Wanda Tamberly has traveled from 18,244 BC to 1989alpha. AD. Hovering above an uncivilized North America with no response on her radio, she thinks for many pages that she has arrived in the wrong time, not in the wrong timeline. When she sees a small city with a massive cathedral in lower Manhattan and square-riggers in the harbor, she gets the message:
"The terrible thing has happened. Something has changed the past..." (p. 350)
(Of course, the proposition that something has changed the past contradicts the Patrollers' other proposition, which Wanda proceeds to repeat, that that past never was but we have been over this ground too often before.)
What Wanda should do is to head straight back to the lodge in 18,244 BC without delay. In one way, it does not matter whether she spends seconds or decades in the altered section of the divergent timeline as long as she does eventually escape back to a period before the alteration. However, the longer she stays in the alpha period, the greater the danger that something will happen to prevent her escape.
In fact, she stays around long enough to rescue Keith Denison which is a Good Thing.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
This is perhaps a weak spot in "Amazement of the World," that Anderson had an intelligent woman like Wanda taking so long to realize what had happened, that she had emerged into a divergent timeline. It should have needed only one or two minutes for her to get that!
Ad astra! Sean
It’s a purely theoretical possibility to her; the vast, overwhelming majority of Patrol agents never come in contact with such a thing. It would be inevitable that she’d suspect being in the wrong time at first.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
True. Wanda was not an Unattached agent. Or even agent assigned to oversee a certain, place, milieu. She was a Specialist, belonging to that group of agents who were scientists and technicians investigating scientific problems. They were not supposed to deal hands on with messy, dangerous, unpredictable situations.
Ad astra! Sean
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