Team Work And Individual Excellence

"One of the hardest lessons [Everard] had had to learn, when first recruited into the Time Patrol, was that every important task does not require a vast organization. That was the characteristic twentieth-century approach; but earlier cultures like Athenian Hellas and Kamakura Japan - and later civilizations too, here and there in history - had concentrated on the development of individual excellence. A single graduate of the Patrol Academy (equipped, to be sure, with tools and weapons of the future) could be the equivalent of a brigade.

"But it was a matter of necessity as well as aesthetics. There were all too few people to watch over all too many thousands of years." (Time Patrol, p. 130)

I was going to make these points but then found that I could simply quote this passage. We see Specialists working alone and Unattached Agents working either alone or in pairs. Sometimes, a small military force is necessary as when attacking a group of Exaltationists. Everard must rescue a Patrol agent from a Templar house in Paris in 1307. To use a timecycle to make the man disappear from within a locked room would be to generate a "miracle" with unforeseeable consequences. It must seem that a gang of robbers have attacked the house at night, stolen what they could and kidnapped the prisoner possibly to hold him for ransom. Thus, Everard and his "bully boys" (p. 757) with "...birthdays scattered through several future centuries and around the globe..." (p. 758) arrive on an "...outsize machine bearing saddles for eight..." (p. 758). Yan, Tabarin, Rosny, Hyman and Uhl are not Unattached agents but "...the most promising he'd found among personnel familiar with this milieu, hastily briefed and drilled." (p. 761)

The team aspect of the Patrol is investigated more as the series proceeds and we end in style with Yan and co.