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Julio Vasquez recounts a narrative to Helen Tamberly and Manse Everard in 1885. (I emphasize that this is Vasquez's account because we have to wind up saying something different.)
According to Vasquez, Stephen Tamberly/Estaban Tanaquil and Luis Castelar mysteriously disappeared from within a treasure house in Caxamalca in 1533. Vasquez, taken from his real mission in Peru a generation earlier, investigated the aftermath of the disappearance - growing hysteria -, then reported to Helen and Manse.
In 1987, Everard tells Wanda Tamberly that the Patrol, having retrieved the two disappeared men from elsewhere in space and time, had put them back (this was still to happen from Everard's point of view) in the treasure house a minute or two after they had been kidnapped from it. The "disappearance" and the subsequent hysteria have been deleted. Any Julio Vasquez who might have been investigating the outcome of the disappearance has been deleted with it.
However, maybe the Patrol base in Lima in 1535 takes Vasquez from his earlier mission in Peru and sends him directly to 1885 to describe the hypothetical hysteria in the deleted timeline to Helen and Manse? But, to keep the sequence of events straight, he has to describe that hysteria as if he had witnessed it? It is not very satisfactory to imagine Patrol agents lying to each other to save the appearances but that is the best that I can come up with at present.
2 comments:
There's a similar scene in THE SHIELD OF TIME, where a Patrol agent in Germany learns of an uptime disturbance on his personal timeline.
If it happens, he's to take some action. If it's prevented, he'll be notified by courier and things will proceed normally.
He notes that Everard has "already" visited him in that uptime segment after the disturbance, and that -that- him will, if the operation succeeds, never have existed.
"It's not quite like dying," Everard thinks to himself. "But... brrr!"
(IIRC; working from memory.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Worrisome and alarming indeed!
Ad astra! Sean
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