And suddenly Oversoul Seven was so enchanted by the odors and by the late sunlight on the white lace curtains, and by the sky showing beyond that he just stared at George in amazement. “In the midst of this beauty, this sensual bath of light and scents, why would you bother looking for other realities … ? If you really felt … what this moment demands … you’d be so filled with life that you’d sense what truth was, and you wouldn’t need to go looking for it.”

“That was a beautiful sermon,” George murmured drowsily. Just before he closed his dream eyes, he muttered, “Grandson? I don’t have a grandson….” His dream body fell back into his physical one, and George Brainbridge was finished with everything but sleep.

Seven sighed. He eyed the sleeping George with a mixture of exasperation and relief, and covered him up with a crisp white sheet that had been folded neatly by the bed. But why, he wondered, had he become so mixed up in time? Did the gas-sniffing activities of the nineteenth-century George have any bearing on the problems of the twentieth-century grandson? The house, Seven mused, was the same. So the space coordinates were the same for both men, though obviously they focused in different time periods. But why, why, had the wrong George attracted him?

Because something had attracted him, Seven thought, or he would have gone undeviatingly to the right George. Seven sighed again; here he was, all alone in some nineteenth-century attic, in the right house, but some hundred years away from where he should be. Worse, usually such errors were somehow self-corrective, or else Cyprus bailed him out. But this time the environment was remaining stubbornly stable. He couldn’t seem to move one minute ahead in time, much less a hundred years—or eighty-five: what was the difference?

Seven stared dejectedly at the floor where Dr. Brainbridge’s paraphernalia still lay. He had to get back to the twentieth century, where he would form a body and live in it for a while. A short while, he hoped. In the meantime, he noticed that the sky was beginning to darken. He looked out the back window of the attic, down through the twilight mist at the wooden barn, smartly painted a dark red. A horse neighed from inside; and then he heard a very clear distinct clippa-cloppa sound, leaned out, and saw an iceman in his horse and wagon. The man wore a green cap with white stripes on it, and a bright green jacket. He stopped the wagon, went around back, picked out a big block of ice and sprinted to the back porch, just beneath the window buttress where Seven couldn’t see him; he reappeared, and leapt back into the wagon.