Crosstime Bandits

In the past five years, Infinity has
shut down a dozen criminal crosstime
operations. There are almost certainly
many more.
The Men Who Would Be King:
There is a steady stream of megalo-
maniacs who try to use advanced tech-
nology or historical knowledge to
seize a position of power in another
timeline. To discover them, the Patrol
uses the same surveillance methods it
uses to catch Centran agents. Indeed,
it can be difficult to determine quickly
whether infiltrators are Homeline
adventurers or Centran operatives!
Time Raiders: Criminals who are
just in it for the money – whether
they’re after crown jewels, the Mona
Lisa, or a nuclear warhead – are hard-
er to catch. The most subtle raiders
strike an echo and grab the loot just
before it was lost “in history,” in an
effort to avoid triggering timeline
shifts that would bring the Patrol
down on them. “Theft to order” for
wealthy private collectors is where the
steady money is . . . but everything
from intellectual property theft to
arms smuggling can be lucrative.
Illegal Immigration and Crosstime
Slavery: This is a growing problem.
Need cheap labor? Find a suitable
dimension, hire a conveyor-load of
would-be illegal immigrants, and take
them crosstime instead of cross-bor-
der. If they go to the authorities, they’ll
be sent to Coventry, so they’ll accept
cheap wages in exchange for the
promise of earning enough to buy
false citizenship papers . . . Criminal
organizations import everyone from
prostitutes to soldiers to nuclear
physicists. And sometimes blackmail
isn’t needed: “rescue” a platoon of
Nazi
soldiers
from
an
echo’s
Stalingrad and they may be eager to
serve as your loyal mercenaries.
There’s also a scary black market in
famous movie stars, singers, and
beauties. Only last month, agents of
the Italian Gruppo di Intervento
Speciale rescued a kidnapped Helen of
Troy from a members-only brothel.
Replacements: Duplicates (“dupes”)
of many Homeline residents exist on
close parallels like Earth-Beta. There
have been cases where Homeliners
have paid to have dead children, old
lovers, or archenemies snatched from
these worlds. In a few cases, the
Homeline original was killed and
replaced by a dupe. A typical scam: If
Mr. Johnson is a millionaire business-
man in Homeline but a homeless bum
who lost everything in a market crash
in Earth-Beta, the Mafia might grab
Beta’s Johnson and offer him a deal to
replace Homeline’s Johnson . . . as
their comfortable puppet.