His hard hooves clattered noisily as he walked across the 
broken concrete road that ran through the middle of what used to be 
downtown.  Actually, crushed concrete would be a better description.  
The broken pavement formed countless pebbles, which slipped and 
slid under Billšs cloven feet.  His four legs normally would have a 
steady gait upon a more regular surface.  But walking along these 
blasted and deserted streets, the pattern of his hoofsteps was erratic 
as he dodged twisted debris here, a human body there.  The random 
rythym and its echo were all that broke the silence on this dead and 
desolate island.  
	Bill shook his mane, as unicorns habitually do when they are 
nervous or distraught.  Of course, Bill had no idea how he knew that.  
He simply knew it, that was all.  Perhaps he could have chosen a 
different shape when he had come here.  He could have taken any 
form that suited him.  A horse's form would have been just as 
appropriate for walking through this no-man's land.  Or a camel 
perhaps, allowing him to be able to walk for a much greater distance 
before looking for water.  But somehow, only the form of a unicorn 
seemed appropriate for a sorcerer like him to shift into.  Magical, 
powerful, and alone.
	Bill quietly turned north to continue his rounds.  He was still 
looking for survivors.  Survivors of "Hell Night". It had been nearly a 
year since that terrible evening, and he had been walking and 
searching the island for the entire time.  He had found no-one, not a 
single living soul.  He peered into the burned and flattened rubble 
that once held families and laughing children, but saw only 
wreckage.  He walked along the cracked and upturned roads, 
checking the buildings he came upon, looking for any sign that 
people were still alive, living like frightened mice.  All of the homes 
on the island were gone: leveled and burned in that one quick night 
of terror.  Now they were only frames, if that.  
	The cars and trucks lining the roads were in no better shape 
than the houses.  The salty air was rapidly turning them into rusted 
hulks with broken glass.  In only a few more years, nothing but the 
skeletons of the cars would be left.  They would be right at home 
with the human skeletons inside them.  Bill figured that many of the 
island's residents had tried to escape the disaster by taking to their 
cars.  Where they had thought to run to on an island, Bill had no idea.  
Their was no corner of the island left unscorched.  But of course, at 
the time, the drivers didn't know that.  They may have thought the 
thin metal would be better protection than their homes.  Perhaps 
they were just blindly running, hoping for good luck.  
	Luck must have been busy elsewhere that night, Bill thought.
	He noticed that many of the high-priced homes which were 
built so close to the beach were nothing more than moss-covered 
foundations now.  The sea had washed away what little remained of 
the wreckage, leaving only the concrete slab and the souls of the 
departed.  Occasionally, when he poked around in the wrecks, he 
would find something that reminded him of his own lost humanity.  
He would sometimes find a teddy bear or a photo album.  But one 
house stood out vividly in his memory.  Unlike most of the others, 
this photo album was in good condition.  The family who had lived 
there must have been quite happy, what with their dogs and three 
children.  They had quite a few photographs of the kids' birthdays 
and Christmases.  Inside the wreckage, he had gone into what must 
have been the children's room.  One of the children's carcasses was 
still clinging to her favorite toy, a badly burned rubber duck.  It was 
horrible!  She couldn't have been more than 5 years old.
	Bill ran from that house as fast as his legs could take him, and 
that was very fast, considering his present form.  He never returned 
to that spot again.
	The homes further inland on the island were in shambles as 
well.  They were not as fancy or expensive as the houses on the 
beach, but they were homes just the same.  The vines and grasses 
quickly took them over as the trees grew closer and taller into the 
yards and subdivisions.  Soon the jungle would overgrow everything, 
and the island would revert back to the way it looked before men 
ever found it.  The jungle was hell-bent to reclaim it's territory.  The 
monkey bars and the tricycles were now lost in the weeds.  The only 
signs that man had ever existed here would be dead-zones where the 
gas pumps once stood, patches of shattered concrete, and the twisted 
wreckage of the aircraft on the airstrips, both military and civilian.
