Outside Of Time?

The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER NINE.

Lockridge and Auri are in a time corridor:

"They couldn't linger, though. At any moment, someone might enter through some other gate and spy them.(Just what did that mean, here in this time which ran outside of time? He'd think about it later.) Moving his hands experimentally to cover the control lights, he found how to operate the vehicle and send it gliding futureward." (p. 81)

Is the bracketed question metafiction: the author acknowledging to his readers that this does not make sense - but we can make sure that Lockridge does not think about it until after the novel has ended?

The length of the corridor runs along our temporal dimension. Therefore, the temporal dimension of the corridor runs along one of our three spatial dimensions. Each of these two temporal dimensions is "outside" the other in that sense but only in that sense. Neither is atemporal. Outside the corridor, many people approach the portal at different times. Therefore, Lockridge and Auri should see all those people arriving in the corridor at different points along the corridor but at the same time, not at different times, within the corridor.

This consideration is making it hard for me to accept the narrative as it stands.