"One Swirl On A River"

Manson Everard graduates from the Time Patrol Academy in the Oligocene:

brief ceremony;
huge party;
arrangements for reunions;
return to the place and hour of recruitment
(for Everard, New York, 1954);
recruitment officer's congratulations;
list of contemporary agents, some in Intelligence;
return to apartment;
special consultant to Engineering Studies Co;
read newspapers for indications of time travel;
be ready to respond to a call.

"It was a peculiar feeling to read the headlines and know, more or less, what was coming next. It took the edge off, but added a sadness, for this was a tragic era." (Time Patrol, p. 17)

I first read that about 1960, six years after 1954, and am now rereading it in 2015, sixty one years after. Everard would have known what was coming next at least until 2000, the end of his "milieu." When the time was right, i.e., when The Shield Of Time was published in 1990, a Patrolman casually mentioned Gorbachev but Everard would have known that name from 1954.

On pp. 17-18 is a passage, quoted before, where Everard, looking out at a hurried New York street, reflects that "...it was all one swirl on a river..." (p. 17) from the prehuman past to the Danellian future. But, of course, as we reflected recently, the Danellians begin a mere million years hence so what happens during and even after their era? Time Patrol narratives almost imply that the Danellians occupy the End of Time whereas nothing is really the End except the much later heat death of the universe - assuming that twentieth and twenty first century scientists are right that that will happen.

"Lights flamed against a hectic sky..." (p. 17) -

- prepares the reader for almost any dramatic events to follow.

Everard finds an indication of unauthorized time travel not in a newspaper but in "...a collection of Victorian and Edwardian stories." (p. 18) It was not until sometime in the 1970s until I read that same collection and found the reference to:

"...a tragedy at Addleton and the singular contents of an ancient British barrow." (p. 18)

Of course Anderson had to have been referring to something but it had never occurred to me to wonder what.