Sunday, 13 September 2015

In Foggia II

See here.

Even if Novak had remained in the beta timeline and had been "deleted" with it, restoring the Time Patrol timeline would at least have restored those parts of his world-line that had existed in that timeline before his final departure to the medieval period.

But then the Time Patrol would have been free to do something that would normally break its own rules: prevent Novak from departing into the past. The Patrol would thus get Novak back albeit without any memories of the measures taken to counteract the alpha and beta timelines.

I think that, in this case, they would have no reason not to break their own rules. They would retrieve a good operative whose loss had been entirely due to a now corrected quantum fluctuation and not to any causal processes within their preferred timeline. The same procedure could have been applied to any other agents who had failed to escape from the now deleted timelines. Thus, even if Wanda had not rescued Denison, the latter could have been prevented from traveling forward into the alpha timeline.

Speaking of Wanda rescuing Denison, Everard asks:

"'You said he was four years in that world?'" (The Shield Of Time, p. 361)

Wanda replies:

"'More like nine, originally. He emerged in 1980, I in '89. But I pulled him out in '84, so the rest of those years never happened to him...'" (ibid.)

The 1984-'89 of the beta timeline never happened to the Denison that Wanda rescued but they had happened to a Denison. We must now distinguish between two slightly different versions of the beta timeline. We could call the second version the gamma timeline but, in this context, that would imply a whole different version of history, which it isn't. The Denison of the beta2 timeline or the gamma timeline or whatever we want to call it would have continued to live for a now unknowable period of time after '89.

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