	Ah yes, the military base on the north side of the island.  It 
didn't hold up to the brunt of "Hell Night" at all.  The houses were not 
only destroyed, they were buried as well.  The base had sat on a 
volcanic plataue about 500 feet above sealevel.  At the end of "Hell 
Night", the entire north end of the island broke off it's pedestal, and 
fell about 200 feet.  It was only a miracle that caused the northern 
section to become wedged on another undersea outcropping of rock.  
Of course, it was a minor miracle at best.  The base was still leveled, 
and all within it still killed.  Entire sections of concrete runway had 
turned over, burying huge aircraft under tons of rubble.  The 
technicians who desperately tried to get the craft off the ground 
were buried along with them.  Also the Command Center, which was 
designed to survive a nuclear attack, was knocked apart until the 
largest part Bill found was the size of a pebble.  There was no 
shortage of bodies here either.  Only, Bill couldn't tell where one 
body began and another ended.
	The Dormitories were on a different section of the base, far 
removed from the runways.  They too were dead.  The dorms were 
each the size of a small ship, and housed about 400 people.  They 
were the only intact buildings left on the island, and they hung over 
the remaining cliffs.  They did not shatter like the other buildings.  
They stayed in one piece, sort of like the people who lived within 
them.  Bill knew all about them.  All of the people there had been 
close-knit, maybe even a kind of family.  They worked together, 
played together, blasted their stereos together, bought music 
together, and got totally wasted drunk together.  And in the end, 
they hid inside together, screamed together, and died together.  Yes, 
Bill knew about them and their lives, very well indeed.  Bill used to 
be one of them.

	And it broke Bill's heart that he was the one who caused all 
this destruction!!

	Bill had not always been a sorcerer.  In fact, once he was just 
another young man serving in the Air Force.  Bill had been stationed 
here on the island for 3 years, fixing the aircraft, and playing the 
Military's silly little mind games.  He had arrived thinking of the 
great times he would have, and of all the beautiful women he would 
meet.  The pictures he found before arriving showed a delightful 
heaven on earth, populated by scantily clad women.  He had a vision 
of a tropical paradise in his mind.  
	But as so often happens in life, reality fell far short of his 
hopes.  There was only one women per every five men on the entire 
island.  (The ratios on the base were even worse.)  And his tropical 
paradise quickly turned into a timeless, endless cycle of work-eat-
sleep-repeat.  The military's constant paranoid attitude and 
harassment eventually wore his spirit down.  A full year went by, 
and Bill felt like he had aged a century.  The monotony was 
surpassed only by the boredom.  There was very little for him to do 
when he wasn't working.  Movies were rare, and videotapes rarer 
still.  He was terrified of drowning, so swimming was out.  The only 
enjoyment he got out of life then was partying with his friends in the 
Dormatories.
	Of course, Bill did go off the base quite a few times.  Not that 
there was much to do out there either.  The speed limit was 15 MPH, 
which made crossing the 20 mile island seem to take forever.  And 
the endless supply of stop signs was frustrating beyond belief.  He 
was used to wide open areas where one could drive forever and not 
come upon another town or car.  He had grown up with large forests 
and enormous trees.  The biggest tree on the island was not more 
than a bush to Bill.  And the entertainment district in what passed 
for downtown?  While Bill was no prude, and he had no qualms 
about whorehouses, he could not understand the local society that 
built them immediately next to churchs.  Nor could he understand 
the mindset of the religiously fundamentalist population who 
frequented them, sometimes right after Sunday services.
	There were many things about the local people he didn't 
comprehend.  They had seemed friendly enough in the beginning.  
