Tomorrow

"Star of the Sea," 2.

Manse Everard and Janne Floris agree that tomorrow they will cope. However, if Everard really believed that his immediately experienced reality:

"...at any instant could not only cease to be but cease ever having been." (p. 480)

- then he would depart without delay into the remote past and address the problem from back then. In fact, it does not matter whether Everard spends a few moments or many decades in any given timeline. Either way, he might travel pastward, then futureward again, to find that that particular timeline has been deleted. Some stranded Time Patrol agents and other time travellers will have spent the remainder of their lives in the deleted Carthaginian timeline.

I first noticed this inconsistency in Everard's thought in "Delenda Est." He and his companions have escaped from their captors in a divergent timeline by travelling backward through time but they are:

"'...still upstairs of the turning point.'"

-Poul Anderson, "Delenda Est" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 173-228 AT 7, p. 217.

When I first read that, I thought that Everard should hasten to get downstairs of the turning point because he had earlier reflected that:

"There were other Patrolmen in the pre-Roman past. They'd return to their respective eras and....

"Everard stiffened. A chill ran down his back and congealed in his belly.

"They'd return, and see what had happened, and try to correct the trouble. If any of them succeeded, this world would blink out of space time, and he would go with it." (5, p. 204)

Multiple issues here. First, Patrolmen returning to their home eras would not all see what had happened. Most of them, like Everard returning from his training at the Patrol Academy in the Oligocene, had returned to their home periods in the Danellian timeline:

"'(Don't ask me why...this is the first time we came back from the far past to find a changed future. I don't understand the mutable-time paradoxes. We just did, that's all.)'" (3, p. 187)

Some Patrolmen will arrive in other altered futures like the alpha and beta timelines in The Shield Of Time.

Secondly, although the world in which Carthage won the Second Punic War will "blink out of [four-dimensional] space time" from the point of view of a time traveller who prevents Carthaginian victory in that war, people, like Everard himself, who exist within that timeline will not cease to exist centuries after the historical turning point! How could that happen? Rome won the war but a world in which Rome lost the war exists for centuries, then ceases to exist?

Logic - the consistency between propositions that is necessary if those propositions are to present a coherent account of reality - must apply to everything, including fictional accounts of time travel. Logic is the criterion by which we judge that some time travel stories are self-contradictory/incoherent/impossible. In "Brave To Be A King," Everard effectively tells Keith Denison," It might turn out to be the case that you who exist here and now hearing me speak and responding to what I say do not in fact exist here and now hearing me speak and responding to what I say." That is impossible. Another four-dimensional continuum in which Denison does not exist? That is possible. Time Patrollers are confused on this issue.