Young doctoral student Sierra chases back to ancient Alexandria after her professor who seems to be chasing after a time traveler who is trying to get Socrates to abandon Athenian death row for the future.

Although I haven’t seen a second novel, a sequel novella called “Unburning Alexandria” featured Sierra chasing around 410 A.D. Alexandria.
If I, today, had finished constructing a device, in this room, which allowed you to travel even a day into the past, and you used it to travel into the past to kill or otherwise distract me from completing the device, how would you have been able to travel in the first place into the past, with no device then constructed?

Variants

(1)
  1. The Plot to Save Socrates by Paul Levinson (Tor Books, February 2006).
    2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Paul Levinson