"'Finally recovered from fifth-century England by two Patrolmen named, haw! Everard and Whitcomb.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 4, p. 28.
They have already recovered the time machine because it is recorded that they completed this task in the fifth century but they have not yet recovered it in terms of their own experience.
In 1980, Carl Farness reflects:
"Looking at [Everard's] dark, bowed head, I had the eerie knowledge that he must have read everything I would write. He knew my personal future as I did not - as I would not until I had been through it. The rule is very seldom waived that keeps an agent from learning his or her destiny; a causal loop is the least undesirable thing that could all too easily result."
-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Time Patrol, pp. 333-465 AT 1980, p. 385.
Mainwethering has not revealed Everard's or Whitcomb's destinies by letting slip that they have recovered or will recover (depending on which way you look at it) the stolen time machine but he has probably broken a rule, nevertheless. Somewhere else, and I cannot find this passage right now, Everard says that Patrolmen carry out each mission in as linearly causational a way as possible, avoiding foreknowledge.
Everard's conversations with Mainwethering raise other issues which have been discussed before but which seem ever new.
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