Part 2

My shout hung in the still air of the control room as I knocked him away from the panel.

"Get to your quarters!" I cracked.

He didn't say a thing, but his big shoulders hunched angrily and he moved across the deck toward me, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. His eyes were wild with rage and avarice.

"You'll hang for mutiny, Spinelli!" I said.

* * * * *

He spat out a foul name and leaped for me. I side-stepped his charge and brought my joined fists down hard on the back of his neck. He stumbled against the bulkhead and his eyes were glazed. He charged again, roaring. I stepped aside and smashed him in the mouth with my right fist, then crossing with an open-handed left to the throat. He staggered, spun and came for me again. I sank a hard left into his stomach and nailed him on the point of the jaw with a right from my shoe-tops. He straightened up and sprawled heavily to the deck, still trying to get at me. I aimed a hard kick at his temple and let it go. My metal shod boot caught him squarely and he rolled over on his face and lay still.

Breathing heavily, I rolled him back face up. His eyes were open, glassy with an implacable hate. I knelt at his side and listened for his breathing. There was none. I knew then that I had killed him. I felt sick inside, and dizzy.

I wasn't myself as I turned away from Spinelli's body there on the steel deck. Some of the greed died out of me, and my exertions had increased my sense of fatigue to an almost numbing weariness. My arms ached terribly and my hands felt as though they had been sucked dry of their substance. Like a man in a nightmare, I held them up before my face and looked at them. They were wrinkled and grey, with the veins standing out a sickly purple. And I could see that my arms were taking on that same aged look.

I was suddenly fully aware of my fear. Nothing fought against the flood of terror that welled through me. I was terrified of that yellow gold in my cabin, and of that ship of devil's metal out there in space that held my shipmates. There was something unnatural about that contra-terrene thing ... something obscene.

I located the hulk in the radar finder and swung the Maid after it, piling on acceleration until my vision flickered. We caught her, the Maid and I. But we couldn't stop her short of using the rifle on her, and I couldn't bring myself to add to my depravity by killing the rest of my men. It would have been better if I had!

I laid the Maid alongside the thousand foot hull of the derelict and set the controls on automatic. It was dangerous, but I was beyond caring. Then I was struggling to get myself into a pressure suit with my wrinkled, failing hands.... Then I was outside, headed for that dark hole.

I sank down into the stillness of her interior, my helmet light casting long, fey shadows across the littered decks. Decks that had a yellowish cast ... decks that no longer danced with tiny questing force-whorls....

As I approached the airlock of the compartment set aside as living quarters for the prize crew, the saffron of the walls deepened. Crazy little thoughts began spinning around in my brain. Words out of the distant past loomed up with a new and suddenly terrifying perspective ... alchemy ... transmutation ... energy. I'm a spaceman, not a scientist. But in those moments I think I was discovering what had happened to my crew and why the walls were turning into yellow metal.

The lock was closed, but I swung it open and let the pressure in the chamber rise. I couldn't wait for it to reach fourteen pounds ... at eleven, I swung the inner door and stumbled eagerly through. The brilliant light, reflected from gleaming walls blinded me for a moment.

And then I saw them! They huddled, almost naked in a corner, skeletal things with skull-like faces that leered at me with the vacuous obscenity of old age. Even their voices were raw and cracked with the rusty decay of years. They babbled stupidly, caressing the walls with claw-like hands. They were old, old!

I understood then. I knew what my wrinkled aged hands meant. That devil-metal from beyond the stars had drawn the energy it needed from ... _us_!

My laughter was a crazy shriek inside my helmet. I looked wildly at the gleaming walls that had sucked the youth and strength from these men. The walls were stable, at rest. They were purest gold ... gold ... gold!

I ran from that place still screaming with the horror of it. My hands burned like fire! Age was in them, creeping like molten lead through my veins, ghastly and sure....

I reached the Maid and threw every scrap of that alien metal into space as I streaked madly away from that golden terror in the sky and its load of ancient evil....

* * * * *

On Callisto I was relieved of my command. The Admiralty Court acquitted me of the charges of negligence, but the Foundation refused me another ship. It was my ... illness. It spread from my hands, as you can see. Slowly, very slowly. So what remains for me? A hospital cot and a spaceman's pension. Those tons of gold in the sky are cursed, like most great treasures. Somewhere, out in the deeps between the stars, the dust of my crew guards that golden derelict. It belongs to them now ... all of it.

But the price we pay for treasure is this. Look at me. I look eighty! I'm thirty two. And the bitterest part of the story is that people laugh at me when I tell what happened. They laugh and call me my nickname. Have you heard it?

It's ... Captain Midas.