"I'm sorry, Madame."
"You called me Lya. Can you stand up? I'll help you."
She helped him. He stood up, there in the admission chamber of Base Camp. Lya Stromminger was smiling, and she was crying, too.
"You didn't go away," he said. "You're still here." The weight of his odyssey, half around Pluto, was beginning to stagger him.
"No, I stayed. I knew you'd come back. I knew Pluto couldn't kill you or keep you from coming back."
He drank more from the cup she held to his lips.
"We'll wait together for them to come with the next expedition," she promised him.
"Twenty years? Supplies—"
"There'll be plenty. Don't you know about Pluto? Didn't those craters, those old volcanoes, tell you?"
Thinking of how he had crossed the crater, Wofforth shuddered.