The retrieval team are a married couple, Iz and John. Iz is actually an African American, although cosmetic surgery has led to an uncomfortable masquerade as a "Caucasian" woman in the chosen alternate history. It turns out to be that of "Terraplane", the previous novel in the DryCo quartet, where Abraham Lincoln was prematurely assassinated in early 1861, the American Civil War never took place, and slavery was only abolished by Theodore Roosevelt in 1907. Therefore, this world is backward when it comes to the civil rights movement and racist segregation is still widespread there.