Tacitus One And Two

"Star of the Sea," 2.

By "Tacitus One," Everard and Floris mean the restored version of Tacitus' Histories that recounts history as we know it. By "Tacitus Two," they mean a different version that has been found by time travelling sociologists in the early second century and that recounts a very different outcome of the Northern revolt. The problem as I see it is: how can a Tacitus Two manuscript exist in the Tacitus One timeline? My suggested solution is that the sociologists were in the second century at a time when both Tacitus One and Tacitus Two were possible. When they wanted to borrow a contemporary copy of the Histories from a private library, they had to travel a short distance into the future in order to enter the library surreptitiously and this short journey took them into the then possible Tacitus Two timeline but then they returned pastward and forward again into the Tacitus One timeline. As far as I can remember, Poul Anderson indicated in private correspondence that he would accept this explanation. However, the problem that I still have with it is that I cannot fit it into any other theoretical framework to explain events as recounted in the Time Patrol series. But then I do not think that anything else fits either. 

Although:

"The Patrol speech had a grammar capable of handling chronokinesis, variable time, and the associated paradoxes..." (2, p. 482)

- Everard and Floris several times postpone speaking Temporal and prefer to stay with English because they do not want to go too deeply into the problem at their first meeting. We understand their English but not what they are trying to say with it.

I think that that is enough time travel for this evening, don't you?