"'But then I'd exist without - without an origin!...I'd have life, and memories, and...everything...though nothing had produced them.'" (Time Patrol, p. 10)
Her trainer replies:
"'What of it? You insist that the causal law, or strictly speaking the conservation-of-energy law, involve only continuous functions. Actually, discontinuity is entirely possible.'" (ibid.)
The key word here is "discontinuity." That was published in 1955. Much later, when Wanda Tamberly asks the same question, "'...where would I have come from?,'" Manse Everard replies:
"'From nowhere. From nothing. Cause-and-effect doesn't apply. It's sort of like quantum mechanics, scaled up from the subatomic to the human level.'" (The Shield Of Time, p. 30)
The key word here is "quantum." Or rather the key phrase is "...like quantum..." That was published in 1990. Causality is not discontinuous but inapplicable. Finally, later in The Shield Of Time, a change in the past is simply caused by "...a quantum leap..." (p. 344).
Thus, three stages:
a causality violation caused by a time traveler;
a causality violation caused by a time traveler but compared to a quantum event;
a causality violation caused by a quantum event.
There was one other intermediate stage. In "The Year Of The Ransom," published in 1988, Everard reflects that:
"...the probability-waves of ultimate underlying quantum chaos [can] change their rhythm..." (Time Patrol, p. 671) -
- but does not make clear whether an intervention by a time traveler is necessary to cause such a change.The implication is not but this is not clarified.
Another answer to "Where would I have come from?" would be "From the previous timeline in a second temporal dimension." However, this may be a situation where both answers are valid, i.e., an event that is a quantum leap in a four dimensional context is an effect of a cause in an earlier timeline in a five dimensional context.
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