I materialized in a small alley in downtown Columbus, Ohio, at about 1:30 in the afternoon. It was the year nineteen hundred and seventy seven. The smells hit me first; exhaust fumes from the automobiles, too strong perfumes from pedestrians, the smell of garbage somewhere nearby.

I hated the twentieth century.

If the Time Clock had been accurate I should be about twenty yards and twelve floors away from my target. I checked my coordinates using my retrieval bracelet out of habit, but the Time Clock had been accurate, as always.

I stepped out of the alley and merged with the pedestrian traffic. One benefit of the twentieth century; I find it difficult to blend into crowds in medieval times where my six feet of height tends to stand out, but in the twentieth century I'm one of a crowd.

People still tended to keep out of my way as I moved along the sidewalk. Something about the way a cop moves in any century. That sense that somebody is going to be hurt, and no one wants it to be them.

I entered the lobby of the office building with the rest of the crowd returning from lunch. The building directory showed the offices of Lambert and Sons, Stockbrokers to be on the twelfth floor. I squeezed myself into an elevator with the rest of the crowd and rode to the twelfth floor.

The Lambert and Sons, Stockbrokers offices were off a small hallway in the back of the building. The man who rented the offices was not named Lambert, and he had no sons. Lying to twentieth century citizens isn't a crime as far as I'm concerned, but working as a stockbroker when you had intimate knowledge of what the stock market would do over the next five years -- that's my jurisdiction.

I entered the office and moved past the protesting secretary into the inner office. The man behind the desk looked up in surprise. Two long steps took me across the office to his desk, and my arms were long enough to reach across the desk and lift him from his chair.

"What do you think--" I stopped his protest by flopping him over onto the desk with his back to me.

"Sid Carstan, you have the right to remain silent." As I spoke I pulled his arms behind his back and wrapped his wrists in a nylon cord with a retrieval unit attached. "If you give up that right, anything you may have ever said can be held against you in the temporal courts."

"Look, I have plenty of money--"

This time I stopped his words with a sharp jab to the small of his back. He coughed pitifully, then continued trying to talk.

"You don't understand, they'll kill me and my family. I'll never have existed."

"I've heard it all before, Sid," I said, shaking my head in disgust.

I triggered the retrieval unit tied to his wrists and took a step back as the unit sent a burst of tachyons forward in time to when Time Clock would be waiting to monitor such bursts. With a brief swirl of air, he disappeared.

I could hear the heavy tread of security personnel moving into the outer office, so I triggered my own retrieval unit. I always wondered what I would do if Time Clock didn't pick up my signal and pull me back to my own time.

Time Clock has never failed yet, and didn't this time either. The office disappeared from sight in a flash of light as I was pulled forward in time.

I tried not to fidget as the Chief told us what they'd discovered from Sid. The entire crew was there, the Chief, Karla, Monty, the observer of the day from the government, and Josh.

"It seems," the Chief said, "that Sid was contacted by an organization calling itself the Architects."

"Where do they get these names," Monty said. "Last week it was the Temporal Terrors." Josh laughed, but the Chief continued as if there'd been no interruption.

"Sid was prepped and sent to the twentieth century from a base in the twenty-first century. We've been able to use a temporal tracer placed on Sid when he was born to get a fix on the location."

"That reminds me, Chief," Karla said. "We were all out of temporal tracers, so I'll have to do that when we get the next shipment tomorrow."

The Chief just shook his head.

"See that you don't forget. The last thing we need is a paradox storm wiping out all of Morgan's hard work."

"Oh, Morgan wouldn't mind." This was Monty again. "He'd probably love to go back and arrest Sid all over again. Maybe try a left cross instead of a right jab this time."

I stared at Monty until his smile drooped and he started fidgeting, then looked back at the Chief.

"So when do I go back to this Architect base?"

"We'll fit you out with twenty-first century fashions and history today, and send you tomorrow. You'll strictly be scouting the area for a larger strike force. We can't afford to let any of them escape."

"Fine." I stood and left the room, heading for the briefing department.