But even the friendliest of them seemed to be out only for their own 
good after a while.  They had an attitude of utter superiority to 
anyone not born on the island.  Many of Bill's friends spent a night in 
jail because a local punk started a fight, and the police would come 
and throw the military guy in the slammer, letting the local go away 
with a warning.  Then several of his friends were murdered by local 
thugs, weeks apart from each other.  And when the local so-called 
justice system finally got around to catching the miscreants, they 
were declared legally "crazy on drugs and alcohol".  They were then 
set free and returned to their families, with instructions to stay off 
alcohol and drugs, and not to get caught killing mainlanders again.  
Not to get caught!  Not "don't do it", but "don't get caught"! 
	And of course what had happened to Sheila.  It was horrible.  
Horrible!  He cried at the memory to this day.  He would never forget 
the state they found her in, and how long it took her to die.  Days... 
several days of what had to have been agony.  She had been beaten 
with a 20 pound rock until her head had split apart, and dumped on 
the beach.  The bleeding inside of what was left of her brain was 
profuse.  She was little more than a vegetable the last few hours he 
was with her.  The brain damage was inoperable, and the damage 
kept spreading.  She had been his confidant, and they had shared 
many a beer lying in lawn chairs on the roof of their dorm.  They 
were not lovers, nor had they ever shared a bed.  But they were 
soulmates, heart and mind.  They knew each others thoughts better 
than many married couples did.  And she died not as a warrior, as 
she had wished, but as a dribbling blob.  It broke his heart.
	And when she died, something felt different inside him.  Some 
who knew him said that part of him died as well.  His disposition 
hardened.  He became cold and reclusive.  His normally warm 
temperment turned to steel, pushing everything and everyone away 
from him.  He began to hate the island, the service, and everything 
else.  His beach-covered paradise had turned into a prison, filled with 
a limitless supply of enemies.  He began to count the days until he 
could leave the god-forsaken place and all its hypocritical people 
behind.
	Of course, the day finally did come for him to return to the 
mainland.  Bill had developed quite a attitude problem, and was 
having trouble adjusting back to civilian life.  He kept having 
flashbacks to when he was still on the island, and all of his friends he 
had left over there.  He was emotionally torn between his hatred for 
the island, and his love for his friends there.  Of course, by this time 
all of them had been shipped back to the mainland as well.  They 
never called or wrote or anything.  But then, neither did Bill.  He 
didn't know what addresses to write to, and probably they didn't 
know how to reach him either.  That was just the way it was.  When 
it was time to move on, you didn't tie yourself to the past.  So Bill 
eventually wrote everything off as a closed chapter in his life, and 
buried the emotions deep so they would not damage his new life.

	And then the power came to him.

	He did not know when it began.  He didn't even know what was 
happening at the time.  Things seemed to happen just the way he 
wanted, and just when he wanted.  At first the power was of little 
strength, and he believed the effects to be simple coincidence.  But 
gradually, the energy available to him grew stronger.  And more 
controlled.  Bill could no longer believe that all the unlikely events 
happening to him were pure coincedence.  He began to experiment 
with the skill.  Slowly, very slowly, he began to learn to use his 
power.  Soon he was able to change the traffic lights in his favor as 
he drove.  It became a routine exercise for him.  He stretched his 
concentration out further each day.  As his skills grew, he practiced 
forcing several sets of lights to follow a sequence.  It proved useful 
for getting through rush-hour, so he used it.  The more lights he 
controlled, the more difficult it became. 
	But exertions eventually always became easy, and he always 
found more challenging exercises to entertain him.  Next  he learned 
to see from places he wasn't.  Slowly, and with more practice, he was 
able to see anything, anywhere within his city, and make any light 
obey his mere wish instead of having to apply force to it as before.  
He used his power to execute a number of jokes, like traffic lights 
that were red in all directions.  Or turning the lights off inside 
peoples' homes as he drove by.  Once he displayed an obscene 
message on a bank clock sign.  That was the best laugh he had in 
months... how the customers reacted to that.

	The one rule he made, was to keep control of the power.

