In the last three days Spock calculated that they had walked sixty miles, and had travelled 53.7 miles directly south from the spot where they had crashed down onto this cold and barren planet. The change in the weather was noticeable. Although the cold was still crushing, snowfalls were becoming a little more infrequent and there had not been so much wind now that they were in rather more undulating country. He noted a five minute increase in daylight hours, too. All in all, his decision to move south seemed vindicated.

It was nearing the end of a long day, and they had pitched the small tent in the lee of a high, bald protrusion of rock which rose up like the forehead of a venerable old man against the thickly clouded sky. The land was pierced all around by these weather-smoothed domes of rock, with small stands of alien trees clustered in their shelter, and hills larger than the first range the party had journeyed through pressing up on the southern side of this flatter terrain.

Spock was in no condition to appreciate the beauty of his surroundings. Three days of walking had pushed his pain tolerance to the limit, and it was all that he could do to lie in the tent with the leg elevated, trying to control the insistent hot aching and throbbing that consumed the whole of the lower limb.

'I'm going to have to take that cast off,' Chapel said to him in no nonsense terms, having sent the ensigns away to forage so that she could deal with the Vulcan in private. 'I'm sorry, Mr Spock, but I will. I warned you against three days without stopping, and it's been too much. The leg is swollen, and if I don't do something about it you'll lose blood supply to the foot.'

Spock blinked his eyes open. The light that shone through the tent fabric seemed to pierce into his eyes, increasing a headache that he had not yet admitted to.

'Your temperature's elevated,' Chapel continued. 'It's possible that you have an infection set in somehow.'

'Possible,' Spock murmured. 'Do what you must.'

Her eyes narrowed. 'It worries me when you agree with me, Mr Spock.' She lightly touched his forehead with the back of her hand. 'Definitely warm.'

'Is that necessary when you have access to a medical tricorder?' Spock asked curiously.

She smiled. 'It's necessary to me. Most doctors and nurses like to have physical contact with their patients. It – speaks to you better than numbers on a screen.'

'Illogical,' Spock said.

'Human,' she replied. 'Now, I'm going to have to use a laser scalpel to cut through the bulk of the cast,' she said. 'I can do the last bit with good old fashioned scissors. But it's important you don't move. The blade is set to cut to a specific depth.'

'Of course,' Spock said.

'It's going to hurt more once the cast is opened,' she warned him. 'I won't take it off. I'll just split it but leave it as a support. Once the swelling is down and when I judge – when I judge,' she repeated forcefully, 'that you're able to walk again, I'll put a new cast on.'

Spock closed his eyes again, lying passively as she peeled his sock away from his foot and examined the exposed flesh.

'I think it's started from this toe,' she murmured critically, touching his smallest toe on that foot. 'Frostbitten again. It just didn't get the chance to recover from last time. You've got an open sore.'

'Do what you must,' Spock said, keeping his eyes closed, concentrating only on the feeling of the nurse touching his foot and the constant thud of his heartbeat through his body.

'First, an antibiotic, anti-inflammatory, and a painkiller,' she said, pressing a hypo to his arm. He did not argue. The medicines hissed into his body and he felt the edges blur away from the pain almost immediately. The pulsing headache was pushed back into something more bearable. 'Now hold still while I cut that cast.'

Spock heard the slight hum as she activated the laser scalpel, and a kind of vibration set up in the cast. To distract himself he said, 'It was always a point of curiosity to me that you settled for the post of nurse, Miss Chapel. You are an intelligent woman. Why not MD?'

She laughed quietly. 'I'm sure Dr McCoy would love that. He already thinks I second guess him enough as it is.'

'You second guess him, as you put it, because your skill level and potential are high,' Spock replied. 'Why not the MD?'

'Nurses are also intelligent people,' she reminded him reprovingly. 'Being a nurse and being a doctor are different things. Not everyone who is a nurse is someone who couldn't be a doctor.'

'But you,' Spock insisted. 'You show every inclination of a woman who would rather be in control than taking orders. You have risen to Head Nurse, and it is quite obvious to me that you have the potential to go further. Yet you do not. You have settled in a position and make no attempt to reach higher. Why not the MD?'

'Oh, it's a long story, Mr Spock,' she said with an odd tone in her voice. 'You don't want to hear it.'

'In fact, I do,' Spock said. 'Else I would not have asked.'

'Well,' she murmured, intent on the cutting of the cast. 'I was pursuing my MD-PhD in biomedical research before I joined the Enterprise.'

