txr%usc-cse@USC-ECL (12/15/82)
The problem of the tricorder recordings is easily solved with only a little imagination. It's true that when McCoy jumps through the display stops, but does it stop immediately? An extra small fraction of a second could easily account for the extra year or two of history recorded. As far as that goes, there is no guarantee that the history display is strictly linear -- it might track some events for a while and then "back up" to another major thread in the fabric of history. A similar idea explains how they got the alternate histories. The guardian displays not only what the past was but what it might have been. Only one recording need have been made to have *both* alternative pasts in it, one with McCoy and one without. (After all, didn't both "already happen"?) When making the first tricorder recording, and before McCoy jumped, there are already the images of both histories within the guardian, even though only one of them "happened." Didn't the guardian say early on in the episode something like "what was, what will be, what might have been"? Tim