	A little while later, he developed the ability to influence matter 
as well as energy.  It took more effort, but he soon was able to move 
material things by thought alone.  He was able to manipulate almost 
anything he wished.  The speed of a car, the path of a baseball, all 
became like feathers for him to control.  He made a little easy money 
by betting on sporting events, and using his powers to influence the 
outcome.  Aiding a pitcher, tripping a horse, deflecting a football, 
these and other tricks quickly swelled his wallet.  Practice and 
mischief became routine.  And fun too!  And always, the power 
became greater.  His strength was such that not even Bill was certain 
of his upper limits anymore.  
	So late one night, Bill decided to determine what his limitations 
were.  He began to move meteors around in deep space, trying to 
guage what his range of influence was.  He brought a number of 
them into a low earth orbit, just to see if he could.  Some of the rocks 
out in space were over a mile wide.  He moved them with ease.  He 
also brought a number of new comets into a parabolic path around 
the sun.  He learned that distance meant nothing at all to his abilities, 
and that astronomers were a high-strung lot who didn't like to see 
drastic changes in space.  The powers he gained seemed without 
range, without limit.

	And always foremost on his mind, was control. 

	Friday.  It had been a difficult day, and the evening had turned 
out even worse.  Work had been exhausting, and he still had stains 
on the front of his shirt where the blonde had thrown a glass of wine 
on him.  It had turned out to be a case of mistaken identity.  She had 
thought that Bill was some creep that kept calling at 3 A.M wanting 
to smell her underwear.  She was very apologetic, which caught the 
attention of her boyfriend, who decided to beat the living shit out of 
Bill that night.  The guy jumped Bill in the parking lot as he left the 
bar.  Now Bill normally would have been able to shield himself well, 
but after the rough day and the drinks and being cussed at by total 
strangers, he wasn't up to his usual tricks.  So after the clown 
knocked Bill's breath out, Bill's mind leaped out on its own and threw 
the guy clear across the parking lot.  There was a loud thud and the 
faint clatter of broken glass as Bill clutched his stomach and 
stumbled away towards his car.  
	Bill didnšt know how he had gotten home.  That night he slept 
fitfully.  He had had too much to drink and had been through too 
much exertion not to be hungover.  He tossed and turned in his bed, 
and all the telephones within 4 miles rang.  All night he groaned, and 
cars alarms across the city went off for no reason.  It was clear that 
he would have no pleasant dreams that night.  He remembered the 
man who had attacked him earlier, and he watched as the cretin flew 
head over heels through the air, as if in slow motion.  He felt a hot 
rush of pleasure as the body smashed into a brick and glass wall, 
sending glass and blood everywhere!  Blood!  Bill could feel the 
warmth as it spilled onto the ground.  The man then leaned against 
the broken bricks holding his shattered head...
	 ...And all the feelings and emotions he had been holding back 
for so many years exploded into a white hot rage!  Where a moment 
ago he saw the man's bleeding head, he now saw Sheila's smashed 
skull!  His insides screamed with agony as he watched her once again  
slip away from him!  Then everything around him exploded like a 
sun!  There was a whirlpool of fiery light, and suddenly he was back 
on the island again, back on the very beach where her life was taken 
from her by one of the local bastards!  Back to the point where he 
swore that he would pay them all back someday.
	It was Friday!  It was payday, at last! 
	In his dream he suddenly was looking down on the downtown 
area from several hundred feet.  He saw the flashing lights of the 
cathouses reflecting off the waves of the ocean.  The red neon gave 
the water the illusion of being made of fire.  If only the sea truly 
were on fire!  Then this zit of existence, this small pile of wasted 
human life, would burn in the hell it truly deserved!  And all of the 
criminals would would be sent to their rewards!  
	Some deep and dark dimension within his mind spoke, and 
their fate was sealed...
	Instantly his mind's eye flashed upwards many miles to all the 
meteors, rocks, comets, and other heavy goodies within a reasonable 
distance.  "Perfect", he thought.  His heart raced as he pulled the 
gigantic stones down from heaven.  He pushed them one by one 
toward the island, deliberately targeting every bit of it!  He would 
bombard the entire island from space, leaving nothing untouched!  
