Unattached Agent

In "Time Patrol," Manse Everard is:

recruited;

trained;

sent on his first mission, woefully unprepared and unsupported as we subsequently realize;

reassigned to Unattached status which will necessitate further training.

That remains his status for the rest of the series although he gains in experience and in the respect of his peers. His superiors could only have authorized that first mission if they knew in advance that the outcome was going to be good for them, an important and influential Unattached agent. The Danellian who intervenes says as much.

Could the present reality:

"...not only cease to be but also cease ever having been...," as Everard thinks yet again in "Star of the Sea"? (Time Patrol, p. 480)

There can be:

a timeline in which the Romans won the Second Punic War;

a timeline in which time travellers intervene and help the Carthaginians to win the Second Punic War -

- but there cannot be:

a timeline in which time travellers intervene and help the Carthaginians to win the Second Punic War and yet history continues as if the Romans had won until the closing decades of the twentieth century at which point that whole reality abruptly, arbitrarily and belatedly ceases to exist!

Some ways of talking about such paradoxes became embedded in sf texts and unfortunately Poul Anderson reproduced them in his otherwise unreproachable Time Patrol series.