Times Without Numbers
In an alternate Spanish-dominated 20th century, Don Miguel Navarro is a time traveler in
the western world’s Society of Time who are locked in a time-travel cold war with the
Confederacy of the East, not to mention their task of tracking down various time
crimes.
I try to avoid major spoilers (stop reading now, if you wish), but the reason
that Don Miguel ends up in a world without time travel is one that I thought of (long
after Brunner) based on fixed-points in mathematics. That idea alone gives the story an
extra star.
The original three stories appeared in three consecutive issues of
Science Fiction Adventure, and they were later fixed up into a short novel that
was subsequently expanded. It’s the expanded version that I read from the CU library.
It wasn’t only the embarrassing experience of being shown off around the hall by
her—as it were, a real live time-traveller, exclamation point, in the same tone of
voice as one would say, “A real live tiger!” That happened too often for members of
the Society of Time not to have grown used to it; there were, after all, fewer than a
thousand of them in the whole of the Empire.