"'Yes. I have not passed it on, because it is very incomplete. Better to assemble a coherent picture first, I assume.' As a matter of fact, it was not, but Everard didn't press the point."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), p. 327.
This quotation highlights a few points. First, much of what the Time Patrol does is Intelligence work. Patrolmen gather intelligence not about other countries but about other times or timelines but it is Intelligence work nevertheless. Secondly, work in any large organization requires continual cooperation, coordination and checking of what colleagues are doing, especially when they have moved away from their own original area of expertise. A historian waits for a coherent picture whereas an Intelligence officer welcomes every single datum as soon as he can get it.
After all the training and induction, we still have finite, fallible human beings working with or around but hopefully not against each other. How much bad practice is out there? Think of some of the teachers you endured. I think about some of the teaching and other services that I provided...
A third point is that we can know that someone is wrong but also that it would not be helpful to challenge him about it right away. In a staff meeting, my boss answered a question by saying, "Paul's dealing with that." I wasn't but it would not have been right to contradict him in front of others.
Finally, Everard has the best attitude to work that I have come across:
"The universe isn't for the likes of me to understand. I only work here." (p. 261)
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