Leela cast her eye over the crew assembled around the breakfast table.

"Where's Hermes?"

"He took the kids home with LaBarbara," Amy said helpfully. "They've been living here on lockdown since the war started."

"Oh."

"I think they went a little stir-crazy. I know I would. Imagine being locked in here for months, with only the Professor and Zoidberg for company."

She shuddered.

"It is a horrible thought," Leela agreed.

"Speak for yourselves," Zoidberg declared. "Those were the happiest months of Zoidberg's life!" He rubbed his fronds together in glee. "At last, friends who couldn't run away! At last, Zoidberg's moment in the sun! For a brief heady time I knew what it was to be not just ignored but tolerated!"

"Yes," Leela mused. "I think we can all agree it must have been hell."

There was an outbreak of fervent nodding.

Zoidberg wilted.

Lars patted him on the claw.

"There, there, buddy."

Leela frowned at the group. Fry was sitting beside her, forking through a plateful of bacon and eggs as if he'd forgotten what he was supposed to do with them. Nibbler was inching his way across the table top, nose twitching as he sensed a meal. Lars had taken a seat on the other side of the table and Amy was glued to his side, despite the empty chairs all around them. Maybe she'd forgotten they weren't cuffed together anymore.

Kif was easing a batch of fresh pancakes off the skillet. Every so often he crossed to the window and gestured down at his men, standing on guard in the street below, to show them he was fine. They seemed to be taking his personal safety pretty seriously, Leela noted. She doubted they were that afraid of her, so what had the DOOP so on edge? Zapp's disappearance? It must be.

Leela added 'DOOP weirdness' to her list of things to investigate later, and pushed on to more immediate concerns.

"What about the Professor? Where did he go? He can't have left. He lives here."

Lars and Amy exchanged a look.

"He's resting," Amy said. "He's been working so hard, maintaining the Planet Express defences all this time. He's exhausted. He's been taking a lot of naps. I think we should let him recuperate."

"Right," Lars agreed. "I took him breakfast this morning and he was, boom, out like a light as soon as he ate it. You couldn't wake him up if you tried. Not that I think we should try. He's an old, old man. It's probably better to let him rest."

Amy nodded virtuously.

"I could not agree more."

"Think how cranky he'd be if we woke him up."

"Yeah, like a toddler. Smeesh."

"We can fill him in later. When he's not so cranky."

"That is a great idea."

"Yes. Yes it is."

Leela observed this strange exchange, frowning.

"What if we need his scientific expertise?"

Amy's smile seemed to have become stuck on her face.

"Well," she said, grinning painfully. "You won't need his expertise because everything he knows, I know. And if I don't know it, we can wake him up and ask him. Problem solved!"

Leela stared around the table. Kif shrugged. Fry poked listlessly at his eggs. Zoidberg began slurping the contents of the sugar bowl.

Leela sighed.

"Oh, fine. But if this triggers one of his angry old man rants, you can deal with it."

"Yes, captain."

Captain. It had been a long time since anyone called her that. But it fit like an old shoe. She'd missed it - had missed having her crew, these familiar faces gathered around for debriefing. The only face that was missing was Bender's, and that couldn't last long. He had to come home eventually. And if he didn't, well, Leela would just have to track him down and drag him back.

For his own good, obviously. He needed repairs. And Fry would be miserable without him.

Leela straightened up, assuming a more captainly posture.

"Right, crew. Kif. Lars. Nibbler. Fry has something he needs to tell us."

Fry let his fork fall. There was a clatter as Nibbler seized his moment to pounce on the plate and devour his breakfast.

Fry hardly even seemed to notice.

"It's the Brains," he said quietly. "They're back in the universe. They're killing people."

Amy, Nibbler and Lars exchanged a look.

"We know," Amy said tentatively.

"Nibbler told us," Lars said. "They took over his home planet."

"They . . . what?"

Nibbler paused, and let out an uncontrolled burp.

"It's true," he said uncomfortably. "There is an ancient enmity between the Brainspawn and my own race. We have been waging war against them since your universe was young. But the war is finally over. Victory is theirs. Eternium is theirs. My people have fallen to Brainspawn control and my homeworld has been hollowed out to create a new Infosphere. It has become the base of operations for their assault upon the universe."

Speech ended, he began licking Fry's plate clean.

Leela tugged it away from him, annoyed.

"That's where you've been all this time? Your home planet?" She narrowed her eye. "You couldn't have called? I've been worried sick about you."

"I'm sorry. I was enslaved and enlisted in the construction of the Infosphere."

"That's no excuse. You could have called. Even Fry called." Leela folded her arms. "And you should have told me you were going in the first place. You know how I feel about you running off on your own. You get into trouble. It's why we agreed on the leash for walks."

