Captain Midas
Date: 2020-11-23T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science fiction; Short stories; Space ships -- Fiction; Gold -- Fiction

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Title: Captain Midas

Author: Alfred Coppel

Illustrator: Al McWilliams

Release date: November 23, 2020 [eBook #63867]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAPTAIN MIDAS ***

CAPTAIN MIDAS

By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.

The captain of the Martian Maid stared avidly at
the torn derelict floating against the velvet void.
Here was treasure beyond his wildest dreams! How
could he know his dreams should have been nightmares?

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Fall 1949.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Gold! A magic word, even today, isn't it? Lust and gold ... they go hand in hand. Like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And, of course, there's another word needed to make up the trilogy. You don't get any thing for nothing. So add this: Cost. Or you might call it pain, sorrow, agony. Call it what you like. It's what you pay for great treasure....

These things were true when fabled Jason sailed the Argo beyond Colchis seeking the Fleece. They were true when men sailed the southern oceans in wooden ships. And the conquest of space hasn't changed us a bit. We're still a greedy lot....

I'm a queer one to be saying these things, but then, who has more right? Look at me. My hair is gray and my face ... my face is a mask. The flesh hangs on my bones like a yellow cloth on a rickety frame. I am old, old. And I wait here on my hospital cot—wait for the weight of years I never lived to drag me under and let me forget the awful things my eyes have seen.

I'm poor, too, or else I wouldn't be here in this place of dying for old spacemen. I haven't a dime except for the pittance the Holcomb Foundation calls a spaceman's pension. Yet I had millions in my hands. Treasure beyond your wildest dreams! Cursed treasure....

You smile. You are thinking that I'm just an old man, beached earthside, spinning tall tales to impress the youngsters. Maybe, thinking about the kind of spacemen my generation produced, you have the idea that if ever we'd so much as laid a hand on anything of value out in space we'd not let go until Hell froze over! Well, you're right about that. We didn't seek the spaceways for the advancement of civilization or any of that Foundation bushwah, you can be certain of that. We did it for us ... for Number One. That's the kind of men we were, and we were proud of it. We hung onto what we found because the risks were high and we were entitled to keep what we could out there. But there are strange things in the sky. Things that don't respond to all of our neat little Laws and Theories. There are things that are no part of the world of men, thick with danger—and horror.

If you doubt that—and I can see you do—just look at me. I suppose you've never heard of the Martian Maid, and so you don't know the story of what happened to her crew or her skipper. I can give you this much of an answer. I was her skipper. And her crew? They ride high in the sky ... dust by this time. And all because they were men, and men are greedy and hasty and full of an unreasoning, unthinking love for gold. They ride a golden ship that they paid for with all the years of their lives. It's all theirs now. Bought and paid for.

It wasn't too long ago that I lifted the Maid off Solis Lacus on that last flight. Not many of you will remember her class of ship, so many advances have been made in the last few years. The Maid was two hundred feet from tip to tail, and as sleek a spacer as ever came out of the Foundation Yards. Chemical fueled, she was nothing at all like the spherical hyperdrives we see today. She was armed, too. The Foundation still thought of space as a possible stamping ground for alien creatures though no evidence of any extra-terrestrial life had ever been found ... then.

My crew was a rough bunch, like all those early crews. I remember them so well. Lean, hungry men with hell in their eyes and a great lust for high pay and hard living. Spinelli, Shelley, Cohn, Marvin, Zaleski. There wasn't a man on board who wouldn't have traded his immortal soul for a few solar dollars, and I don't claim that I was any different. That's the kind of men that opened up the spaceways, too. Don't believe all this talk about the noble pioneering spirit of man. That's tripe. There never has been such a thing as a noble pioneer. Not in space or anywhere else. It is the malcontent and the adventuring mercenary that pushes the frontier outward.

I didn't know, that night as I stood in the valve of the Maid, watching the loading cranes pull away, that I was starting out on my last flight. I don't think any of the others could have guessed, either. It was the sort of night that you only see on Mars. The sort of night that makes a spaceman wonder why in hell he wants to leave the relative security of the Earth-Mars-Venus Triangle to go jetting across the belt into deep space and the drab desolation of the outer System.

