On the train ride west, Dagny rescues a hobo who is riding the rails. He used to work for the Twentieth Century Motor Company. He tells her that the company put into practice the communist slogan, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," a scheme that resulted in enslaving the able to the unable. The first man to quit was a young engineer, who walked out of a mass meeting saying that he would put an end to this once and for all by "stopping the motor of the world." The bum tells her that as the years passed and they saw factories close, production drop, and great minds retire and disappear, they began to wonder if the young engineer, whose name was John Galt, succeeded.
On her trip west, Dagny's train is stalled when the crew abandons it. She finds an airplane and continues on to Utah to find Daniels, but she learns at the airport that Daniels left with a visitor in a beautiful plane. Realizing that the visitor is the "destroyer," she gives chase, flying among the most inaccessible peaks of the Rockies. Her plane crashes.
Dagny finds herself in Atlantis, the hidden valley to which the great minds have gone to escape the persecution of a dictatorial government. She finds that John Galt does exist and that he's the man she's been seeking in two ways: He is both the inventor of the motor and the "destroyer," the man draining the brains of the world. All the great men she admires are here — inventors, industrialists, philosophers, scientists, and artists. Dagny learns that the brains are on strike. They refuse to think, create, and work in a world that forces them to sacrifice themselves to society. They're on strike against the creed of self-sacrifice, in favor of a man's right to his own life.
