Gaius and A Rift in Time

A short article analysing the time paradoxes created by Gaius' travels in time.

By Jackie Clark

There are some assumptions that I'm making to my theory at the outset.

1. That Gaius is either an alien who does not originate on Earth, or someone from the TP's future. He cannot be from the Romanesque version of the future because that time line doesn't exist at the outset of the story, so his Roman nose is a coincidence. This makes me think he does *not* originate on Earth at all. He may be someone curious about this aspect of Earth's past purely because he has such a prominent Roman facial feature.

2. If he does come from the TP's future the question is whether he intentionally wanted to change the past in order to change his own time's present and make it more Roman - or at least more advanced. This is a dangerous business. To have started out with the intention of deliberately changing the past may result in his own paradoxical destruction and to an intelligent man would be a *very* risky undertaking. Therefore I am making the assumption once again that he didn't originate on Earth. He may have wanted to have fun exploring time travel and come to Earth in order to prevent rifts affecting his own planet. That way he always has somewhere unchanged to return to and is unlikely to interfere in his own existence.

3. He uses a crude time pump as a means of time travel, possibly indicating that he was one of the people Peter alluded to in Medusa Strain. The fact that his equipment is not too advanced indicates that he comes from a planet (or time) in the present or not too distant future.

4. Gaius cannot move in space because he cannot teleport and would need to take his large device with him if he wanted to visit the past in other places or on other planets.

5.The time pump has certain energy requirements, as does much of the other smaller equipment he takes with him. A massive boost of energy is required to power up the pump and this sends both man and machine (a few seconds later) to whenever they have programmed. He does not have the means of taking this power sources with him, presumably because it is too bulky. If he used electricity from the mains power grid in the 1970's to push him back to early Britain, the equipment itself would not go with him. He would be fully aware of the necessity to build a power source as soon as he became established with somewhere to work in secret - allowing himself the means to return or explore elsewhere.

Given the technology of the time - and not wishing to seem too out of place thus drawing attention to himself from the local authorities who may have accused him of using magic or some demonical device, the most advanced thing he could build was the steam engine.

6. Coming from either the TP's present (i.e. around 1970) or their future, he is
aware of the Time Guardians and the fact that they are psionic so he carries
a dampener of sorts as standard equipment to protect himself from being
arrested by them. This dampener also has the ability to detect psionic beings in the vicinity. He detected Peter shortly after his arrival - as soon as the building of the steam engine was complete and his equipment up and running. His commandeering of the gladiator school and building of this equipment could be the thing that alerted the Time Guardians to his presence in the first place. Switching on the device meant that Peter lost his powers, but also made it difficult for Gaius to know that he had in fact captured a Time Guardian. Gaius was testing Peter in order to ascertain whether he was TP. By placing him in dangerous situations he wanted to use the Prime Barrier - or rather Peter's refusal to cross it - as evidence that he had captured the right boy.

Of course when the group of TP's arrived Gaius' device signals him once again, so he then knows that more psionic beings are in the vicinity and expedites his escape from
the school. Steam being such a crude power source may have been problematical for Gaius, affecting his ability to transport both himself and the time pump. The haste of his withdrawal from this time stream may have also been responsible for the implosion and resulting vacuum.

7. A Time Guardian by their very nature is immune to time changes and exist slightly out of phase with the universe around them. They inhabit a time stream (lane) all of their own and this allows them to do their job without being changed themselves while things around them do change. A Time Guardian can allow other people (in this case the TPs) to share in their personal time stream and also be immune to the effects of time rifts and changes.


Antecedents to the Rift!

Gaius comes to Roman Britain and establishes himself as head of the gladiator school. Fearful of discovery he needs to set up his equipment and builds the steam engine to power the dampener and time pump. This causes a small ripple effect in time and precipitates the Time Guardian's dispatching of Peter to investigate.

Peter arrives - Gaius is alerted and switches on the dampener device.

Peter sends the message to Stephen because he realises that it is the only way to alert people in the future of his plight. This implies that at this time the future in unchanged. The existence of the steam engine has caused just a small rift; detectable by the Guardians, but which the TPs are unaware of.

The TPs arrive and Gaius is warned again - they lose their powers.

Gaius' original time line was still intact at this point. If he had merely remained as a visitor, interacted with the school, built the steam engine and used it to power his time pump as he departed without incident, he most likely would not have had much impact on the future. Although Cotus had knowledge of how to build and maintain the steam engine at this time he didn't realise the value in that knowledge. He was destined to be killed at the horse trials anyway so that knowledge would have died with him.

