"Chinese food," Jean said briskly. "We've simply got to take Doc out for Chinese. How can anybody go their entire life without tasting a barbecued pork bun? It's practically inhuman!" She clapped her hands excitedly, nearly falling headfirst between the bed and nightstand. Elizabeth sat up in alarm.

"Be careful. You'll be out of here in less than an hour, unless you do something stupid. Anyway," she went on, tapping her nose with a pencil, "is Chinese food that essential of a life experience?"

"YES!"

"You're the doctor." Elizabeth scrawled Chinese Food in her careful, archaic script. "Speaking of doctors, how are you feeling?" It had been five days since Jean had put herself in critical condition, after an extremely successful bid to circumvent the strict visitation rules of the hospital's intensive care unit. Doc Holliday had returned the next day, followed by Jean two days later.

"Me? I'm sparkly." Jean shrugged. "My throat's kind of sore from that Shop-Vac you put me on, but you wouldn't be letting me go if I was still half-dead."

Elizabeth cackled. "Shop-Vac? That's.. original? I had an old man once who referred to his genitals as "my cats..."

"Cats? Was he gender-confused but polite?"

"No idea. I had to cath him one day and he started screeching 'My cats!! What are you doing to my cats?!'" Elizabeth smirked. "Darn it! I'm at work, on my day off, and I swear, I feel naked." She tugged at her ankle-length skirt and crossed her legs. "What about... films?"

Jean nodded enthusiastically. "Which ones?"

"Titanic?"

"Your capacity for sadism is greater than that of Margaret Thatcher and Bill Gates - combined."

"Ooh, that's harsh." Elizabeth feigned a stab to the heart, rolling her eyes back until they twitched frantically. "Allright," she said, blinking rapidly, "so Titanic has been struck down as more an instrument of torture than a movie. Now," she said, suddenly deadly serious, "I've got to say this, okay? You're a damn fool, Jean Bruster. I don't care if you are getting out of here in ten minutes, you're stupid and I'm going to let you know it if it kills me!" Elizabeth stuffed her notepad into a pocket and scowled viciously at Jean, who blinked innocently and fluffed a plastic-encased pillow.

"Really, Liz. I don't quite see what you're getting so worked up about... It was a bit impulsive, okay, but so what?"

Elizabeth stared. "I don't believe you sometimes. You could have died, you could have ended up a vegetable... I mean, what if I hadn't been standing right there? What if the ET tube went into your gullet instead of your windpipe? I swear," she thundered, drawing up to her full height, eye-level with Jean's mouth, "pull something like that again and I will personally kill you. With my bare hands. Okay?"

"I'd like to see that," Jean smirked, "especially considering that you freeze and start hyperventilating if a spider this big appears." She held her thumb and forefinger a couple millimetres apart.

"Yes, I am a chicken, " Elizabeth sighed, "but you're an ignoramous."

"Who cares? You believe me now, don't you? That's Doc Holliday, and I have proved it beyond the shadow of a doubt," she pointed out, stabbing her finger at Elizabeth.

"Silly ass."

"Stuffy doormat."

"Heathen prune. I'm not done berating you, darnit. Whether or not Doc is Doc Holliday is utterly beside the point. Anyway -" the nurse sighed, plumping into the hard plastic bedside chair, "have you got all your things together?"

Jean waved her fingers at two plastic bags, abandoned in the middle of the bed. "I've been ready since 8 o'clock - and as it's now 11.30 -"

"Sorry I'm late," a flustered redheaded nurse panted as she darted into the room, stethoscope swinging. "Hi, Liz; are you Jean Bruster?"

"The same," Jean drawled. "Are you the parole board?" She accepted a clipboard from the pumpkin-haired nurse, who busied herself with a blood-pressure cuff.

"In a manner of speaking. I'm Sarah Linstead, charge nurse. I just need to get your vital signs and have you sign this liability release right there- " she tapped the clipboard and strapped the cuff around Jean's biceps.

"Great, a Kevorkian scarf," Jean mumbled, scribbling 'Richard M Nixon, PhD.' "Are we done yet?"

"Almost." Nurse Linstead counted Jean's pulse out under her breath. "Dr Nehrvati will be in shortly to go over your discharge instructions."

"I'm already here," grinned the immensely tall Hindu. "Bye, Sarah - hello, Elizabeth, Miss Bruster."

"Greetings, warden. Let me guess - you're here to tell me that eating peanuts of any stripe is stupid, please don't do it again, and by the way avoid all controlled substances."

"Well, not in so many words. Avoid peanuts, carry rapid epinephrine administration device, and never do that again. Or I will personally help Dooley here to kill you, because my hands are stronger." He grinned evilly and picked up the clipboard, scrawling something. "You're officially free - President Nixon?"

"Thank Poseidon!" Jean exclaimed. "Five more minutes and I would have been re-admitted - to the psych ward!" She grabbed her bags and scurried out the door, leaving Elizabeth scrambling to keep up.

Doc muddled over his lunch, poking disinterestedly at a dish of banana pudding. "What the hell is a banana, anyway?" he muttered, abandoning the daisy-yellow glop in favour of an indifferently fried chicken leg. "I'll be," he said thoughtfully, noticing the wall calendar for the first time in days. "November thirteenth? That makes... three weeks. Three weeks in this damn weird place. Hmph!" He shrugged and returned to the chicken.

