"Impressive design," he said aloud to himself. "Tapered hull, to minimize resistance in the temporal slipstream. Efficient placement of the Doppler compensators. The quantum shields are configured in a pattern which is imaginative yet tasteful. A fine example of chronodynamics."

Smedley Faversham was looking upwards as he said this, because the wormhole which supplied the time machine's temporal conduit was located in midair, twenty meters above the ground. Therefore, when the time machine completed its path through the wormhole and emerged into conventional space-time, it immediately dropped like a rock.

Or, rather, the time machine fell like a meteorite. Instead of plummeting straight down, it descended at an angle caused by its trajectory through space-time relative to the Earth's rotation. From a safe distance, Smedley Faversham watched as the time machine struck the ground, plowing into the pale sand of the New Mexico desert. The impact dislodged a starboard Doppler compensator, and soon a trail of debris was jettisoned abaft. Like a stone skipping over the surface of a pond, the time machine bounced into the air and then fell again, bounced again, fell again ... strewing fragments of wreckage in its wake as it carved a deep gouge through the ground. At last, with a thud of finality, the superstructure of the time machine struck the desert sand once more, then turned over and came to a halt aftside upwards in the middle of a dune.

"Wow!" said Smedley Faversham. "I'll bet that must have hurt!"

He waited for a moment, just in case the time machine might burst into flames, or flood the area with polarized tachyons, or explode into a super-heated plasma cloud of alpha particles, or do anything else interesting like that. When nothing happened, and the radiation tag in Smedley's cummerbund remained unfogged, he sauntered towards the wreckage.

Part of the time machine was definitely a cockpit, with an insulated dome. Someone or something was scrabbling around in there, trying to get out. Smedley located the escape mechanism, and he pressed this while he aimed his flashlight's beam into the cockpit. There was a hiss of pressurized air escaping, and a man emerged from the time machine's debris.

"Thanks, mister," said the chrononaut as he climbed out. He blinked several times in the night air, shielding his eyes from the gleam of Smedley Faversham's flashlight. "Pleased to meet you. My name's Tom Morrow."

"Of course it is," said Smedley Faversham, who knew a nom du bologna when he heard one. But it is always rude to accuse a man of lying, especially if he's a liar. So Smedley Faversham decided to accept that the time-pilot's name was, indeed, Tom Morrow.

On a control panel inside the time machine's cockpit was a half-melted puddle of slag, which Smedley Faversham recognized as the remains of a chronogational vector indicator ... fused beyond all repair. Tom Morrow glanced at this, and shuddered. "Say, friend," he said to Smedley Faversham, in a too-obvious attempt at sounding casual, "would you happen to know where I am?"