Difficulties In The Details

"The Year of the Ransom," 25 May 1987.

Everard has:

"'...been hopping around like a flea on a griddle, tying up loose ends in this case." (p. 731)

But do the loose ends get tied up? The friar and the soldier who had disappeared will be returned to the time and place from which they had disappeared:

"'They'll exit on foot and that will be that.'" (ibid.)

Will it? Wanda asks a pertinent question:

"'Uh, you mentioned before that the guards got worried, looked inside, and found nobody. It caused a nasty sensation. Can you change that?'" (ibid.)

Everard has been telling us that he cannot change events, even events that are wrong:

"We dare not undermine even this forbidden pattern of events." (15 April 1610, p. 720)

- whereas now he replies:

"'Yes, in such cases, when the past has been deformed, the Patrol does annul the events that flow from it. We restore the "original" history, so to speak. As nearly as possible, anyhow.'" (pp. 732-733)

This sequence - first an original history, second an altered history, third a restored original history - is a temporal process. The quotation marks around the word, "original," in Everard's dialogue acknowledge that, in this case, the word is not being applied to an original state of affairs in the first temporal dimension. Therefore, it is being applied to the original history in the second temporal dimension.

This passage and at least two others -

"Brave To Be A King"
The Shield Of Time, PART TWO, 1985 A. D., p. 123 -

- imply that the Patrol can fine-tune temporal alterations, i.e., that they can alter the contents of a finite volume of space-time without affecting any other part of the current timeline. The simplest view is just that any alteration, however small, requires a whole new timeline even if it is one that is mostly indistinguishable from its predecessor. What kind of dimensional framework will allow for this kind of fine-tuning?

We are told that a time traveler who has entered and remains in a deleted timeline is deleted with it. If a time traveler leaves a timeline that is deleted, then the section of his world-line that is within the deleted timeline is deleted with it. Time Patrolman Julio Vasquez was in that volume of space-time where the friar and the soldier had entered the treasure house and had not exited it and the guards then found the house to be empty. Therefore, that section of Vasquez's world-line is deleted. But surely this would prevent him from traveling futureward to report to Everard in 1885 and this in turn would negate or at least change the rest of Everard's investigation? Unless the Patrol is capable of that fine-tuning that I mentioned?

I have got a feeling that none of this makes sense, anyway.