Nibbler cringed. He raised a paw, nervously preening himself. And here came the big sorrowful eyes, right on cue . . .

Oh, lord.

"I am sorry. If it's any consolation, I have missed you terribly. Particularly the half-defrosted hunks of ham. And your prowess at grooming. None of my people could match your skill with a boar bristle brush."

Leela sniffed.

"I can tell. Your fur's lost all its luster. I can see knots under the collar, it's shameful."

Nibbler hung his head and issued a pathetic whine.

"Shameful indeed."

Leela found herself reaching out to pet him automatically. She cursed as she tickled under his chin and he started to purr.

"Damn you for being so cute." She sighed. "Oh, fine. You're forgiven. And I'm sorry about your home planet. We'll think of something, to save your people."

Nibbler pulled away.

"My people are beyond saving. The Brainspawn have achieved ultimate supremacy over us. You cannot fight them. No-one can, save one."

"Me," Lars said grimly, as Fry muttered, "Me."

Fry blinked.

"It's me," he said. "The Brains are my problem. I almost beat them before, but whatever I did to fight them, it wasn't good enough. They came back, and they've been killing people ever since. That's what they do. They take over people and make them into zombies, and then they make them . . ." He shook his head, looking nauseated. "I have to stop them. I'm the only one who can stop them. I have this thing in my head, that stops their mind warp powers working on me. I don't know, I'm different somehow -"

"You lack a Delta brain wave," Nibbler informed him. "It is a fundamental component of the brain processes of every sentient being in the universe. But you somehow manage to function without one. It is this lack of a Delta wave that shields you from the Brainspawn's psionic attack. It also renders you invisible to them."

"They can't see me?"

"Not unless you're thinking very complex thoughts. That pains them. But the Brainspawn don't 'see' as you understand the term. To assess their surroundings visually, they hijack the information relayed to the brain by the optic nerve of the nearest living creature."

"That's disgusting," Lars said."They hack into people's brains just to see?"

Fry still looked like he might be sick.

"They made people attack me," he said slowly. "My friend, Captain Glottus. We stopped at this gas station and there was a brain there. It took him over. It made him try and kill me. I tried to stop him but he wouldn't listen. I couldn't get through to him. It was like he was . . . I don't know. Possessed or something."

"Brainspawn control is absolute. Even my people never fully understood the workings of their species, but we knew enough to fear them. In all our long history, you were the only being we ever discovered with the ability to fight them. Your coming was so portentous it was foretold by our soothsayers, many thousands of years before you were born. Our prophets foresaw -"

Lars shut Nibbler down.

"That's not important. What matters is, Fry isn't the only one who can stop them. I can too, and we can use that to fight back. Nibbler knows the way to the heart of the Infosphere. He can show me, and we can sneak in and set off a bomb, and blow them all to hell. Then there's no way they could ever come back."

Leela paused in her petting of Nibbler.

"That plan sounds ridiculously dangerous."

Lars nudged Amy.

"See?" he murmured, just loud enough for Leela to hear him. "I told you."

Leela narrowed her eye at the pair of them.

"This is no time for 'I told you so's, and it's no time for stupid, reckless plans."

"It's not stupid," Lars argued.

Leela arched her eyebrow.

"So you agree, it is reckless. Good. Because it is, as well as being stupid in more ways than I can count."

"It's not stupid," Lars insisted. "It's a solid plan."

"No, it isn't. First." Leela held up her fingers, ticking off the reasons. "Nibbler is under a foot high, and you're on crutches. I don't know what kind of black ops special agents you both think you are, but you wouldn't last five minutes infiltrating a secret Brainspawn base. This thing is planet-sized. What are you gonna do, hobble your way to the center? Give Nibbler a piggy-back ride?"

"That won't matter. We'll have a ship. We'll fly."

"And what if it breaks down? What if you need to fight your way through their defences? What if any of the many things that could go wrong with this plan do go wrong? What then?"

"Well . . . we'll just have to hope they won't."

Leela crossed her arms, furious.

"Oh, great. So you'll be trusting to bone-headed luck. Why am I not reassured?"

"It could work."

"And then what? You find your way to the hub of the sphere, by some miracle, without the brains detecting you. Then you incinerate an entire planet . . . using what, exactly? The Professor doesn't have any Doomsday devices left. I made him destroy them all after the scammers -"

"Um." Amy raised a hand, interrupting her. "We do have Doomsday devices. I know what you said what you said about them being too dangerous in the wrong hands, and we did decommission most of them, I swear! But some of them, the only way to disable them was to detonate them, so we put them in the deep freeze and -"

"And lied to me about it?"

Leela couldn't believe what she was hearing.

Amy at least had the good grace to look ashamed.

