An Uncertainty In The Continuum

"The Only Game in Town," 6.

It suddenly occurs to Everard that his and Sandoval's mission to 1280 might fail:

"Obviously something was going to prevent Toktai's return. But was it so obvious? Why had this interference been ordered at all, if there were not - in some paradoxical way his twentieth-century logic couldn't grasp - an uncertainty, a shakiness in the continuum right at this point?" (p. 161)

Logic, like mathematics, is the same in every century. 2+2=4 in the fortieth century as well as in the twentieth. The equation is atemporal.

What uncertainty can there be? The Danellian Era begins more than a million years after the life of a man born in AD 9573. For convenience, let us say that Danellians in AD 1.5 million order Sandoval in the mid-twentieth century to co-opt an Unattached agent and, with that agent, to intervene in 1280.

The Danellians in 1.5 million exist in a timeline where the Mongols did not conquer North America. Whatever happened in 1280, it is impossible that the Danellians, having issued their orders to Sandoval, will then cease to exist in the event that Sandoval failed back in 1280!

There can be:

(i) a timeline in which the Mongols did not conquer North America and in which the Danellians do exist over a million years later;

(ii) a second timeline in which the Mongols did conquer North America and in which the Danellians do not exist over a million years later -

- but there cannot be:

(iii) a third timeline in which the Mongols did conquer North America and in which the Danellians exist a million years later but cease to exist because the Mongols had conquered North America a million years earlier.

(iii) is an incoherent attempt to fit the events of two mutually incompatible timelines into a single timeline.

However, maybe the Danellians know that:

the Mongol conquest of North America was prevented by a Time Patrol intervention ordered by themselves;

if they do not order this intervention, then they run the risk that, when they time travel to years earlier than 1280, then attempt to return to their home period, they will arrive in the year 1.5 million of the timeline in which the Mongols did conquer North America, therefore the Danellians do not exist.

That might be the uncertainty in the continuum. In fact, it is the only one that I can think of.