let's collect the work parts from Ayn

[atlashead]

He had awakened and dressed at six o’clock this morning; he had never slept more than four hours on any night of his adult life. He descended to his dining room where breakfast was served to him. His penthouse, a small structure, stood on the edge of a vast roof landscaped as a garden. The rooms were a superlative artistic achievement; their simplicity and beauty would have aroused gasps of admiration had this house belonged to anyone else; but people were shocked into silence when they thought that this was the home of the publisher of the New York Banner, the most vulgar newspaper in the country. After breakfast he went to his study. His desk was piled with every important newspaper, book and magazine received that morning from all over the country. He worked alone at his desk for three hours, reading and making brief notes with a large blue pencil across the printed pages. The notes looked like a spy’s shorthand; nobody could decipher them except the dry, middle-aged secretary who entered the study when Wynand left it. He had not heard her voice in five years, but no communication between them was necessary. When he returned to his study in the evening, the secretary and the pile of papers were gone; on his desk he 340 found neatly typed pages containing the things he had wished to be recorded from his morning’s work.

Roark had come to this room every morning, had done his task, and had heard no word of comment. Cameron would enter the drafting room and stand behind Roark for a long time, looking over his shoulder. It was as if his eyes concentrated deliberately on trying to throw the steady hand off its course on the paper. The two other draftsmen botched their work from the mere thought of such an apparition standing behind them. Roark did not seem to notice it. He went on, his hand unhurried, he took his time about discarding a blunted pencil and picking out another. "Uh-huh," Cameron would grunt suddenly. Roark would turn his head then, politely attentive. "What is it?" he would ask. Cameron would 48 turn away without a word, his narrowed eyes underscoring contemptuously the fact that he considered an answer unnecessary, and would leave the drafting room. Roark would go on with his drawing.

In the crowded tension of the days that followed he never spoke to them, except of their work. They felt, entering the office in the morning, that they had no private lives, no significance and no reality save the overwhelming reality of the broad sheets of paper on their tables. The place seemed cold and soulless like a factory, until they looked at him; then they thought that it was not a factory, but a furnace fed on their bodies, his own first. There were times when he remained in the office all night. They found him still working when they returned in the morning. He did not seem tired. Once he stayed there for two days and two nights in succession. On the afternoon of the third 216 day he fell asleep, half lying across his table. He awakened in a few hours, made no comment and walked from one table to another, to see what had been done. He made corrections, his words sounding as if nothing had interrupted a thought begun some hours ago.

Shortly after six, Davis departed furtively from the empty drafting room, leaving Keating at his table. Bending under a solitary green lamp. Keating glanced at the desolate expanse of three long rooms, oddly silent after the day’s rush, and he felt that he owned them, that he would own them, as surely as the pencil moved in his hand.

"Give me your hat," she said, "be careful of that chair, it’s not very steady, we have better ones in the living room, come in." The living room, he noticed, was modest but somehow distinguished, and in surprisingly good taste. He noticed the books; cheap shelves rising to the ceiling, loaded with precious volumes; the volumes stacked carelessly, actually being used. He noticed, over a neat, shabby desk, a Rembrandt etching, stained and yellow, found, perhaps, in some junk shop by the eyes of a connoisseur who had never parted with it, though its price would have obviously been of help to him. He wondered what business her uncle could be in; he had never asked.

No contractor equal to McNamara seemed to exist anywhere. She had taken the best she could find. No engineer on the Taggart staff could be trusted to supervise the job; all of them were skeptical about the new metal. "Frankly, Miss Taggart," her chief engineer had said, "since it is an experiment that nobody has ever attempted before, I do not think it's fair that it should be my responsibility." 'It's mine," she had answered. He was a man in his forties, who still preserved the breezy manner of the college from which he had graduated. Once, Taggart Transcontinental had had a chief engineer, a silent, gray-haired, self educated man, who could not be matched on any railroad. He had resigned, five years ago.

At the age of twenty-seven, Dr. Robert Stadler had written a treatise on cosmic rays, which demolished most of the theories held by the scientists who preceded him. Those who followed, found his achievement somewhere at the base of any line of inquiry they undertook. At the age of thirty, he was recognized as the greatest physicist of his time.

