Belgotai, ever a mercenary, wants to travel far enough into the future so that he can join the fighting that there must be on the Galactic frontier. In 4100 AD, the Solar Council decrees that the Galaxy already has too many barbarians so that Saunders and Belgotai must continue into the future. In 4300 AD, mercenaries are welcome out in the Galaxy but Sol is visited so rarely that Belgotai might have to wait years for transport. Again, he stays with Saunders. (When the Doctor loses an assistant, he immediately gains another thanks to BBC casting but Saunders might not be so lucky.)
Time travel now merges with future history. Priogan's modified relativity theory allows for faster-than-light travel by warping through higher dimensions but Priogan's reformulation of spatiotemporal theory entails that infinite energy is required to travel more than seventy years into the past.
Saunders and Hull made it twenty years into their past and back without any problem - also twenty years into their future and back. Could someone travel further into the past in stages? Travel back twenty years, then switch off the projector and let it cool down. Then another twenty years and another twenty and so on?
The Council regards the time travellers as "'...unintegrated individuals...'" (p. 234) whose mere presence threatens Solar sanity. We remember "integrate civilization" in Anderson's Psychotechnic History.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
That Solar Council irritates me--its menacing talk about "unintegrated individuals" reminds me of ideological totalitarian regimes purging people unwilling to toe the party line. Or even just people who did not adapt quickly enough to those changes.
Ad astra! Sean
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