The Barkeep is a temporal agent who is severely burned on a mission to foil a serial bomber known in the media as The Fizzle Bomber . Returning to his base in 1985, he receives skin grafts, resulting in a completely new face. Once sufficiently recovered, he embarks on a new mission to 1970, posing as a bartender. On this job, he befriends a customer who calls himself The Unmarried Mother , a nom de plume he uses when writing articles for true confessions magazines from a woman's point of view. The barkeep encourages him to tell his life story, then shows him his time machine and brings him to 1985, where he is recruited into the Temporal Bureau.Later, he takes The Unmarried Mother on his first assignment, and instead of waiting, makes an unauthorized time jump in a failed attempt to stop the Fizzle Bomber. He then returns to pick up his recruit, who has now realized he has been tricked. However, the Barkeep points out that there's no one else for him to blame. Returning to 1985, the Barkeep prepares for his chosen retirement to 1975 in New York City, despite this being nearly the time and place of the Fizzle Bomber's most deadly attack, killing over 10,000. When he makes the jump, his time machine is supposed to decommission itself, but this fails. He tracks down the Fizzle Bomber and, despite the latter's claim that he has saved more lives than he has taken, shoots him.......The Unmarried Mother was a little girl in an orphanage, where she had been left on the doorstep. She in unusually intelligent and strong, but is regarded as an outsider by the other children, and gets into fights. In her late teens, she applies to Space Corps as a companion for (invariably male) astronauts, but is dismissed after a fight with another trainee.She enters college and meets an older man with whom she falls in love. After a short time, he disappears and she learns she is pregnant. After she gives birth to a girl, her doctor explains that she had male sex organs as well as female. The latter were just sufficiently developed to permit the successful birth, but were severely damaged in the process. The doctor was forced to perform a hysterectomy, and also insured that her (from now on his ) male sex organs would fully develop. A few days after the birth, an unidentified man enters the hospital and leaves with the baby. Eventually, he finds work as a writer of confession stories. It is at this stage that he meets The Barkeep, is recruited as a temporal agent, and embarks on his first mission.After being left on assignment by The Barkeep, he bumps into a woman whom he soon recognizes as his younger self. He finds himself replaying her first encounter with her lover, this time as the latter. He falls in love with her, but eventually The Barkeep returns and takes him away. He is prepared for his next mission, an attempt to deal with the Fizzle Bomber, during which he is severely burned. Show less «