Slowly, Martin walked out of the building and slid into the car. Sandy welcomed him with a joy-filled barking and tail-wagging and tried to lick his face, and the pup attempted to waddle across his legs.
"No, Sandy, don't." He stared unseeingly through the windshield. "Everybody's gone, Sandy, everybody on Earth, except me." His eyes widened slightly. "Course, there _might_ be somebody else, somewhere. The gas never got to us in the cave. Maybe somebody else escaped, somehow."
He shook his head. "Nope, no use hoping for that. Odds'd be a thousand to one 'gainst my finding 'em. No, we just got to make up our minds that we're the last ones alive."
_The last ones alive._ The thought was like flame in his mind. The numbness was gone now, as coldness thaws from a warmed body, but there came to him a second thought, a horrible, fear-born thought which he dared not say aloud, even to Sandy.
_A man can't live alone, without hearing another human voice, without seeing another human form. A man isn't made that way. You've got two choices now, just two: Suicide or madness. Which will it be? Suicide or madness, suicide or madness...._
He sat for a long, long time, his mind a jumble of indecision. Then at last he thought, _I don't want to go mad, the other way is best. We'll make it easy. Carbon monoxide would be the easiest way._
But suddenly there was a churning and a twisting in his stomach, as though it were being squeezed by a giant hand.
"Golly, Sandy, we forgot to eat. And we haven't eaten for two days." And to himself he said, _This'll be our last meal, the last we'll ever have._
He took the pup in his arms and Sandy followed. He spied a huge sign not far away--_Cafe Royale_. It was a magnificent restaurant, the carpeted, canopied entrance reminding him of the front of a sultan's palace. Three days ago--if he'd been foolish enough to come to the City then--he'd have rushed past it with his hand protecting his pocketbook, hardly daring to look within lest the stiff-shirted, high-chinned waiters and patrons think him a country bumpkin.
He ambled through the vast dining hall with its multitude of white-clothed tables, its potted palms, its modernistic, chromium bar. The high walls were decorated with soft-hued, multi-colored murals depicting the rise of Western Civilization--first, the pioneers, the cowboys, then a factory scene and a war scene, and finally a group of spacemen entering a moon-bound rocket.