The Early Ayn Rand (10 page)

His steps rang like gunshots in the sweet peace of the summer afternoon—and the summer afternoon on Dicksville’s Main Street was very sweetly peaceful. There were almost no passersby, and those that did pass moved with a speed implying human life to be five hundred years long. The store windows were hot and dusty, and the doors wide open, with no one inside. A few old, overheated tomatoes were transforming themselves into catsup on the sidewalk in front of the Grocery Market. In the middle of Dicksville’s busiest traffic thoroughfare a dog was sleeping in the sun, cuddled in a little depression of the paving. Laury was looking at it all and clenching his fists.

It was Laury McGee’s twenty-third summer on earth and his first on the
Dicksville Dawn.
He had just had a significant conversation with his City Editor. This conversation was not the first of its kind; but it was to be the last.

“You,” said City Editor Jonathan Scraggs, “are a sap!”

Laury looked at the ceiling and tried to give his face an expression intended to show that his dignity was beyond anything the gentleman at the desk might choose to say.

“One more story like that from you and I’ll send you to wash dishes in a cafeteria—if they’ll take you in!”

Laury could not help following with his eyes the Editor’s powerful five fingers as they closed over his beautiful, neatly typed pages, crunched them with the crisp, crackling sound of a man chewing celery, and flung them furiously into an overflowing wastebasket; the pages that he had hoped would double the
Dicksville Dawn
’s circulation with his name on the front page.

Laury was very sure of being perfectly self-possessed, but he bit his lips in a way that might have been called self-possession—in a bulldog.

“If you don’t like it,” he threw at the Editor, “it’s your own fault, yours and your town’s. No story is better than its material!”

“You aren’t even a cub!” roared Jonathan Scraggs. “You’re a pup, and a lousy one! Just because you were the star quarterback at college doesn’t mean that you can be a reporter now! I still have to see you use your head for something besides as a show window to parade your good looks on!”

“It’s not my fault!” Laury protested resolutely. “I’ve got nothing to write about! Nothing ever happens in this swamp of a town!”

“You’re at it again, aren’t you?”

“Since I’ve been here you’ve sent me on nothing but funerals, and drunken quarrels, and traffic accidents! I can’t show my talent on such measly news! Get somebody else for your fleas’ bulletins! Let me have something big,
big
!—and you’ll see what’s in my head besides good looks, which I can’t help, either!”

“How many times have I told you that you’ve got to write about
anything
that comes along? What do you expect to happen? Dicksville is no Chicago, you know. Still, I don’t think we can complain—things are pretty lively and the
Dawn
is doing nicely, and I can’t say that much of the
Dicksville Globe,
for which the Lord be praised! You should be proud, young man, to work for Dicksville’s leading paper.”

“Yeah! Or for Dicksville’s leading paper’s wastebasket! But you’ll learn to appreciate me, Mr. Scraggs, when something happens worthy of my pen!”

“If you can’t write up a funeral, I’d like to see you cover a murder! . . . Now you go home, young man, and try to get some ideas into your head, if it’s possible, which I doubt!”

Somebody had said that Laury’s gray eyes looked like a deep cloudy sky behind which one could feel the sun coming out. But there was no trace of sun in his eyes when they stared straight at City Editor Jonathan Scraggs, and if there was anything coming behind their dark gray it looked more like a thunderstorm, and a serious one.

“Mr. Scraggs,” he said slowly, ominously,
“things are going to happen!”

“Amen!” answered Mr. Scraggs, and turning comfortably in his chair lit a cigar, then dropped his head on his breast and closed his eyes to enjoy the peace of the Dicksville afternoon, with the hot summer air breathing in through the open windows that needed a washing.

Laury took his coat from an old rack in a corner and looked fiercely at the room; no one had paid any attention to the conversation. The city room was hot and stuffy, and smelled of print, dust, and chewing gum. One walked as though in a forest on a thick carpet of fallen leaves cracking under the feet—a carpet of old, yellow newspapers, cigarette wrappers, bills, ads, everything that has ever been made out of paper. The walls were an art museum of calendars, drawings, cartoons, comic strips, pasted on the bare bricks and alternated by philosophical inscriptions such as “Easy on the corkscrew!” and “Vic Perkins is a big bum!” The dusty bottle of spring water on a shaking stand was hopelessly and significantly empty; water, after all, was not the only drink that had been used in the room.

