Paratime

I've read these stories many times since I first bought this collection in 1981, so I feel that the collection as a whole deserves a four-star rating, although it contains five stories with some variation in quality.“He walked around the horses” is a classic short story, perhaps the best of this collection, although it's the odd one out, being the only story to make no mention of the Paratime Police. It deals with the disappearance of Benjamin Bathurst while travelling through Prussia in 1809. He was a real person whose disappearance is a fact of history, although most likely he was murdered and robbed in a mundane fashion. Instead, this story shows him transferred to a parallel world with a different history, and what happens to him there.The other four stories describe a vast (possibly infinite) number of parallel worlds, on one of which a method of travel between worlds has been developed, and has been used for a long time to exploit the other worlds in various ways—quietly. The world with the secret of travel wishes to keep that secret, and it employs the Paratime Police to maintain law and order among travellers in paratime, but above all to ensure that the secret remains a secret.The stories describe four different problems tackled by Verkan Vall of the Paratime Police.“Police Operation” (a novelette) introduces the Paratime Police and its context.“The Last Enemy” (a novella) is about the political implications of research into reincarnation on one of the more advanced worlds.“Time Crime” (a longer novella) is the best of the four, about a large-scale criminal conspiracy enslaving people on one world and selling them on another.“Temple Trouble” (a novelette) is adequate but not very interesting; it's about rivalry between two companies wishing to exploit the resources of a relatively primitive world.The Paratime Police also appear in a novel, [b:Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen 1440162 Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen H. Beam Piper https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1264374069l/1440162.SY75.jpg 1430769].All of these stories are old-style sf, first published from 1948 to 1955, so of course they're dated in style and content—with the exception of “He walked around the horses”. Being set in 1809, and written in the form of an exchange of letters, gives it an oddly timeless quality: if I didn't know when it was written, it would be hard to guess.