'Ambitious,' Spock commented. He opened his eyes to see her bending over his leg, very carefully tracing the laser scalpel along the cast.

She smiled, her eyes still on his leg. Her hair was dishevelled after a day's walking and tied loosely behind her head, and there was a smudge of dirt on her cheek. She wore no make-up. It struck Spock that she was naturally more beautiful than the woman he was used to with carefully coiffured hair and a painted face.

'I was brought up ambitious,' she said. 'I didn't ever stop to consider that I couldn't do it. Mom and dad were behind me all the way, paid for everything. They saw me lecturing in a big university, I think. And during the course of my training I met Roger...'

'Roger Korby,' Spock said.

He vividly recalled that mission to Exo III, ostensibly to rescue Roger Korby from the planet, that had turned into such a personal tragedy for Christine and a greater tragedy for the world of medical archaeology. Instead of finding the woman's fiancé alive and well they had discovered a man who had become an android, callous of feeling and brutal in his attempt to commandeer the Enterprise for his own ends.

'Yes, Roger Korby,' she said with a wistful tone to her voice. Her mind seemed to be far distant from the present moment. 'He was – he was so engaging. Fascinating in every way. He was older than me. I looked up to him. He came to the university during his research into medical techniques on Abalon 7. There was something of a stash of artefacts there. One of the professors was an expert. I guess at first he awed me, and then he attracted me, and then – before I knew it we were engaged. It was – ' She shook her head. 'It was a strange time. Happy. Sad. Sometimes I can't work out how I felt.'

Spock kept his eyes fixed on her face, trying to read her expressions. Human affairs were so complicated. How could one be happy, sad, and indecisive all at once, and still commit to something as concrete as an engagement?

'I did love him,' Christine said, running her finger down the split in the cast, picking out debris. 'Oh, I'm sorry,' she said, as Spock winced unintentionally.

'It is all right,' he said quickly.

She smiled, and set to work again, cutting the groove a little deeper.

'Yes, I did love him,' she said with more firmness in her voice.

Her eyes seemed very far away. In the light that filtered through the tent fabric they looked violet, and Spock stared at them, fascinated. She could have been a hundred light years away, talking to herself.

'He was wonderful, but then – I always had those little misgivings. He could be – controlling. He didn't always agree with my research. He tried to steer me in the directions he thought I ought to go. He thought I should concentrate harder on the PhD side of the study and not on the MD. I wonder – well, I wonder sometimes if he was a little jealous.'

Spock did not comment. He did not feel anywhere near qualified.

'He encouraged you to give up the MD?' he asked, trying to get the conversation back on track.

'Not exactly,' she smiled. 'No. He went off to do his research. Went to Exo III. We were going to be married when he came back. But he never came back, and – well, it seemed like no one was going to do anything about it. The university he worked for shrugged their collected shoulders. Starfleet wasn't interested. The Council for Xeno-Medical Archaeology weren't interested. They would have let him freeze into a block of ice, and no one would lift a finger. So I made a decision. I took a final few months of training that would turn the MD studies into a nursing qualification, and I joined Starfleet. They were desperate for nurses then. They took me on, and I found myself assigned to the Enterprise. It was where I wanted to be. The Enterprise is one of the furthest ranging ships in the fleet. I thought that once I was out in space I could do something, work to find him. I made connections, contacted people, used spare bits of money to pay for investigations into where he might be. And then in the end the Enterprise was sent to Exo III.'

She put the laser scalpel down and picked up the scissors. Although they looked old fashioned they were almost certainly made of durinium, so hard that they would never have to be sharpened. They could not fail like a laser scalpel might, and it was almost certain that the nurse had a few other cutting instruments of the same material in her kit. But she did not move to cut the final thickness of the cast. She just sat there holding the scissors, her left hand on Spock's foot, apparently staring into space.

'Nurse,' Spock said.

She started. 'Oh, I'm sorry,' she said quickly. 'I was – in another time.'

'I quite understand,' Spock said, and she looked at him with a startled expression.

Spock could clearly recall the whole of that mission on Exo III, how she had been forced to accept that her fiancé was long dead, but had also had to watch the facsimile of him, containing his consciousness, be destroyed. She had seemed haunted for days following that mission. Later she had appeared to be back to normal, but he had sense a grief and distraction beneath the façade. Humans often believed that Vulcans had no emotions and no empathy, but that was not true.

'I'll – start cutting the final layer now,' she said. 'It might feel odd. Tell me if I hurt you.'

'Of course,' Spock said.

