As Dagny rides west on the train, she encounters a hobo sneaking a ride in the vestibule of her car. She invites him in. His name is Jeff Allen, and he once worked for the Twentieth Century Motor Company. He tells her that he and the factory’s other employees first phrased the question, “Who is John Galt?” Twelve years earlier, the company owner died and his heirs took over. The new owners put into practice a plan based on the communist slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The plan enslaved the most able to the unable. The first man to quit the company was a young engineer who said that he would put an end to such irrationality once and for all—he said he would stop the motor of the world. Years passed, factories closed, production declined, and the motors stopped. Jeff Allen and the factory’s other workers began to wonder if the young engineer had succeeded in his mission. The engineer’s name was John Galt.
The train suddenly comes to a stop, and Dagny learns that the crew members have deserted it. Desertion is becoming a common phenomenon, because men are reaching their breaking points and have no legal way to quit their jobs. Many of Taggart’s trains have been “frozen” in this way—abandoned on the tracks for someone else to deal with.
Dagny walks down the tracks and phones for help for the abandoned train. She doesn’t return to it, however, choosing instead to walk to a small airfield, where she rents a plane. She flies to Afton, Utah, but the airfield attendant tells her that she has just missed Quentin Daniels. He recently left with a man flying a beautiful plane. Dagny knows instinctively that the man flying the plane is the destroyer, and she decides to follow him. She trails him into the most desolate area of the Colorado Rockies and crashes her plane while attempting to follow the destroyer down.
