Ayn Rand - The Early Ayn Rand

“Well, what's the use of bellyaching now?" the estimator snapped as Roark said nothing- "I say, let it go. It'll stand all right. If Darrow here wasn't so damn finicky... And anyway, it's a fine time to be getting soused on us! What can you expect with the kind of fine architect we got around here?"

"Look, Roark," Darrow said quietly, "the work's held up. Someone's got to decide."

Behind them, Cameron burst into laughter suddenly, a high, monotonous, senseless, agonized laughter. He was still sitting there, on the planks, and he looked up, and his face seemed contorted, even though not a muscle of it moved.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, staring at Roark, his eyes stubbornly insistent and disturbed. "That's what I want to know, what you're doing here. You look funny. You look damn funny. I like your face, do you know that? Yes, I like it. Look, get out of here. You should be home. You should be home and in bed. You don't feel well. Look, don't worry about what you see here, about this..." He waved his arm vaguely at the building. "It's no use. It's absolutely no use. It doesn't matter. Also they have a drill in there. You don't see it, but that's because they're clever, they've hidden it. What do you want to get hurt for? It doesn't matter anyway."

"There!" said the estimator triumphantly. "See?"

Cameron sat, breathing heavily, wisps of steam trembling from his open mouth up into the frozen air, his stiff, cold fingers convulsed on the edge of a plank, and he looked up at the men.

"You think I'm drunk, don't you?" he asked, his eyes narrow and sly. "You damn fools! All of you, the red-headed one in particular! You think I'm drunk. That's where you're wrong. This is the time when I'm sober. The only time. And then I can have peace. Otherwise, I'm drunk always. Drunk all the time. Seeing things that don't exist. Me, I drink to stop the DT's. I drink to see clearly for once. To know that it doesn't matter... Nothing... Not at all... It's so easy. Drink to learn to hate things. I've never felt better in my life."

"Pretty, ain't it?" said the estimator.

"Shut up," said Darrow.

"God damn you all!" the estimator screamed suddenly. "We wouldn't have had any trouble if they'd hired a real architect! That's what happens when people get charitable and pick out a worthless bum who's never been any good, an old drunk who..."

Roark turned to him. Roark's arm went back and down, and then forward slowly, as if gathering the weight of air upon the crook of his elbow; it was only a flash, but it seemed to last for minutes, the movement stopped, the taut arm motionless in speed, and then his knuckles shot up, to the man's jaw, and the estimator was on the ground, his knees bent, upturned, his hand on his cheek. Roark stood, his legs spread apart, his arms hanging indifferently by his sides.

"Let's go up," said Roark, turning to Darrow. "Get the superintendent. I'll tell you what's to be done."

They went inside the structure, behind them Cameron staring stupidly ahead and the estimator scrambling slowly to his feet, dusting himself, muttering to no one: "Aw, what the hell, I didn' mean no harm, what the hell, you can't do that to me, you son of a bitch, I'll get you canned for this, I didn' mean no harm..."

The construction superintendent followed Roark and Darrow to the elevator, silently, reluctantly, glancing dubiously at Roark. The elevator — a few planks with a precarious railing — shot upward along the side of the building, swaying, shuddering, its cables creaking. The pavements dropped below them, the tops of automobiles descending softly down into an abyss till only flat little squares remained, flowing evenly through the thin channels of streets; the windows of houses streamed down, past them, and roofs flashed by, as flat breaks in the stream, as pedals pressing the houses down, out of the way of their flight. The superintendent picked his teeth thoughtfully; Darrow held on to the wooden railing; Roark stood, his hand closed about a cable, his legs apart, and looked at the structure, at the layers of floor arches flying past.

Twenty floors above the pavement, they stepped out onto a gray mat of concrete in the open cages that were to be the penthouse. "You can see," Darrow was saying, "it's worse than the tests showed."

Roark saw it at once, the odd gray color of the concrete, not the healthy, normal gray of the floors below; he could hear it with his eyes, the cry of warning, the alarm bell rising from the cold, hard, flat stretch of gray under his feet. It was as a disease written upon the skin of this thing he loved, this thing delivered suddenly to his care, and he stood over it as a doctor too sure of the symptoms when he had not wanted to be sure. He ran his fingers over the cold edge of a column encased in that treacherous gray; softly, absently, as if caressing the hand of a precious patient in sympathy, in understanding, in reassurance, to give comfort and to gain it in return.

"Well, Mr. Roark?" the superintendent asked. "What's going to happen?"

"Just this," said Roark. "When you get your elevator machinery up here, it will go straight through this, straight down to the basement."

"But, Jesus! What're we going to do now?"

Roark walked away from the two men, who stood watching him; he walked slowly, his eyes taking in every column, every beam, every foot of space, his steps ringing hard and hollow against the naked concrete. Then he stopped; he stood, his hands in his pockets, his collar raised, a tall figure against the empty gray sky beyond, one strand of red hair fluttering under his old cap. It was up to him, he thought, and each hour counted, each hour adding to that cost that stood as a monster somewhere, leering at them all; to do it over, to remove that concrete — it would mean two weeks of blasting to destroy one day's work, of blasting that might shake the building to its roots, if it could stand the strain at all. He would have to let the concrete remain, he thought, and then he would have to devise supports for these floors — when so little space was available, when every foot of it had been assigned to a purpose in the strict, meticulous economy of Cameron's plan. To devise it somehow, he thought, and to change nothing, not to alter one foot, one line of the building's silhouette, of its crown, of its proud profile, that had to be as Cameron had wished it to be, as each clear, powerful, delicate line rising from the ground demanded it to be. To decide, he thought, to take that into his hands, Cameron's work, to save it, to put his own thoughts irrevocably into steel and mortar — and he was not ready for that, he could not be ready. But it was only one part of him that thought this, dimly, not in words and logic, only as a twisted little ball of emotion in the pit of his stomach, a ball that would have broken into these words had he stopped to unravel it. He did not stop. The ball was only driving on the rest of him, and the rest of him was cold, clear, precise.

He stood without moving for a long time. Then he seized a piece of board from the ground and a pencil from his pocket. He stood, one foot resting on a pile of planks, the board on his knee, his hand flashing in swift, straight jerks, the outlines of steel supports rising on the wood. He sketched for a long time. The two men walked to him, stood watching his hand silently from behind his shoulder. Then, as the scheme became clear, it was the superintendent who spoke first, to gasp incredulously: "Jesus! It'll work! So that's what you're driving at!" Roark nodded and went on.

When he had finished, he handed the board to the superintendent, saying briefly, unnecessarily, because the crude, hurried lines on the board said everything: "Take the columns you have stored down below... put supports here... see?... and here... you clear the elevator shafts like this, see?... and here... clear the conduits... there's the general scheme."