Originally Brunner wrote three stories published in 1962 in consecutive issues of the British magazine Science Fiction Adventures: "Spoil of Yesterday" in No.

In the same year, a considerably different version appeared as a fix-up novel under the title Times Without Number, which was published as an Ace Double together with Destiny's Orbit by Donald A. Wollheim (using the pseudonym David Grinnell).

At some unspecified later time Spain also managed to conquer and absorb its long-time rival France through circumstances that are evidently not considered as pivotal as the conquest of England.

However, having their hands full in the north, the Spaniards neglected the defense of their own Iberian homeland, which was reconquered by Islamic forces of the Mediterranean Khalifate – a titanic event of which no details are given, either.

In 1892, an Italian named Carlo Borromeo discovered the secret of time-travel, though otherwise the overall level of technology remained not much higher than it was in the 16th Century, with people travelling primarily on horseback and cities lit by open fires.

In all, the alternate 20th Century depicted by Brunner is significantly more humane than that in Keith Roberts' Pavane, written a few years later and also based on a victory of the Spanish Armada.

Don Miguel is then entrusted with returning it to the exact spot in the past from which it was taken, in time for it to be used in the Aztec bloody rites of mass human sacrifice – with which he is duty bound not to interfere but which leave him shaken.

There he learns of the burning of the palace and the deaths of all of the assembled dignitaries – including the entire Royal Family – at the hands of dozens of female warriors (transported, it turns out, from an alternate timeline in which an Indian king on the Mongol throne rules all of Asia and Europe and which senior members of the Society of Time secretly contacted).

However, though seeming to end well, the episode leaves Don Miguel with a mounting feeling of anxiety, having found out that his superiors engage in dangerous experiments and thus realizing that his entire reality hangs by an extremely thin thread.

Fearing a violation of the treaty between the Empire and the Confederacy of the East regulating time travel, Don Miguel alerts the Society, which launches a full-scale investigation.

When Father Ramón arrives on the scene, however, he insists that no violation has taken place, even though a scouting expedition confirms that there is indeed a group from the 20th Century mining the land in the past.

The reason for that becomes clear upon their return: Don Miguel finds out that the "discovery" had in fact been planted by Two Dogs, who is spearheading a conspiracy of anti-Mohawk Native Americans seeking to bring down the Empire, and who manipulate the Eastern Confederacy and make use of it but have their own far-reaching agenda.

Urgently rushing back to the present, Don Miguel hopes to sound a last minute warning, but is overtaken by the forwardly proceeding wave of changing reality (a highly painful experience) and arrives not in New Madrid but its analogue, New York City, emerging in Central Park to the amazement of passers-by.

In both there is a Catholic Empire based in London and ruling the British Islands, France and the entire Western Hemisphere (with Christianized Native Americans accepted into its aristocracy).

And in both works the Empire depicted is monarchial and conservative, without any trace of democracy, but still relatively benevolent; locked in a decades-long cold war with an Eastern European rival; technologically backward compared to our world, but still possessing a key field of knowledge (time travel, magic) unknown to our 20th century.