Under the low-dropping sun, he and his sled shot into open country beyond the range.
His right arm felt dead from shoulder to fingertip. His head roared and drummed with the racing of his blood. His face had tired spots in it, where muscles he had never used before had locked into an agonized grimace.
On he sped, straight west, gasping and gurgling and mumbling in crazy triumph.
An hour, an anticlimactic hour wherein the sled almost steered itself over the smoothest of plain, and up ahead he spied the black outline of Base Camp.
It was a sprawling, low structure, prefabricated metal and plastic and insulation, black outside to gather what heat might come from outer space. It held aloof on the dull frozen plain from the irregular stain where the expedition ship had braked off with one set of rockets and had soared away with another set. Larger, more familiar, grew Base Camp with each second of approach. Shakily Wofforth cut his engine, slowed from high speed to medium, to a hundred miles an hour, to sixty, to fifty. He made a final circle around Base Camp, and let it coast in with the engine off, to within twenty yards of the main lock panel.
He got up, on legs that shook inside his boots. He felt his heart still racing, his head still ringing. He sighed once, and walked close, his gauntlet fumbling at the release button on the lock panel.
But the button did not respond.
“Jammed,” he said. “No—locked.”
He couldn’t get in. He had reached Base Camp, but he could not get in. They hadn’t counted on his return. They’d gone off and left Base Camp locked up.
He sagged against the lock panel, and cursed once, with an utter and furious resignation.
He felt himself slipping. He was going to faint. His legs would not hold him up. He was slipping forward—seemed to be sinking into the massive and unyielding outer surface of Base Camp. It was a dream. Or it was death.
He did not lose all hold on his awareness. He had a sense of lying at full length, and blinding light flashes that made his eyelids jump. And a tug somewhere, as though his helmet was coming off. He would have put out a hand to see, but his left arm was broken, and his right arm limp from weariness.
“You’re back,” said a voice he knew, a voice strained with wonder. “You managed. I knew you would.”
“Now,” said Wofforth, “I know it’s a dream. We dream after we die.”
A hand was cupped behind his neck, lifting him to a sitting position. He felt warm fluid at his lips. “It’s no dream,” said the voice beseechingly. “Look at me.”
“I don’t dare. The dream will go away.”
But he opened his eyes and looked at her hair like Plutonian night, her eyes like bright stars. “Lya,” he said. “I’m going to call you Lya.”
“Please call me Lya.”
“I’d be bound to dream about you. I’ve dreamed about you so much. … Owww!”
He got his right hand up to cherish his tingling cheek.
“So you felt that,” she said. “Now you know you’re awake. Or must I slap you again?”
“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.
“Pluto is colder than anybody even guessed—outside. But inside are the internal fires—like all the solid planets. We made our tests and we can tap them. I kept the instruments for that. It means we’ll have power, and can make our synthetic foods and so on for as long as we need them. You and I are the inhabitants here—”
He stumbled to a chair and sat. “Twenty years—” he said.
Her arm was still around him. Her hair brushed his cheek. “It won’t be long. We have so much to say to each other.”
Colophon
Short Fiction
was compiled from short stories and novellas written and published between 1932 and 1958 by
Manly Wade Wellman.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Galen Hazelwood,
and is based on transcriptions produced between 2007 and 2024 by
Gary Weeks, Mary Meehan, Graeme Mackreth, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
The Variety Theatre in Paris,
a painting completed in 1912 by
Magnus Enkell.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
January 30, 2025, 6:47 p.m.
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Uncopyright
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