Way Station

Decades ago, I read Clifford Simak's Way Station in the yellow-covered Gollancz edition but I prefer the cover shown here.

Jack Havig's time travel group grub-staked Olav Torstad, born 1850, to a farm close to where the Eyrie would be. Torstad hides their weapons, receives them only after dark and assumes the ongoing risk involved. Thus, he is the group's "Way Station." We see him only as Havig, Leonce and their companions are en route to their temporal attack on the Eyrie in the twenty second century.

Torstad is one of many details, like the group's main base in the Pleistocene, that could have been developed further in a full length novel not about Havig's entire career but just about this one phase of it when he is organizing against the Eyrie. There Will Be Time is what I call a telegrammic novel.