TASK DEFINITION: You will be given a summary of a story. You need to create a question that can be answered from the story. You can create a question about characters, events, facts and beliefs, etc. Your question should be specific, try not to use pronouns instead of full names. As the stories are sometimes movie plots, they will contain actor names in parentheses. You should not use those names. Only use character names. Try to ask a question about all parts of the plot, not just the beginning.
PROBLEM: The 1958 version: At the end of the Twentieth Century petty crook Ross Murdock is given the choice of facing a new medical procedure called Rehabilitation or volunteering to join a secret government project. Hoping for a chance to escape, Ross volunteers to join Operation Retrograde and is taken by Major John Kelgarries to a base built under the ice near the North Pole. Teamed with archaeologist Gordon Ashe, he is trained to mimic a trader of the Beaker culture of Bronze-Age Europe.
Sent back to southern Britain around 2000 B.C.E., Ross and Ashe (as Rossa and Assha) find that their outpost has been bombed, destroyed by the wrath of Lurgha, the local storm god, according to two of the natives. Discovering the direction whence the bomber came and other clues pointing to the general area occupied by the Soviet base, Ross, Ashe, and McNeil, the lone survivor of the bombing, go to that area.
Somewhere near the Baltic Sea, Ross, Ashe, and McNeil begin building a Beaker trading post and learn from the locals that to their southeast lies a land populated by ghosts, a land whither no man of good sense would go. Ross gets separated from Ashe and McNeil in a night attack and must go into the taboo area alone in an effort to find them. Far inside the ghostland he finds the Soviet base and is captured by the Reds.
In an effort to escape Ross steps onto the base s transporter plate and is transferred to a Soviet base even further back in time. The Reds recapture him and take him outside the base, abandoning him on a glacier to freeze to death. He climbs out of the crevice into which he was shoved and follows the trail leading away from the Soviet base, coming to a giant globe half buried in the ice. Half dead from the abuse he has received, he enters the globe and then falls through a panel and into a tub full of transparent-red gel.
When he regains consciousness Ross discovers that all of his wounds are healed, he is no longer hungry or thirsty, and his Beakerman clothing is gone. A mechanism offers him a skin-tight suit made of an iridescent dark-blue fabric that covers all but his head and his hands. He explores what is clearly some kind of ship and is recaptured by the Reds, but not before he activates the ship s communication system and comes face to face with a hostile-looking humanoid with a large bald head.
The Reds interrogation of Ross is interrupted by explosions that rock the base. Ross is reunited with Ashe and McNeil and the three men escape to the time transporter, pausing only to steal some recording tapes. Back in the Soviet Bronze-Age base, the men leave the time-travel building and escape from the village just as the alien Baldies attack. The men then make their way to the river that will take them to the Baltic Sea to be picked up by their submarine.
Ross is again separated from Ashe and McNeil when he falls off their hastily built and uncontrollable raft. He discovers that the Baldies are hunting him when he is captured by warriors from a barbarian tribe. Again he escapes and continues down the river, reaching the sea and the camp occupied by Ashe and/or McNeil only hours after the sub took them away. Two of the Baldies attempt to capture him with telepathic hypnosis, but they flee when Kelgarries and his men arrive. Leaving the alien skinsuit on the beach, so that the Baldies can t trace the Americans to their base, the men take Ross to the sub and home. There Ashe tells him that the tapes he stole indicate other alien spaceships abandoned on Earth, at least three of them in the Americas. Operation Retrograde is about to become much more interesting and Ross still wants to be part of the action.
The 2000 version: Norton modified the 1958 version by making three changes in the text;
1. She reset the story in the first quarter of the Twenty-First Century instead of in the last quarter of the Twentieth, shifting the action futureward by a full generation.
2. The Reds have become the Russians and Greater Russia has replaced the Soviet Union.
3. Space travel has not gone beyond the first lunar landings instead of having not gotten beyond the first attempts to put satellites into orbit. Instead of being ridiculed as impossible, space travel is publicly ridiculed as infeasible.

SOLUTION: What does Ross discover aftter being sentenced to death by the Reds?