"Is it such a good idea to send Morgan back on a reconnaissance mission? He seems a trifle violent." The government observer always seemed to have things to say after everyone else had left, the Chief thought. Too bad they could never send the same person twice so he could stop answering stupid questions.

"As I'm sure you read in your briefing material," the Chief could tell from the look on the man's face he hadn't read his briefing material, "Morgan and all the other cops were sent to HQ, some five centuries in our future. HQ enhances their bodies and trains them, as well as conditioning them to put their job above everything else."

"I don't think the conditioning worked for Morgan."

The Chief laughed.

"The conditioning worked just fine on Morgan. He might rough up a suspect or two, but he would literally do anything to protect the sanctity of the timeline. They all would."

"Well, I guess if you think he's reliable. But about this Monty. Is such levity really appropriate?"

The Chief sighed.

I walked into the lobby of the Creepy Crawley's confident in myself. I'd been through this type of scenario dozens of times. I walk into the suspected headquarters of the temporal bandits, raise a fuss and make a target out of myself, and then beat the crap out of them when they try to take me out.

After all, most temporal bandits are nothing more than a few small-time crooks using a homemade time launcher they'd built in their garage from blueprints they found on the net. Most of them didn't even realize that if they changed the past significantly enough, their time launcher waiting uptime for their signals would quietly disappear and leave them stranded.

So I walked into the lobby in broad daylight. A bulky native American sweeping a broom across the floor looked up at me. I nodded to him and stopped a few yards away.

"Where's the boss?"

He looked at me like he was wondering whether to talk to me or swat me like a fly. Finally he motioned toward a back hallway.

"Third door on the left."

The third door on the left was open, and led into a small lounge. Two hired thugs stood along the wall, while a man in a white suit sat at a table working on a portable computer. White suit looked up as I entered.

"Who're you?"

"I want a piece of your action," I said, trying to give it my best gangster intonation. Could be I was a couple centuries too late there, but the implanted knowledge sometimes gets mixed up. I was overdue for cleaning all that junk out of my mind from the last several missions.

The man in white nodded to the two toughs, who moved toward me. I managed to avoid grinning; this was the part I loved. As the nearest of the two moved into range I snapped my right foot into his knee. He crumpled to the ground right on schedule.

He didn't cry out in pain, but just reached up with his hands to grab my right arm. I could barely hear servos whining slightly, and realized he was a cyborg.

Well, I could still take one tough and a cyborg.

At that point, the other tough disappeared and reappeared behind me. I dropped to the floor as his fist swung at my head. Okay, a cyborg and a teleporter.

I hated the twenty-first century.

I couldn't shift the cyborg's grip, so I twisted onto my back and kicked with my feet into the teleporter's face. His reflexes weren't good enough to get him out of the way in time, and he ended up slumped against the door I'd come through.

Meanwhile the cyborg was trying to get into a position to throttle me. Enough was enough. I pulled out my plasma pistol and shot him through the head. His hand still wouldn't let go, but another shot through his wrist solved that problem.

I stood and brushed off my clothes, looking at the man in white. I crossed my arms over my chest.

"Please, have a seat," he said. Sure, easy to be gracious when you have no choice. I sat in the chair he offered and leaned back.

The electricity that surged through the chair was a complete surprise, for the moment or two I managed to retain consciousness. The man in white was sitting across the table smirking at me.

Some people have no class.

I woke feeling cold metal on my back. I was prone, my wrists and ankles apparently shackled to whatever I was laying on, with the annoying sound of conversation nearby.

"Our telepath couldn't get anything from him, and drugs didn't work either," one voice said. This sounded like the man in white.

"He must be a temporal policeman." I'm not one to be intimidated, but this voice made the hair on the back of my neck bristle. Here was one I needed to get back to HQ for interrogation.

"I knew we should have left well enough alone," the man in the white suit said. "Killing bumbling tourists is one thing, but these cops could wreck everything."

"Anton, shut up." The other one moved closer to me. "The tourists complicated our plans to the point where we couldn't make a temporal change without one of them screwing it up. The so-called temporal police are a known quantity, one we can work around."

