Re: Confirmation "Enterprise" is in Alternate Universe ('Carpenter Street' spoilers)

"Chris Basken" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

>Since the time travelers themselves came from the natural timeline, it was
>theoretically possible for one to go back and alter history so that he was
>never born, but Asimov's take on the process was that such precision was
>nearly impossible.  That is, the time travelers didn't leap forward and
>backwards over the span of years or centuries, but whole millennia at a time,
>because it was hard to control exactly when you "landed."

        Er ... I think you've convoluted ``The End Of Eternity'' with 
``The Ugly Little Boy.'' In ``The Ugly Little Boy'' the time travel 
mechanism used could only dimly focus -- and in its first iteration could 
not focus on anything nearer than about 50,000 years in the past -- but in 
``The End of Enternity'' tight control was possible, indeed, essential.  
The changes made in the timeline were made in niches as little as a couple 
minutes wide.  

        The folks in ``The Ugly Little Boy'' trusted that whatever change 
their extraction of people and things from history made would tend to be 
tiny and to fade away, which seems to have worked for them.  They were 
lucky; in Asimov's first draft of that story the little boy extracted from 
his native time, by horrible quirk of fate, happened to be *the* person 
who tamed fire, and when they didn't return him in time they set all of 
civilization back twenty-five centuries.  Whoops.  

                                                                Joseph Nebus
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