Records Of What Did Not Happen II

Another "record of what did not happen" is the Tacitus Two document. My theory of how the Patrol acquired this alternative version of Tacitus' Histories contradicts the terminology of successive timelines. I theorize that:

the sociologists doing field research in the early second century AD were at a time when the sequence of events described in Tacitus One and the alternative sequence of events described in Tacitus Two were both possible;

the sociologist who acquired a copy of Tacitus from a private library had to travel a short distance uptime in order to do so;

thus, he traveled forward into the Tacitus Two timeline and acquired a version of the Histories that described the alternative sequence of events;

rejoining his companions and reading the alternative account, the sociologist became alarmed and traveled futureward, this time along the Tacitus One timeline, to alert the Patrol in the twentieth century;

when Everard and Floris travel into the past to investigate, they know that they have traveled back along the Tacitus One timeline to a time before a fork in events;

their task is to ensure that, at that "fork," events move in the Tacitus One direction;

until the fork has been passed, events are in an "...unstable space-time zone..." (Time Patrol, p. 629);

after that, Tacitus Two records events that "did not happen."