As the rocks fell towards their destinations, they grew red, then 
white hot.  The atmospheric friction turned each of them into flaming 
fiery balls of devastation!  Richly deserved by the criminals below, 
and long overdue.
	He recalled Shiela's broken face again, and with a snarl he 
finalized the course of the first meteor towards downtown.  He 
watched as it hit the center with all of his fury!  The stone, part solid 
and part liquid by now, exploded on impact.  The blast instantly 
disintegrated the buildings around it, killing every person inside 
without warning!  The heat made every nerve in his body vibrate.  It 
felt like music playing as he watched the shock wave expand and 
envelope the area at the speed of sound.  The nearer buildings had 
their walls ripped apart and set aflame.  People unfortunate enough 
to be on that street were blown apart and brutally burnt by the 
explosion.  Many bodies were flung into the sea by the blast, trailing 
smoke from the remenents of burnt clothing as they arced into the 
ocean.  Then all too quickly the shock wave disipated.  Only a few 
seconds had passed.  It had felt wonderful!  He felt so alive, avenging 
all his dead friends so!
	And soon, those who survived the first salvo would be coming 
out of the damaged buildings.  It would take a couple of minutes, 
since they would all be in shock.  It didn't matter to him, since he 
knew that none of the buildings would survive the remainder of his 
arsenal now bearing down from above!  He had lots of rocks!  Lots 
and lots and lots of rocks!
	His mind flew up again, and began changing the courses of the 
other meteors.  He watched as they fell unerringly toward their 
targets.  His next target was the marina, since he didn't want anyone 
to try and escape.  His mind watched from the dock as it fell, fell, fell.  
The meteor hit the water and BOOM, it created a shock wave so 
powerful it stunned even Bill!  A split second later Bill refocused 
enough to see the boats tied up in dock splinter and turn to scrap 
under the unforgiving pressure wave.  A few seaman had come out 
onto the dock to find out what the explosion was on land.  They were 
blown to pieces, and their remains sped away into the ocean!  Fast 
food for the Fishies, Bill laughed horribly to himself.
	But wait: He was only getting started.  There was the movie 
theater which only played movies more than five years old.  And 
then only the movies the local bishop agreed to.  Bill sent a rock 
straight through the roof, and the show was over.  He dreamed the 
building coming apart like it was in slow motion.  First the flash, then 
the doors and windows flew off.  Then all the boards came apart 
from the frame at once, traveling away from the center of the blast 
at unbelievable speed, disintegrating as they went!  And of all the 
people who had been running into the theater for shelter a moment 
ago; well, it was a stupid place to hide.
	This continued for quite some time, Bill didn't know how long.  
He was pushing rocks down from space to hit whatever caught his 
eye, and watching for the couple of seconds as the meteor leveled his 
target.  Then back up to finallize the approach of more meteors.  He 
was keeping about 200 stones enroute at all times.  He was sparing 
no areas.  None whatsoever.  He bombed the airport with 20 stones, 
all coming down in a straight line down the runway about 3 seconds 
apart.  The tenth one hit a jetliner which was trying to escape and 
POOF the plane and passengers were gone.  A few seconds later, and 
the terminal was destroyed as well.  The terminal walls, which were 
made of glass, would rain down on a 3 mile radius.
	Not that people were going to worry about falling glass much...
	He blasted the beaches, and they melted into glass.  He bombed 
the top of the cliffs, and the cliffsides fell down onto the villages 
below.  He struck the powerstation, and suddenly the only light to be 
seen on the island was from the countless fires he had begun.  The 
island had turned the color of blood, and the reflections from the 
clouds made him think of hell itself.  He hit the oceans close to shore, 
and steam-blasted nearby buildings into oblivion.  He hit the military 
base on the northern part of the island, but the buildings didnšt 
collapse.  Hmm, he would have to do something about that.  He owed 
the service as much as he owed the island!  
