"Why didn't you come to my office?"

"You don't want me in your office."

"I don't want you here, either."

"But I'm only . . . I'm only trying to be considerate and not to take your time when you're so busy and . . . you are very busy, aren't you?"

"And?"

"And . . . well, I just wanted to catch you in a spare moment . . . to talk to you."

"About what?"

"I . . . Well, I need a job."

He said it belligerently and drew back a little. Rearden stood looking at him blankly.

"Henry, I want a job. I mean, here, at the mills. I want you to give me something to do. I need a job, I need to earn my living.

I'm tired of alms." He was groping for something to say, his voice both offended and pleading, as if the necessity to justify the plea were an unfair imposition upon him. "I want a livelihood of my own, I'm not asking you for charity, I'm asking you to give me a chance!"

"This is a factory, Philip, not a gambling joint,"

"Uh?"

"We don't take chances or give them."

"I’m asking you to give me a job!"

"Why should I?"

"Because I need it!"

Rearden pointed to the red spurts of flame shooting from the black shape of a furnace, shooting safely into space four hundred feet of steel-clay-and-steam-embodied thought above them. "I needed that furnace, Philip. "It wasn't my need that gave it to me."

Philip's face assumed a look of not having heard. "You're not officially supposed to hire anybody, bat that's just a technicality, if you'll put me on, my friends will okay it without any trouble and—" Something about Rearden's eyes made him stop abruptly, then ask in an angrily impatient voice, "Well, what's the matter? What have I said that's wrong?"

"What you haven't said."

"I beg your pardon?"

"What you're squirming to leave unmentioned."

"What?"

"That you'd be of no use to me whatever."

"Is that what you—" Philip started with automatic righteousness, but stopped and did not finish.

"Yes," said Rearden, smiling, "that's what I think of first."

Philip's eyes oozed away; when he spoke, his voice sounded as if it were darting about at random, picking stray sentences: "Everybody is entitled to a livelihood . . . How am I going to get it, if nobody gives me my chance?"

"How did I get mine?"

"I wasn't born owning a steel plant."

"Was I?"

"I can do anything you can—if you'll teach me."

"Who taught me?"

"Why do you keep saying that? I'm not talking about you!"

"I am."

In a moment, Philip muttered, "What do you have to worry about?

It's not your livelihood that's in question!"

Rearden pointed to the figures of men in the steaming rays of the furnace. "Can you do what they're doing?"

"I don't see what you're—"

"What will happen if I put you there and you ruin a heat of steel for me?"

"What's more important, that your damn steel gets poured or that I eat?"

"How do you propose to eat if the steel doesn't get poured?"

Philip's face assumed a look of reproach. "I'm not in a position to argue with you right now, since you hold the upper hand."

"Then don't argue."

"Uh?"

"Keep your mouth shut and get out of here."

"But I meant—" He stopped.

Rearden chuckled. "You meant that it's I who should keep my mouth shut, because I hold the upper hand, and should give in to you, because you hold no hand at all?"

"That's a peculiarly crude way of stating a moral principle."

"But that's what your moral principle amounts to, doesn't it?"

"You can't discuss morality in materialistic terms."

"We're discussing a job in a steel plant—and, boy! is that a materialistic place!"

Philip's 'body drew a shade tighter together and his eyes became a shade more glazed, as if in fear of the place around him, in resentment of its sight, in an effort not to concede its reality. He said, in the soft, stubborn whine of a voodoo incantation, "It's a moral imperative, universally conceded in our day and age, that every man is entitled to a job." His voice rose: "I'm entitled to it!"

"You are? Go on, then, collect your claim."

"Uh?"

"Collect your job. Pick it off the bush where you think it grows."

"I mean—"

"You mean that it doesn't? You mean that you need it, but can't create it? You mean that you're entitled to a job which I must create for you?"

"Yes!"

"And if I don't?"

The silence went stretching through second after second. "I don't understand you," said Philip; his voice had the angry bewilderment of a man who recites the formulas of a well-tested role, but keeps getting the wrong cues in answer. "I don't understand why one can't talk to you any more. I don't understand what sort of theory you're propounding and—"

"Oh yes, you do."

As if refusing to believe that the formulas could fail, Philip burst out with: "Since when did you take to abstract philosophy? You're only a businessman, you're not qualified to deal with questions of principle, you ought to leave it to the experts who have conceded for centuries—"

"Cut it, Philip. What's the gimmick?"

“Gimmick?"

"Why the sudden ambition?"

"Well, at a time like this . . ."

"Like what?"

"Well, every man has the right to have some means of support and . . . and not be left to be tossed aside . . . When things are so uncertain, a man's got to have some security . . . some foothold . . . I mean, at a time like this, if anything happened to you, I'd have no—"

"What do you expect to happen to me?"

"Oh, I don't! I don't!" The cry was oddly, incomprehensibly genuine.

"I don't expect anything to happen] . . . Do you?"

"Such as what?"

"How do I know? . . . But I've got nothing except the pittance you give me and . . . and you might change your mind any time."

"I might."

"And I haven't any hold on you at all."

"Why did it take you that many years to realize it and start worrying?

Why now?"

"Because . . . because you've changed. You . . . you used to have a sense of duty and moral responsibility, but . . . you're losing it.

You're losing it, aren't you?"

Rearden stood studying him silently; there was something peculiar in Philip's manner of sliding toward questions, as if his words were accidental, but the too casual, the faintly Insistent questions were the key to his purpose.

"Well, I'll be glad to take the burden off your shoulders, if I'm a burden to you!" Philip snapped suddenly. "Just give me a job, and your conscience won't have to bother you about me any longer!"

"It doesn't."

"That's what I mean! You don't care. You don't care what becomes of any of us, do you?"

"Of whom?"

"Why . . . Mother and me and . . . and mankind in general. But I'm not going to appeal to your better self. I know that you're ready to ditch me at a moment's notice, so—"

"You're lying, Philip. That's not what you're worried about. If it were, you'd be angling for a chunk of cash, not for a job, not—"

"No! I want a job!" The cry was immediate and almost frantic. "Don't try to buy me off with cash! I want a job!"

"Pull yourself together, you poor louse. Do you hear what you're saying?"

Philip spit out his answer with impotent hatred: "You can't talk to me that way!"

"Can you?"

"I only—"

"To buy you off? Why should I try to buy you off—instead of kicking you out, as I should have, years ago?"

"Well, after all, I'm your brother!”

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"One's supposed to have some sort of feeling for one's brother."

"Do you?"

Philip's mouth swelled petulantly; he did not answer; he waited; Rearden let him wait. Philip muttered, "You're supposed . . . at least . . . to have some consideration for my feelings . . . but you haven't."