Manse Everard sends a shuttle from his New York apartment in 1954 to the London office, June 25, 1894, and, a few minutes later, receives a typed note from J. Mainwethering, inviting him to attend with a qualified British agent at 12:00 midnight on June 26, 1894. Getting an ok (by phone?) from his immediate superior, Everard sends a note to Whitcomb in 1947 and Whitcomb agrees.
Going to the Patrol warehouse, Everard gets a timecycle, like a motorcycle without wheels or kickstand but with two saddles and an antigravity propulsion unit. He departs to a warehouse in London, 1947, when he is joined by Whitcomb, and they depart for Mainwethering's gas-lit office in 1894.
Like Wells updated.
The bureaucratic procedures are a good touch -- coordinating with the chain of command, signing out equipment, etc.
ReplyDeleteKaor, Mr. Stirling!
ReplyDeleteEven the Time Patrol, which prided itself on its senior agents being initiative, needed SOME bureaucratic procedures, to keep things from hopelessly tangled up.
Sean
I suspect that the far-future equivalents of computers they had available made administration -relatively- simple for them.
ReplyDeleteI do get a sense in the earlier books that the Time Patrol is an immense organization; in the later ones, not so much.
Incidentally, the Oligocene location of the Academy is a fail-safe mechanism of some subtlety. It puts all of the Patrol's agents at a period -previous to the emergence of the human race-.
ReplyDeleteThat way, they're all safe from being "wiped out" by an alteration of history.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
ReplyDeleteI agree with all your points, except one. A Time Patrol tasked with policing a million years or more of history would seem to necessarily be HUGE. And we do see mention of member of the Patrol who were administrative staff, not field agents. Such as Cynthia, the wife of Keith Denison. But the advanced computers the Patrol almost certainly used would help to keep this kind of staffing down to a minimum.
Ditto, what you said about the Patrol's Oligocene academy being a fail safe and back up.
Sean
"Time Patrol" gives info on how long the Academy lasted and how quickly it trained agents. A long time and very quickly.
ReplyDeleteKaor, Paul!
ReplyDeleteIf I recall correctly, the Academy lasted half a million years before the last agents graduated and was then carefully demolished.
Yes, a fairly short time was all it needed to train new agents at the Academy. Some, like Pummairam, might have needed somewhat more time.
Sean
Judging from what we see, the Academy turns out at least a couple of hundred agents annually. Multiply that by 500,000 years... at least 50,000,000 agents, possibly several times that.
ReplyDeleteSean: I agree it has to be huge, and you get that impression in the earlier stories. In the later ones, it's never -stated-, but it -feels- smaller, at least to me.
ReplyDeleteKaor, Mr. Stirling!
ReplyDeleteThat impresses me, a Time Patrol with at least 50,000,000 or more agents of all ranks and an administrative staff!
But I didn't get the impression in the later Time Patrol stories that the organization was small. We still still see mention of Attached/Unattached agents, specialists like historians and scientists, the Middle Command, an administrative staff, etc. So I still think the Patrol was huge.
Sean