The energetic activity of Dicksville’s leading paper made Laury grind his teeth. The chief copy man was very busy making a sailboat out of a paper drinking cup. The sports editor was carefully drawing a pair of French-heeled legs on the dust of a file bureau. Two reporters were playing an exciting game of rummy; and a third was thoroughly cleaning his fingernails with a pen and trying to catch a fly that kept annoying him. The copy boy was sound asleep on a pile of paper, his back turned disdainfully on the room, his face red like his hair and his hair red like a carrot, his decided snores shaking the mountain of future newspapers under him.

However, at one of the central desks, under an imposing sign of: “Don’t park here. Busy” Vic Perkins, the
Dawn
’s star reporter, was profoundly absorbed in some serious work. Vic Perkins had a long, thin face and a little black mustache under his nose that looked like he needed a handkerchief, more than like anything else. He always wore his hat on the back of his head and never condescended to use a toothbrush. He was chewing zealously the end of a pencil and looking up at a green-shaded lamp, in deep meditation.

“Any news?” asked Laury, approaching him.

“There’s always news for the man who’s smart enough to write ’em!” replied Vic Perkins in a tone of disdainful superiority.

Laury glanced at the story he was writing. It was a gripping account of Dicksville’s latest sensational crime—$550 cash and a silver pepper shaker stolen by Pug-Nose Thomson, the town’s desperate outlaw.

Laury swung on his heels and walked out of the building, slamming the door ferociously, hoping one of the dusty glass panes would bust for a change; but it didn’t.

Laury had graduated from college with a B.A. degree, high honors, and the football championship, this spring. He had accepted the first opportunity to work on a newspaper, to start on the road of his buoyant ambition. He came to the
Dicksville Dawn
with an overflowing energy, a wild enthusiasm, an irresistible smile, and no experience whatsoever. And he was disappointed.

He had expected a glorious career full of action, danger, and thrills, the career of a glamorous being whose every word on the printed pages sends thousands of hearts beating fast, like a sonorous trumpet that rings through the country thrilling and terrifying men. And now he had found himself hustling after news that wouldn’t disturb a mosquito. . . .

Laury walked fast, his hands in his pockets, a lock of unruly hair falling down to mix with his long, long eyelashes. The sky was blue, blue like a color postcard. An odor of frying grease floated from the open door of Ye Buttercup Tea Room. In a music shop a hoarse radio was singing “My Blue Heaven.” Clampitt’s Grocery Market was having a big event—a canned-goods sale.

Oh, if only something would happen here! Laury’s heart throbbed. But what could happen—
here
?

A drowsy newsboy was muttering: “
Dicksville Dawn
poiper,” as though he were selling sleeping tablets. Laury threw a quick glance at the front page, passing by. The headline announced the birth of the town Mayor’s fifth child; there was a prominent news item about the Spinsters’ Club annual convention; and an editorial by Victor Z. Perkins on the importance of animal pets.

Were these, then, the scorching, flamboyant headlines, roaring into people’s eyes, that he had dreamed about? Oh, if only somebody would do something! Somebody,
anybody
. . . . It seemed hopeless in Dicksville. And yet . . . was it so hopeless? Wasn’t it possible to . . . ?

Laury quickened his steps and clenched his fists in his pockets. His eyes narrowed and glistened. His heart beat faster. For City Editor Jonathan Scraggs’ opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, Laury McGee
had
an idea.

It would be dangerous, he knew. He had had that idea for a long time. It would be a mad chance to take, a frightful risk. And yet . . . and yet . . .

“Sap!!”

He felt a strong knock across his body and when he turned his head all he could see was a slim, swift, sparkling sports car, like a thrown torpedo, speeding away, and a wild mass of brown hair flying above it like a flag.

He realized that he had been crossing a street, too absorbed in his serious thoughts to notice anything, automobiles included. The result of which was a considerable pain and a greasy line on his tan trousers where the sports car’s fender had struck him.

