During the main storyline of the book, Galt has secretly organized a strike by the world's creative leaders, including inventors, artists and businessmen, in an effort to "stop the motor of the world" and bring about the collapse of the bureaucratic society. While working incognito as a laborer for Taggart Transcontinental railroad, he travels to visit the key figures that he has not yet recruited, systematically persuading them to join the strike. This strike is not revealed immediately within the story, but forms the backdrop of the novel as a mystery which protagonist Dagny Taggart seeks to uncover, with Galt as her antagonist. She calls him "The Destroyer" and regards him as her arch-enemy, on one occasion seeing a door which just closed and realizing he had been in the room ahead of her. The strikers have created their own secret enclave known as "Galt's Gulch", a town secluded in a Colorado mountain valley, based on Ouray, Colorado.