> Hey! I don't think I've read that particular story, but it sounds awfully like a scenario mentioned in Larry Niven's "Long ARM of Gil Hamilton" universe. (In this series, The ARM are part of a future U.N. police force dedicated to controlling and suppressing dangerous technologies like time machines, which could conceivably destroy little things like, oh, the entire space-time continuum.) And the main character, the Gil Hamilton detective, lives on an earth so vastly overpopulated by its 18 billion humans that pick-pocketing is legal... but running a red light in traffic automatically incurs the death penalty -- assuming the offender successfully made it through the traffic light alive, and didn't take out fifteen other people with him. Does any of that ring a bell? :-)

Yes, it does. I read the story in a science fiction anthology that Asimov put together. It had a lot of different authors, and Niven probably was the author, becuase I remember the title of the story was "ARM" or at least had "ARM" in it.

It wasn't the sci-fi/mystery anthology, however. It was part of series of anthologies of the different decades of science fiction writing, going back to the 1920's I believe. I don't remember which volume this story was in, though.

There was also a very intriguing time travel story in one of those books by Frederick Pohl. (Or it may have been Poul Anderson). The inventor created a time machine that could only travel *forward* in time, but didn't find this out until he and his assistant had travelled 100 years ahead and then tried to go back home. When they found that they couldn't, they decided to keep going farther and farther into the future, hoping to eventually find the era where mankind had discovered the secret of going back in time. But they never did. His assistant got killed at their second stop, and so he kept on going into the future, picking up various companions along the way. In the end, he found out that time is cyclical as he went beyond the death of the universe and then witnessed the birth of a "new" one, only to keep going and discover that he had started over and the "new" universe was identical to his old one. So he made it home after all, in a roundabout fashion.

Gri"It doesn't actually work that way, but it's an interesting idea"shny