He felt the cold blade of the scissors pressing beneath the cast, the first fresh thing to touch his skin there in over a week. It was an odd feeling; not unpleasant, but odd. She steadily cut down the length of the pre-cut groove, and Spock lay there feeling entirely disassociated from the leg upon which she worked; that is, until she reached the area where his leg had suffered its trauma. He drew in breath sharply, and air whistled between his teeth, as the blade of the scissors made contact with that first patch of skin that must have sat directly above the break.

Christine passed in her cutting. 'All right?' she asked.

'Yes,' Spock said tightly. 'I would rather you did it swiftly.'

'As swiftly as I can,' she promised him.

'Then you gave up on your chance of becoming a doctor in order to find your missing fiancé,' Spock said, attempting to draw his mind away from the pain again. 'Quite fascinating.'

'It's not only men who can act the white knight,' she said with a rather wry smile. 'Now, I'm going to crack this cast open.'

Spock nodded briefly, and braced himself. He watched her putting a hand on each side of the cast, putting considerable force into pulling the two sides apart. Instantly simultaneous sensations of relief and pain pulsed through the leg.

'Are you all right, Mr Spock?' she asked.

Spock took a moment, then said in a thin voice, 'Yes, Miss Chapel. I am fine.'

'It's really quite swollen,' she murmured. 'Very bruised looking still. Now, if I can find something to tie around it it will carry on acting as a kind of splint, for rudimentary support – meaning you can get up to go to the bathroom, things like that – but no unnecessary moving around.'

'Miss Chapel, there is no bathroom here,' Spock said innocently.

She sighed, putting the scissors back in her kit.

'I'm going to leave it to rest for a few minutes before I do anything else,' she said. 'Let the air get to it for a bit.'

She closed up her medical bag and turned around, lying down on top of the sleeping bag next to Spock and gazing up at the top of the tent.

'I didn't give up on my chance of becoming a doctor,' she said after a moment's silence, sounding as much as if she were speaking to herself as to the Vulcan. 'I still have ambitions. I don't see myself being Head Nurse on the Enterprise forever.'

Spock turned his head to look at her. 'That, Miss Chapel, will be the Enterprise's loss,' he said gravely.

She smiled, her face lighting up as if the sun had come out. Spock felt gratified to see that change in her.

'But why, Miss Chapel, did you not leave the Enterprise once Roger Korby was discovered to be beyond help?' he asked curiously. 'That was some years ago now, but you are still Head Nurse of the Enterprise.'

She flushed, seeming consternated.

'The Enterprise is a very challenging workplace,' she said after a moment. 'I encounter things there that I never would back home studying for my MD. Earth seems very boring...'

'There are other places to study than Earth,' Spock pointed out. 'The Enterprise is not a teaching ship, but I am sure that there are opportunities. There are hospital ships belonging to Starfleet. You would not even have to leave the service.'

'Yes, there are,' she said vaguely, fiddling with the fabric of the sleeping bag with one hand.

'I am sure that one of your talent and experience would be granted a transfer almost immediately,' Spock said. 'I don't doubt that Dr McCoy would be irritated at losing his best nurse, but he would find another.'

'It's never that simple, Mr Spock,' she said distantly. 'There are – ties.'

'Friendships, of course,' Spock replied. The cocktail of drugs that she had given him were making him feel relaxed and sleepy. 'Human distractions. Friendships are – '

'Don't say they're illogical,' Christine said, turning her head to look at him suddenly. 'Please don't say that.'

'No,' Spock said slowly. 'No. No man exists in a vacuum.'

He lay still, thinking of the people that he may never see again. Jim with his very human passion, McCoy's irascibility. Lieutenant Uhura with her warm smile and her considerable musical talent. Scott and his love of alcohol and traditional entertainment. His parents, somewhere far away on Vulcan, who may not even know yet that he was missing. In all of those people, Jim was the greatest thought in his mind. He knew no other person, neither Vulcan nor human, who accepted him so completely for what he was. Definitely no Vulcan. He had yet to find a Vulcan who did not attempt to unpick his human traits from his Vulcan. Jim accepted them all as a tapestry that did not need dismantling to understand.

'You miss them,' Christine said.

'Yes,' Spock replied simply. His eyes were closing. He felt very tired. 'But I have one person left to me. One person...'

He felt her swell of emotion like a wave crashing onto the shore, but he could not separate the different washing feelings. Regret, sadness, happiness, love. How could humans process so many emotions if they all came at the same time? How did they ever manage without rigid mental disciplines to sort them? It was true that human emotion did not reach the depths of Vulcan, but still, how did they manage?

