Science fiction giant Keith Laumer delivers a fast-paced, wry adventure of time travel and twisted realities in three classic interwoven tales. <P>American Brion Bayard is abducted on the streets of Stockholm, and thrust into what he believes is a truck. He's relieved to find his captors very apologetic, and very British–that is, until they began speaking about nations of which Bayard has never heard. <P>His captors were from Earth, yes. But not <I>his</i> Earth. <P>Turns out that there are countess parallel Earths, each different, where history has taken every possible turn –and there are even more uninhabitable worlds, destroyed by the misuse of cross-time travel. <P>Bayard discovers that the Earth <I>he</i> has now been thrust into, the Earth of the Imperium, is at war with a dangerously aggressive parallel Earth that has taken a wrong turn somewhere in time and whose ruler is. . .a parallel version of Bayard himself! Now Bayard's mission is clear: to prevent his alternate self from destroying the new plane of reality that he now calls home, the Imperium.