Atlas Shrugged Part III, Chapter 6: The Concerto of Deliverance (Part 2) - The Radio Address

This second half of the chapter is one of the most intense stretches in the entire novel. Rearden walks into a room full of bureaucrats. He walks out a different man. And between those two moments, a kid dies in his arms. If Rand wanted to show what happens when the system finally runs out of people to exploit, this is it.

“You’ll Do Something!”

So the government officials summon Rearden to discuss the Steel Unification Plan. It’s basically a scheme to pool all steel output and redistribute it. Sounds fair on paper, right? Except when you do the math, Rearden’s mills produce 750 tons per furnace per day. Orren Boyle’s produce garbage. Average them together, and Rearden gets paid for less than half his actual output while Boyle gets paid for almost double his.

Rearden lays it out coldly. “How long do you expect me to last under your Plan?”

They don’t have an answer. Lawson shouts about duty and sacrifice. Holloway says the country can’t afford to let Boyle go bankrupt. Mouch says they can’t theorize about the future. Rearden offers a real solution: let Boyle go broke, let him buy the plant, and it’ll produce a thousand tons a day from every furnace. “That would be monopoly!” they gasp. Let his superintendent buy it, then. “That would be letting the strong have an advantage over the weak!”

So Rearden says the quiet part out loud: “All you want is production without men who’re able to produce, isn’t it?”

Growing up in a post-Soviet country, I’ve heard versions of this conversation in real life. Not about steel, obviously. But the same logic. The factory that works gets punished. The factory that doesn’t work gets propped up. And when you ask “but what happens when the good factory can’t carry the bad one anymore?” you get the same answer: uncomfortable silence.

The moment that breaks Rearden is when James Taggart blurts out: “Oh, you’ll do something!” And it hits Rearden like a steel door slamming open. That’s it. That’s the whole engine of the system. Not ideology, not evil genius planning. Just the faith that productive people will keep producing no matter what you do to them. You can tax them, regulate them, steal from them, insult them. They’ll still produce. Because it’s “in their blood,” as Dr. Ferris puts it.

And Rearden realizes he’s been enabling this the whole time. Every directive he obeyed, every extortion he accepted, he gave them proof that reality can be cheated. He trained them to believe that wishing is enough.

He gets up. He walks out. They’re screaming behind him. “You can’t go! Not yet!” But he’s already gone.

The Wet Nurse

This is the scene that wrecked me.

Rearden drives back to his mills. He sees flames. Gunfire. A mob is storming the main gate. It’s not his workers. It’s a staged riot, organized from Washington, designed to justify a government takeover of his mills.

He swerves onto a side road, and that’s when his headlights catch something in a ravine. A human hand, waving.

It’s Tony, the Wet Nurse. The young bureaucrat assigned to monitor Rearden’s mills, the one who used to quote textbook slogans about moral relativism. They shot him because he refused to sign passes that would let government goons infiltrate the plant. He refused to help them frame Rearden. For that, they put a bullet in his chest and dumped him on a slag heap.

The kid crawled up from the bottom of that heap to reach the road. Shot, bleeding, dying. He crawled because he had to tell someone the truth.

He tells Rearden everything. The riot is fake. The Steel Unification Plan is the real goal. Theater to justify seizing the mills.

And then Tony says something that guts you. He says: “I’d like to live, Mr. Rearden. God, how I’d like to. Not because I’m dying, but because I’ve just discovered tonight what it means, really to be alive.” He found it in the moment he told the bastards to go to hell. In the moment he chose to act on his own judgment instead of floating along.

Rearden picks him up and starts carrying him up the slope. Tony cries silently. Rearden kisses his forehead. The kid manages one last flicker of his old grin: “Who’s the Wet Nurse now?”

Then he says, “Mr. Rearden, I liked you very much.”

And he dies.

I’ve read a lot of death scenes in fiction. This one stays with you. Because a kid who spent his whole life being taught that nothing matters finally discovered that everything does. And he discovered it just in time to lose it.

Rearden carries him into the mill hospital like a funeral procession. Then walks toward the fighting.

The Furnace Foreman

Rearden gets clubbed from behind by thugs near the gate. Someone grabs him, breaks his fall, and blows the attackers away with two gunshots. A furnace foreman named “Frank Adams” who’d been working at the mills for two months.

Rearden wakes up in his office, bandaged. The superintendent can’t stop praising this mysterious foreman. Best man he ever had. Organized the entire defense. Armed the workers when the police conveniently failed to show up. Stood on a roof picking off attackers with casual precision.

Rearden asks to see him. The door opens.

It’s Francisco d’Anconia.

Standing there in scorched overalls and a bloodstained shirt, looking like he’s wearing a cape in the wind. The man Rearden had slapped. The man he’d called a traitor. Working undercover as his bodyguard for two months, ever since blowing up the d’Anconia copper mines.

And Rearden doesn’t need to say anything about forgiveness. Francisco already knows. “You’ve been torturing yourself for months, wondering what words you’d use to ask my forgiveness. But now you see that it isn’t necessary.”

Rearden tells him: “You kept your oath. You were my friend.”

Francisco once told Rearden at Taggart’s wedding that he was pursuing his greatest conquest. It was Rearden he meant. Not money, not copper, not power. Getting Rearden to see.

The chapter ends with the glow of molten steel sweeping across the office walls, “as if in salute and farewell.” Rearden Steel, as Rearden’s life work, has just been set free. He’ll leave it behind. Not as betrayal, but as the last honest thing he can do.

And Francisco is finally ready to tell him everything. About the strike. About Galt. About the world that’s coming.

The stage is set for the most famous speech in fiction.

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Next: Part III, Chapter 7: This Is John Galt Speaking (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.