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.