"No cab drivers?"
"Ain't no need for 'em any more," I says. "Ain't no people in town to use cabs. Town's empty. Everybody's gone."
He looks kinda green and says: "What do you mean, everybody's gone?"
I shrugs and starts walking back to town. "Everybody took off," I says. "Your Paradise booths were real popular."
He still looks blank so I give it to him straight. I had first thought about it when Wally Claus disappeared. It occurs to me then that everybody has times when they wish they could crawl out from under and quietly disappear. You see, Joe had assumed that some people were adjusted to society and some weren't. Well, actually nobody is, it's just a difference of degree.
Once Wally took off, it sorta burst the dam. More and more people sneaked into the booths, dropped in a quarter, and whisht—they were a billion miles away.
It was lonely and dark in town. No street lamps, of course. There was nobody down at the power plant to work the switches. And there weren't any lights in the houses 'cause there wasn't anybody around.
"I can't imagine everybody going," Joe says, biting his lip. "What about all the kids?"
"I kinda think they were among the first," I says. I waves at the starry sky. "There's probably a planet up there some place where there's nothing but hot rods and football stadiums. And I suppose there's one section of the universe fenced off for all the Junior Spacemen that'll be roaming around it."
Anybody you could think of mighta had a reason for leaving, I told him. The boys at Schultz's probably took off for a world where Marilyn Monroe has a thousand twin sisters; and Johnny Douglas, the ace at Kelly's Bowling Alley, is probably located on a world where it's impossible to bowl anything but a three hundred game.