Actually, Rand and her heroes were only Pied Pipering readers to get a flashlight and take the book under a cozy blanket. “Atlas Shrugged” never offered any serious alternative to the social order; whatever Rand’s intention, the novel was not a call to arms but an invitation to escape. The book could never, in fact, have been any shorter, because it needed to feel like a whole substitute world, a full-blown reassuring place — you’re right, they’re wrong; you’re special, they’re not — into which the discoverer can jump, as into a magic wardrobe, and then live, happily, airlessly, for weeks of reading and rereading.