Unexpectedly, this country is pleasant, yes, once inside it, quite pleasant after all. Even though there is a villain here, serious as death. It is this typical American teenager’s own Father, trying episode after episode to kill his son. And the kid knows it. Imagine that. So far he’s managed to escape his father’s daily little death-plots—but nobody has said he has to keep escaping.

He’s a cheerful and a plucky enough lad, and doesn’t hold any of this against his father particularly. That ol’ Broderick’s just a murderin’ fool, golly what’ll he come up with next—

It’s a giant factory-state here, a City of the Future full of extrapolated 1930s swoop-façaded and balconied skyscrapers, lean chrome caryatids with bobbed hairdos, classy airships of all descriptions drifting in the boom and hush of the city abysses, golden lovelies sunning in roof-gardens and turning to wave as you pass. It is the Raketen-Stadt.

Down below, thousands of kids are running in windy courtyards and areaways, up and down flights of steps, skullcaps on their heads with plastic propellers spinning in the wind rattling and blurred, kids running messages among the plastic herbage in and out of the different soft-plastic offices—Here’s a memo for you Tyrone, go and find the Radiant Hour (Weepers! Didn’t know it was lost! Sounds like ol’ Pop’s up to somma those tricks again!), so it’s out into the swarming corridors, full of larking dogs, bicycles, pretty subdeb secretaries on roller skates, produce carts, beanies whirling forever in the lights, cap-gun or water-pistol duels at each corner, kids dodging behind the sparkling fountains WAIT that’s a real gun, this is a real bullet zinnnggg! good try, Pop, but you’re not quite as keen as The Kid today!

Onward to rescue the Radiant Hour, which has been abstracted from the day’s 24 by colleagues of the Father, for sinister reasons of their own. Travel here gets complicated—a system of buildings that move, by right angles, along the grooves of the Raketen-Stadt’s street-grid. You can also raise or lower the building itself, a dozen floors per second, to desired heights or levels underground, like a submarine skipper with his periscope—although certain paths aren’t available to you. They are available to others, but not to you. Chess. Your objective is not the King—there is no King—but momentary targets such as the Radiant Hour.