He saw the day when he stood on a rocky ledge and felt a thread of sweat running from his temple down his neck. He was fourteen years old and it was his first day of work in the iron mines of Minnesota. He was trying to learn to breathe against the scalding pain in his chest. He stood, cursing himself, because he had made up his mind that he would not be tired. After a while, he went back to his task; he decided that pain was not a valid reason for stopping, He saw the day when he stood at the window of his office and looked at the mines; he owned them as of that morning. He was thirty years old. What had gone on in the years between did not matter, just as pain had not mattered. He had worked in mines, in foundries, in the steel mills of the north, moving toward the purpose he had chosen. All he remembered of those jobs was that the men around him had never seemed to know what to do, while he had always known. He remembered wondering why so many iron mines were closing, just as these had been about to close until he took them over. He looked at the shelves of rock in the distance. Workers were putting up a new sign above a gate at the end of a road: Rearden Ore.

When my husband left Twentieth Century, we came here and he took a job as head of the engineering department of Acme Motors. It was a growing, successful concern at the time. It gave my husband the kind of work he liked. He was not a person prone to inner conflicts, he had always been sure of his actions and at peace with himself. But for a whole year after we left Wisconsin, he acted as if he were tortured by something, as if he were struggling with a personal problem he could not solve. At the end of that year, he came to me one morning and told me that he had resigned from Acme Motors, that he was retiring and would not work anywhere else. He loved his work; it was his whole life. Yet he looked calm, self-confident and happy, for the first time since we'd come here. He asked me not to question him about the reason of his decision. I didn't question him and I didn't object. We had this house, we had our savings, we had enough to live on modestly for the rest of our days. I never learned his reason. We went on living here, quietly and very happily. He seemed to feel a profound contentment. He had an odd serenity of spirit that I had never seen in him before. There was nothing strange in his behavior or activity—except that at times, Very rarely, he went out without telling me where he went or whom he saw. In the last two years of his life, he went away for one month, each summer; he did not tell me where. Otherwise, he lived as he always had. He studied a great deal and he spent his time on engineering research of his own, working in the basement of our house. I don't know what he did with his notes and experimental models. I found no trace of them in the basement, after his death.

Yes—but it was more than fear. It was the kind of emotion that makes men capable of killing—when I thought that the purpose of the world's trend was to destroy these children, that these three sons of mine were marked for immolation. Oh yes, I would have killed—but whom was there to kill? It was everyone and no one, there was no single enemy, no center and no villain, it was not the simpering social worker incapable of earning a penny or the thieving bureaucrat scared of his own shadow, it was the whole of the earth rolling into an obscenity of horror, pushed by the hand of every would-be decent man who believed that need is holier than ability, and pity is holier than justice. But these were only occasional moments. It was not my constant feeling. I listened to my children and I knew that nothing would defeat them. I looked at them, as they sat in my back yard, and beyond my house there were the tall, dark buildings of what was still a monument to unenslaved thought—the Patrick Henry University—and farther in the distance there were the lights of Cleveland, the orange glow of steel mills behind batteries of smokestacks, the twinkling red dots of radio towers, the long white rays of airports on the black edge of the sky—and I thought that in the name of any greatness that had ever existed and moved this world, the greatness of which they were the last descendants, they would win, . . . I remember one night when I noticed that John had been silent for a long time —and I saw that he had fallen asleep, stretched there on the ground. The two others confessed that he had not slept for three days. I sent the two of them home at once, but I didn't have the heart to disturb him. It was a warm spring night, I brought a blanket to cover him, and I let him sleep where he was. I sat there beside him till morning—and as I watched his face in the starlight, then the first ray of the sun on his untroubled forehead and closed eyelids, what I experienced was not a prayer, I do not pray, but that state of spirit at which a prayer is a misguided attempt: a full, confident, affirming self-dedication to my love of the right, to the certainty that the right would win and that this boy would have the kind of future he deserved." He moved his arm, pointing to the valley. "I did not expect it to be as great as this—or as hard."

Rearden opened the door and stopped on the threshold. One of the hotel's costliest satin-shaded lamps stood in the middle of the floor, throwing a circle of light on wide sheets of drafting paper. Francisco d'Anconia, in shirt sleeves, a strand of hair hanging down over his face, lay stretched on the floor, on his stomach, propped up by his elbows, biting the end of a pencil in concentration upon some point of the intricate tracing before him. He did not look up, he seemed to have forgotten the knock. Rearden tried to distinguish the drawing: it looked like the section of a smelter. He stood watching in startled wonder; had he had the power to bring into reality his own image of Francisco d'Anconia, this was the picture he would have seen: the figure of a purposeful young worker intent upon a difficult task, In a moment, Francisco raised his head. In the next instant, he flung his body upward to a kneeling posture, looking at Rearden with a smile of incredulous pleasure. In the next, he seized the drawings and threw them aside too hastily, face down.

