them burn 'til they're nothing but ashes.

"What are you gonna do with the booths in town?" I ask.

He goes down to the basement and comes up with a hatchet. "Come on," he says grimly. "I'll show you what I'm going to do with them!"

The first two we chop in small pieces until the walk is covered with cogs and wheels and smashed tubes and dials. We stop at the third one. That was the fanciest one of all, with the leather upholstery inside and the big red neon sign on top that you could read halfway across town.

Joe stares at it for a long minute, then makes up his mind. He fishes around in his pocket for a coin.

"What do you think you're going to do?" I asks, alarmed.

"I'm going to look for Marge," he says. "I need a vacation anyways."

"How you gonna find her, Joe?" I asks. "You don't even know what kind of a world to look for!"

"Yes, I do," Joe says wistfully. "It'll be the kind of world where Marge always wanted to spend a vacation. Some place like up in Massachusetts during the summer. White beaches, little wooden houses, fishing boats and lobster pots.... She's described it to me so often I could picture it down to the last pebble on the beach."

He gets into the booth.

"Think you'll ever be back, Joe?" I asks.

He drops a quarter in the coin slot and a picture builds up on the screen of a beach with a little town in the distance.

"Sure," Joe says confidentially. "We'll be back." And then there's a flash of blue light and Joe's gone, too.

I hung around for a couple of days afterward but Joe and Marge never came back. I think he found her all right but Marge didn't want anything to do with the old world so they just stayed there.

And that's about all there is, son. Except I've often wondered what happened when strangers drove through and found Fremont a ghost town....

Now, lookahere, son, it's no cause for you to go calling me a liar just because you never heard of Stellar Electric and Fremont ain't listed on any map you've got. You didn't expect me to stay behind when everybody else had left, did you? I always had a hankerin' for a different type of world, too.

A world where a body didn't have to work so blamed hard and total strangers would be willin' to listen to my stories and buy me a beer....

... THE END