Civilized Time Travel

"Star of the Sea."

In HG Wells' The Time Machine as in Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever," an experimental temporal vehicle sets off into the future. These two vehicles are called the Time Machine and the time projector, respectively. 

Anderson's Time Patrol series could not be more different. No one from either the nineteenth or the twentieth century has to set off into any future period. There are time travelling civilizations in the future - after 19352 A.D. There is also a time travel police force, the Patrol, with vehicles called "timecycles" and with local agents and bases in earlier centuries. Within that organization, Janne Floris, born and based in the twentieth century, is:

"A field agent, Specialist second class..." (2, p. 479)

"...she did field research in the Roman Iron Age, that period when the archaeology of northern Europe began fitfully merging with recorded history." (p. 481)

Of course, the Patrol has its own recorded history even of the archaeological period thanks to the researches of agents like Floris although she must not read the findings of her own researches until after she has conducted those researches.

The Middle Command of the Patrol is concerned about some events in:

"'...the Low Countries in the first century A.D.'" (pp. 483-484)

(I think that the Middle Command is so called because it is human... The Time Traveller's future mankind devolves in to Morlocks and Eloi whereas the Time Patrollers' evolves into Danellians.)

Everard and Floris agree that neither of them has yet been on the scene in relation to this particular concern but, of course, they have. If they are going to visit the first century Low Countries in order to investigate:

"'...a report of inconsistencies in a chronicle of Tacitus's...'" (p. 483)

- the they have already done so. They just do not yet know what they did back then.