Paratime Series - Travelling Through Timelines

Travelling Through Timelines

The means of traveling through timelines is a conveyor using the Ghaldron-Hesthor field-generator. Conveyors are fixed in place, which means that as they travel through timelines, they may end up inside nuclear reactors or other hazards or be caught in warfare (a common activity on at least one timeline in nearly every trip, Paratimers note). Weakening of the transposition field is a concern of Paratimers.

Because there are so many timelines and many conveyors, it is possible for two conveyors to "cross" each other and end up with mutually weakened fields. In this case, objects from the outside may penetrate the conveyor. Often these objects are alive. If they are people, they face two choices: be shot or have their memory obliterated. The Paratime Secret is more important than one outtimer's life. Sometimes they stumble out of the conveyor onto another timeline: this could have happened to British diplomat Benjamin Bathurst in He Walked Around the Horses (Note: This "could" is almost a certainty since the details of the story of such an occurrence that Tortha Karf tells in Police Operation match exactly the events in this story) or to the stranger on the train in Crossroads of Destiny as it did to Pennsylvania State Police officer Calvin Morrison in Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen. In those cases, the Paratime Police try to return them to their home timelines with memory obliteration. In other cases, such as a "Christian Avenger" of the Hitler-victory timeline, they decided he's better off dead and will let the locals do the job.