Manse Everard's and Piet Van Sarawak's counter-intervention in the Battle of Ticinus has to be one of the classics of this kind of sf. How many uncollected pulp magazine short stories preceded it?
The Patrolmen have deduced that, in the divergent timeline, the Scipios died at Ticinus:
"'Somebody must have knocked them off... Some time traveler. It could only have been that.'" (7, p. 219)
Well, no. There are two other possibilities: a personal causal nexus or a quantum fluctuation in the events of the battle. But Everard does not know that yet. He later talks to Guion, an Unattached agent who monitors Time Patrol personnel, who also seems not to know it yet. However, an agent might sometimes know more than a colleague who must be left to acquire important information at the appropriate stage of his own career. Thus, there is no way of knowing how much Guion really did know when he interviewed Everard and Wanda Tamberly.
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One of the difference between the earlier and later Time Patrol stories is how difficult it is to change the course of things. It gets easier (and sometimes happens spontaneously) in the later stories.
(From SM Stirling.)
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