I stood there, watching the lights of Canalopolis in the distance. For just a moment I was ... well, touched. It looked beautiful and unreal under the racing moons. The lights of the gin mills and houses made a sparkling filigree pattern on the dark waters of the ancient canal, and the moons cast their shifting shadows across the silted banks. I was too far away to see the space-fevered bums and smell the shanties, and for a little while I felt the wonder of standing on the soil of a world that man had made his own with his rapacity and his sheer guts and gimme.

I thought of our half empty cargo hold and the sweet payload we would pick up on Callisto. And I counted the extra cash my packets of snow would bring from those lonely men up there on the barren moonlets of the outer Systems. There were plenty of cargoes carried on the Maid that the Holcomb Foundation snoopers never heard about, you can be sure of that.

In those days the asteroid belt was the primary danger and menace to astrogation. For a long while it held men back from deep space, but as fuels improved a few ships were sent out over the top. A few million miles up out of the ecliptic plane brings you to a region of space that's pretty thinly strewn with asteroids, and that's the way we used to make the flight between the outer systems and the EMV Triangle. It took a long while for hyperdrives to be developed and of course atomics never panned out because of the weight problem.

So that's the orbit the Maid took on that last trip of mine. High and clear into the supra-solar void. And out there in that primeval blackness is where we found the derelict.

I didn't realize it was a derelict when Spinelli first reported it from the forward scope position. I assumed it was a Foundation ship. The Holcomb Foundation was founded for the purpose of developing spaceflight, and as the years went by it took on the whole responsibility for the building and dispatching of space ships. Never in history had there been any real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, and when the EMV Triangle proved barren, we all just assumed that the Universe was man's own particular oyster. That kind of unreasoning arrogance is as hard to explain as it is to correct.

There were plenty of ships being lost in space, and immediately that Spinelli's report from up forward got noised about the Maid every one of us started mentally counting up his share of the salvage money. All this before we were within ten thousand miles of the hulk!

All spaceships look pretty much alike, but as I sat at the telescope I saw that there was something different about this one. At such a distance I couldn't get too much detail in our small three inch glass, but I could see that the hulk was big—bigger than any ship I'd ever seen before. I had the radar fixed on her and then I retired with my slide rule to Control. It wasn't long before I discovered that the derelict ship was on a near collision course, but there was something about its orbit that was strange. I called Cohn, the Metering Officer, and showed him my figures.

"Mister Cohn," I said, chart in hand, "do these figures look right to you?"

Cohn's dark eyes lit up as they always did when he worked with figures. It didn't take him long to check me. "The math is quite correct, Captain," he said. I could see that he hadn't missed the inference of those figures on the chart.

"Assemble the ship's company, Mister Cohn," I ordered.

The assembly horn sounded throughout the Maid and I could feel the tug of the automatics taking over as the crew left their stations. Soon they were assembled in Control.

"You have all heard about Mister Spinelli's find," I said, "I have computed the orbit and inspected the object through the glass. It seems to be a spacer ... either abandoned or in distress...." Reaching into the book rack above my desk I took down a copy of the Foundation's Space Regulations and opened it to the section concerning salvage.

"Sections XVIII, Paragraph 8 of the Code Regulating Interplanetary Astrogation and Commerce," I read, "Any vessel or part of vessel found in an abandoned or totally disabled condition in any region of space not subject to the sovereignty of any planet of the Earth-Venus-Mars Triangle shall be considered to be the property of the crew of the vessel locating said abandoned or disabled vessel except in such cases as the ownership of said abandoned or disabled vessel may be readily ascertained...." I looked up and closed the book. "Simply stated, that means that if that thing ahead of us is a derelict we are entitled to claim it as salvage."

"Unless it already belongs to someone?" asked Spinelli.

"That's correct Mister Spinelli, but I don't think there is much danger of that," I replied quietly. "My figures show that hulk out there came in from the direction of Coma Berenices...."

