The discovery of time travel means that everything we know, anyone we know, might not only vanish, but never even have existed. Against that possibility stand the men and women of the Time Patrol, dedicated to preserving the history they know and protecting the future from fanatics, terrorists, and would-be dictators who would remold the shape of reality to suit their own purposes.HARD TIMES That's what leads Manson Everard to answer an ad offering "high pay and foreign travel for men and women with military experience." But compared to where - and when - he's going, "hard times" in the 20th-century U.S.A. are easy!REVIEWThe best ScFi is concerned with the question "What if ?" Well, what if someone threatened to travel back in time and stop your father meeting your mother so you were never born ? That's when you'd want to call in Poul Andeson's Time Patrol, recruited from everywhere and everywhen, to counter such mischievous intererence with the proper order of things.Anderson's hero is recruited in the mid 20th Century, then plunged into a series of temporal scenarios where, amongst other things, the Carthaginians win the Punic Wars, and the Mongols discover America and only he can get the historical record back on track.A glorious romp from thr Golden Age of SciFi.