Time Patrol 3

Gibraltar Falls

by Poul Anderson

• Release: October 1975
• Format: Short Story
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Audience: Adults
• Content: Definite Time Travel
• Original Language: English

The Mediterranean floor lay ten thousand feet below sea level. The inflow took most of that drop within a fifty-mile strait. Its volume amounted to ten thousand cubic miles a year, a hundred Victoria Falls or a thousand Niagaras.

VARIANTS

1 English variant

TAGS(SPOILERS!)

Time Periods

• Pre-Human Age of Mammals (66 Ma to 3.4 Ma: Cenozoic/Paleogene/Neogene)

Timeline Models

• Unexplained Timeline Model: Other stories of Anderson’s Time Patrol have multiple timelines, but it’s unclear whether this story has one or many.

Time Travel Methods

• Time Fliers: The patrol call them hoppers.

Themes

• Intertemporal Communication Systems between Time Travel Agents/Offices/etc.: message capsules
• Long Life: Longevity treatments are mentioned.
• Rescue after the Fact: After Feliz is safe, Tom must still go back in time multiple times so that the multiple copies of himself are indeed part of the search.
• Save “Jimmy”!: Tom may have unexpressed amourous feelings for Feliz, but his actions to rescue her are because he is her patrol partner.
• Selves-Visitation: [. . .] a score of him searched along the fall in that span of seconds when Feliz might be alive.
• Time Cops: The patrol’s mission is to protect the timeline by tracking down and stopping illegal changes, although in this story they appear to be studying the past more than protecting it.

Groupings

• Cited in Paradoxes of Time Travel by Rayn Wasserrman ()
• Cited in Worlds Enough and Time, edited by Gary Westfahl ()
• Fiction (France) (periodical): #297, January 1979
• The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (periodical): October 1975
• Time Patrol (story series): 3