Everard's Vacations

(i) Twenty thousand years ago, there is good hunting and winter sports at the Time Patrol lodge in the Pleistocene Pyrenees where the Patrol pays Cro-Magnon guides with items like steel knives. Everard has killed a mammoth, skied, mountain climbed and watched native dances. With two weeks of furlough left, Piet Van Sarawak suggests relocating to Augustan Rome but Everard replies that that period is overrated and that the best decadence, apart from a long way into the future, is New York in his own milieu if you know the right phone numbers. (Can New Yorkers confirm this?)

Van Sarawak concedes that a pioneer society like his twenty-fourth century Venus "'...has little use for the finer arts of amusement.'" (Time Patrol, p. 175) They set off to New York, 1960.

(ii) Everard vacations in the scientific base that the Patrol maintains in southern Iberia during the hundred or so years of inflow from the Atlantic into what becomes the Mediterranean.

(iii) In 18,244 BC, Everard and Wanda Tamberly holiday at the Pleistocene lodge. She photographs mammoths etc instead of shooting them.They ski, climb and visit Cro-Magnon settlements. The lodge has a large stone fireplace, the Patrol symbol cast in brass on a wall and also a mural of bison by a local artist.

(iv) Everard frequently holidays at the lodge. His vacation with Van Sarawak is subjectively earlier but objectively later than the one with Wanda.

(v) In early January 1990, Everard and Wanda agree to holiday on the coast near San Francisco. On 8 March, they are in San Francisco when his part of the holiday is interrupted by the last ever mission that we see him go on - although we are to understand that, after it, he will return to San Francisco, then to the rest of his Patrol career.