Actually, I was working on that, CC.
Best I could come up with, though, was:
A) If you find the dead body and then go back in time to prevent the body from becoming dead, you get into one of those awful causality loops that no one really wants to have to deal with. (That exploding thing you mentioned.)
B) Temporal Prime Directive, Corollary One: You can go back in time to fix problems created by villains, but you can't go back in time to fix your own mistakes or problems that occured naturally. If that sort of thing was allowed, it could easily get out of hand and lead to all sorts of abuse problems. So, there's a strict departmental policy against trying anything even close to that without solid proof that there has been interference in the timeline. Madge has gone far enough using the portal without due process. Using it again to break a rule that big is just out of the quesiton.
(This also explains why no one has gone back to fix any of Andrus's flubs. It may also explain why no one went back in time to stop Herb from picking up Tempus in the first place. Herb himself, of course, is not a member of the department, but he is sometimes monitored by them. So, he has some leeway, but he's not completely free.)
C) Given the shock and dispair felt by Madge and crew at seeing their last best hope crushed, they simply didn't think to try it. They barely convinced each other to test the remains, and even that was, in their minds, mostly busy work. They're not exactly at their best right now.
Not sure what you came up with, CC, but that's what I've got.
Paul
