Till Now

"It turned out that even the Patrol knew little about the dark period when the Romans had left Britain, the Romano-British civilization was crumbling, and the English were moving in. It had never seemed an important one."

-"Time Patrol," 4, p. 29.

The English had to move into England and the Britons/British were driven into Wales and the far north!

"This wasn't milieu headquarters, after all. It hadn't even appeared to be overseeing an especially important sector, till now."

-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 467-640 AT 2, p. 478.

"'What we've got is an anomaly that needs investigation. I daresay it escaped notice earlier - yes, 'earlier' is meaningless too - because of its dates. Nearly all attention is elsewhere.'"

-ibid., 2, p. 491.

If a word is meaningless, then why use it? "Earlier" is meaningful in terms of Time Patrol agents' collective experience. So far in Everard's career, he has believed that certain periods are unimportant. Now he has learned that some of those periods are important. He must ensure that the knowledge that these dates are important is communicated to other Patrol agents but not in such a way that that knowledge interferes with any of their previous successful missions. He must ensure that his younger self remains uninformed about the importance of post-Roman Britain.