Gannett groaned his aching body out of bed and padded heavily to the window. He put his big hands on the sill and looked out. Purple snow was falling on a quiet world. The flakes came down softly, big wet, colored things like fluffy bits of cotton candy escaping from a circus in the sky. There was his jeep down on the street where he had left it. He could recognize it, for it was the only jeep on the block.
"Then it wasn't no lousy dream," he said miserably.
He went back to the bed and sat down on the edge of it. He recalled the headlines in the paper.
"Them lousy Reds," he whispered. "They done this, sure as hell."
That made him think a little. Everybody was dead, even the redhead in the Golden Bubble who couldn't lose.
"What the hell am I doin' alive, then?" he asked himself.
There was no answer to that. He thought of his mine, The Lousy Disappointment, and wondered if, living most of the time below the surface as he did, he had been protected from some sort of purple gas or something that seemed to have killed off everybody else. It could be. Some very light gas, maybe, that wouldn't seep below the surface.
"Aw, for cripe sakes!" he grunted disgustedly.
He dressed and left the room. He went downstairs. There was the lobby, all soft, quiet carpeting and soft, quiet furniture and soft, quiet drapes. A sheet of paper on a writing desk said Grand Pachappa. He was in a hotel, then. He must have wandered into it after he left the Golden Bubble.
He carefully avoided looking at two well-dressed women who sat in lobby chairs, staring off into nothing, but he felt their presence chillingly. He shivered. He made his way outside, the purple snow coming down and giving his cheeks wet, cold caresses. He angrily brushed them off, but they came down anyway. Above the snow, the sky was a sodden mass of purplish gray.