time crime n.

Time Crime.

When time travel was invented, a whole new set of laws was promulgated to cover it. One such law is this: time crime cannot be punished by my own century. Time crime must always be tried and punished by the laws of the century visited.

The way they talk, the death penalty is inflicted a million times a day. Actually I don’t think there have been fifty executions for timecrime in the past ten years. And all of those were real nuts, the kind whose mission it is to murder Mohammed.

Crazy hypothesis: Was there a double tampering? [...] No way. Besides, how could Honeywell vanish, leaving Pat to complain about things? Nonsense. And how could there be two different time crimes when I hadn’t yet found traces of one?

‘Hello,’ said a prerecorded voice. ‘You’re through to the Swindon ChronoGuard. To assist with your inquiry, we have a number of choices. If you have been the victim of temporal flexation, dial one. If you wish to report a temporal anomaly, dial two. If you feel you might have been involved in a timecrime...’

The Time Patrol was created to guard Proven Time. Any threats from one time period to events in another are met with the harshest punishments. There was a movie once, back when they made them still, that had a line in it that kind of sums up what we do. A guy holds out a pocket watch and says something like, ‘It’s just a cheap piece of junk, but bury it in the desert for a thousand years and it becomes priceless.’ If that were the extent of timecrime, I’m not certain anyone would even care. That’s not the kind of stuff the Patrol was formed to stop.

They keep having to switch topics when he drifts too close, so he doesn’t figure out the whole thing is partially a cover for a time crime.