West Valley Pad

ney arrived in the town of Playas ahead of schedule and used his spare time to take a look around. What he saw amazed him. Although he knew Playas was a virtually abandoned, modem company town, it was quite another matter to see it. The two-lane road into town was paved, and just on the outskirts were two churches, baseball fields a swimming pool, and a recreation center. The road looped around a grass

y knoll dotted with trees that formed the gateway to the town, where a single-story apartment building with a covered portal faced the park like setting. Beyond the town a sweep of low hills rose up, rock strewn, barren, and steeply sloped. Backed against them the town looked out at a dry, glistening white lakebed in a broad valley that stretched to the Animas Mountains. The word for beaches in Spanish was playas, and the dry lakebed looked exactly like a pristine sandy shore without any water. Playas was a bit of suburbia transplanted in the middle of the desert.