Synopsis: From the back cover of the DAW first edition: "There is real time... and there is potential time. By controlling the difference, the Chronotic Empire came into existence and maintained itself over a thousand years of human history. Its Time Fleets, armadas of time-traveling fortresses, patrolled its temporal borders relentlessly, blotting out potential-time deviations, erasing errors of history that might undermine the empire. But nevertheless the empire's days were numbered, for somewhere in its own future was the century of the Hegemony, its implacable enemy. Barrington J. Bayley, author of COLLISION COURSE, once again demonstrates in this brilliantly different novel, his ability to weave unusual concepts of time with the human problems of the men and women caught up in the contradictions of a destiny no mortal could ever comprehend."