In this post, I want to address just one aspect of the Time Patrol time travel paradox. There are other aspects but we have discussed them often enough before.
"Did he even have to decide anything? There were other Patrolmen in the pre-Roman past. They'd return to their respective eras and...." (5, p. 204)
"They'd return, and see what had happened, and try to correct the trouble." (ibid.)
These "other Patrolmen" include:
Everard's younger self, several times over;
many other individuals who had returned to their home eras from moments either before or after the moment of Everard's and Van Sarawak's departure from the Pleistocene lodge.
All of the younger Everards and many, if not all, of the other individuals returned to the Danellian timeline. Why should not all of them return to it? If only two Time Patrolmen disappear into the Carthaginian timeline, then their colleagues will wonder what has become of them but that will be the extent of the problem.
I have speculated that there is a causal relationship between different journeys into the past, e.g.:
Everard travels to a historical period on a particular timecycle and returns that cycle to the Time Patrol New York warehouse;
a time criminal steals that specific cycle and uses it to change the past;
the next time Everard, using a different cycle, travels from 1990 into the further past and returns, he returns to an altered 1990.
Thus, there is a reason why Everard returned to the correct timeline on the first occasion but not on the second. Maybe all time journeys are causally related but in an incalculably complicated way?
1 comment:
Note that -all- members of the Patrol are present before any historical change, because they all study at the Academy, and the Academy is located before the evolution of human beings.
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