Time Patrol Premises And Installations: The Academy

The Time Patrol Academy stood for 500,000 years in the American West of the Oligocene period and then was "...carefully demolished so that no trace would remain." (Time Patrol, pp. 5-6) Manse Everard's class was at the Academy 1000 years after its construction whereas Wanda Tamberly's class was there 50,000 years before its demolition. On arriving at the Academy, Everard thinks that his twentieth century life is somewhere between 15,000,000 and 20,000,000 years in the future. However, Wanda's spell at the Academy is dated 31,275,389 BC.

Everard's class represents the period 1850-2000. Everard was recruited in 1954, Charles Whicomb in 1947 and Elizabeth Gray in 1972. Although Wanda was recruited in 1987, her class includes Tu Sequeira who was born on Mars in the Solar Commonwealth. Both Wanda and Tu will work outside their home eras. Wanda will do prehistoric paleontology and Tu will monitor the earliest space travel.

Everard's class receives:

physical and psychological training;
conditioning against revealing the existence of the Patrol to unauthorized persons;
instruction in -

- Temporal;
the combat techniques of fifty thousand years;
the history, science, arts, philosophies, dialects and mannerisms of the 1850-2000 period;
the organization of the Patrol;
how to handle spaceships.

Any other instruction will be given as necessary through hypnotic conditioners which, in any case, allow standard training to be completed in just three months.

"...the intensity of training and education pushed the edge of human endurance. Any respite came, and went, like sunshine striking into a hurricane's eye." (The Shield Of Time, p. 128)

That comparison was worth recording.

We see the Academy on three occasions because it is also where "A worried conference met..." (Time Patrol, p. 220) to respond to the damage caused by two Neldorians during the Second Punic War.