"Sorry. The Professor was planning to detonate them in some other dimension, but he never got around to it and I got distracted running some new experiments on dark matter -"

"Unbelievable," Leela fumed. "I ask you to do one thing -"

Lars jumped in before Leela could hit her stride.

"Forget about that. Don't you see? We have a bomb! We can do this. It's a solid plan."

"It's a bogus plan and it's full of holes," Leela retorted. "That planet will be teeming with brains. The chances of you sneaking past them without being found? Terrible. The chance you plant the bomb somewhere they won't find it, and get out again in time? Even more terrible. This plan relies too much on dumb luck."

"I agree," Kif said. He held up his hands at Amy's look of wounded betrayal. "I'm sorry, but Leela's right. So much could go wrong in this plan. I would never send my men on an operation like this, unless . . ."

"Unless?"

Kif sighed.

"Unless there was no good alternative." He wilted under the force of Leela's glare, but stood firm. "I'm sorry, Leela, but they have a point. The Brainspawn have the advantage over us. If Nibbler is to be believed, the best soldiers in the universe would be useless against them. That means it has to be Fry or Lars who moves against them. And if that's the case, as neither is a formidable fighter . . . a stealth attack is our only option. A small craft might be able to sneak past planetary defenses, if piloted by someone familiar with the terrain. It would require a certain amount of luck, but it could work."

"I can't believe what I'm hearing. Someone else must think this is crazy."

"Yeah," Fry said suddenly. "Me. I think it's crazy. You can't send Lars. He can barely walk. I should go instead."

"Absolutely not," Leela said immediately, but she was surprised when Lars, Nibbler and Amy chimed in with a back-up chorus of "No!"s.

"You can't go!" Amy cried.

Lars nodded forcefully.

"Why not?" Fry scowled at them all. "This is my fight. You weren't anything to do with it. And I'm stronger than Lars. I'm a better fighter than him, I can run faster -"

"It's not about that," Lars interrupted.

"Then what is it about?"

Lars opened his mouth and then wrenched it shut again. He looked like he was having difficulty restraining himself from what he really wanted to say.

"You have a baby on the way," he said at last. "And Leela just got you back. She needs you. You can't run away again and take stupid risks. You need to stay here and grow the hell up, and be a dad."

"The hell I do!"

Fry's temper had flared again. He slammed his fists on the table, then came back to himself and shot a panicked look at Leela.

"I didn't mean it like that," he said quickly. "I meant . . . this is my fight! You don't understand. None of you understand!"

He tore the gold chain from around his neck and threw it on the table, so that the data nugget split open and the green light bounced back at them. The list of names scrolling again.

"The Brainspawn killed all those people," he pleaded. "All of them. And it was all because of me."

He shook his head.

"We went to Trisol," he said quietly. "And they were all dead. The whole planet. We found these prisoners, they were the only ones left alive, and they thought I saved them, but I didn't do anything. I didn't even know."

Another compulsive shake of the head.

"And then the Brains got Captain Glottus. They made him try and kill me. Maybe they made him kill more people, I don't know. He didn't know either. But he was a good man, maybe the best man I ever knew and they destroyed him. They ruined his life. He died, trying to get the truth to the universe, trying to protect the people he cared about, but he couldn't, and I couldn't help him. All I did was make everything worse."

He swallowed.

"Then the Brains came. I saw them. Thousands of them, maybe millions, I dont know. They came pouring down out of the sky, like the apocalypse, like the end of the world, and there was nothing I could do then either. I know they killed everyone on Erosh. I know it. That's what they do. They destroy whole planets and that's what they want to do to me, that's what they want to do to Earth. I can't let them." He turned pleading eyes on Leela. "I don't want to run away from our baby. I want to protect her. I want to make Earth safe for her, for all of you, because the Brains will keep coming and they won't ever stop, and they'll kill you all for being near me. I know it, and I won't - I can't -"

He broke off, gulping for air.

"Fry."

Leela touched the back of his hand. He was shaking, the same uncontrollable tremor running through him that Leela had felt when she kissed him. She wanted to abandon all pretense and pull him to her for comfort, but . . .

It was worrying, that tremor. Leela had the sense that Fry was holding himself together only poorly, and she had no desire to be the one who broke him.

"Fry . . . I understand. I really do. But you're in no condition . . . mentally." There was no nice way to say it. "You're not in great condition physically either, but I'm sorry, your nerves are shot. You're jumping out of your skin at every little thing. And maybe you haven't noticed the thousand yard stare, but the rest of us have, and it worries us." She swallowed. "It worries me."

There was an outbreak of nervous nodding among the crew. Even Lars looked uncomfortable.

"If you were one of my men," Kif said carefully, "I wouldn't clear you for combat. You're exhibiting signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. It would be dangerous to put you in the field."

