who had what should have been his. And for one moment he saw the world the way it should have been, a world that matched Rearden’s stature. Then the moment passed, and he accepted reality again.
“It’s not that I don’t suffer,” he tells her. “It’s that I know the unimportance of suffering.”
The Price of the Moment
After their reunion in the tunnels, Galt is honest with her. He broke his own rules tonight. He gave in to something he’d denied himself for a decade. And there will be a price.
He tells her she is the danger. Not his enemies. Them. Because she is the only one who can lead the looters to find him. Not on purpose. But as long as she stays in their world and fights their fight, she’s the thread they could follow.
And then he sets the terms. He’ll stay at his post. She must not seek him out. She must not come to his home. When she’s finally ready to quit, she should chalk a dollar sign on the pedestal of Nat Taggart’s statue. Then go home. He’ll come for her in twenty-four hours.
When she asks where he’s going, he says: “To be a lamppost and stand holding a lantern till dawn. Which is the only work your world relegates me to and the only work it’s going to get.”
The chapter ends with Dagny sitting at the base of Nat Taggart’s statue in the empty terminal, her cape dusty, her gown ruined, too spent to cry. She keeps seeing a figure holding a light. Sometimes it looks like the Statue of Liberty. Sometimes it looks like a man with sun-streaked hair holding a red lantern.
A bum sitting on the steps tells her: “Don’t take it to heart, lady. Nothing’s to be done about it. What’s the use? Who is John Galt?”
And for the first time in the book, Dagny knows the answer.
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Next: Part III, Chapter 6: The Concerto of Deliverance (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.