Is there another answer?

I'm obsessed by time. If I had a time machine I'd visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens. Perhaps I'd even travel to the end of the universe to find out how our whole cosmic story ends.

- Stephen Hawking, How to Build A Time Machine

I've previously mentioned that my employers have a long and unfortunate history of choosing admin staff with little or no knowledge of Star Trek.  We've recently hired a new employee to fill one of the positions in question - I offered to prepare some basic Star Trek questions for the interview process, simple things like: "What is the name of Data's brother?", but I was quietly reassured that the HR people could take care of that sort of thing themselves.

So far, I haven't really had a chance to test the hiring team's due diligence in this critical area, although I've been reassured that I shouldn't worry. However, a recent encounter with Diana, our new co-worker, has made me a bit concerned about how things will work out in the long run.

Coming back from lunch with my fellow employee Wendy* last week, we bumped into the new hire wandering down the street with what appeared to be a bagged lunch clutched in one hand.  Wendy politely recommended a nearby park with a nice view of the mountains and dock gantry cranes and so on as a pleasant spot to eat.  I added that I had found a time machine there a few months ago as well, which I felt added a certain je ne sais quoi to the park's credentials.

Diana considered this for a moment, and then asked, "What year does it go to?"

Mildly affronted, I replied, "What year does it go to?  All of them! How do you think this works?  'Excuse me, does this time machine go to the Battle of Hastings?'  "Sorry, no, miss, this is the Number 12 Time Machine, I only go to the French Revolution.  You want the Number 8 Time Machine at the stop across the street.' "

At this point Wendy intervened and explained that further explanation of my mania could be found on my ongoing eight-year old science fiction blog**, which concluded with Diana pointing at me and happily exclaiming, "AH, YOU'RE A GREAT BIG NERD!!!!!"

Well, yes...was there a question in there?

But, honestly...what year does my time machine go to?  It's time PORTALS that only go to one date, what do they teach people in school these days?

Seriously though, from Wells' eponymous Time Machine through almost 120 years of time chairs, time ships, time projectors, time highways, time tunnels, police boxes, DeLoreans and phone booths, I am at a loss to think of a single example of a mechanical time travel device which is dedicated to a single temporal destination.  I open this up to my readership - any examples of single-stop time mechanisms come to mind?

- Sid  

* There is some mild irony here in that Wendy, to whom I offered the Star Trek interview questions, is one of the people who experienced Jean-Luc Picard fail at the reception window. She has since been promoted, which would seem to indicate that the company doesn't place the same focus on this that I do.

**The blog thing really does take all of the guesswork out of it for people, perhaps I should have t-shirts made or get cards printed or something.

All the ladies in the house say, “Awwwww….”

Spider-Man in particular, he loves Spider-Man.

Terry, talking about his son Edward

And now, here's Ed with his favourite umbrella.  Ed is apparently also fond of Los Angeles, but that's less relevant for this blog.

 - Sid

But which seven?

There's a 1949* novelet by Keith Bennett called The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears which details the trials of Ground Expeditionary Patrol One, whose ship crashes during an exploratory mission on Venus.** Thirty-two men set off on a five hundred mile trek back to their main base - seven survive the trip.

The story is told partially from the perspective of Clarence Hague, an inexperienced young gunnery officer who, through the process of attrition, ends up in command of the last remnants of the ship's crew. Near the end of the story, he lists the remaining eight men under his command:

There was young Crosse, his face twitching nervously.  There was Blake, the tall, quiet bacteriologist; Lenkranz, the metals man; Hirooka, the Nisei; Balistierri; Whitcomb, the photographer, with a battered Hasselbladt still dangling from its neck cord against his armored chest. Swenson was still there, the big Swede crewman; and imperturbable Sergeant Brian, who was now calmly cleaning the pneumatic gun's loading mechanism.

Following one last battle with the lizardlike natives of the Venusian jungles, they successfully arrive at the base:

Chapman remembered his field glasses and focused them on the seven approaching men.  "Lieutenant Hague is the only officer."

And so the story ends. Obviously Hague survives that final skirmish, but I've always felt a bit cheated by the fact that we are never told which two of those other eight men fail to complete the journey. I wonder why Bennett decided to omit that crucial bit of information - and why the editor let him get away with it?

 - Sid

* In the interests of complete accuracy, copyright is from 1949, but the story wasn't published in Planet Stories until Spring of 1950.

** There was a point in time where Venus was theorized to be Earth-like but much warmer due to its position closer to the Sun.