But even that plan was doomed to frustration. I mentioned it to Torrence. "We should head for Earth," he said dogmatically. "I have had enough of this."
It was then, before we had gone far toward the Senza country, that I noticed the rocket streams were acting queerly. A seeming lack of power.... Torrence had gone down into the hull; he came back presently to the turret.
"The Pelletier rotators are slowing," I said. "What's the matter?"
He shook his head. "I noticed it," he said. "Haven't found out yet. You want to come and look?"
I locked the controls, left Ama and went down into the hull with Torrence. In the dim mechanism cubby, as I bent over the Pelletier mechanisms, suddenly Torrence leaped on me! It came as quickly, unexpectedly as that. The culmination of his brooding, murderous, cowardly plans. His heavy face was contorted, his eyes blazing. In his hand he held a sliver of metal arrow. It was bent, doubled over, so that all this time he had been able to keep it hidden in his clothes. The arrow he had taken from Roberts' body, as it lay there near the bow of the wrecked spaceship! The little light in the mechanism cubby gleamed on it now; glistened on the green and red spots of the sleek, sand-colored metal. Allurite! The precious substance—not an alloy, not a low-grade allurium ore, but allurite in its pure state! On Earth this single bent little arrow could be worth a fortune!
And the frenzied Torrence was gloating: "See it, you damn fool—your allurite—right under your nose all the time! And now it's mine—" In that second he would have plunged the needle-sharp arrow-point like a stilletto into my heart. But his own frenzied, murderous hysteria defeated him. My fist struck his wrist, knocked his stab-thrust away, with the arrow clattering to the floor. And then I had him by the throat, strangling him until he yielded and I tied him up....
As you who read this, of course, already know from the news reports, I dropped Ama near the edge of the Senza village. I recall now how she stood in the Vulcan night, in the torchlight with the excited crowd of her people behind her; the last I saw of Vulcan was the little figure of her waving at me as I rose into the leaden sky and headed back for Earth.... Maybe—just maybe—I'll return someday to that land where Jan gave his life that his friends might live.