There was a long silence before Zaleski shifted his two hundred pounds uneasily and gave a form to the muted fear inside me. "You think ... you think it came from the stars, Captain?"

"Maybe even from beyond the stars," Cohn said in a low voice.

Looking at that circle of faces I saw the beginnings of greed. The first impact of the Metering Officer's words wore off quickly and soon every man of my crew was thinking that anything from the stars would be worth money ... lots of money.

Spinelli said, "Do we look her over, Captain?"

They all looked at me, waiting for my answer. I knew it would be worth plenty, and money hunger was like a fever inside me.

"Certainly we look it over, Mister Spinelli," I said sharply. "Certainly!"

The first thing about the derelict that struck us as we drew near was her size. No ship ever built in the Foundation Yards had ever attained such gargantuan proportions. She must have stretched a full thousand feet from bow to stern, a sleek torpedo shape of somehow unspeakable alienness. Against the backdrop of the Milky Way, she gleamed fitfully in the light of the faraway sun, the metal of her flanks grained with something like tiny, glittering whorls. It was as though the stuff were somehow unstable ... seeking balance ... maybe even alive in some strange and alien way.

It was readily apparent to all of us that she had never been built for inter-planetary flight. She was a starship. Origin unknown. An aura of mystery surrounded her like a shroud, protecting the world that gave her birth mutely but effectively. The distance she must have come was unthinkable. And the time it had taken...? Aeons. Millennia. For she was drifting, dead in space, slowly spinning end over end as she swung about Sol in a hyperbolic orbit that would soon take her out and away again into the inter-stellar deeps.

Something had wounded her ... perhaps ten million years ago ... perhaps yesterday. She was gashed deeply from stem to stern with a jagged rip that bared her mangled innards. A wandering asteroid? A meteor? We would never know. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of things beyond the ken of men as I looked at her through the port. I would never know what killed her, or where she was going, or whence she came. Yet she was mine. It made me feel like an upstart. And it made me afraid ... but of what?

We should have reported her to the nearest EMV base, but that would have meant that we'd lose her. Scientists would be sent out. Men better equipped than we to investigate the first extrasolar artifact found by men. But I didn't report her. She was ours. She was money in the bank. Let the scientists take over after we'd put a prize crew aboard and brought her into Callisto for salvage.... That's the way I had things figured.

The Maid hove to about a hundred yards from her and hung there, dwarfed by the mighty glistening ship. I called for volunteers and we prepared a boarding party. I was thinking that her drives alone would be worth millions. Cohn took charge and he and three of the men suited up and crossed to her.

In an hour they were back, disappointment largely written on their faces.

"There's nothing left of her, Captain," Cohn reported, "Whatever hit her tore up the innards so badly we couldn't even find the drives. She's a mess inside. Nothing left but the hull and a few storage compartments that are still unbroken."

She was never built to carry humanoids he told us, and there was nothing that could give us a hint of where she had come from. The hull alone was left.

He dropped two chunks of metal on my desk. "I brought back some samples of her pressure hull," he said, "The whole thing is made of this stuff...."

"We'll still take her in," I said, hiding my disappointment. "The carcass will be worth money in Callisto. Have Mister Marvin and Zaleski assemble a spare pulse-jet. We'll jury-rig her and bring her down under her own power. You take charge of provisioning her. Check those compartments you found and install oxy-generators aboard. When it's done report to me in my quarters."

I picked up the two samples of gleaming metal and called for a metallurgical testing kit. "I'm going to try and find out if this stuff is worth anything...."

The metal was heavy—too heavy, it seemed to me, for spaceship construction. But then, who was to say what conditions existed on that distant world where this metal was made?

Under the bright fluorescent over my work-table, the chunks of metal torn from a random bulkhead of the starship gleamed like pale silver; those strange little whorls that I had noticed on the outer hull were there too, like tiny magnetic lines of force, making the surface of the metal seem to dance. I held the stuff in my bare hand. It had a yellowish tinge, and it was heavier....

