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.

[Illustration: _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.