It was not, in fact, even clear to him that he had made a choice. But it was in those humming moments in the room smelling of a summer day, whose light no one had lit yet, with her round straw hat a frail moon on the bedspread, lights of the Wheel slowly pouring red and green over and over outside in the dark, and a group of schoolboys singing in the street a refrain from before their time, their sold-out and cruelly handled time—Juch-heierasas-sa! o tempo-tempo-ra!—that board and pieces and patterns at least all did come clear for him, and Pökler knew that while he played, this would have to be Ilse—truly his child, truly as he could make her. It was the real moment of conception, in which, years too late, he became her father.

Through the rest of the furlough, they strolled about Zwölfkinder, always hand in hand. Lanterns swaying from the trunks of elephants’ heads on top of tall pillars lit their way… over spidery bridges looking down at snow-leopards, apes, hyenas… along the miniature railway, between the corrugated pipe legs of steel-mesh dinosaurs, down to the patch of African desert where every two hours exactly the treacherous natives attacked an encampment of General von Trotha’s brave men in blue, all the parts played by exuberant boys, and a great patriotic favorite with children of all ages… up on the giant Wheel so naked, so void of grace, there for only the clear mission: to lift and to frighten….

On their last night—though he didn’t know it, for they would take her as abruptly and invisibly as before—they stood looking in again at stuffed penguins and false snow, and around them the artificial aurora flickered.

“Next year,” squeezing her hand, “we’ll come back here, if you like.”

“Oh yes. Every year, Papi.”

Next day she was gone, taken back into the coming war, leaving Pökler alone in a country of children, to go back to Peenemünde after all, alone….

So it has gone for the six years since. A daughter a year, each one about a year older, each time taking up nearly from scratch. The only continuity has been her name, and Zwölfkinder, and Pokler’s love—love something like the persistence of vision, for They have used it to create for him the moving image of a daughter, flashing him only these summertime frames of her, leaving it to him to build the illusion of a single child… what would the time scale matter, a 24th of a second or a year (no more, the engineer thought, than in a wind-tunnel, or an oscillograph whose turning drum you could speed or slow at will…)?