Even as I watched, the metal grew yellower, and the hand that held it grew bone weary, little tongues of fatigue licking up my forearm. Suddenly terrified, I dropped the chunk as though it were white hot. It struck the table with a dull thud and lay there, a rich yellow lump of metallic lustre.

For a long while I just sat and stared. Then I began testing, trying all the while to quiet the trembling of my hands. I weighed it on a balance. I tested it with acids. It had changed unquestionably. It was no longer the same as when I had carried it into my quarters. The whorls of force were gone. It was no longer alive with a questing vibrancy ... it was inert, stable. From somewhere, somehow, it had drawn the energy necessary for transmutation. The unknown metal—the stuff of which that whole mammoth spaceship from the stars was built—was now....

Gold!

I scarcely dared believe it, but there it was staring at me from my table-top. Gold!

I searched my mind for an explanation. Contra-terrene matter, perhaps, from some distant island universe where matter reacted differently ... drawing energy from somewhere, the energy it needed to find stability in its new environment. Stability as a terrene element—wonderfully, miraculously gold!

And outside, in the void beyond the Maid's ports there were tons of this metal that could be turned into treasure. My laughter must have been a wild sound in those moments of discovery....

A slight sound behind me made me spin around in my chair. Framed in the doorway was the heavy figure of my Third Officer, Spinelli. His black eyes were fastened hungrily on the lump of yellow metal on the table. He needed no explanation to tell him what it was, and it seemed to me that his very soul reached out for the stuff, so sharp and clear was the meaning of the expression on his heavy face.

"Mister Spinelli!" I snapped, "In the future knock before entering my quarters!"

Reluctantly his eyes left the lump of gold and met mine. "From the derelict, Captain?" There was an imperceptible pause between the last two words.

I ignored his question and made a mental note to keep a close hand on the rein with him. Spinelli was big and dangerous.

"Speak your piece, Mister," I ordered sharply.

"Mister Cohn reports the derelict ready to take aboard the prize crew ... sir," he said slowly. "I'd like to volunteer for that detail."

I might have let him go under ordinary circumstances, for he was a first class spaceman and the handling of a jury-rigged hulk would need good men. But the gold-hunger I had seen in his eyes warned me to beware. I shook my head. "You will stay on board the Maid with me, Spinelli. Cohn and Zaleski will handle the starship."

Stark suspicion leaped into his eyes. I could see the wheels turning slowly in his mind. Somehow, he was thinking, I was planning to cheat him of his rightful share of the derelict treasure ship.

"We will say nothing to the rest of the crew about the gold, Mister Spinelli," I said deliberately, "Or you'll go to Callisto in irons. Is that clear?"

"Aye, sir," murmured Spinelli. The black expression had left his face and there was a faintly scornful smile playing about his mouth as he turned away. I began wondering then what he had in mind. It wasn't like him to let it go at that.

Suddenly I became conscious of being very tired. My mind wasn't functioning quite clearly. And my arm and hand ached painfully. I rubbed the fingers to get some life back into them, still wondering about Spinelli.

Spinelli talked. I saw him murmuring something to big Zaleski, and after that there was tension in the air. Distrust.

For a few moments I pondered the advisability of making good my threat to clap Spinelli into irons, but I decided against it. In the first place I couldn't prove he had told Zaleski about the gold and in the second place I needed Spinelli to help run the Maid.

I felt that the Third Officer and Zaleski were planning something, and I was just as sure that Spinelli was watching Zaleski to see to it that there was no double-cross.

I figured that I could handle the Third Officer alone so I assigned the rest, Marvin and Chelly, to accompany Cohn and Zaleski onto the hulk. That way Zaleski would be outnumbered if he tried to skip with the treasure ship. But, of course, I couldn't risk telling them that they were to be handling a vessel practically made of gold.

I was in agony. I didn't want to let anyone get out of my sight with that starship, and at the same time I couldn't leave the Maid. Finally I had to let Cohn take command of the prize crew, but not before I had set the radar finder on the Maid's prow squarely on the derelict.

