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Trying to locate a sci-fi story I read in the '90s, and the story is probably written in '50s-'70s. Paraphrasing, might have fudged details, but the essence follows.

The narrator A is a cop from the future, arriving in our time to check on B, a (political?) enemy-of-the-state / criminal, also from the future, who has been exiled to our time as punishment. In the years that B has been here, he has settled down, made a life, has a wife, kids, etc, and despite being an anachronism in his mind, has found happiness. A and B talk about things for a bit.

The story ends with A revealing to B, to B's dismay and horror, that A is here to impose the real punishment now, a second exile for B, uprooting him from the life he has painstakingly built for himself.

The story ends with A saying something to the reader like "I sent him back to a small village in Eurasia (?) in the __th century, 3 years before Genghis Khan (/ Attila the Hun?) ransacked the region."

[Update 01:] Mark Olson has identified it as "My Object All Sublime" by Poul Anderson. He found the story in this Google Books link. (I was clearly muddled on story specifics.)

Triskele
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  • Nice question! Do you remember where you read this? A themed or single-author anthology, an old magazine, a retrospective best-of collection... Also do you have any memory of what the cover might have looked like? – DavidW Apr 22 '20 at 13:48
  • I think it was a paperback anthology of several authors, already an older book when I read it in the '90s. Don't remember the cover, unfortunately. – Triskele Apr 22 '20 at 13:58
  • Accepted by comment here, and at https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/221270/a-man-condemned-to-serve-his-sentence-in-other-times/221275#221275 – FuzzyBoots Apr 22 '20 at 14:46

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I'm pretty sure that's Poul Anderson's "My Object All Sublime" -- it fits in most details, though it's Damascus he leaves him in just before Tamerlane sacks it.

I found it on Google Books.

It seems to be fairly widely anthologized: ISFBD and ISFDB (I wonder why it has two entries?)

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Mark Olson
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  • http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?58309 – Organic Marble Apr 22 '20 at 13:57
  • Brilliant, yes, that's the one, thank you! It also seems to be mistakenly attributed to Heinlein a lot. – Triskele Apr 22 '20 at 14:04
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    The second entry is a variant title, presumably to make the joke more clear. (For people unfamiliar with the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, the remainder of the line of the song is "I shall achieve in time.") – DavidW Apr 22 '20 at 15:03