The place wasn't bad, he acknowledged; no, the problem was that Doc hardly knew what to make of anything. From his limited window view, he could see no horses, no wagons; in place of the dirt roads and wooden buildings to which he was accustomed lay pavement and edifices of glass or concrete, peopled by... people, but like none Doc had ever seen. This new world is - incredible, he thought; they can cure consumption or fly to the moon if they wish it.

The door scraped open; Doc craned his neck. "Oh! Miss Bruster and Miss Dooley. I'm afraid you find me not precisely ready to receive guests - but you are both very welcome. I have," he said direly, "been on the verge of expiring from sheer boredom."

"Sorry, Dr Holliday," Elizabeth shrugged, "but -"

"I was in a coma and Liz is germ-phobic," Jean cut in. "How the hell are you, Doc?" She bounced in place like a cocaine-tripping marmoset.

"Actually, it wasn't a coma," Elizabeth began.

"Quiet, you. Let the man speak."

"You be quiet. I'm not a germ-phobic either; I'm simply cautious."

Jean leered derisively. "Cautious enough to shower with Lysol?"

"If you knew what kind of germs fly around here, you'd do the same. Anyway, nobody was allowed to visit Doc until last night. He hadn't been cleared from isolation."

Doc held up a bony hand. "First, you find me astonishingly well, considering that last month I was somewhat more than half-dead. Second - why was I "isolated" in the first place? If it was for medical reasons, I beg you to recall that consumption is a purely individual malady, and cannot be passed from one person to another."

Elizabeth gaped. "I'm sorry, but I'll be doing that a lot... I tend to forget that you're, well, not exactly what I would call up-to-date with medical knowledge." She snapped her knuckles and wrists. "There are things, organisms, called bacteria - "

"I have heard of those," Doc interrupted. "Nevertheless, proceed." He stroked his moustaches pensively as the nurse explained.

"Right. Bacteria - which cause a lot of diseases, and TB - consumption, sorry - is one." Liz gazed at Doc, sifting through her memory. "When are you from, 1881? Next year, in your time at least, a German physician named Koch will discover that consumption is caused by bacteria and is contagious - very contagious, in the right conditions."

"Fascinating," Doc replied, while his mind went wild processing this new information. "That contradicts everything I was told at university."

"Right, well, anyway, you had to be kept away from everybody else so that nobody would catch it."

"Like how people were walled up alive during the Black Plague," Jean interjected gleefully. "Morituri te salutant!"

"We, who are about to die, salute thee - but I am not going to die." Doc spoke so definitely that Jean quit cackling and Liz paused, open-mouthed, on the verge of another lecture. He stared hard at each in turn, scanning their faces for confirmation. "That is the truth, am I correct? My life is somehow no longer in danger from consumption."

"No, you're entirely right," said Liz. "Why do you ask, though?" It's a cureable disease, she thought, then mentally hit herself over the head. Not for him, you dope.

"Forgive me if I wax a little morbid," Doc remarked dryly, deciding once and for all to ignore lunch, "but I lived with the Reaper's scythe hanging over me for nine years. Every physician I consulted - and one was my own uncle - told me that I would die inside of a year if I remained in Georgia, and inside of two if I relocated to the West. Last October twenty-sixth, at which time I was brought here by no mechanism I pretend to understand, I had outlived their rosiest predictions by seven years." Distantly, he shook his head.

"On some serious borrowed time, eh?" Jean inquired flatly.

"You have no idea... but what I am getting at is this: I'd lived the last quarter of my life expecting to drop dead any day. For all practical purposes, I was dead; I didn't care what sort of trouble I got into." Doc paced to the window and drew the ugly pink curtains aside. "You cannot know what it is to live that way," he said softly, "always, always knowing that you are dying. It drives a man to insanity."

Liz glanced at Jean, who flashed a knowing look of "Shut up, I'll handle this." "So, Doc," Jean asked, "You don't mind being marooned in strange times like these?"

He thought for a moment, and shook his head. "No, I can't truly say as I do mind," he drawled, letting the curtain fall back into place.

"I have to warn you, people have gotten awfully stranger than you're used to," she cautioned, with a reproving glare at Elizabeth.

"Times may be strange, Miss Bruster, but humans were perverse in 1881, exactly as they were in 1781 and back to the dawn of time. I should know; the West has a tendency to bring out everything that is terrible and primitive in a man. At the present time, I am mostly concerned with the fact that I have no longer to torture my mind with thoughts of my impending death..." Joy, he mused, is bittersweet, when none here can share it. For the first time in weeks, he wondered what would have become of Wyatt by now - almost certainly, he was dead. Kate would be dead, too; everybody he knew was gone. No need to concern the ladies with that maudlin nonsense just now, he reminded himself sternly, shaking off a fog of nostalgia. "I have all the time in the world to acquaint myself with your civilisation." If only they could have helped Mother, too. Be quiet, you pantywaist.

Jean clapped her hands. "Doc, the instant you're granted parole, Liz and I will teach you how to paint the town red. Well - I'll teach you, and Liz with trail behind wishing we'd act our age and show some dignity."

"I love how you typecast me as the stuffy one," Liz growled dangerously.

"Ten years ago you were the lusty wench. Want to bring that back?"

"I could remind you that you've been mistaken for a man 45 times... and one was a freaking fortune cookie..."

What strange and amusing women, Doc thought.