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170 the main debris area, where the occasional rains may have washed them? Or where the frequently strong winds could have blown them? It seems reasonable, but as yet not a single tiny scrap has been found. And while almost a half-century has passed, the urge to have one more look cannot be resisted. You walk slowly, cautiously over the rough ground, your eyes focused just in front of your feet. Kick a clump of dirt, push back a gnarled old limb, pry apart a recently split rock. No matter how preposterous the odds, it must be done, for the joy on finding a piece of spacecraft must instantly blot out the growing feeling of embarrassment at spending so much time on such an obvi- ously hopeless task. You tell yourself there's hardly a chance in a million of finding anything. Yet one chance in a million is infinitely better than no chances. It means that it's possible you'll find what others have failed to find. A scrap of stuff that will briefly lift you off this battered old planet on a flight to the one from which the craft came so many years ago. But it is a flight of fancy. There's nothing here but common shrubs and trees and grass and dirt and rocks. And yet... you have to keep going. Who knows but what the very next rock will reveal a piece of silvery foil that has been waiting almost two generations for you. It's hot and lonely and the thin air is uncomfortably dry. It's a strange place for city folk, but it must have been a far stranger place for the visitors who ended their days here. No matter why they were flying over New Mexico, they died here, and so perhaps this place should be given greater respect. When astronauts or cos- monauts finally visit another inhabited world and perhaps die in the effort, how will we feel about the locals tramping around that crash site in hopes of finding souvenirs? The longer you poke around the dusty hills of the sheep ranch and find nothing, the more you feel like quitting. No, not exactly like quitting, but more like postponing the final and possibly successful attack on a bunch of innocent rocks and bushes that must be hiding the high-tech Grail. Convinced CRASH AT CORONA