"Time Trap" is a 1970 comedic science-fiction novel by Keith Laumer, who was also famous for writing the Retief series of novels. It is short, around 140 pages (although, as we will see, mine was much shorter), and mixes adventure with comedy with cosmic science-fiction action.
The book's prologue opens with several scenes of people being displaced in time. A boat of Portguese sailors comes ashore in modern times, Abraham Lincoln is spotted in Africa, and a prim spinster finds herself walking around in circles. We are then introduced to our protagonist, Roger Tyson. whose car has broken down somewhere. When he tries to flag down a motorcycle rider, it turns into an accident, and the rider, a beautiful woman, tells Tyson with her dying breath that he must find a special location. And immediately afterwards, a motorcycle ridden by a monstrous rutabaga (and, yes, the book describes it in those terms) roars by. Tyson finds himself fleeing through time and space, meeting other displaced characters, all in pursuit of a mysterious mission. As is often the case in these stories, Tyson is slow on the uptake, and even after going through several glowing portals in the sky, refuses to admit he is time travelling at first.
Unfortunately, at page 48, something happened. The story changed abruptly, and when I looked at the next page, I saw it was page 73. I thought perhaps the missing pages were bound somewhere else, but no, they weren't there. I also considered that this was part of the book's gag, but no, it was a binding mistake. The 25 pages that I missed were apparently a series of picaresque time travel adventures where Tyson eventually met some super advanced humans, including the beautiful motorcycle woman who died (in a different time frame). The remainder of the book goes to its conclusion, where we find out that the rutabaga is a hyper-advanced alien, and that there are then even more hyper-advanced aliens and that the time displacement was due to some extradimensional entities cutting up time for what amounts to microscopic slides. In the last few dozen pages, the book piles both its cosmic and comedy aspects upwards. If there is one thing I took away from this book, it is something I thought about while reading The Eyes of Bolsk: how the cosmoridiculous is a subgenre of science-fiction, but that I have never really read an analysis of it. Certain things--- extra dimensions, temporal paradoxes, and extremely powerful entities---are so beyond human experience, that rather than seeming intimidating, they seem comedic.
Laumer is a convincing comedy writer, and his light, breezy style kept the story moving. Along with wishing I had the missing pages, I almost wish this book would have taken its premises more seriously, because the cosmology was threenine-dimensional that I thought it could have been developed further.