"Ages Before You Were Born"

"Time Patrol," 6.

In a time travel scenario, unless we are very careful, we wind up thinking of different times as if they were different places coexisting at the same time.

Two SF Scenarios
(i) Instantaneous interplanetary teleportation: someone teleports from Earth to Mars, spends twenty minutes on Mars, then returns to Earth - arriving twenty minutes after his departure? Yes.

(ii) Time travel, meaning the ability to disappear at any time and to (re)appear at any other time, whether earlier or later: someone disappears from 2020, appears in 3020, spends twenty minutes in that year, disappears from then and reappears back in 2020 - appearing twenty minutes after his disappearance from that year? Not necessarily. With the ability of time travel as described, he can appear at any time in 2020, not just twenty minutes after his original disappearance from that year.

A Danellian tells Everard:

"Your appeal has been considered... It was known and weighed ages before you were born." (p. 51)

The Danellians, who live over a million years after Everard, considered his appeal ages before he was born?  No. That does not sound right. Are we thinking of the twentieth century and the Danellian Era as if they were two different places that have coexisted for ages?

There is a simple solution. Given the mutable nature of history in the Time Patrol series, the Danellians must surely establish a base many ages in the past. Thus, that base would be unaffected by any alterations to human history made by time criminals. In that base, Danellians would be able to spend as much time as they needed to consider Everard's appeal and to perform any other such tasks.

But, nevertheless, when we first read the Danellian's statement did we then unreflectingly think that someone who lives over a million years after Everard's lifetime could have considered Everard's appeal ages before his birth?