"The out of the way places," Rod Serling called them, those tiny hamlets and villages that dot the landscape of the endless fields of flyover country, their subsistence and survival a matter of consequence only to their own inhabitants. Ashley, Kansas, was one of those places, forgotten, inconsequential, not even a speck on the map, its very existence a question mark in the first place, but a gateway to the boundless possibilities of a million universes.<