A time-travel agency sends agents Arvid 6 and Tendal 13 on what should be a routine retrieval mission: harvest the "life essence" of a historical figure named Kanad. But the jumps go wrong. They stumble through history at the wrong moments, leaving ripples that shatter the present. A woman named Nancy Laughton watches a man die at her dog's teeth in the afternoon, then shoots that same man in the chest that night. The police are baffled by a suspect who reeks of whiskey but has no alcohol in his blood, whose scars haven't had time to heal, whose dog drops dead for no reason. The error compounds with each paradox, each life collateral, each impossible detail that shouldn't exist but does. Jerry Sol's 1952 novel is a darkly comic paradox engine, where good intentions in the past poison the future, and the smallest change avalanches into tragedy. It's both a pulp thriller about time cops chasing their own mistakes and a quiet meditation on whether we have the right to rewrite lives we think don't matter.
