Rearden. Don't sacrifice them. Examine their cause. There is a limit to how much you should have to bear."

"How did you know this about me?"

"I made the same mistake, once. But not for long."

"I wish—" Rearden began and stopped abruptly.

Francisco smiled. "Afraid to wish, Mr. Rearden?"

"I wish I could permit myself to like you as much as I do."

"I'd give—" Francisco stopped; inexplicably, Rearden saw the look of an emotion which he could not define, yet felt certain to be pain; he saw Francisco's first moment of hesitation. "Mr. Rearden, do you own any d'Anconia Copper stock?"

Rearden looked at him, bewildered. "No."

"Some day, you'll know what treason I'm committing right now, but . . . Don't ever buy any d'Anconia Copper stock. Don't ever deal with d'Anconia Copper in any way."

"Why?"

"When you'll learn the full reason, you'll know whether there's ever been anything—or anyone—that meant a damn to me, and . . . and how much he did mean."

Rearden frowned: he had remembered something. "I wouldn't deal with your company. Didn't you call them the men of the double standard? Aren't you one of the looters who is growing rich right now by means of directives?"

Inexplicably, the words did not hit Francisco as an insult, but cleared his face back into his look of assurance. "Did you think that it was I who wheedled those directives out of the robber-planners?"

"If not, then who did it?"

"My hitchhikers."

"Without your consent?"

"Without my knowledge."

"I'd hate to admit how much I want to believe you—but there's no way for you to prove it now."

"No? I'll prove it to you within the next fifteen minutes."

"How? The fact remains that you've profited the most from those directives."

"That's true. I've profited more than Mr. Mouch and his gang could ever imagine. After my years of work, they gave me just the chance I needed."

"Are you boasting?"

"You bet I am!” Rearden saw incredulously that Francisco's eyes had a hard, bright look, the look, not of a party hound, but of a man of action. "Mr. Rearden, do you know where most of those new aristocrats keep their hidden money? Do you know where most of the fair share vultures have invested their profits from Rearden Metal?"

"No, but—"

"In d'Anconia Copper stock. Safely out of the way and out of the country. D'Anconia Copper—an old, invulnerable company, so rich that it would last for three more generations of looting. A company managed by a decadent playboy who doesn't give a damn, who'll let them use his property in any way they please and just continue to make money for them—automatically, as did his ancestors. Wasn't that a perfect setup for the looters, Mr. Rearden? Only—what one single point did they miss?"

Rearden was staring at him. "What are you driving at?"

Francisco laughed suddenly. "It's too bad about those profiteers on Rearden Metal. You wouldn't want them to lose the money you made for them, would you, Mr. Rearden? But accidents do happen in the world—you know what they say, man is only a helpless plaything at the mercy of nature's disasters. For instance, there was a fire at the d'Anconia ore docks in Valparaiso tomorrow morning, a fire that razed them to the ground along with half of the port structures. What time is it, Mr. Rearden? Oh, did I mix my tenses? Tomorrow afternoon, there will be a rock slide in the d'Anconia mines at Orano—no lives lost, no casualties, except the mines themselves. It will be found that the mines are done for, because they had been worked in the wrong places for months—what can you expect from a playboy's management? The great deposits of copper will be buried under tons of mountain where a Sebastian d'Anconia would not be able to reclaim them in less than three years, and a People's State will never reclaim them at all. When the stockholders begin to look into things, they will find that the mines at Campos, at San Felix, at Las Heras have been worked in exactly the same manner and have been running at a loss for over a year, only the playboy juggled the books and kept it out of the newspapers.

Shall I tell you what they will discover about the management of the d'Anconia foundries? Or of the d'Anconia ore fleet? But all these discoveries won't do the stockholders any good anyway, because the stock of d'Anconia Copper will have crashed tomorrow morning, crashed like an electric bulb against concrete, crashed like an express elevator, spattering pieces of hitchhikers all over the gutters!"

The triumphant rise of Francisco's voice merged with a matching sound: Rearden burst out laughing.

Rearden did not know how long that moment lasted or what he had felt, it had been like a blow hurling him into another kind of consciousness, then a second blow returning him to his own—all that was left, as at the awakening from a narcotic, was the feeling that he had known some immense kind of freedom, never to be matched in reality. This was like the Wyatt fire again, he thought, this was his secret danger.

He found himself backing away from Francisco d'Anconia, Francisco stood watching him intently, and looked as if he had been watching him all through that unknown length of time.

"There are no evil thoughts, Mr. Rearden," Francisco said softly, "except one: the refusal to think."

"No," said Rearden; it was almost a whisper, he had to keep his voice down, he was afraid that he would hear himself scream it, "no . . . if this is the key to you, no, don't expect me to cheer you . . . you didn't have the strength to fight them . . . you chose the easiest, most vicious way . . . deliberate destruction . . . the destruction of an achievement you hadn't produced and couldn't match. . . ."

"That's not what you'll read in the newspapers tomorrow. There won't be any evidence of deliberate destruction. Everything happened in the normal, explicable, justifiable course of plain incompetence. Incompetence isn't supposed to be punished nowadays, is it? The boys in Buenos Aires and the boys in Santiago will probably want to hand me a subsidy, by way of consolation and reward. There's still a great part of the d'Anconia Copper Company left, though a great part of it is gone for good. Nobody will say that I've done it intentionally. You may think what you wish."

"I think you're the guiltiest man in this room," said Rearden quietly, wearily; even the fire of his anger was gone; he felt nothing but the emptiness left by the death of a great hope. "I think you're worse than anything I had supposed. . . ."

Francisco looked at him with a strange half-smile of serenity, the serenity of a victory over pain, and did not answer.

It was their silence that let them hear the voices of the two men who stood a few steps away, and they turned to look at the speakers.

The stocky, elderly man was obviously a businessman of the conscientious, unspectacular kind. His formal dress suit was of good quality, but of a cut fashionable twenty years before, with the faintest tinge of green at the seams; he had had few occasions to wear it. His shirt studs were ostentatiously too large, but it was the pathetic ostentation of an heirloom, intricate pieces of old-fashioned workmanship, that had probably come to him through four generations, like his business.

His face had the expression which, these days, was the mark of an honest man: an expression of bewilderment. He was looking at his companion, trying hard—conscientiously, helplessly, hopelessly—to understand.

His companion was younger and shorter, a small man with lumpy flesh, with a chest thrust forward and the thin points of a mustache thrust up. He was saying, in a tone of patronizing boredom, "Well, I don't know. All of you are crying about rising costs, it seems to be the stock complaint nowadays, it's the usual whine of people whose profits are squeezed a little. I don't know, we'll have to see, we'll have to decide whether we'll permit you to make any profits or not."