It is good to reread a Poul Anderson text and find points to discuss but earlier questions about the time corridors are still bugging me.
There is a two-page Andersonian fight scene when Lockridge escapes. Anderson liked his action.
I used to work with a guy who tried my patience beyond its limits. One of his stunts was as follows. Some of us were eating our sandwich lunches in a workplace staffroom. I had a copy of The Corridors Of Time lying on a table. This guy picks up the book, opens it, reads aloud a paragraph from Lockridge's fight scene in a sarcastic tone of voice, puts the book back down and walks off, totally oblivious to what he has just done. Someone else asks me, "That's not yours, is it, Paul?" The book has just been mocked on a basis of total ignorance.
The mistreatment of Auri is the spur that motivates Lockridge to go on the attack, quickly disposing of several antagonists with his future combat techniques and thus making the remaining warriors back off. They cannot discern his moves in the dark and, crucially, still think that he is a wizard. Thus, Anderson makes this escape plausible. And I need not add here that there is much more in this book than just this fight scene.
Why does the text call the invaders Indo-Europeans, not Aryans?
(Searching the blog, I find that I have been annoyed enough about that staffroom incident to post about it before. See here.)
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