He looked again at the disappearing car and started as though hit by a sudden inspiration. He had recognized the driver. It was Miss Winford, the “dime-a-hair girl”; called so for being the sole heiress to her father’s fortune, that could number a dime for each hair on her head; which may not seem much, but try to figure it out!

Christopher A. Winford was a big steel magnate from Pittsburgh who had the bad taste to spend his summers in Dicksville. He owned half the town and the white residence on a hill overlooking it, a royal building whose glass-and-marble turrets looked like glistening fountains thrown to the blue sky from a sea of green foliage.

Miss Winford was eighteen and the absolute leader of Dicksville’s younger set, of her parents, and of her sports car. Laury had never met her, but he had seen her often in town. She looked like an antelope and acted like a mustang. She had big, slightly slanting, ominously glistening eyes that made people feel a little nervous wondering just what was going on behind their suspicious calm; she had thin, dancing eyebrows and a determined mouth. Her brown hair was thrown behind her ears in a long, disheveled cut. From the tips of her little feet to that stormy tangle of hair she was slim, straight, strong like a steel spring.

Her ambitious mother had christened her Juliana Xenia. But her friends of the younger set, to the horror of said mother, called her simply Jinx.

Laury stood staring at her car long after it had disappeared. He had a strange, fixed, enraptured expression on his face, the expression of a man who has just been struck by an idea for the invention of an interplanetary communication. That girl . . . was it a coincidence? His idea—this was just what he needed for his idea. He had the aim—here was the means. . . .

He walked home without noticing the streets around him, the sky above or the pavement under his feet. . . .

That night, in his apartment, Laury McGee sat on the desk, his feet on a chair, his elbows on his knees, his chin on his fists, his eyes unblinking—and thought. The result of these thoughts was the lively happenings which occurred in Dicksville in the days that followed.

Jinx Winford was speeding home at fifty miles an hour, as usual; and at midnight, as usual, too. She had been visiting a girl friend out of town and now was on her way back, not in the slightest measure disturbed by the fact that her little gray sports car was the only sign of life on the dark, deserted road. Under a heavy black sky the endless plain stretched like a frozen sea with immobile waves of hills. Far ahead, a pale glow rose to the sky like a faint luminous fog, and the lights of Dicksville twinkled mysteriously, in straight lines bordering streets and in lonely, disorderly sparks, as though a tangle of golden beads had been thrown into the dark plain and some strings had broken in the fall.

The gray sports car was flying down the road like a swift, humming bug with two long, shuddering feelers of light sweeping the ground and tiny wings beating in the wind—the silk scarf on Jinx’s shoulders. Her two firm hands on the wheel, Jinx was whistling a song. And she remained perfectly calm when, turning a sharp curve, she saw an automobile standing straight across the road, barring the way. It was an old sports car with no one at the wheel. But its lights were turned on, two glaring white spots that made the darkness beyond it seem empty and impenetrable, like a bottomless black hole.

She stepped on the brakes just in time to make her car stop with a jerk and a sharp, alarmed creaking a few inches from the strange sports car.

“Hey, what’s the idea?” she threw into the darkness where it seemed she could distinguish the shadow of a man.

In the darkness, behind the old sports car, Laury McGee was ready. He had been waiting there for two hours. He had a black mask and a revolver. The lips under the mask were grim and determined; the fingers clutching the revolver trembled. Laury McGee was not hunting for news any more—he was making it.

The time had come. He looked, catching his breath, at the girl in the gray sports car, who sat clutching the wheel and peering into the darkness interrogatively, with raised eyebrows.

“How will she take it?” he shuddered. “I hope she doesn’t scream too loud! Oh, I hope she doesn’t faint!”

Then, resolutely, with broad steps, he walked towards her and stopped in full light, his threatening eyes behind the mask and the muzzle of his revolver looking straight at her. He waited silently for the effect that his appearance would produce. But there was no particular effect. Jinx raised one eyebrow higher and looked at him with decided curiosity, waiting.

“Don’t scream for help!” he ordered in his most lugubrious voice. “No man can save you!”