	His mind saw that some of the aircrews were desperately 
trying to get their families off the island on the giant transport 
planes.  The huge aircraft were already heading down to the end of 
the runway, leaping into the air.  He didnšt care if some of the planes 
escaped, let them go.  But he would ensure that none of the others 
made it.  He sent a medium sized stone down into the middle of the 
runway, and its blast ripped a massive hole into the concrete just a 
football field distance in front of another aircraft.  A bomber this 
time, with only a crew of 8.  Its windshield and radome were 
destroyed by the shock wave, and probably the pilots were killed 
immediately.  But the inertia of the plane kept it moving forward.  It 
went into the hole, ripping out the landing gear as it did so.  In an 
instant it folded over like wet paper on the concrete, and exploded.  
	And all this time, the meteors still fell on the rest of the island, 
but now Billšs thoughts were elsewhere.  They continued without 
guidance, and incinerated whatever was under them.  Jungles, farms, 
schools, ocean, churchs.  And where they struck, nothing was left 
intact.  He could see that numerous large craters now covered the 
island.  The fiery streaks coming down in the sky looked like tinsel.  
On the white sandy beachs of the south, he saw that many of the 
fancy homes built on the shore had been badly damaged.  Gigantic 
fires now covered downtown.  The villages were in rubble, but here 
in the north, on the base, one fire burned where the bomber 
crashed... just one fire.
	Only one fire?  How could that be possible?  He pummeled the 
base with 50 meteors, some of them weighing a ton!  How could the 
base not be in rubble?  His mind's eye again moved in obedience to 
his will, instantly going over the base.  He saw the craters where the 
stones hit, and glass everywhere.  But the buildings themselves still 
stood.  It only took a moment to figure out why.  All of the 
construction on the base had been designed to withstand a nuclear 
attack.  After all, it was a nuclear bomber base, and a prime target 
for any enemy.  Bill stopped for a couple of seconds, thinking about 
the complication the hardened base presented.
	A sudden surge of anger coursed through his mind as he 
remembered some of the incidents on that base.  His refusal to 
reinlist got him dumped into all the rotten details on the flightline...  
He remembered the smell of shit from the aircraft toilets he had 
been made to clean out, and how the smell stuck to his clothes.  
Another surge of rage then flowed from him.  He kicked the poopcan 
as hard as he could in his dream-state... And the stone column which 
held up the northern end of the island broke in half, with a 200 feet 
section being knocked out!  The island shook as it had never shook 
before!  Trees fell out of the ground.  Houses sank into the earth.  The 
entire runway rolled over, burying all the aircraft that sat on the 
tarmac.  The very ground turned to liquid.  And it didn't end until 
the northern end of the island broke free and fell the 200 feet to 
become stuck on the remaining outcropping of stone from the sea-
floor.
	And suddenly, Bill was tired.  He was drunk, his anger was 
spent, and he was beggining to grow weary of the nightmare.  He 
slowly backed away from the island, watching the red glow from 
countless fires fade into the distance.  And then all went black, and 
Bill was asleep.

	The next day he felt so alive.  He felt as if he had won the 
marathon, or perhaps the lottery.  Every sinew in his body felt like 
he had accomplished something great.  All that from just one night's 
sleep, Bill thought.  And a sleep filled with nightmares at that.  Bill 
figured that he should have been hungover, but he wasn't.  He 
smiled, stretched, and began his morning routine.  First the coffee, 
then the clothes.  Bill hummed along to the song playing on the clock 
radio as he dressed.  Then breakfast as he watched the morning 
news on TV.
	He threwup on his toast with the first picture.
	On the news, Bill saw the terrible destruction of the island.  It 
sent a shock straight through him.  The dream, or what he had 
presumed to be a dream, had been quite real.  The destruction was 
real.  The meteor craters were real.  And the sudden collapse of the 
northern end of the island was also real.  And all of it was in graphic 
detail on his television.  The news reports were coming in about 
death tolls and damage estimates and the like.  Bill could feel the 
blood drain from his face.
