At the Time Patrol Academy in the American West and the Oligocene period, training is completed in three months because of hypnotic conditioners. (p. 13)
Manson Everard, recruited in 1954, is taught to handle spaceships. (ibid.) Why? He is expected to work mainly in his own era at least to begin with and how could he learn about the many different kinds of spaceships that can be expected to exist during the millennia that mankind will be in space? He is also taught about the weapons of fifty thousand years in case he is called into other periods but again that sounds like a lot to learn.
Detailed study is only of his own 1850-2000 period because hypnotic conditioners will give special instruction when necessary if he is called elsewhen so why can this principle not also be applied to spaceships and weapons?
The most telling moment in his training comes when the spaceship instructor says that, because time travel is outside the world-picture of the Babylonians, they have to be given "'...a battle-of-the-gods routine.'" (p. 14) Asked what routine the recruits from 1850-2000 are being given, he replies, "'The truth... As much of it as you can take.'" (ibid.)
What does that imply? Is "time travel" another "routine"? Maybe not but Everard does learn the real purpose of the Patrol right at the end of the second volume, The Shield Of Time.
In the next post, we will probably return to characters who work in only a single period of a different timeline.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And there's also the case of the Tyrian youth, Pummairam. Apparently, he was a rare exception to the general of discouraging attempts at recruiting persons from before about AD 1600. Because their "mental conditioning" made them unable to accept or adapt to time traveling or the existence of the Time Patrol.
Ad astra! Sean
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