Chakotay sat in the pilot's chair, but he was allowing young Ensign Jim Joseph to pilot the shuttle from the co-pilot's seat. The commander approved of Mr. Joseph's handling of the craft. "Nice flying, Ensign. It looks like you've been doing your homework."

"Thank you, Commander. I've been getting a lot of flight time lately with Lt. Paris. He's a real good teacher."

"Does he sprinkle his lessons with as many jokes as he does everything else?"

The young man smiled. "Yeah, I guess, but there always seems to be a point to his stories, you know? After I'm finished with a lesson with him, I can always see that the jokes fit in somehow with what he's teaching. He's pretty patient, too. I remember one time, we were checking out a repaired shuttle - you probably remember that, don't you, sir? When the shuttle jumped into warp and slammed us all around? The inertial damper field started to fluctuate some, and I got pretty sick, to tell you the truth."

"That was after the "asteroid" bombardment incident."

"That was the time. Well, anyway, we had trouble with all the systems for just long enough for us to land in that asteroid field that hid us from the sensors. I was sure we were going to crash into one of the asteroids. There were so many of them, but somehow Lt. Paris managed to steer us around them long enough for us to get things shut down and to stop the shuttle. He seemed so calm. Then he cracked some joke about how scared he was, which I didn't believe for a second, but it helped me feel a lot better."

"I am glad to hear Mr. Paris is a good teacher. I haven't had the pleasure of having any classes with him."

"Did you ever have his father at the Academy, Commander?"

"No, he was doing lot of other things for Starfleet at the time, so I never was able to take any classes with him."

"You didn't miss much in my opinion, sir. He was at the Academy for my first two years there, and I had him for Survival Training. He was good at giving you the facts, I'll grant him that. But I hated the way he graded."

"Didn't do so well?"

"That wasn't it. I got an A- for the course. What bothered me was that he picked certain people that he would give a hard time to, and no matter what they did, he marked them down for it. There was one guy there, from one of the colonies, who was phenomenal at everything we did in wilderness training. He was in my group for the wilderness test. Well, everyone in our group got an A but Jareth. He got a B-, even though he was our leader! If all of us got an A, how could he get a B-? Jareth would never say anything, but after semester break was over, the rest of us went to the Admiral's office to respectfully ask him to reconsider the grade. Do you know what he said?"

"No, what?"

"Admiral Paris said that anyone who was raised on a wilderness world should have done everything perfectly. Now, as far as the rest of us could tell, Jareth HAD done everything perfectly. We could never figure out what it was that the admiral thought wasn't perfect, and he wouldn't tell us what it was, either. That was pretty unfair, I thought. At least he could have pointed out what could have been done better. I made sure I didn't take any more classes with him after that. I sure wouldn't have wanted for him to have been my father, if you know what I mean, sir."

"I think I do, Mr. Joseph." The commander and the ensign both fell silent. Even though Chakotay had not seen eye to eye with his own father much of the time, Kolopak at least had tried to be fair to his son. Tom had never made a secret of the fact that he and his father had not gotten along. The ensign's story shed a little more light on a possible source of Tom Paris' problems with authority. Perhaps Chakotay's own troubles with Paris had little at all to do with Chakotay himself, but were simply a legacy of his history with his father. Captain Janeway always seemed to be able to keep Paris in line. It was something that the commander would ruminate upon later, when he had the chance.

Ensign Joseph's announcement of, "We're at the edge of the nebula, Commander," brought Chakotay's attention back to the matter at hand.

All social conversations ceased. Megan Delaney and Ensign Vorik, who were acting as the technicians on this flight of the shuttle, went to their tasks. The extra instrumentation installed within the Sacajawea helped them obtain a great deal of data on the solar flares and other conditions within the Tantrum system. Several hours of hard work later, the shuttle returned to Voyager, mission accomplished.

Kathryn Janeway was waiting for the return of the commander and the away team in the shuttle maintenance bay. She and Ensign Elaine Myers, the nominal chief of the Shuttle Repair and Construction Team, were standing under the sign in the shuttlebay that announced, "You Blitz 'Em, We Fix 'Em." Lt. Carey arrived as Chakotay and his team exited the small craft.

"Welcome back. What is Tantrum doing today?"

The commander nodded to Megan Delaney, having her make the report, as had been decided on the trip back. "The nebula was the calmest that its been since right after we arrived in the system. The flares seem to have stopped, but the nebula has not died down quite enough to try to go in yet. As long as conditions continue their current trend, it might be possible in a day, maybe two, Captain."

