I never even thought of that. That may very well be an evil Uncle Sam, or whatever you can call him. Truggs knows the H-Dial because in the comics he stole it in his time period. Also, Savage is still around. The Time Trapper version of him ceased to exist after he was replaced by Time Trapper Paul.Oh. My. Gosh.
recruitment-poster-come-to-life
ask not what your world can do for you, but ask what you can do for your world
I was rereading and just figured this out.
Per Degaton didn't send someone loyal but unimaginative back in time to found eliminations inc. He sent the nation-spirit of his united earth empire. As someone he could absolutely rely on to devote themselves to recreating his nation, who could be reasonably expected to have the superhuman power and both loyalty and intelligence to succeed. And be able to beat any other time-travelers who are sent to stop them from changing the timeline. Because I think most time-travelers don't have superpowers, and are often unfamiliar with magic.
The only question is how he prepared the spirit to handle the whole issue of possibly having its strength scale to match the strength of its nation, and whichever nation it represents being extremely weak in the past. Who wants to bet that Per Degaton's nation actually rules Antarctica now? possibly even openly declared as doing so, pretending to be one of those silly nations that people found from their basements.
And now that Truggs is recruiting high-end allies for himself, he not only got Circe, but managed to track down the time-travelling nation-spirit of Per Degaton's time. And they have very compatible ambitions, because Truggs wants the earth unified, but would just prefer to minimize breakage in the process.
There's a lot that I don't understand in that chapter, like implications of Truggs having seen the dial before in relation to time travel, but I'm pretty sure of the above.
Also now that we know Savage had the Cosmic Convertor technology, ?and Savage died to a time wedgie? Was never fully clear on that. I suspect that Truggs is now the one with the Cosmic convertor technology. And depending on how much progress he's made at weaponizing it he could have a lot of dangerous stuff.
Also PS I suspect that the dial is an 'icon' from the 853 century.