“Oh. Ah. Haaaa, haaa….” The sounds from the closed door drove Seven to distraction. He had to talk to George and find out what the connection was between his sniffing gas and the time changes. “And then, the solution came,” he told Cyprus again later. “I saw the closet, and from then on I knew what to do.” Seven went quickly into a small closet to the left of George’s door, sat his body nicely down, hidden and out of the way. And then, pleased with his resourcefulness, he just left his body, took an astral image of a wise old man, and walked through George’s door.

George Brainbridge the First giggled slightly and said, “So you’ve come back! Here, have a sniff. I’ve made the most astounding discovery.”

“How come you always see my astral form when you’re sniffing gas?” Seven demanded. “And what have you been up to? I just saw you downstairs a few minutes ago and—“

“Hush, hush, hush, now,” George said. Then in a happy singsong voice he went on: “I saw … I saw … the future. I saw this house in the future…. I even saw a book on dentistry that’s in the library where it can’t be, of course. But it is.”

“Well it won’t be there for you now,” Seven replied glumly. “We’re back in your time now. What did you do to … make it happen? I’m supposed to be in the other time, the future one.”

“Zounds. A problem,” George said, in the same singsong voice. “That is, I haven’t the faintest inkling of how or why it all happened.”

Really worried now, Seven sat down on the cot beside George. The late afternoon sunlight filtered through the lace curtains and glinted here and there on the rose petal pattern of the wallpaper. The carriage house door had been left open and the carriage was gone. The maple trees were full of singing birds. The white doily on George’s old bureau moved gently at the edge by the window as the soft breeze blew in. George lifted the small canister, took another sniff of gas, and said dreamily, “I hardly ever get to come up here during the day, but several patients canceled their appointments … ah, how lovely … a day in June it is.” His moustache quivered, his brown eyes smiled fondly at Seven, and he snapped his suspender straps gently back and forth. “Whoever you are, welcome again and again,” he murmured.

And Seven thought: The carriage was gone from the carriage house, just as George the Third’s car was gone from the garage. Did that mean that George was still at the store?

“I’m going to write down the name of the book I saw, too,” the George beside him said. “It will prove that I was in the future somehow. Maybe I’ll even inform that personage, William James, about my story….”