'Christine,' he murmured, but the word died away on his lips as he fell into sleep.

Christine looked sideways at Spock as his eyes fluttered closed, pleased that the sedative had finally done its work. He looked like a child lying there like that, every line melted out of his face. She lay still for a moment, just watching, trying to push down the surges of feeling that Spock would no doubt decide were terribly illogical. She never could understand him. He uttered sentences or words that seemed to have deep meaning, and she never found out what that precise meaning was. It is illogical to protest against our natures... What did he mean? What did he ever mean?

She needed to concentrate on her job. She sat up, turning her attention to the Vulcan's leg. She spread a sleeping bag out flat and gently lowered the limb down onto it, removing the rucksacks that had served to elevate it. His skin had that odd, pale look of skin that had been covered over for a long time, like something brought up from underwater. The dark hairs on his leg stood out starkly against the white behind.

Under her pressure the cast came open enough for her to slip it off. The leg looked as if he had been in a fight. Deep greenish black bruises blossomed around the site of the break. They should have been healed by now, but the continued pressure the Vulcan was putting on the limb retarded any meaningful progress. His foot and lower leg were both swollen and felt hot to her touch.

She put the cast aside and felt the leg with both hands, manipulating the site of the break in a way she would never have done if Spock were awake. She could still feel a grating there. The bones were not fusing as they should.

She filled a small cup with water, then heated the water with a very light phaser beam. Then she very carefully cleaned the whole area of the leg that had been covered by the cast, the foot as well, and finished off by rubbing in an antiseptic spray. There would be alien bacteria here that none of them had ever been exposed to, and if she were honest about it the infection in his foot scared her. She could not lose him. She was determined not to lose him.

There was noise outside the tent, and Ensign Del Sarto looked in.

'I've found – ' he began in a normal tone, then lowered his voice as he saw the Vulcan was sleeping. 'I've found some more food,' he said. 'Identified a couple of insect-like critters that might be poisonous, too. Karen's busy outside with a small mammal thing we caught. Dinner for tonight. We found more edible roots and nuts for Mr Spock, too.'

'That's wonderful,' Christine said with a smile. 'Don't worry about keeping your voice down. He won't wake up for a while. I slipped a sedative into him so I could sort out this leg without hurting him. He wouldn't have agreed.'

'How is it?' Del Sarto asked, coming further into the tent and kneeling down so he could look at the leg more closely. By the expression on his face he wasn't used to looking on injury.

'Not good,' she said honestly. 'If he keeps on as he is he's going to lose it. I just need to work out how to convince him of that.'

'Keep him sedated for a week?' Del Sarto asked with a laugh. 'I don't know. Maybe I could speak to him, man to man...'

Christine looked at the eager, eighteen year old boy and fought the desire to smile. She had been eighteen once, and had not felt nearly as young as Del Sarto looked to her now. She had to remember not to patronise him because of his age.

'Spock's fond of reminding us humans that he's not a man,' she replied wryly. 'Man to man, woman to man, woman to Vulcan, I'm not sure if he'll listen. We need to convince him that he's much more useful to us alive and whole.'

'Mutiny?' Del Sarto asked, with a slight uncertainty in his voice.

'I'll pull medical rank if I have to,' she assured him. 'No need to risk a charge of mutiny. Look, can you help me, Ben? I want to get this cast back on now I've cleaned his leg. I'll apply a proper one when we start moving again, but he needs this as a splint. Can you hold the thing open while I ease his leg back into it?'

'Sure,' he nodded, and picked up the cast, putting careful force into holding it open. Christine was glad of this diligent, resourceful man. If he was a sample of the six ensigns they had left the ship with, she regretted the loss of four of them even more.

'There,' she murmured as she carefully lowered Spock's leg into the cast. 'That's fine. Thank you, Ben. Why don't you go and see how Karen's doing with the food, and I'll be out in a minute? I could do with some fresh air.'

Once she was alone she sat back on her heels just looking at the Vulcan. A scan showed that the medicine was already beginning to combat the infection that had taken hold in his leg. The swelling had not gone down as yet, but that was not surprising considering the manipulation she had just put it through. She picked up his hand, gloved as it was, and held it in hers for a moment, remembering the dozens of times she had done the same on the ship when he had been unconscious in sick bay.

'You know you're the reason I don't have my MD,' she said, almost in a whisper. 'Perhaps I'm just a sucker for certain men... But what would you do without me there to keep putting you back together each time you go running into trouble?'