Site, which is open to the public one day a year. It hadbeen some thirty years since the first atomic bomb wasdetonated over that hot, dusty, windy plain. A long lineof cars was met by a military escort at a shopping centernorth of Alamogordo and taken some seventy miles outinto the White Sands Missile Range. We finally parked,disembarked and walked to Ground Zero. There wasrealty nothing to see. I had read how that first blast hadleft a crater of fused aluminum silicates twenty-five feetdeep and a quarter-mile across. It was gone. The desertwinds had filled it in, the desert plants (unmutated) hadtaken root above it. The radiation level was only slightlyabove normal background. The place looked pretty muchlike parts of my backyard. After a moment's disappointment at the absence of a spectacle following the longdrive, I suddenly felt elated as I realized how completelythe earth had recovered in the span of a single generation, Life's resilience.

Some years ago, a scientist who was planning onbeaming some television pictures outward, in an attemptto communicate something concerning us and our ways towhatever might be watching the late show, asked meto suggest some of the content for the program. Alongwith a lot of predictable technical and social stuff, I recall suggesting a symphony orchestra with closeups of theindividual instruments being played, sailboats and—I believe—a flight of hot air balloons—as these seemed threesorts of objects where form has been so perfectly anduniquely married to function that our tools have becomeworks of art—which I suppose puts even my estheticthinking into a kind of Platonic hardware store.

I enjoy being a writer and I even like the paperwork.That's enough about the author. Here are the stories.

PASSION PLAY

This was my first published story, as it states below. Awhile back, Jonathan Ostrowsky-Lantz, the editor of