"...[Wanda] was newly back from wilderness [in 13,212 BC], tossed into a period [the 1960s] whose likeness and unlikeness to home [1987-1990] were equally disturbing." (The Shield of Time, p. 169)
They would be. Traveling from the late '80s to 1965 for a meeting with a colleague would not be like traveling from London to New York or even from Earth to Mars. 13,212 BC might seem like another planet but 1965, the year in which Wanda was born, would probably seem more like a parallel universe, a confusing combination of similarities and dissimilarities.
How would time travelers cope with this? A large part of Academy training would have to address the issue. Patrol head offices for 1850-2000 are in 1890-1910. Most Patrol agents remain in their own periods. Nevertheless, an agent operating in 1850 would be part of an organization whose head office would not begin to exist for another forty years and would then exist for only twenty years but would nevertheless manage agents operating as late as 2000. Anderson did not tell us how the Patrol is organized after that. We last see Everard and Wanda in 1990. But they are still part of a milieu that began in 1850 when the world was a different place. The past is a foreign country. For those who were required to do so, traveling backwards and forwards within this milieu would be no easy matter.
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