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.
