Seven looked around. What he saw was the dirty, cluttered twentieth-century attic, with boxes stashed all over, antique furniture standing at odd angles, and the smell of dust mingling with the scent of lilacs that came in through the opened window. It was then that Seven spied the old desk. It was the same one that had stood polished and gleaming in the attic study of George the First. Quickly Seven went rummaging through the drawers until finally he found what he was looking for. It was too much to ask for, he thought, grinning, as he came upon the neat stack of old journals.

Still, Seven paused before opening the one at hand. Was their author, George the First, invisibly there? And if he was, would his desk drawers open as if by an invisible hand? Or would his journals and desk drawers remain motionless? Because as Seven thought of opening the first journal, he felt very close to George the First—close enough to touch him, in fact.

Seven paused, staring. He studied the positions of the old journals, now scattered on the floor and looked at the dusty surface of the desk. Everything seemed complete twentieth-century except—Seven squinted his eyes—except for one tiny circle of air. Well, the circle wasn’t tiny exactly, he thought, and he wasn’t even sure how he knew it was different from all of the other air in the attic room, but it was.

Seven stared at the shiny segment of space suspiciously and hopefully at the same time. He simply had to discover what George the First knew about the Codicils! Was that odd super-transparent circle of space somehow connected with the same space in the 1890s? Because now Seven felt closer than ever to George the First—and more than that, he smelled a difference between that significant spot of air, and all the rest in the room.

Seven grinned: he had it! His inner senses were much more acute than the physical ones that came with his body, of course, and now he realized that the smell of dust and lilacs was everywhere else in the attic—except in that circle of space he was staring at. He stepped closer, thinking that here, for some reason, the times of both Georges must intersect.

In the next moment, though, Seven stepped back so quickly that he almost fell over, because suddenly a very real and solid red-sleeved lower arm and red-cuffed hand appeared in the center of the circle of space; it reached out and picked up the nearest journal that Seven hadn’t yet placed with the others. And as the hand (surely George the First’s) grabbed the journal, the dust instantly vanished from it; its color brightened, and the journal looked quite new.