Timesweep agent Ravel finds himself the only survivor of an attack on the Dinosaur Beach
substation until his wife shows up, although their marriage still lies in her future.
The Timesweep program was a close parallel to the space sweep. The Old Era temporal
experimenters had littered the timeways with everything from early one-way timecans to
observation stations, dead bodies, abandoned instruments, weapons and equipment of all
sorts, including an automatic mining setup established under the Antarctic icecap which
caused headaches at the time of the Big Melt.