The Time Patrol And The Service

There are some similarities between Poul Anderson's Time Patrol and the Service in James Blish's "Beep"/The Quincunx of Time. I want to discuss these similarities as a lead-in to identifying a possible problem with Time Patrol practice. This might take a while. Tomorrow will be dominated by a family wedding.

The Time Patrol

Civilizations later than 19352 AD have space-time machines and a police force, the Patrol, whose agents ensure that recorded and unrecorded historical events happen on schedule because those events constitute the timeline in which they all live and which will lead to the post-human Danellians who will found the Patrol. However, Wanda Tamberly in 1990 cannot be sure that Manse Everard will "'...come home safe and successful...'" from a mission in 1307 because:

"The hazards of paradox and the wounds to the soul would be overmuch, did Time Patrol people go back to visit their beloved dead or forward to see what was to become of their beloved living."

-"Death and the Knight," p. 752.

Two features of the Patrol:

a mission to protect the past;

a rule against knowing when colleagues will die.

If we replace "past" with "future," then we identify the two features of the Service.

Time travel developed from an attempt to find a means of instantaneous transportation.

The Service

Late in the twenty first century, when there is already faster than light interstellar travel, Terrestrial Intelligence tries to find a means of instantaneous communication. Thor Wald invents the Dirac communicator. Any Dirac communicator simultaneously receives all messages transmitted by any other Dirac communicator. In a four dimensional continuum, this means all messages that have been, are being or will be transmitted. All the messages arrive together as a single beep but individual messages can be extracted and slowed down. 

The Intelligence Bureau that becomes the Service knows of many future events and works to bring every one of them about. Any other decision, to cause some events but prevent others - if that is even possible - would have been hubris. The consequences of this policy are increasingly utopian and the Service becomes the only interstellar government.

Blish does not explain why the consequences are utopian but I think that I can see the reason. A message reporting a massacre will be received only if such a message is transmitted. It will be transmitted only if a massacre occurs. A massacre will occur only if the Service allows or even commits it. The Service will allow or even commit a massacre only if, first, they receive a message reporting a massacre and, secondly, they are the kind of people who would insist on implementing their policy of preserving the known future even at the expense of allowing or causing a massacre. It follows that messages reporting massacres will be received only if messages reporting massacres are received (so far, a tautology) and if Service personnel are capable of massacres. Since they are not capable of this, such messages are not received. Instead, Service personnel foresee themselves implementing only, to them, morally acceptable scenarios and then have no problem about implementing such scenarios which is why only such scenarios are implemented and foreseen. Merseians, kzinti, Klingons or Draka with a Dirac transmitter would foresee themselves conquering the galaxy.

This has not got us to the point that I was aiming at but maybe it is enough for this evening.