Seven looked dejected. “How come you’re so much better at time traveling than I am?” he asked plaintively. “Sometimes I have no problems, and then … well, I get confused.”

“All right,” Cyprus said. “Look at that chair beside you.” Seven did as he was told, studying the red velvet Victorian armchair until it suddenly shimmered and became the leather rocker in George’s twentieth-century waiting room. “That’s the easiest way for you to do it now,” Cyprus said. “There are better ways, and before long, you’ll know what they are.”

“Where is that guy?” George muttered from his office.

“Well? Where’s your body?” Cyprus demanded. “Isn’t it ready?”

Seven sighed. “I haven’t even had time to think about a body, much less do anything about getting one,” he said disconsolately.

“We just can’t have your body suddenly appearing from nowhere in the middle of the room, either,” said Cyprus. “Stop pouting, Seven. Come over here, around the corner, where George can’t see you from his office.”

They stood by a corner of the fireplace in the waiting room. “Now,” Cyprus directed. “First, adopt the image you want. A young man is best; about twenty-six years old will do. As for the rest, use your imagination.”

Rather regretfully, Seven dismissed his fourteen-year-old image entirely and started over. He stood six foot three. His hair was almost black, and bushy. He added a beard, then removed it. First his eyes were blue, then he changed them to brown. “What about the mouth?” he asked Cyprus.

“Hurry, Seven,” she said scoldingly. “Decide on one clear image and let that be that.”

So Seven changed his hair to a bushy dark brown, added a rather high forehead, a resolute jaw (so he’d look trustworthy). The mouth just seemed to come of itself; it belonged to the fourteen-year-old image he liked so well, except that its mischievous humor was modified by a slight turn downward. “That’s it,” Seven cried.

“All right, now,” Cyprus said. “Try to keep your consciousness as clear and still as you can. This will just take a moment.”

Seven wasn’t sure exactly what Cyprus did then, but he felt his image slowly solidify. Invisible atoms rushed from the four corners of the earth to congregate within the form. He felt tremendous activity. Then, in a flash, he felt the activity from inside. A heart was pumping blood; the blood flowed through the brand-new veins. His pulse started like a tiny clock. Seven grinned, trying out his facial muscles. He’d been inside a few of his personalities’ bodies before, to help them out for one reason or another, but this was different. A body of his own! A strange sense of possessiveness overtook him. This living parcel of earth belonged to him; let no one trespass!

“I see the experience isn’t so undesirable after all,” Cyprus said drily. “But there seems to be something you’ve forgotten.”