"Are the ship's repairs completed enough for us to go tomorrow, if conditions permit, Lt. Carey?"

"We could probably go in today if we had to Captain. There are only a few things that we still need to work on, and they aren't in critical systems."

"Let's let everyone know we plan on going in the day after tomorrow, then, commander. If we are able to go tomorrow, it would be even better, but I'd rather surprise the crew by going a day early if we can, instead of disappointing everyone if we have to put it off again."

"I agree, Captain. The crew needs to feel we have firm plans to pick up Torres and Paris. Hopefully, there won't be any further delays." Chakotay turned back to the away team and the shuttlebay repair crew. "By the way, people, this is confidential information! I know how the gossip mill works, and I will have a very short list of who might have talked if the word gets around." The younger crew members smiled uneasily at each other. The commander must have been reading their minds.

"Good work, everyone." The captain started to leave with Chakotay but thought of something else she wanted to say. "Oh, and by the way, Crewman Delaney . . . "

"Yes, Captain?" Megan responded. She was surprised that the captain was speaking to her.

"I want to commend you for the name you gave that star system. It certainly was appropriate."

"Thank you, Captain Janeway." The red haired crewman's face flushed to a shade close to that of her hair in pleasure.

"Carry on." Kathryn Janeway strode out after her first officer, a half-smile of pleasure on her own face. She had a good crew, and having an opportunity to give praise was one of the best parts of her job.

The commander walked with the captain out to the turbolift. When they were inside, away from the rest of the crew, Janeway asked him, "What are our chances of getting to Tom and B'Elanna tomorrow, Chakotay? Our real chances."

"I think it will be okay to try tomorrow, as long as we cut out of warp before we actually get into the system. Our people in Stellar Cartography think that we just had bad luck in going into the system when we did. There seems to be some kind of periodicy to the solar flares, but we aren't sure the warp drive didn't have an effect. Better safe than sorry, even if it takes a few hours longer. If we use caution and travel on impulse once we are in the system itself, I don't think that it will disrupt the nebula so much that we can't get them and ourselves out."

"I hope so, Commander." The captain smiled crookedly. "I need to get Mr. Paris working on my holodeck program again. I'm getting a little impatient to meet with Signor Da Vinci."

"The engines seem to miss B'Elanna, too."

The captain sighed. "The engines aren't the only ones."

B'Elanna checked Tom's clothes. They were still distressingly damp. Looking again at the gathering clouds, she tried to decide whether to take her chances and leave them out any longer, or if she should grab them and bring them in before the weather turned as wet and nasty as it appeared it would before long. Primitive housekeeping was getting to be a headache.

A tall figure with boots on his feet and clothed in Neelix's blanket, but not much else, appeared up the path they had worn from the cave to the cliff. "Are my clothes dry yet, Be'? It's starting to get cold in the cave."

"No, they're still pretty wet. I told you we should have washed up before we went up to the top end of the valley."

"Then we would have gotten rained on before we got back, and both of us would have been wet and cold instead of only one of us." Tom bent over his clothes to check them himself. He didn't find them any dryer than she had.

"What do you think, shall I use the phaser? If I put it on low power, wide dispersal, I may be able to get them dry. I'd just have to be careful not to leave the beam on too long."

"And what if you vape them? That would be nice. Then I would have to find out if a straw skirt would be adequate clothing for me in this climate. No, thank you, Lt. Torres. I would rather take my chances on the air drying them, even if I have to wait until tomorrow to get dressed again."

"We could bring them inside the cave and leave them near the fire. You could cuddle up next to them and to the fire to stay warm."

"Better than risking losing them forever, I guess. I think I would rather stay in our den and stay warm another way. Care to join me?"

"We'd better bring the clothes in first." Looking at the sky, he had to concur. A darker cloud that was shedding what appeared to be a heavy rain was coming straight for them. Between the two of them they managed to gather up Tom's wardrobe, but they still had to run the last few meters to the cave with the rain pounding down around and on top of them.

"Your clothes look like they need to get dry, too, Be'," he joked. The pouring rain had not soaked the winter jacket she had put on to go outside, but it was almost as damp as Tom's laundry was. Tom built the fire up while B'Elanna scattered his clothes on rocks and over their door hanging.

Tom was sitting on a rock near the fireplace with the blanket around him, picking away at his hair. "Whatever are you doing, Tom? You're making your hair look worse with all of that fussing."

"This soap makes it stick out all over."

