Meeting In The Corridors Of Time

Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

The Warden, Hu, and his companions, Malcolm Lockridge and Auri, travel futureward but leave the Danish time corridor in the seventh century A.D.

Hu explains that, at this gate:

Frodhi rules the Danish islands;
the mainland is peaceful;
the Vanir, ancient local gods of earth and water, are still at least co-equal with the imported Aryan Aesir, gods of sky and war;
a little further on, the Rangers will drive out the Wardens and the Viking age will begin;
thus, they would be more likely to encounter Rangers further along the corridor.

Does this make sense? -

few Rangers travel down the corridor from 700 to 600;
more Rangers travel from 800 to 700;
therefore, Hu and his companions would be more likely to meet Rangers between 700 and 800 than between 600 and 700?

But surely, if even one Ranger travels from 700 to 600, then they will meet him when traveling from 600 to 700? In fact, why do they not meet everyone who travels down that section of the corridor, including, where appropriate, their older and younger selves? See here.

They travel at different (second-order) "times"?! Then what determines the "time" at which a traveler passes along the corridor? Why are some travelers there at the same "time" and others not?

In CHAPTER THREE, p. 30, Storm sent the platform on which she and Lockridge had traveled back to its proper station because, if Brann knew that his men's killers had entered the corridor from 1964 and found the platform at the gate by which they had left the corridor, then he would know which time they had gone to - she says. But a traveler or travelers from a different stage of the time war might have used that platform. It seems that, if Storm flees into a time corridor and Brann enters that same corridor in pursuit or to investigate, then the temporal sequence within the corridor follows the temporal sequence of their entrances into the corridor. This allows the novel to present a sequential narrative but does not explain the physics of the corridors.