Together, Spinelli and I watched the Maid's crew vanish into the maw of the alien ship and get her under way. There was a flicker of bluish fire from her jury-rigged tubes astern, and then she was vanishing in a great arc toward the bright gleam of Jupiter, far below us. The Maid followed under a steady one G of acceleration with most of her controls on automatic.

Boats of the Martian Maid's class, you may remember, carried a six inch supersonic projector abaft the astrogation turret. These were nasty weapons for use against organic life only. They would reduce a man to jelly at fifty thousand yards. Let it be said to my credit that it wasn't I who thought of hooking the gun into the radar finder and keeping it aimed dead at the derelict. That was Spinelli's insurance against Zaleski.

When I discovered it I felt the rage mount in me. He was willing to blast every one of his shipmates into pulp should the hulk vary from the orbit we'd laid out for her. He wasn't letting anything come between him and that mountain of gold.

Then I began thinking about it. Suppose now, just suppose, that Zaleski told the rest of the crew about the gold. It wouldn't be too hard for the derelict to break away from the Maid, and there were plenty of places in the EMV Triangle where a renegade crew with a thousand tons of gold would be welcomed with open arms and no questions asked. Suspicion began to eat at me. Could Zaleski and Cohn have dreamed up a little switch to keep the treasure ship for themselves? It hadn't seemed likely before, but now—

The gun-pointer remained as it was.

As the days passed and we reached turn-over with the hulk still well within visual range, I noticed a definite decrease in the number of messages from Cohn. The Aldis Lamps no longer blinked back at the Maid eight or ten times a day, and I began to really regret not having taken the time to equip the starship with UHF radio communicators.

Each night I slept with a hunk of yellow gold under my bunk, and ridiculously I fondled the stuff and dreamed of all the things I would have when the starship was cut up and sold.

My weariness grew. It became almost chronic, and I soon wondered if I hadn't picked up a touch of space-radiation fever. The flesh of my hands seemed paler than it had been. My arms felt heavy. I determined to report myself to the Foundation medics on Callisto. There's no telling what can happen to a man in space....

Two days past turn-over the messages from the derelict came through garbled. Spinelli cursed and said that he couldn't read their signal. Taking the Aldis from him I tried to raise them and failed. Two hours later I was still failing and Spinelli's black eyes glittered with an animal suspicion.

"They're faking!"

"Like hell they are!" I snapped irritably, "Something's gone wrong...."

"Zaleski's gone wrong, that's what!"

I turned to face him, fury snapping inside of me. "Then you did disobey my orders. You told him about the gold!"

"Sure I did," he sneered. "Did you expect me to shut up and let you land the ship yourself and claim Captain's share? I found her, and she's mine!"

I fought to control my temper and said: "Let's see what's going on in her before deciding who gets what, Mister Spinelli."

Spinelli bit his thick lips and did not reply. His eyes were fixed on the image of the starship on the viewplate.

A light blinked erratically within the dark cut of its wounded side.

"Get this down, Spinelli!"

The habit of taking orders was still in him, and he muttered: "Aye ... sir."

The light was winking out a message, but feebly, as though the hand that held the lamp were shaking and the mind conceiving the words were failing.

"CONTROL ... LOST ... CAN'T ... NO ... STRENGTH ... LEFT ... SHIP ... WALLS ... ALL ... ALL GOLD ... GOLD ... SOMETHING ... HAPPENING ... CAN'T ... UNDERSTAND ... WHA...." The light stopped flashing, abruptly, in mid-word.

"What the hell?" demanded Spinelli thickly.

"Order them to heave to, Mister," I ordered.

He clicked the Aldis at them. The only response was a wild swerve in the star-ship's course. She left the orbit we had set for her as though the hands that guided her had fallen away from the control.

Spinelli dropped the Aldis and rushed to the control panel to make the corrections in the Maid's course that were needed to keep the hulk in sight.

"Those skunks! Double crossing rats!" he breathed furiously. "They won't shake loose that easy!" His hands started down for the firing console of the supersonic rifle.

I caught the movement from the corner of my eye.

"Spinelli!"

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.

I nailed him with a right from my shoe-tops.

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.

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