Poul Anderson's Time Travel II

The time travel stories by Poul Anderson that I would include in a revised Past Times are, in this order:

"Wildcat"
"The Nest"
"The Little Monster"
"The Man Who Came Early"
"Welcome"
"Time Heals"
"Flight to Forever"

The other stories in the original Past Times should, of course, be preserved elsewhere. In particular, "Eutopia" deserves to be included in another (proposed) collection:

The Old Phoenix and other Universes
"The House of Sorrows"
"Eutopia"
"House Rule"
"Losers' Night"

The seven stories in the proposed Past Times: Revised Edition span the geological past, the historical past, the near future and the ultimate cosmic future, then return to 1973 in a story published in 1950. These are independent stories, each presenting an instance of time travel in a distinct scenario.

If Anderson's "Time Patrol" (1955) had not initiated a series that spanned his career, then it would have made an appropriate concluding item for PT:RE. However, it differs from the previous seven in two respects. First, it addresses and answers the question, "Can the past be changed?" Its answer is subtle and not fully coherent in my opinion, but I have discussed this before.

Secondly, it presents not just another single, finite application of the time travel concept but a vast time traveling organization spanning and overseeing human history in its entirety. This was clearly the premise for a series and a second story, "Delenda Est", was published later that year.

"History was divided into milieus, with a head office located in a major city for a selected twenty-year period (disguised by some ostensible activity such as commerce) and various branch offices. For his time, there were three milieus: the Western world, headquarters in London; Russia, in Moscow; Asia, in Peiping; each in the easygoing years 1890-1910, when concealment was less difficult than in later decades, when there were smaller offices..."
-Time Patrol (New York, 2006), p. 13.

"...his time..." turns out to mean 1850-2000. Two decades is a very short time by comparison with a century and a half or even an expected human lifetime, let alone the indefinitely extended lifespan of a Time Patroller. Do all Patrol members receive the futuristic longevity treatment or only those who need it more because they time travel a lot? Those who do get it, which I assume is all, have to move to a different public identity in a different milieu after a few decades. We see just a little of this happening but obviously there is much more that we could be told about the Patrol.

We ordinary people work, retire and die whereas Patrollers work indefinitely and die by accident eventually so their lives are completely different from ours. A single Patroller could work for the entire twenty years in London, then Moscow, then Peiping, then somewhere/when else and so on indefinitely. The series does not begin to address such ramifications.

"Temporal, the artificial language with which Patrolmen from all ages could communicate without being understood by strangers, was a miracle of logically organized expressiveness." (p. 12)

Yet:

"'Merau Varagan, you are under arrest by the Time Patrol," [Everard] called in Temporal." (p. 278)

- so Varagan's time criminal group, the Exaltationists, must not only have stolen timecycles but also somehow learned the secret language?

The Time Patrol is time travel fans' heaven.