Seven kept trying to speak, but again no one heard or saw him. Worse, an odd shifting seemed to take hold of everything—not just the furniture as before, but the very house itself. It was as if space speeded up through time … or as if time speeded up through space; Seven couldn’t decide which. But the walls themselves began to flutter almost like wooden curtains, and then to break up into beads, and then into dots.

Seven realized that the walls had vanished. He stood alone, on a grassy knoll, in a warm dark night. The house and Dr. Brainbridge and the thief—indeed, the entire neighborhood—were gone. Yet Seven was sure he was in the same place, though he wasn’t sure just how he knew this. A soft wind blew past his face, and then he saw that the river (the same river?) was still approximately the same distance away.

Seven was more upset than he wanted to admit, because his experiences thus far had seemed to lack any kind of organization—or rather, while he could perceive some order, he didn’t seem to know how it worked at all. Before, the house had given some orientation. Now it was gone. Besides this, Cyprus seemed to have abandoned him, at least for the present; any present, he thought, dejected.

He looked about. As far as he could see, the area was entirely wooded except for the small clearing on which he stood. Where or when was he? “Cyprus?” he called, mentally. But there was no answer.

Was this the spot on which the Brainbridge house stood? If so, from the viewpoint of the house’s existence, was he in the future or the past? Seven looked up. Three globes glittered in the far distance above the earth. He groaned and tried to recall earth history. The first floating city was in operation in the twenty-third century; he remembered because one of his personalities—Proteus—lived there. The second floating city came around the twenty-fifth century and the third wasn’t habitable until … until the late twenty-eighth century. Oversoul Seven let himself drop down on the uneven but grassy ground as he recognized his unhappy predicament. By his reckoning, it was about 2985 give or take a couple of centuries; so even if he was in the right space, he was a thousand years off his target!