This is a collection of stories Piper wrote with his "Paratime" concept, originally published in a sci-fi mag back in the '40s and '50s. The basic conceit is there are thousands upon thousands of parallel timelines, some very similar to others, but none identical. In one of these timelines, humanity (which apparently originated on Mars) figured out how to move between the timelines.
Not forward or backwards in time, and not in space. If you slipped to the next timeline over at 2 p.m. today in your living room, you would appear in that same place at that same time. It might not be your living room, though, or anyone's living room, for that matter. Humanity might not have progressed past the Iron Age and you just appeared in the king's bath chambers, or it's a Jetsons world and all the buildings are miles above your head.
Piper doesn't get into those aspects all that much, beyond mentioning that as the machine carries one to their destination timeline, it may inadvertently pick up hitchhikers. Piper's more interested in the problems caused by humans. The timeline that developed this machine (which calls itself the First Level) economically exploits all the other timelines.
In "Temple Trouble," a company's employees present themselves as priests of a particular god and use the temples as cover to mine uranium. The issue isn't that they're doing this. It's that their god fell out of favor and several of them are to be executed, which risks their technology being found by the locals. In fact, the protagonist Verkan Vall, who works for the Paratime Police, criticizes a company bureaucrat for not authorizing the head "priest" to use their advanced weapons to kill a few locals and put the fear of the god back in them.
"Time Crime" likewise revolves around Vall and his wife Dalla trying to track down a criminal organization that's abducting people from one timeline and selling them into slavery in another. Again, slavery itself not so bad, as Verkan and Dalla have servants that were pulled from such timelines and are referred to as "proles". But we are assured that's different, because they're treated well. Unless one refuses to cooperate with a police investigation in which case, the brakes are off.
It was a different time, I suppose. Governing systems or ideologies that could be broadly compared to Communism pop up in a couple of stories, always as boogeymen to be averted. Being forgiving, I could figure Piper was pointing out how easy it is for Vall to make these pronouncements, as someone at the top of the heap, and eager to make sure no other timeline figures out this technology and challenges the "First Level's" access to all those resources. He wasn't taken away from his home to be a servant for some guy whose face Piper variously describes as "immobile" or "expressionless" (which I originally thought meant Vall had suffered some sort of injury, but I think he's meant to be stoic.) I'm not sure that's what is happening here.
Paratime is a concept writers could (and I'm sure, have) do a lot with, but Piper sticks to notions suited for adventure. Shootouts and fighting. Maybe that was the constraint of writing for a sci-fi magazine, which probably had certain expectations of the stories it would print. Or maybe that was just what Piper was interested in writing.
'"But, fortunately, they now have the atomic bomb, and they are developing radioactive poisons, weapons of mass effect. And their their racial, nationalistic, and ideological conflicts are rapidly reaching the explosion point. A series of all-out atomic wars is just what that sector needs, to bring their population down to their world's carrying capacity; in a century or so, the inventors of the atomic bomb will be hailed as the saviors of their species."'
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