Ripping Time by Robert Asprin & Linda Evans

As she pocketed her hair band, Ann glanced side-long at Kit. “You really have been moping with Margo gone, haven’t you? Honestly, Kit, they’ve been thick as mosquitoes in a swamp for days. Rumor has it,” and she winked, “that Peg had a line on a Greek bronze that was going up for auction in London and Robert was just about nuts, trying to find somebody to snitch it quietly for him the night the auction warehouse goes up in smoke. Or rather, went up in smoke. It burned the night of Polly Nichols’ murder, in a Shadwell dry-dock fire.”

Kit grinned as he escorted Ann through the crowds. Robert Li was engaged in an ongoing, passionate love affair with any and all Greek bronzes. “I hope he gets it. Peg Ames will make him the happiest man in La-La Land if he can lay hands on another one for his collection.”

The IFARTS agent and resident antiquarian had personally rescued from destruction a collection of ancient bronzes that most up-time museum directors would’ve gnashed their teeth over, had they known about them. Rescuing artwork from destruction was perfectly legal, of course, and constituted one of the major exceptions to the first law of time travel. Collectors who salvaged such art could even sell it on the open market, if they were willing to pay the astronomical taxes levied by the Bureau of Access Time Functions. Many an antiquarian and art dealer made a good living doing just that.

But Robert Li would sooner have sold his own teeth than part with an original Greek bronze, even one acquired through perfectly legitimate means. Of course, snitching one from a down-time auction warehouse before it burned did not qualify as a “legitimate” method of acquisition. To rescue a doomed piece of art, one had to rescue it during the very disaster destined to destroy it. Li was a very honest and honorable man. But when it came to any man’s abiding passion, honesty occasionally went straight out the nearest available window. Certainly, many another antiquarian had tried smuggling out artwork that was not destined for down-time destruction. Hence the existence of the International Federation for Art Temporally Stolen, which tried to rescue such purloined work and return it to its proper time and place of origin. Robert Li was the station’s designated IFARTS agent, a very good one. But if he had a line on a Greek bronze that was scheduled to be destroyed by some method it couldn’t easily be rescued from, or one that had just disappeared mysteriously, he wouldn’t be above trying to acquire it for his personal collection, whatever the means.