Seven shook his head, and suddenly began laughing. Tears fell down his face. George Brainbridge the Third was so pragmatic, so focused in his time and place that, well, anything else would seem an impossibility. And as Seven laughed, a part of his consciousness merged momentarily with George’s, and through George’s eyes Seven saw the twentieth-century room just as it had always been as far as George was concerned. And in that instant, George the Third unknowingly endeared himself to Seven forever after.

“What’s so funny?” George asked, beginning to laugh too. “Is there egg on my face or something? Did you sniff some laughing gas from my canister?”

Seven laughed louder; here was the down-to-earth George in the present, perceiving his usual environment, come hell or high water, while upstairs and ninety-five years away, his grandfather couldn’t even begin to keep his times straight.

“I don’t know,” Seven gasped. “You made me laugh, something you said or didn’t say….” As George’s face broke into a new cheerful grin, Mrs. Norway vanished, the tea table disappeared, and Seven was back in George’s twentieth century, where he belonged.

Chapter Five

A Would-Be Thief in the Night

They sat at the kitchen table. “We have this whole second floor as our living quarters,” George said. “Usually it’s noisy as hell, but with Jean and the three boys at the cottage, it sure gets quiet.”

Seven grinned, imagining George surrounded by young sons.

“Shit,” George said. “Last weekend I started enlarging two rooms at the cottage, but you could still put the whole place in the middle of this house and have room left over! No one builds houses like this one any more.”

Thank Heaven, Oversoul Seven thought, enjoying his own joke. But the dinner was excellent. George half considered himself a gourmet cook. In fact he wore an old apron over the summer shorts he’d put on after work. Seven stared at George’s thick thighs with some begrudging admiration, and wondered if he should have made his own thighs larger.

“My parents and their parents must have had thousands of suppers in this same spot,” George said, musingly.

Seven almost said, “I wish you hadn’t said that,” because as soon as George mentioned his grandparents, Seven imagined them sitting at the 1890 summer table.

“I’ll say,” George answered. “It’s spooky in a way to think of it. And these old houses. They’re being torn down through the city all the time. This one has really been kept up, though. So has the neighborhood. But it is decaying. The town would love to make it into an urban renewal project.”