PROBLEM: Lord Coombe is considered to be the best-dressed man in London. He is also a man whose public reputation, despite his formidable intellect and observant eye, is one of unmitigated wickedness. During one of his social forays, he meets a selfish young woman named 'Feather' with the face of an angel. Fascinated by her, he slowly drifts into her circle. When her husband dies unexpectedly, leaving her alone and desolate in London, he ends up taking her under his wing.
Feather has a daughter named Robin, of whom she takes little notice. She treats Robin with shocking neglect and once Coombe takes over responsibility for the household's finances, Feather readily abandons poor Robin to the less-than-kindly ministrations of her nurse. In fact, Robin doesn't even know Feather is her mother for her first six years, calling her 'The Lady Downstairs'. Robin also hates Coombe, having heard a conversation that blamed him for the loss of her first friend. This was a little boy named Donal who was in fact Coombe's heir. Donal's mother disapproves both of Coombe and Feather and when she discovers that her son has been playing with Robin, she whisks him away, leaving Robin heartbroken. However, Coombe does not return this dislike and in fact makes a point of serving as her guardian, albeit without Robin's knowledge. As Robin grows, he builds her a set of rooms, engages a loving nurse for her, and eventually secures a reputable governess for her. While her mother continues to behave with the selfish freedom of a wanton child.
As Robin grows, she becomes a lovely and intelligent though innocent, girl. Feather's circle includes some unsavory characters, one of whom, a German nobleman, tries to make Robin into his plaything. This caricature of Imperial German stereotypes uses Robin's desire to support herself to trap her in a house of ill repute. His plan fails mainly through the actions of Coombe, but the after-effects leave Robin crushed.
One of Coombe's few true confidants is a dowager Duchess - a woman of both great intellect and great understanding who has recently lost her long-time lady companion. After Robin's experiences with the German, Coombe suggests Robin as a suitable replacement. The Duchess is the one person who knows the secret of Coombe's determination to watch over Robin and why he is willing to tolerate the activities of her mother. This secret is finally communicated to the reader as well during one of Coombe's talks with the Duchess. The Duchess does indeed take in Robin and befriends her. Robin is introduced to the Duchess' children and their friends and finally sponsors a small dance for Robin. At the dance, Robin meets Donal again as Coombe and the Duchess learn that an Austrian Archduke has just been assassinated in Serbia.

SOLUTION: Who befriends Robin and throws her a small dance?

PROBLEM: Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson) works in a California oil field (shot in and around the city of Taft in the San Joaquin Valley) with his friend Elton (Billy "Green" Bush), who has a wife and baby son. Most of Bobby's time is spent with his waitress girlfriend, Rayette (Karen Black), who has dreams of singing country music, or in the company of Elton, with whom he bowls, gets drunk, and has sex with other women. Bobby has evidently not told Elton that he is a former classical pianist who comes from an eccentric family of musicians.
When Rayette is said to have become pregnant and shortly before Elton is arrested for having robbed a gas station a year earlier, Bobby quits his job and leaves for Los Angeles where his sister, Partita (Lois Smith), also a pianist, is making a recording. Partita informs him that their father, from whom Bobby is estranged, has suffered two strokes. She urges Bobby to return to the family home in Washington state, to visit their father.
As Rayette has threatened to kill herself if Bobby leaves her, he reluctantly asks her along. Driving north, they pick up two women headed for Alaska, one of whom is obsessed about "filth". The four of them are thrown out of a restaurant when Bobby gets into an argument with a waitress who refuses to accommodate his special order. Reaching his destination, Bobby, embarrassed by Rayette's lack of polish, registers her in a motel before proceeding to his family home on an island in Puget Sound.
He finds Partita giving their father a haircut, but the old man seems completely oblivious to him. At dinner, Bobby meets Catherine Van Oost (Susan Anspach), a young pianist engaged to his brother, Carl (Ralph Waite), a violinist. Despite personality differences, Catherine and Robert, the name she calls Bobby, become attracted and make love in her room.
Rayette runs out of money at the motel and comes to the Dupea estate unannounced. Her presence creates an awkward situation, but when Samia, a pompous family friend, ridicules Rayette, Bobby strongly defends her. Storming from the room in search of Catherine, he discovers his father's male nurse giving Partita a massage. Now more agitated, he picks a senseless fight and is quickly knocked to the floor.
Bobby tries to persuade Catherine to go away with him, but she declines, believing he does not love himself, or indeed anything at all. After trying to talk to his unresponsive father, Bobby leaves with Rayette, who makes a playful sexual advance that he angrily rejects. When Rayette goes in for some coffee at a gas station, he gives her his wallet and then abandons her, hitching a ride on a truck headed north.

SOLUTION:
In what state is Bobby's family home located?