Mainwethering And Everard

"Time Patrol."

Everard, having found evidence of unauthorized extratemporal activity in the fifth century, suggests that:

"'...this business may be quite harmless. In fact, since we're here now, it must have been harmless.'" (3, p. 23)

Mainwethering replies with a harmful hypothesis:

Everard and Whitcomb travel to Jutish times;
they find "'...the marauder...'" (ibid.), i.e., a time criminal;
he shoots them;
he waylays any other agents sent after the first two;
he establishes an industrial revolution or whatever else he intends;
history changes;
Everard and Whitcomb continue to exist, albeit as corpses, after the change-point;
however, Mainwethering, Everard and Whitcomb in 1894 have never been;
this conversation is not taking place...

Hold on there, Mainwethering! I have two major problems with what you are saying.

First, Everard and Whitcomb are new recruits on their first case after graduating from the Time Patrol Academy yet you propose to send them, as if they were experienced Unattached agents, into an unknown situation in another era where they might be killed without any preliminary reconnoitering, preparation or backup. That is not how Everard operates later in his career when, after further training, he has become an Unattached agent. The only possible excuse for this sloppiness must be that the Patrol knows the outcome and finds it acceptable: Everard's early promotion after which he will become one of the most important agents operating in a period of several thousand years.

Secondly, Mainwethering is now having the conversation with Everard so it makes no sense whatsoever for him to say that it might come about that this conversation is not now taking place. If Everard and Whitcomb travel to Jutish times and are then killed with the further consequences suggested by Mainwethering, then their deaths and those consequences occur in a divergent timeline. In that timeline, it will certainly be true that Mainwethering, Everard and Whitcomb in 1894 have never been. The problem of that altered timeline will have to be addressed by those Time Patrol agents, if any, who, having traveled further into the past than the fifth century, return uptime into the altered timeline. If none do, then it is no one's problem.