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!"