"They were both of Levantine appearance and in Canaanite garb, but here, shut away from the office staff and household servants, their entire bearing changed, posture, gait, facial expressions, tone of voice. Everard would have recognized them as being of the twentieth century even if he had not been told. The atmosphere was as refreshing to him as a wind off the sea."
-Poul Anderson, "Ivory, And Apes, And Peacocks" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 229-331 AT p. 244.
Of course Everard would be able to recognize people from the twentieth century but how perceptive of Anderson to realize this. Everard must have been sent to Tyre because he is the Zoraks' contemporary whereas their local superior, the director of Jerusalem Base, Epsilon Korten, responsible for temporal traffic between the birth of David and the fall of Judah, is from twenty ninth century New Edom on Mars where the Patrol recruited him both because of his computer analyses of Semitic texts and also because of his exploits as a spaceman in the Second Asteroid War. He is both a man of action and a profound scholar.
Everard thinks of the Time Patrol as:
"...an organization that guarded a traffic through the epochs..."
-op. cit., p. 245.
Mark Twain, writing before HG Wells had coined the term, "time traveling," used the phrase, "transposition of epochs."
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And of course Everard would have been just as refreshing to the Patrol agents in Tyre--because, for a while, they could relax from playing a role.
And was Anderson's "...traffic through the epochs" a faint echo of Mark Twain's "transposition of epochs"?
Sean
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