When Mainwethering says:
"'Those cases [where the Patrol has a record of failure] are still being worked on, and if success is achieved at last, history will be changed and there will "always" have been success.'" (p. 29)
- he uses temporal language that obviously does not refer to the past or future of his timeline. Thus:
"...at last..." does not mean "after a long period of time, at some point in the future, of this timeline;"
"...will be changed..." does not mean that a change will occur at some point in the future of this timeline.
The process that he is describing is the replacement of an entire timeline in which there was a failure by an entire timeline in which there has always been not failure but success. That replacement will not occur in the future of the timeline that is being replaced. Each of these two timelines:
is itself a set of temporal relationships between three dimensional states of the universe;
is also temporally related to the other timeline.
Thus, the timeline in which there was failure exists/has existed/will have existed before the timeline in which there has always been success. Therefore, it makes no sense to claim, as the Patrol does, that when the second timeline has replaced the first timeline, it is then true to say that the first timeline has simply never existed in any sense whatsoever. It is true that it has never existed in the past of the second timeline but it is also true to say that it did exist before the second timeline in a second temporal dimension, which is why Mainwethering has to use temporal language like "'...at last...'" and "'...will be changed...'"
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