Rising from his seat, Eric walked to the lounge of the small ship, seated himself at the table, and picked up the drink list. His throat felt dry; the bickering that went on within the Ackerman clan always made him dully thirsty, as if he were in need of some reassuring fluid ... perhaps, he thought, a substitute for the primordial milk: the Urmilch of life. I deserve my own babyland, too, he thought half in jest. But only half.

To everyone but Virgil Ackerman, the Washington, D.C., of 1935 was a waste of time, since only Virgil remembered the authentic city, the authentic time and place, the environment now so long passed away. In every detail, therefore, Wash-35 consisted of a painstakingly elaborate reconstruction of the specific limited universe of childhood which Virgil had known, constantly refined and improved in matters of authenticity by his antique procurer – Kathy Sweetscent – without really ever being in a genuine sense changed: it had coagulated, cleaved to the dead past... at least as far as the rest of the clan were concerned. But to Virgil it of course sprouted life. There, he blossomed. He restored his flagging biochemical energy and then returned to the present, to the shared, current world which he eminently understood and manipulated but of which he did not psychologically feel himself a native.

And his vast regressive babyland had caught on: become a fad. On lesser scales other top industrialists and money-boys – to speak in a brutal and frank way, war profiteers – had made life-size models of their childhood worlds, too; Virgil's now had ceased to be unique. None, of course, matched Virgil's in complexity and sheer authenticity; fakes of antique items, not the actual surviving articles, had been strewn about in vulgar approximations of what had been the authentic reality. But in all fairness, it had to be realized, Eric reflected, no one possessed the money and economic know-how to underwrite this admittedly uniquely expensive and beyond all others – imitations all – utterly impractical venture. This – in the midst of the dreadful war.