Gaius escapes, expecting to return to his own time with very little changed. Unfortunately, due to the haste of his departure the time-pump overloaded and threatened the school.

Gaius is in transit - a circular loop or time bubble. Gaius steps into the time pump and while in transit things happen.Peter agrees to the saving of the boys from the school. When Cotus is saved from his impending death the knowledge of steam engines continued within him. The time rift thus spread forward along the time lanes… once the school is destroyed, Cotus is left to return home, but having seen and heard of the wondrous things that Stephen and Peter talked about, he suddenly sees potential profit in his knowledge. At this point the time rift accelerates even more.

Once he had salvaged the parts from the remains of the machine the future is completely altered. Gaius arrives in 1974 (or slightly before) but the time pump was left behind/destroyed in the past. Gaius likes the new found Roman order on Earth. He realises that although he is out of time, he does have knowledge useful to this new Roman Empire and acquires himself a position of authority. The job he creates for himself is to watch out for those who would change time back again. Knowing that Peter was definitely a Time Guardian (Peter announced it as Gaius disappeared) he also knows that Peter and the others will follow him back to the present. He realises that as soon as they see what he has done in changing the Earth they will immediately return to try and put things straight again. So he sets up monitoring stations and waits for them to arrive. He could have been waiting years, but he knew that one day someone would try to arrest him for what he has done and that they must be killed either in his own present or back in the past.

When they arrived he recorded their conversation to help learn what they planned to do. He then leads a party of soldiers back to kill them in the past. He needn't have gone back immediately, he could have taken as long as he wanted to invent another time travel device - which this time was more advanced than his original and had no need of a large power source, so could be activated anywhere, anywhen.Gaius follows the TP back When Gaius follows them back he could have had various attempts to pin point the exact date and place where they are located. Having done this he makes sure that he arrives just before them to install the psi-dampener device and knows that this will indicate as soon as they enter the vicinity.Once he captures them he asks what their time was like. This indicates that he doesn't know about their time and some people think that this implies that he was originally from the Roman version of the future or was a different Gaius than the first one.

I believe that he asks this question because he was not native to Earth. He is definitely the same man. If this man is a different, Roman, version of Gaius, it implies that when the earlier version left the past in the crude time pump he went some where unknown (and is still at large) and that the current version was brought up in the new Roman Empire and just happened to experiment with time travel like his other self. Then having spotted and recorded the TPs talking with Peter he put two and two together and guessed that they were in fact chasing another version of himself and had returned to the past to correct a time rift. It makes a lot more sense to me that he was the same man, but had changed slightly because of intervening years and experiences.

When one of Gaius' men knocked out Cotus and he lost his memory, they changed their own future reinstating the version that the TPs know about. Because the steam engine was no longer invented in ancient Roman times the entire future Roman Empire stopped. As Gaius had used future Roman technology to get back to this point in time, the equipment no longer existed, which meant that he was never there. Something also happened to Cotus. In the original time stream Cotus was destined to die so that knowledge of steam wasn't invented for thousands of years. In this time loop Cotus had lived and become rich and famous with his invention thus pushing forward technological advances. After being hit on the head it seemed to Elizabeth that Cotus had been killed, but suddenly things seemed to change and he was in fact alive after all. Did he experience a small time bubble of his own?Cotus was destined to be at the horse trials because of Gaius, and although the Future Gaius had no longer visited this time stream, the original Gaius had, which implies that this was still meant to happen. In fact the person who had just hit him on the head had never really been there so he could not have actually been killed. Still, in this time stream Cotus' life had been altered by his interaction with the TPs. Perhaps he was no longer destined to die.

There fore at the point when they were successful in re-establishing their own futures, Cotus' future was also assured and he came back to life - so to speak. When the time rift was healed it appeared that Gaius disappeared, but this was not the case. It was this loop in time that failed to happen, putting us back to the place when the original Gaius was in transit using the crude time pump.

Gaius arrives in 1974 (or slightly before)

Gaius stepped out of the time pump back in 1970's Earth and it is unchanged from when he began his travels. But this time because his time pump was destroyed as he fled, he has no means to interfere again so cannot go back again, but must end his time travelling and return to his own planet.

There is just one thing left to explain. Why were the TPs unaffected when their own time line disappeared? When they appeared in Roman 1970 they should have immediately disappeared. Using the same logic as above, if Gaius could disappear when his time device ceased to exist, then the TPs would disappear when they realised that the Lab and Tomorrow People of the Roman Empire did not exist. Even if they didn't disappear they would have at least lost their memory of their own personal histories, as none of those events would now have taken place. The answer to this dilemma is that they were protected from the time rift by Peter's presence.