As he looked about, Oversoul Seven felt a deepening sense of desolation. Here, in the very spot where George Brainbridge’s house stood in easy hearing distance of the busy traffic of Water Street; where the busy twentieth-century air was full of activity—now, in the twenty-fifth century, all of that had vanished; the Earth for all purposes was a deserted, sterile world. Seven let his consciousness roam. While he stood disconsolately, his mind traveled over the nearly blank landscape. In the flash of a human eye, Seven’s consciousness leapt from continent to continent. Even the seas were sluggish, and the vegetation had sloughed off the mountains so that only here or there one lonely dwarfed tree remained. What had happened?

Seven was almost overwhelmed by the desolation; he was an Earth soul after all. So what if some mortals dwelled in the manufactured cities above the earth? What heritages had been lost? What physical echoes no longer sounded in the blood?

Window wouldn’t be found here, Seven realized suddenly. This world had no inhabitants. Then where was the precise future probability that Window belonged in? Besides, wasn’t Window in the twenty-third century, not the twenty-fifth?

Then why had he come here? Seven wondered. Cyprus, he knew, would say, “Trust yourself, even your seeming mistakes.” But what good would that do? Seven nervously looked around again. He wanted to get out of this probability as quickly as possible. But maybe the century was somehow right, even though he was positive that Window had been in the twenty-third century last time he remembered.

Scowling, Seven stared directly before him again, this time at a spindly, dead gray twig. Probabilities, he knew, were like tangents out from a certain time … they were horizontal extensions, sort of. So he stared at the twig and stared and stared. Finally it began to blur just a bit. At the same time, he felt as if he were just looking through his right eye, or tipping very gently sidewards to the right, or leaning psychologically to the right. At least this is how he tried to explain it to himself as everything—ground, sky, Seven, and all his thoughts—suddenly took a turn in one probability and shifted into another. The time was still the twenty-fifth century, for the three floating cities still hung in the sky. The twig (or its double? or triple?) was now infinitesimally to the right of the first one. The distance was so small it could never be physically measured. But Seven knew he was in a different world.

This became apparent at once as new objects kept appearing everywhere, so quickly that Seven leapt back. When he did, something struck his leg or his leg struck something, and he spun around, rubbing his eyes with momentary disbelief.