	He left his city that morning.  He packed just enough to survive.  
Everything else he abandoned: his job, his apartment, his furniture, 
his new friends, everything.  Bill caught the next flight to the west 
coast, and tried to connect from there to the island.  All flights to the 
island were cancelled, so Bill caught an airplane to the nearest 
neighboring island.  The airport on the little atoll was buzzing with 
activity.  But Bill saw no refugees, and there was no talk of rescuing 
people from the island.  Bill did hear gossip of Chemical and 
Biological weapons that were detonated that night, and the locals 
were evacuating their own island since the wind would soon carry 
the killer diseases to their own island.  
	There were no relief flights heading to or returning from the 
dead island.  All the boats had fled as well.  Bill wept to himself as he 
walked the mile from the airport with its mass of frightened people, 
down to the edge of the ocean.  
	Bill dove into the water, and began to swim to his old island, 
the recent victim of his temper.  Shortly after he began, Bill thought 
of the shape of some dolphins he had seen in the ocean, and his 
shape changed into that of a dolphin.  It took but a few moments to 
figure out how to swim as he watched the other dolphins ahead of 
him and mimicked their movements.  Soon Bill had the technique 
worked out, and he swam the 400 miles to the scene of the crime.
	When Bill arrived, the island was completely silent.  He shifted 
his shape back into human form, and began to wander around.  No-
one was left alive, at all.  The place certainly was a shambles.  There 
was nothing left that could support human life.  The farms, stores, 
warehouses, everything was gone.  The thick jungles weren't even 
the same anymore.  Once the island was solid green, interupted only 
by the occasional road or home.  Now it was black, interupted by 
unidentifiable things that were blacker still.  The once bright hills 
which rose from the edge of the island, now looked like piles of coal.
	Bill changed shape once again, taking on the shape of a unicorn.  
And he began searching...  surely not everyone was killed.  Maybe 
the rumors of nerve agents and germ gasses were just rumors after 
all.  Maybe some had survived somewhere.  He began his quest...
	But Bill found no-one, in a solid year of searching.  Occasionally 
some airplanes would fly by, and Bill could just make out the 
cameras in the windows as they went past.  Bill wondered what the 
media would do with photos of a unicorn walking this unholy place.  
But they never landed.  
	And they never would either.  Nobody else would ever set foot 
on this island again, not by sea or air.  They feared the diseases that 
were free on the island.  Because on his first pass through the base 
on the northern end, he found the remains of just those kinds of 
weapons.  Blown apart in their bunkers by meteor strikes, Bill 
counted about 30 kinds of germ-warfare munitions.  He had opened 
up a real Pandora's Box of destruction with his dream.  It was no 
wonder that no-one was left, and that no-one would ever return.  Bill 
imagined that anyone else coming back here would have to be 
suicidal; "come on back, come in, come in, choose how you want to 
die, would you like leprosy or nerve-poison, we have it all here."  Bill 
had no idea why he was still alive.  The germs set loose that night 
would never lose their potency, making this island forever forbidden 
to men.
	It also made the island a prison for Bill, again.  His new shape 
kept Bill safe from the diseases now loose on the island.  But since he 
now carried those germs within him, anywhere Bill went, people 
would die.  Bill could not allow that to happen.  He had destroyed an 
entire civilization.  A tiny civilization, but dead nonetheless.  He 
therefore accepted that he would never again leave the island, and 
would do whatever was in his power to help restore the island and 
make it habitable again.  As he saw it, he created this hell-on-earth, 
he should live in it.  He also swore that he would try to make amends 
to the rest of the world, when possible.  He would do things like 
reducing the intensity of Earthquakes and storms, changing the 
course of Hurricanes, stopping floods.  He would try to compensate 
humanity for the rest of his life.  
	And he hoped that the souls of the dead would forgive him one 
day...