Atlas Shrugged Part III, Chapter 6: The Concerto of Deliverance (Part 1) - Galt Steps Into the Light

This chapter is where Hank Rearden finally breaks free. And it starts, as these things always do in Rand’s world, with the system tightening the screws one more time.

The Trap Closes on Rearden

The government pulls every trick in its playbook. First, a staged union demand for higher wages at Rearden Steel. The workers who filed the complaint aren’t even Rearden’s real workers. They’re newcomers the Unification Board slipped into the mills. Rearden learns about the demand from the newspapers because, naturally, nobody bothered to tell him. The Board rejects the demand, and then the newspapers start painting Rearden as the villain, running stories about starving workers next to articles about steel tycoon champagne parties. The tycoon in question was actually Orren Boyle, but who needs names when you’ve got a narrative to push?

Then come the staged incidents. New workers smash machinery, attack a foreman, nearly kill people with a spilled ladle of molten metal. The newspapers express concern about “inflammatory situations.”

And then the real hit. An attachment order seizes all of Rearden’s property. Bank accounts, safety deposit boxes, everything. The legal justification? A tax deficiency from three years ago. A trial that never happened. A debt that never existed.

Growing up in a post-Soviet country, I can tell you this scene is not exaggeration. This is how it works. The paperwork is always perfect. The procedure is always followed. And the reality underneath is always a lie. I’ve seen businesses dismantled by bureaucrats who had every legal right to do what they were doing, because the law was written to give them that right. Rand captures this pattern with surgical precision. The attachment order is formally correct while being completely fabricated, and that is the point.

The Family Ambush

Rearden’s mother calls, begging him to visit before his evening conference in New York. When he arrives, he finds not just his mother and brother Philip, but his ex-wife Lillian too.

What follows is one of the most painful family scenes in the book. His mother asks for forgiveness. Not real forgiveness. Not the kind where people change their behavior. The kind where you say “I forgive you” and then keep letting them do what they’ve always done. She wants his feelings, not his thoughts. She wants mercy without justice.

Rearden asks the question they cannot answer: “What would my forgiveness mean?” She says it would make them feel better. He asks if it would change the past. She says no, but it would make them feel better knowing he forgave it.

This is a loop I recognize. The family guilt machine. You hurt someone for years, then you ask them to forgive you, and the forgiveness itself becomes another way to extract something from them. The victim has to do the emotional labor of absolving you. And if they refuse, they’re the monster.

But the real purpose of the visit leaks out. Philip slips up and reveals they know about the attachment order and the conference. They’re afraid Rearden will disappear like the other industrialists. If he vanishes, Directive 10-289 says his family gets nothing. No heirs. They didn’t call him out of love. They called him to stop him from leaving.

Lillian, having lost every other weapon, tries one final shot. She tells Rearden she slept with Jim Taggart. She screams it at him. She wants it to destroy him. And Rearden just looks at her like a stranger approached him on the street with an unwanted confession. The total indifference in his response breaks her more than any anger could have.

The Steel Unification Plan

Rearden drives to New York for the conference at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel. Inside, he finds Wesley Mouch, Eugene Lawson, James Taggart, Dr. Ferris, and Tinky Holloway. They present the Steel Unification Plan: all steel companies pool their earnings, and profits get distributed based on the number of furnaces owned, not tons produced.

Rearden does the math for them, right there. Orren Boyle has 60 furnaces producing 300 tons each. Rearden has 20 furnaces producing 750 tons each. Under the plan, Rearden produces 15,000 tons daily but gets paid for 6,750. Boyle produces 12,000 tons but gets paid for 20,250.

“How long do you expect me to last?” he asks.

Their answers are all variations of “you’ll manage.” Dr. Ferris says it plainly: “You can’t help it. It’s in your blood.” They’re counting on the fact that a productive person will keep producing even while being drained to death. Because that’s what productive people do.

And then James Taggart blurts out the line that unlocks everything: “Oh, you’ll do something!”

That sentence hits Rearden like a physical blow. It’s the thing Francisco tried to tell him years ago. The looters aren’t stupid. They’re not irrational. They’re perfectly rational within their own framework. Their framework simply assumes that someone like Rearden will always appear to clean up the mess. He’ll do something. He’ll figure it out. He always has.

And Rearden realizes he’s been proving them right. Every time he obeyed a directive, paid an extortion, accepted an unjust law, he told them that reality was negotiable. He was the one who made their irrational world possible.

The Riot, the Wet Nurse, and the Reveal

Rearden drives back to find his mills under attack. A mob is storming the main gate. The whole thing is staged by Washington to justify seizing control.

At the edge of a ravine, he finds the Wet Nurse, the young government observer who’d been assigned to his mills. The kid refused to sign passes that would have let the hired goons inside. They shot him for it. He crawled up from a slag heap, bleeding out, to tell Rearden the truth about the setup.

This is, honestly, one of the hardest scenes in the book. The kid, Tony, who spent the whole novel spouting the empty phrases of his college education about conditioned chemicals and social constructs, discovers in his final hour that values are real. That his life matters. He says: “I’d like to live, Mr. Rearden. God, how I’d like to.”

Rearden carries him up the ravine. The boy dies in his arms. And Rearden’s rage is directed not at the thug who pulled the trigger, but at the teachers who sent a kid into the world armed with nothing but meaningless phrases.

After the riot is put down, Rearden wakes in his office to learn he was saved by a furnace foreman named Frank Adams. A foreman who organized the defense, armed the workers, and picked off attackers from a rooftop with impossible accuracy.

The foreman walks in. It’s Francisco d’Anconia.

He’s been working in Rearden’s mills for two months. As a bodyguard. Waiting. Francisco tells Rearden there’s nothing to forgive between them. Rearden calls him by his first name. Francisco calls him Hank.

The glow of the furnaces sweeps across the office walls. And Hank Rearden is ready to hear the truth.

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Next: Part III, Chapter 6: The Concerto of Deliverance (Part 2)

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.