The second thing on Guion's mind was that Everard's and Tamberly's world lines appear to impinge on many others. Here he is onto something. In PART SIX, the Patrol learns that the non-time travelling Lorenzo de Conti's activities affect the lives of so many pivotal medieval figures that a minimal change in his career causes massive changes to history. Guion is trying to prepare for such changes even before he or anyone else has experienced them. As he had already said to Wanda Tamberly:
chaos has a basic coherence;
things and people recur;
those who have been part of great events might be so again;
this might be the case -
"...whether or not our extant records know anything of it.'"
-PART THREE, p. 136.
This is why he tries to prepare for a historical alteration by interviewing Everard and Tamberly.
(The attached image has the back cover illustration of The Shield Of Time, the title, The Boat Of A Million Years, and blurb that I cannot identify.)
1 comment:
This is the flip side of time "self-correcting" as is mentioned in many Time Patrol stories.
Eg., that if you went back and prevented Booth from killing Lincoln, the most likely result (unless you took very elaborate precautions) was that someone else would kill him at the same time... and Booth would get blamed for it.
This is why time travel is allowed at all.
In the later stories, it also becomes apparent that the Time Patrol itself is a force that bends the timeline back to its "original" course -- even when it works out that way because the Patrol intervened in the first place, as in THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN.
The way the Patrol is set up, firstly, makes a deliberate historical change by time travelers very unlikely to succeed, because there will alway be a massive Patrol presence -in pre-history- ready to swing into action.
That same presence makes it unlikely that some -random fluctuation- not involving time travel in historical time will "stand", because again, the massive pre-historic presence of the Patrol, armed with the knowledge of how things are "supposed" to go, is always ready to shove things back onto the original line.
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