At a US Air Force base in France in the mid-1950s a team of young officers turn a mannequin into a sort of fornicating machine. It is stolen and an Airman is to be put on trial for rape. Meanwhile a chess game is being played by one of the lieutenants and a University of Maryland professor, a game that parallels the plot -- thus there is a Story-Within-the-Story. Another officer is the Double of of one of the fabricators, so that element is also present, as are Time Elision and Corruption of Reality by Dream. Interspersed are poems and essays, in emulation of the method of Hermann Broch in The Sleepwalkers.