When Manse Everard says that only a few months have passed since he was best man at the Denisons' wedding, Cynthia replies:
"'Entropic time. Regular, untampered-with, twenty-four-hours-to-the-day time.'" (p. 56)
She asks Manse:
"'...how long has it been for you, Manse? How many years have you rung up, in how many different epochs...?'" (ibid.)
A colleague who borrowed the Time Patrol volumes had trouble understanding why, when two acquaintances within the Time Patrol meet, a different length of time has passed for each of them! - whereas it would be a coincidence if they had both aged by the same amount.
When I first read Guardians Of Time in the 1960s, I welcomed Cynthia's comments because they were a credible adult response to life in the Patrol. I was still a school pupil who read sf comics and Guardians... was sf with time machines and equivalents of extraterrestrials - the Danellians are "extratemporals" - but here was an adult woman talking about her marriage and about her personal experience of the difference between entropic time and time travel. This was really it.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And of course Keith Denison had been away, HIS time, from Cynthia at least sixteen years. And for Manse, it might have been a HUNDRED years (recall Danellian life extending treatments).
Ad astra! Sean
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