LATER: aliens discover midas's body and use him as a highly unstable source of gold, keeping him in vacuum suspension with magnetic fields. but their ship soon suffers a power failure, midas hits the floor, and the ship is transmuted. the ship drifts until drawn in by the gravitational field of a backwater planet, where it crashes and causes the planet to suffer the same fate as Earth. we join our story centuries later as our heroes, bounty hunters seeking the near-mythic Midas Flesh, successfully break quarantine and get past the defences erected around the planet. they are the first to land on the Second Golden Planet.