The Time Patrol IV

I remembered that there was a good description of an inn in Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol" but it turns out to be just a single sentence:

"There was an extraordinarily dirty inn filling the moss-grown ruins of what had been a rich man's town house."
-Time Patrol (New York, 2006), p. 35.

But that is enough. A careless author would just have written that Everard and Whitcomb entered an inn. Instead, Anderson continues to remind us of the social milieu that the two Time Patrolmen have entered. The Romans have withdrawn from Britain. The English are moving in and the original British being driven back. What had been a wealthy man's house in town is now ruined and moss-covered but nevertheless is in use as an unusually dirty inn. Times are changing. The Patrolmen are here to prevent even more change than is already happening.

Life will change also for Everard and Whitcomb. They have joined the Patrol and it will not be what they expect. At the end of the story, Everard, expecting cashierment, is summarily told that, on returning to his base year, he must report to his sector chief for further training because, clearly unfit for steady work, he will instead have:

"'...Unattached status - any age, any place, wherever and whenever you may be needed. I think you'll like it.'" (p. 53)

His case is no big deal. in fact: "'There is a regular procedure for it.'" (ibid.)

Everard has just been through a harrowing experience to help his friend, has even met a Danellian and now he is told that. There is a new weight on his shoulders and this is conveyed by the concluding paragraph. To return home, all that he has to do is to make a single time jump from World War II (1944) to the post-War period (1954):

"Everard climbed weakly aboard the hopper. And when he got off again, a decade had passed." (ibid.)

Physically, the temporal jump was effortless. Psychologically, he feels ten years older.