Guardians of Time
Poul Anderson
160 pages
published in 1961
I read this on a Saturday night, after I had finished Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen and was in the mood for a similar sort of book. Having read it before, I knew Guardians of Time would fit the bill nicely.
Guardians of Time is a collection of four novellas: "Time Patrol", (1955) "Brave to be a King" (1959), "The Only Game in Town" (1959) and "Delenda Est" (1955). All star Manse Everard, one of Anderson's patented Scandinavian descended adventurer engineers, somewhat at a loose end in the United States of the mid-fifties, where there's little chance of adventure or romance. Which is why he answered that obscure advert which promised "high-pay work with foreign travel".
Turns out the travel is slightly more foreign than anybody could expect; Manse Everard has been recruited into the Time Patrol, the organisation that makes sure the timeline stays safe. (Anderson would use a similar sort of setup in The Corridors of Time.) It's the time patrol's job to make sure their future comes to pass, to let order prevail over chaos. Anderson here has chosen to have just one single timeline, which can be modified, though this is much more difficult than say killing your grandfather before he could meet your grandmother...
The first story, "Time Patrol" introduces the patrol and its history and goals. Everard's first case revolves around a mysterious cylinder of radioactive material found in England in 1894, in an ancient burial site. In the course of this case he has to rescue a friend, who has eloped to the past to rescue his girlfriend from death by German bombing; he also meets a certain detective who is far too perceptive for his liking...
In "Brave to be a King" Everard has to research the disappearance of another friend, also in the Patrol, who disappeared on a trip to Persia in the year 558 B.C. When Everard goes back to this time he soon discovers that the great Persian King Cyrus, who had came from nowhere to create an empire, is none else but Keith, his friend... Everard manages to extract both himself and his friend from this paradox, though it is unclear whether he did his friend a favour, reuniting him with his bride several years older, when she has only missed him for a week...
In "The Only Game in Town" Everard learns that the time patrol may not necessarily be as noble as it presents itself. Supposedly the patrol are neutral guardians of the timestream, protecting the "real" history from any attempts to remake it. Here Everard learns that this is not always the case, when he stops an Mongol expedition from discovering and colonising America in the 12th century.
Finally, in "Delenda Est", we see what happens what happens when somebody managed to disrupt the timestream enough to wipe the patrol from existence --and everything else familiar from history. When Everard jumps back to the 20th century from R&R in prehistoric Switzerland, the world he lands in is totally unfamiliar. After some adventures, he manages to get back to the R&R facility and warn the rest of the surviving patrol members and make a plan to put things right, which duly happens.
It is interesting to see the progression of these stories. "Time Patrol" introduces the patrol and the whole spin about protecting the timestream and how no paradoxes are allowed etc. but also shows that some paradoxes can be allowed. "Brave to be a King" takes this further, with Everard going against everything the patrol has taught him to rescue a friend. With "The Only Game in Town", any remaining illusions that the time patrol is a neutral force is dispelled, while "Delenda Est" puts the morality of time changing in the spotlight: what rights does one time traveller has to alter time and wipe out the lifes of millions upon millions of people?
All this and some rollicking adventures too!
