Unstable Time-Streams

"'This is something that must be, lest the time-stream flow still worse awry.'"

-Roma Mater, XIX, 2, p. 345.

This sentence, spoken by a Queen of Ys, makes her sound like a Time Patrol agent.

"...at last [events] were out of the unstable space-time zone and could safely be left to themselves."

-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 467-640 AT III, 20, p. 629.

"'What they showed me, though, the records -'

"He nodded. 'Consequences of time gone awry. Bad.'"

-Poul Anderson, The Shield of Time (New York, 1991), PART FOUR, 1990 A. D., p. 253.

Time as a stream that might flow awry? The course of events might easily be diverted from some preferred future course but could it also be diverted from its already recorded past course? The whole dynamic of Anderson's Time Patrol series is to try to make some sense of this second proposition.