Slowly I raised my head and looked up at him.
"Please," I said. "I know that. I'm glad we came here. If we had our lives to live over, we'd come again. We'd go through all the hardships of those first few years, and enjoy them just as much. We'd be just as thrilled over proving that it's possible to farm a world like this, where it's always freezing and the air is thin and nothing will grow outside the greenhouses. You don't need to tell me what we've done, or what we've gotten out of it. We know. We've had a wonderful life here."
"But you still want to go back?"
"Yes," I said. "We still want to go back. We're tired of living in the past, with our friends dead and nothing to do except remember."
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he said slowly, "You realize, don't you, that if you went back to Earth you'd have to stay there? You couldn't return to Mars...."
"I realize that," I said. "That's what we want. We want to die at home. On Earth."
or a long, long moment his eyes never left mine. Then, slowly, he sat down at his desk and reached for a pen.
"All right, Mr. Farwell," he said. "I'll give you a visa."