18,244 BC

For a short while in 18,244 BC, Time Patrol members who happened to have been holidaying at their lodge in the Pleistocene Pyrenees operate in secret from the rest of the Patrol. If they travel futureward from that short period, then they enter timeline alpha even though it is their job to prevent that timeline from coming into existence. If they succeed, then futureward chronokinesis will again take them and any other time travelers into the preferred timeline guarded by the Patrol and, in that case, no other time traveler need even be told that this crisis has occurred. The object is to ensure, as far as possible, that history continues to flow as it would have done if there had been no temporal disruption.

Unattached Agent Manson Everard is a leading member of this secret group but the secret must be kept even from the younger Everard who visits the lodge in earlier and later periods of its existence. To seek the help of the younger Everard would be to change the course of Everard's life and indeed to duplicate him since the secret group would then include an Everard whose earlier life has just been interrupted by the need to deal with the crisis and an older Everard who has no memory of such an interruption to his earlier career.

In the absence of a Danellian or of any higher ranking human agents, the small group in the lodge is, temporarily, the leadership of the Patrol. This is extremely paradoxical but Poul Anderson makes it plausible.