time patrol n.

Time Patrol.

The other division of the Time Service is the Time Patrol, whose task it is to prevent abuses of Benchley Effect devices and to guard against the emergence of paradoxes. At our next lesson we will consider in detail the nature of these paradoxes and how they may be avoided.

They understood. One by one, the time-patrol put down their glasses and slipped silently from the room. Carl was elected to take the robot back to 1937.

Now to go back to the machine and return to 2006, she thinks. To start my new life. But as she leaves the apartment, a tall, lean man steps out of the hallway shadows and clamps his hand powerfully around her wrist. ‘Time Patrol,’ he says crisply, flashing an identification badge. ‘You’re under arrest for temponautic murder, Mrs. Porter.’

‘What happens,’ Vivian asked, ‘if a tourist meets his own grandchildren and hates them and decides not to get married? Wouldn’t that change history?’ ‘There’s a whole branch of Time Patrol checking to make sure that won’t happen,’ said Ramona. ‘Hush, Sam.’

Then—finally!—the Time Patrol shows up with funguns blazing, and for once school is, like, actually interesting.