Margo shrugged. “Sounds easy enough to avoid. You just don’t try to watch Julius Caesar murdered twice.”
Malcolm said, “You couldn’t do that, anyway. The two ends of the time strings that form gates are connected. They move at the same pace. If a week goes by here, a week goes by there. Once you miss an opportunity to see something, it’s gone forever, unless another time string opens up to the same point in time.
Of course, if you tried to go back, you’d cross your shadow and end up not seeing it-or anything else ever, ever again.
”The point is,” Kit nodded, “the more down-time trips you make, the greater the odds that when you step through a gate into some unknown time, you’ll already exist somewhere and somewhen else. Eventually the odds catch up and you die.”
Margo chewed her lower lip in a thoughtful fashion. “So …you take this gamble every time you walk through an open gate, because you never know when-to what time-it leads? Why bother to keep records at all, if you could just vanish anyway? Seems like a lot of fuss, when you could blip out before you knew what hit you, no matter what you put in this thing. I mean, you don’t know when you’re going, so what does it matter that you know when you’ve been?”
Kit told himself that Margo was very young. “A couple of reasons. First, it’s your job, as scout, to keep meticulous records. Scholars and tour companies will want to review any data you bring back. Second, if you don’t keep records, you could accidentally kill yourself just trying to take a vacation or by, trying to visit another station, or even the wrong gate in the same station.”