I am sitting here in a corner of a room at home NOW. (NOW is a moment that, throughout this experiment, is to be regarded as "the present," such that every other moment is either past or future.) In the opposite corner, there is either a Wellsian Time Machine or a Time Patrol timecycle. Five minutes from now, in the future, I will walk across the room, sit on this temporal vehicle and set off to travel thirty years into the past while remaining stationary in relation to the Earth's surface. (The Time Machine does remain stationary in relation to the Earth's surface whereas a timecycle can move in space as well as in time.) It follows that, thirty years minus five minutes ago, I arrived/appeared in the opposite corner of this room. On arrival, I performed some action which had an immediate consequence. For example, I shouted, "It works!" and was heard by my younger self in the other room on this floor. Let us pause the experiment there. That is quite complicated enough for us to deal with, at least at present.
NOW, it is true to say that my arrival, my action (a speech act) and its consequence all happened thirty years minus five minutes ago. It is true that my departure has not happened yet. It will happen five minutes in the future. However, my arrival, my action and its consequence are not waiting to come into effect five minutes from NOW either when I sit on the temporal vehicle or when I set off on it into the past. They have already happened thirty years minus five minutes ago.
Some readers might think that this is obvious and wonder why I am spelling it out. Because there are people who think that a consequence of an action performed after my arrival will somehow not come into effect until after my departure. We are discussing time travel. In this example, which is travel from the future into the past, the arrival, as well as anything that happens immediately after the arrival, precedes the departure by thirty years. If that is understood, then there is no confusion. Otherwise, discussion becomes incoherent.
Prevented Events
At any moment in his career, a Time Patrol agent might deal with consequences either of events that have happened or of events that have been prevented from happening. Guion speaks of causes that are "'...not in our yet.'" I do not at present have access to the text to extract a proper quotation. Some passages in Time Patrol stories describe events that would have happened if other events had not prevented them from happening.
How can an event that did not happen have any effects? In Time Patrol physics, a time traveler can arrive from a prevented future. But do prevented events have any significance in our timeline? In Lancaster, there is a place that I could go to but the consequences of my going there would almost certainly be negative. Therefore, I will not go there. That event, my arrival in a particular place, does not happen. I prevent it from happening simply by doing nothing. Therefore, I do not experience its consequences. Those consequences are in a prevented timeline but they affect my actions and inactions here and now. This feels almost like a Time Patrol scenario.
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