Leela squeezed Fry's hand again.

"It's nothing to be ashamed of. But you need time to heal."

"I am healed. I'm heal-ing. It doesn't matter. I need to do something. I need -"

"You need to listen to me and stop, Fry."

"Leela's right," Lars said roughly. "You're a liability. We only get one shot at this before they know we're coming. We can't afford to screw it up. And that's what you'd do. You know you would."

Fry flinched.

"Lars," Leela snapped. "That's not helping."

Fry had visibly folded in on himself. He turned to Leela, desperate.

"You really think that?" he begged. "You think I'm a liability?"

Leela stared back at him.

"That's not what I said." Picking her words felt like crossing a minefield. There were so many ways they could blow up in her face. "I think you're a danger to yourself," she said at last. "I think it would be better for everyone if you sat this one out."

"Oh." Fry deflated even further. "Maybe you're right," he said at last. "Maybe there is something wrong with me."

He put a hand to his temple, apparently unconsciously. He had that look again.

Distant. Drifting.

What was that? It scared Leela that she didn't know.

"I get confused sometimes," Fry muttered. "Lately. I find myself places and I don't remember how I got there. And I see things that don't exist. Or, I don't know if they exist. I hallucinated my brother once. And other people. Strangers. I thought they were real. But they weren't. Bender told me they weren't."

Leela tightened her grip reflexively on his hand.

"You've seen Bender?"

The words were out before she could stop herself.

Fry nodded.

"He took me home."

"Oh, thank God. How was he? Did he seem damaged to you? Why the hell didn't he come home?"

Fry blinked, and Leela realized she'd asked him too many questions at once. Fry didn't respond well to being overloaded at the best of times.

She decided to rephrase.

"How was he? How did he seem?"

"I don't know. Normal. Weird. I don't know." Fry frowned. "He was walking. And talking. But he was sober. I think there was something wrong with him. He explained, but I forgot. Or maybe I didn't get it."

Leela sighed.

"The idiot tried to overclock himself while you were away. I don't know what he was thinking. He almost fried every processor in his head." She tapped the table, considering. "It sounds like his fuel converters are damaged. That could be dangerous."

"You mean he could blow up?"

"No, I mean . . ."

Don't scare him, Leela chided herself. Fry was already keyed up. The last thing he needed was to work himself into a frenzy over Bender too.

"He needs repairs," she said.

"He hugged me."

"What?"

"Bender. He hugged me."

"Well . . . maybe he was just overexcited. You know how he gets sometimes. He missed you. Maybe he was just -"

Fry shook his head.

"No, it wasn't like that. There wasn't a reason. It was more like . . . like an 'I love you buddy' kinda hug."

Leela studied his face, uneasy. That sounded a lot like the hug Bender had given her, before taking the madman step of overclocking himself. She didn't like the sound of it.

"Well, maybe -"

"It was real," Fry said obstinately. "I know it was."

Leela held up a hand.

"That's not what I was going to say. I was going to say, he did the same thing to me. I thought maybe he was jacked up on electricity again. It was pretty unsettling." She squeezed Fry's shoulder. "Try not to let it upset you. We'll find Bender, I promise, and we'll fix whatever's wrong with him. He'll be the evil, kleptomaniac bastard we all know and love again before you know it."

Fry was still fretting.

"But I dont know where he is. He just disappeared. He could be anywhere."

"I know. I don't like it any more than you do. But Bender's gonna do what Bender's gonna do. He always has. He'll come home eventually. When he's bored or he's broke or he wants someone to laugh at his jokes. You know how he is."

"Yeah. I guess I do."

For the first time, Fry looked cheered. Leela squeezed his hand. He squeezed back, and held on.

The others had been watching their conversation with interest.

"I'm glad Bender's okay," Amy said tentatively. "And I think Leela's right. He'll come back soon. He's an obsolete model, and overclocking violates his terms of use. If he's damaged, the Professor is probably the only person who can fix him without shutting him down."

"Exactly," Leela agreed. "He can root around in Bender's robot brain and put everything back the way it was before. Why wouldn't Bender want that? All we have to do is wait for him to get his shiny metal butt back here and we can put him back to normal. Problem solved."

Kif cleared his throat.

"Uh. Speaking of problems solved . . ."

Lars jumped in.

"We all agree, I should be the one to go to Eternium with Nibbler?"

Leela sighed.

"For the record," she said sharply, "I'm only agreeing to this plan because you sprung it on me and I can't come up with anything better myself."

"But you are agreeing?"

"Fine. Yes. You can fly into a Brainspawn hive with Nibbler, set the fuse on a doomsday device and run like hell. Why not?"

She rubbed the side of her temple, where a headache was blooming behind her eye.

"What could possibly go wrong?"