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. It was insane. "Why?" he asked. "How?" Nathen laughed again harshly, reaching for the mike. "Get them out? There isn't a lake or river within hundreds of miles from here!" A shiver of unreality went down the _Times'_ spine. Automatically and inanely, he found himself delving in his pocket for a cigarette while he tried to grasp what had happened. "Where are they, then? Why can't we see their spaceship?" Nathen switched the microphone on in a gesture that showed the bitterness of his disappointment. "We'll need a magnifying glass for that." End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Pictures Don't Lie, by Katherine MacLean