They tensed, waiting. The _Times_ brought a map of the state before his
mind's eye.
"A half circle of cliffs around the horizon. A wide muddy lake swarming
with swimming things. Huge, strange white foliage all around the ship
and incredibly huge pulpy monsters attacking and eating each other on
all sides. We almost landed in the lake, right on the soft edge. The
mud can't hold the ship's weight, and we're sinking. The engineer says
we might be able to blast free, but the tubes are mud-clogged and might
blow up the ship. When can you reach us?"
The _Times_ thought vaguely of the Carboniferous Era. Nathen obviously
had seen something he had not.
"Where are they?" the _Times_ asked him quietly.
Nathen pointed to the antenna position indicators. The _Times_ let his
eyes follow the converging imaginary lines of focus out the window to
the sunlit airfield, the empty airfield, the drying concrete and green
waving grass where the lines met.
_Where the lines met. The spaceship was there!_
The fear of something unknown gripped him suddenly.
The spaceship was broadcasting again. "_Where are you? Answer if
possible! We are sinking! Where are you?_"
He saw that Nathen knew. "What is it?" the _Times_ asked hoarsely. "Are
they in another dimension or the past or on another world or what?"
Nathen was smiling bitterly, and Jacob Luke remembered that the young
man had a friend in that spaceship. "My guess is that they evolved
on a high-gravity planet, with a thin atmosphere, near a blue-white
star. Sure they see in the ultra-violet range. Our sun is abnormally
small and dim and yellow. Our atmosphere is so thick, it screens out
ultra-violet." He laughed harshly. "A good joke on us, the weird place
we evolved in, the thing it did to us!"
"Where are you?" called the alien spaceship. "Hurry, please! We're
sinking!"
* * * * *
The decoder slowed his tumbled, frightened words and looked up into the
_Times'_ face for understanding. "We'll rescue them," he said quietly.
"You were right about the time factor, right about them moving at a
different speed. I misunderstood. This business about squawk coding,
speeding for better transmission to counteract beam waver--I was wrong."
"What do you mean?"
"They don't speed up their broadcasts."
"They don't--?"
Suddenly, in his mind's eye, the _Times_ began to see again the play
he had just seen--but the actors were moving at blurring speed, the
words jerking out in a fluting, dizzying stream, thoughts and decisions
passing with unfollowable rapidity, rippling faces in a twisting blur
of expressions, doors slamming wildly, shatteringly, as the actors
leaped in and out of rooms.
No--faster, faster--he wasn't visualizing it as rapidly as it was,
an hour of talk and action in one almost instantaneous "squawk," a
narrow peak of "noise" interfering with a single word in an Earth
broadcast! Faster--faster--it was impossible. Matter could not stand
such stress--inertia--momentum--abrupt weight.