In that moment Seven knew that something was going to happen, and he didn’t want George or Josephine around when it did. On impulse, he opened the car door and squeezed himself out. “I think I’ll sit on the porch a while,” he said, a bit apologetically. “The heat’s really getting to me. It’s getting toward suppertime, but I’m not even hungry. Why don’t you two get a bite and pick me up afterward? In the meantime, ‘I’ll think a lot,’” he said, borrowing one of George’s pet phrases.

Josephine shook her head. “No food for me. But I think we should check the center again. George can look outside, and I’ll go in on some pretext or other….”

Seven nodded impatiently because he could already feel times changing. The car turned the corner just as the road itself disappeared.

Seven sprang to his feet, as the house behind him disappeared; so did just about everything else. In a bewildering display, objects again appeared, disappeared, and were replaced by others.

Finally Seven remembered a knack of dealing with such events, one that he’d learned (somewhere? when?) and forgotten. He stared directly ahead, and when the next object—a small tree—appeared there, Seven kept his gaze riveted on the spot. Everything disappeared again, and now the tree was taller. So he was going into the future; at least he had that settled, he thought. And he wanted to find Window of the twenty-third century to see what connections there were between him and his namesake in the twentieth century. If he found the future Window … would he automatically find the twentieth-century one?

Seven was blinking furiously. The tree was full-grown, then dead; then the spot was vacant. A hut appeared, then the spot was empty again. Then new growth … Seven groaned; the spot looked more or less the way it had when he’d found himself in the twenty-fifth century with the floating cities. If so, he’d gone two centuries too far. But before he could think of anything to do about this, the environment began to stabilize. He looked up, his suspicions confirmed. The landscape looked more or less deserted, and in the sky the floating cities caught the rays of the sun like glittering, round kites.

Seven gulped; something decidedly unpleasant had happened in this latest time change. Instead of grass, the ground was covered with a sickly brown layer of vegetation that almost looked like the thin wisps of hair on a bald man’s head. And beneath, the ground was almost gray in color. The only trees were dwarfed crooked ones, hardly three feet tall at most; and though the air was warm enough (meaning it was still summer), there were no flowers or birds or—Seven listened intently—or insects; or if there were, they were ominously still.