Now I was intrigued. There were no temporal tourists. Time travel has been regulated since its invention, and the temporal police have existed since just about the beginning. Either these guys were nuts, or they knew something I didn't.

"It just galls me," Anton said, "We're responsible for the cops existing, and now they're trying to fuck with us."

"Patience, Anton." The other voice was near my side now. "We shall find out what this one knows, and then make a third major shift that will leave us as the only time travellers in existence.

"You may as well open your eyes, we know you are awake."

I opened my eyes and looked into the most evil face I'd ever seen. Oh, he looked okay physically, but underneath you could just tell he'd be fitting me for an iron maiden and thumb-screws if this wasn't the twenty-first century.

"You're wasting your time, you won't get anything out of me." This wasn't bravado on my part; part of our conditioning in the future is a resistance to all forms of interrogation, whether physical, mental, or drug based.

"Well, then," the sinister one smiled, "I shall thoroughly enjoy myself trying."

I shivered a bit at that. I wasn't afraid of the pain, but the pure sadism of the bastard made me want to push his nose out through the back of his head.

I don't remember much of the next hour and a half. There was pain, and screaming, and talking, but I'm pretty sure I was only responsible for two out of the three.

At one point the sinister guy, whose name turned out to be Slyston, bragged about how the Architects has already managed a major shift in the time line. In the original time line, time travel was available to everyone, and all those pesky temporal tourists kept messing up Slyston's big plans for remaking the world in his own image.

So the Architects jumped back to just after the invention of the time machine and used their agents in the government to get the technology classified. While making sure they still had use of it, of course. Unfortunately for Slyston, the government also started a temporal police force.

I stopped hearing actual words by that point. I knew he was talking, but the idea of sounds having rational meanings associated with them was beyond me. I could see Slyston and Anton through a haze of pain. My conditioning held firm, but it did not stop me from feeling the agony of the torture.

I knew only two things at the core of my being. First, I would give my life to preserve the time line. Second, time travel allowed people to fuck up the timeline. To do anything about this, I had to get away from Slyston and Anton.

As I writhed on the metal table, I gripped the shackle on my right wrist and pulled. A couple of muscled popped, but the shackle came loose. I whacked Anton across the head with it. He flew backward ten feet and collapsed like his strings has been cut. Slyston immediately ran for it, probably to get reinforcements.

The way I was feeling, he'd need them.

I managed to rip off the rest of the shackles, and keyed in a quick time trip back about twenty years into my recall bracelet. The bracelet communicated with Time Clock, the time machine used by all temporal police, currently waiting several hundred years in the future. Through some quirk of temporal technology, time machines became far less accurate if they were based before the discovery of time travel, so Time Clock was based in the future.

The lab disappeared in a swirl of light as Time Clock recognized and granted my request.

It was fall, in the year nineteen hundred and ninety nine. I materialized in the library of the University of Southern California. I made my way across campus to the physics building.

As I entered the building, I caught sight of two men who had been lounging outside the building follow me. I led them into a small hallway pulling my plasma pistol as I went. A quick whirl, two shots, and the two men were laying on the ground with smoking holes in their chests.

I dragged the bodies into a closet and frisked them. They were Architect agents, probably charged with protecting Dr. Winston.

I left the closet and move to Dr. Winston's office. I opened the door and saw Dr. Winston sitting at his desk, working over pages and pages of calculations. Just like we see in the training holos at the academy. This was the man responsible for the invention of time travel, and the subsequent ability to alter the timeline.

I pulled out my plasma pistol and shot him.

My recall bracelet can no longer communcate with Time Clock. My elimination of Dr. Winston has eliminated time travel from the timeline.

The possibility exists that others will follow in his footsteps, but I'll be waiting. While my recall bracelet can no longer be used to request time travel, it can still detect the use of temporal energies, and doubles as a computer link for hacking into local systems. I should be able to get some id from various government police agencies to give me some legitimacy in this time.

The Architects probably have bases in this time as well. While I'm waiting for another scientist to duplicate Dr. Winston's work, I'll track down those bases and eliminate the remnants of the Architects.

As the last living temporal policeman, that's my job.

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