In fact, the biggest headache faced by our residual team of stay-behind technician volunteers was having to deal with rising cries of envy from every other metropolis – and all the various monster castes – demanding when will it be our turn? Well, nothing is punished like success. And I hope all of you suffer its highly-mixed pangs.

Still, any sense of triumph that I felt dissolved when, after things seemed well in-hand, it was time for our bone-tired crew to depart for Alliance territory.

I stayed on the ground as long as possible, supervising the reprogramming of the Big Computer so its ongoing activity, releasing milder doses of Leininger factor, would keep squiddish afterlife going while slowing the rate of death. After which I directed the final evacuation of Obtainia Base – a duty I took on in order to delay an inevitable unpleasantness.

But it came at last, unavoidably. My turn to ride up-ship in one of the last parties, conveyed skyward by cellular-slurry transporter.

While waiting in queue outside the liquescing chamber, along with some security greenies and a Ya-Tze priest, I admit that I felt yet again the Great Temptation. To ask myself if I truly was on the right side. To wonder if our Spertin cousins had a point, after all…

But no, the doubt passed. As it passes almost every time. Even after a much later adventure finally forced me into retirement and left me here, whiling away time in this spaceport bar, telling stories to slumming academy students.

What story is that? The thing that finally used up all my taste for adventure and made me flee back to Earth? Why, it was a ridiculous thing, A horrible, magnificent, transcendent storm of ironies, bizarre coincidences and terrible, terrible punning…

No. I won’t talk about that. Not today.

Anyway, are you seriously under the impression that my Planet-of-the-Undead adventure was over at that point?

Yes, yes. I saw some of you eye-flicking and consulting official records, while I talked, checking on my veracity. And screw you, too. And yes, the tale tapers off here, as far as it applies to our principal mission, or to the famous Captain Ohm.

But not for me.

Within the liquescing chamber, we arranged ourselves along two nested circles, facing inward, since we were heading home, turning our backs to any danger, instead of confronting it. I recognized only a couple of the green-clad guys and now I knew why the others were strangers. Because the Gamble had replenished her ranks from the crew and passengers of a demmie-plus colony ship – long written-off as lost – that had been marooned beyond an impassible hyperspace reef, trapped in a tidal pool of semi-liquid time.