Larkin glanced away, as if debating something in his mind. After a while, he asked cautiously, "How is your man in Washington?""Okay, I guess."
"You ought to be sure of it. It's important." He looked up at Rearden, and repeated with a kind of stressed insistence, as if discharging a painful moral duty, "Hank, it's very important."
"I suppose so."
"In fact, that's what I came here to tell you."
"For any special reason?"
Larkin considered it and decided that the duty was discharged. "No," he said.
Rearden disliked the subject. He knew that it was necessary to have a man to protect him from the legislature; all industrialists had to employ such men. But he had never given much attention to this aspect of his business; he could not quite convince himself that it was necessary.
The gov’t ARE the outlaws.