A week ago Cameron had come into the drafting room and had thrown down on Roark’s table a violent sketch of a country residence. "See if you can make a house out of this!" he had snapped and gone without further explanation. He had not approached Roark’s table during the days that followed. Roark had finished the drawings last night and left them on Cameron’s desk. This morning, Cameron had come in, thrown some sketches of steel joints to Roark, ordered him to appear in his office later and had not entered the drafting room again for the rest of the day. The others were gone. Roark pulled an old piece of oilcloth over his table and went to Cameron’s office. His drawings of the country house were spread on the desk. The light of the lamp fell on Cameron’s cheek, on his beard, the white threads glistening, on his fist, on a corner of the drawing, its black lines bright and hard as if embossed on the paper. "You’re fired," said Cameron.

For three months, he had awaited the commission of the Security Trust Company. One after another, the chances that had loomed before him at rare intervals, in the last two years, had vanished, looming in vague promises, vanishing in firm refusals. One of his draftsmen had had to be discharged long ago. The landlord had asked questions, politely at first, then dryly, then rudely and openly. But no one in the office had minded that nor the usual arrears in salaries: there had been the commission of the Security Trust Company. The vice-president, who had asked Cameron to submit drawings, had said: "I know, some of the directors won’t see it as I do. But go ahead, Mr. Cameron. Take the chance with me and I’ll fight for you." Cameron had taken the chance. He and Roark had worked savagely--to have the plans ready on time, before time, before Gould & Pettingill could submit theirs. Pettingill was a cousin of the Bank president’s wife and a famous authority on the ruins of Pompeii; the Bank president was an ardent admirer of Julius Caesar and had once, while in Rome, spent an hour and a quarter in reverent inspection of the Coliseum. Cameron and Roark and a pot of black coffee had lived in the office from dawn till frozen dawn for many days, and Cameron had thought involuntarily of the electric bill, but made himself forget it. The lights still burned in the drafting room in the early hours when he sent Roark out for sandwiches, and Roark found gray morning in the streets while it was still night in the office, in the windows facing a high brick wall. On the last day, it was Roark who had ordered Cameron home after midnight, because Cameron’s hands were jerking and his knees kept seeking the tall drafting stool for support, leaning against it with a slow, cautious, sickening precision. Roark had taken him down to a taxi and in the light of a street lamp Cameron had seen Roark’s face, drawn, the eyes kept wide artificially, the lips dry. The next morning Cameron had entered the 59 drafting room, and found the coffee pot on the floor, on its side over a black puddle, and Roark’s hand in the puddle, palm up, fingers half closed, Roark’s body stretched out on the floor, his head thrown back, fast asleep. On the table, Cameron had found the plans, finished...

[atlashead]

I also had a dream once where a building is being erected and the structural engineer asks Roark "These are new types of welds, do you want me to check them?"  "I already did."
And then a very vivd dream after Dominique marries Peter, but after her cruise with Wynand that she actually walks up behind him in a shop and watches him weld

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

AH,

Fan fiction?

I've never seen it done with Rand's fiction before this thread, but what the hell.

Go for it.

 

Michael

[atlashead]

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.” “Jesus!” said the superintendent, frightened and delighted. “It’s never been done that way before.” “You’re going to do it.” “It’ll hold,” said Darrow, studying the sketch. “We may have to check some of these beams of yours . . . this business here, for instance . . . but it’ll hold.” “The owners won’t like it,” said the superintendent, as a regretful afterthought. “They’ll take it and keep their damn mouths shut,” said Roark. “Give me another board. Now look. Here’s what you do on the two floors below.” He went on drawing for a long time, throwing words over his shoulder once in a while. “Yes,” whispered the superintendent. “But . . . but what’ll I say if someone asks if . . .” “Say I gave the orders. Now keep these and get started.” He turned to Darrow. “I’ll draw up the plans and you’ll have them this afternoon to check, and let him have them as soon as possible.” He turned to the superintendent. “Now go ahead.” “Yes, sir,” said the superintendent. He said it respectfully. They went down silently in the elevator. The superintendent was studying the drawings, Darrow was studying Roark, Roark was looking at the building.

Rand, Ayn. The Early Ayn Rand . Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Rand, Ayn. The Early Ayn Rand . Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Rand, Ayn. The Early Ayn Rand . Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.