SF scenario: someone arrives somewhere. The
Enterprise or an Okie city enters orbit around a new planet. The Time Traveller arrives in 802,701 AD. Time Patrol agents arrive in the wrong timeline.
Sometimes a story opens with its viewpoint character somewhere or -when else without having told us how he got to be there. James Blish added this information when he expanded "A Hero's Life " as "A Style in Treason." Poul Anderson's "Delenda Est" opens with Manse Everard and Piet Van Sarawak at the Patrol Pleistocene lodge but presumably they arrived there by "scooter" and indeed they depart by that means. Anderson's The Shield Of Time, PART SIX, 18,244 B. C., opens with Everard and Wanda Tamberly at the lodge but presumably they arrived by "hopper" and indeed Tamberly departs thus. (As the series advanced, "timecycle" replaced "scooter" or "hopper" but not entirely.)
"Brave To Be A King," 3, begins with Everard in 542 B.C. When Denison asks him where his scooter is, he:
"...waved a hand. 'Up in the hills.'" (7, 93)
Would it be safe there? (On the other hand, a Patrol agent can send a scooter up into the sky and call it back down.)
"The Only Game in Town," 2, begins with Everard and John Sandoval in 1280 A.D. In 4, there is reference to their:
"...scooter - antigravity sled cum space-time hopper - which had brought them."
-Poul Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), p. 145.
Here, a "scooter" is described as a "hopper." At the beginning of 5:
"The scooter had jumped two days futureward and now hovered invisibly far above to the naked eye." (p. 150)
On p. 152, the scooter glides forward and, on p. 153, it has "...sizable baggage compartments..." and carries Patrol-trained horses on "...framework stalls..."
The Shield Of Time, 209 B.C., pp. 17-25, opens with Everard in 209 BC. "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks" begins with him in 950 BC. OK, we know how he got then. "Gibraltar Falls" begins with Everard, Tom Namura and Feliz a Rach at the transition from the Miocene to the Pliocene. The vehicles by which Nomura and Feliz fly above the inflow of the Atlantic into the Mediterranean are the same kind that brought them so far back in time.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Most times, stashing a time hopper in a cave was safe enough. But Keith Denison had the bad luck to almost immediately fall into Harpagus' hands after doing that with his cycle.
Assuming such devices were real there must have been a technically precise scientific name for such time traveling machines. But we are never told it.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But how many conveniently located caves are there? And how many loose bricks etc for "dead letter drops"?
Paul.
Kaor, Paul! If you mean not as many as we might think, I agree. But a cave in a distant, remote location should be unlikely, most times, to be visited by persons who should not find a time hopper. Sometimes a Patrol agent has to take chances. And the same for dead letter drops. Ad astra! Sean
And of course the Patrol would know exactly where all caves are at any given time and, if necessary, whether any wandering herdsmen were likely to show up at the wrong time.
And think of all the names that have been used for "car" in popular speech -- auto, automobile, jalopy, wheels...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling! I agree. Ad astra! Sean
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