B'Elanna sat down next to him. "Let me do that for you."

After a few moments of silence, he asked, "Well, can you do anything with it?"

"Why are you worried so much about your hair, Tom?"

"I have such a high forehead."

She laughed. "For such a student of all things Klingon, you should be glad. You have a very distinguished Klingon hairline. With your red beard, it's very attractive."

"Reddish-gold beard, Lieutenant."

"Reddish-gold. I stand corrected, Mr. Paris. How could I have made such a mistake?" Actually, his forehead was very handsome. She kissed it. So smooth. She kissed his forehead again, then his cheeks, nose, and the lips in the middle of his rapidly-filling in reddish-gold beard. Moving downward, she kissed him some more on the matching fuzzy surface at the base of his neck, and below.

"Okay, Be', that's enough. What if a Voyager away team should beam down here right this minute, with me undressed like this and you kissing my chest like that? Everyone will presume we've been doing exactly what we have been doing during our sojourn at this lovely tourist stopover." He paused a moment, considering, "I wonder what the betting line is?"

"Betting line! It doesn't matter what the line is, as long as no one can confirm it! Let them think what they like. As long as we aren't actually doing anything when they get here, what can they prove? Besides, you know they won't beam down too casually after all that happened here before. They'll signal us through our badges and then beam the two of us back on board."

After several minutes of steadily increasing romantic activity, Tom whispered into her ear, "I think it's time for one of our wash day adjournments, don't you think?"

"Mm, you're probably right. Get inside that den, Mr. Paris. I'll follow you in a minute."

As Tom crawled into bed, B'Elanna stripped off her outer jacket, which still bore the comm badge she had taken off her jumpsuit when the latter was being laundered. She spread her jacket outside of their crypt next to Tom's, which had his comm badge on it. B'Elanna called in to him, "Are you ready for some company?"

"Right now would not be soon enough, Lieutenant."

A knowing smile on her face, Lt. Torres climbed into their den to enjoy herself with Lt. Paris.

"Any response to our signals, Mr. Tuvok?"

"No Captain. There is no reply to our hail. The nebula might be affecting the planet's atmosphere, however. It has some volatile properties that have masked our signals previously."

A few minutes later, Voyager assumed orbit over Tantrum IV, and Tuvok offered, "There are still no replies to our hails, Captain."

"Scan the surface, Mr. Kim."

"Captain, there seem to be two life signs in a cave, lying in what appears to be some kind of vegetative matter."

The captain turned to her first officer. "What do you think, Commander?"

"With the rigorous climate, they might be unconscious from the cold. It is daytime where they are."

"Let's not take any more chances at not getting them back. Mr. Kim, can we transport them out of there?"

"We should be able to, Captain."

"Then transport that entire pile of 'vegetative matter' and the lifesigns that go with it directly to Sickbay. I'm going to go down to check on Lt. Torres and Mr. Paris. Commander Chakotay, you have the conn."

When Captain Janeway reached Sickbay, she was greeted by the sight of a half-naked Tom Paris sitting on a biobed, wrapped in a Starfleet issue sleeping bag/blanket, receiving some kind of treatment from the Doctor. To get to her helmsman, the captain had to step around a large pile of what appeared to be hay, which was strewn with blankets, a wrist light, and various articles of clothing, primarily of the underwear type. She was relieved that he looked only a little the worse for wear. Her other missing officer was nowhere in evidence, however.

"Where's Lt. Torres?"

"After breaking Mr. Paris' collarbone, she pulled on her clothing and stormed out of Sickbay, Captain. Kes tried to stop her so that I could examine her for injury or illness, but she was extremely hostile."

One look at the faces of Tom and Kes revealed that there was a lot more to this story she needed to know, and not a very happy story, she thought.

"Why did she attack you, Tom?"

"The two lieutenants arrived flagrante delicto, Captain," answered the Doctor for his patient.

"That is not what happened!" Tom cried out, but then he added gloomily, "Not quite, anyway. Close enough, I guess. We were asleep, wrapped in each other's arms, and from the way we weren't dressed, it wasn't too hard to figure out what we had just been doing. When we woke up, B'Elanna got so upset she punched me. It was a reflex, Captain; she didn't mean to break my bones or anything."

"I'm sorry, Tom."

"We had expected you to hail us first, when you came back for us."

"We've been trying to raise you for some time. Where are your comm badges?"

"I don't know, oh, wait a minute. We put them on our cold weather jackets when we were washing our clothes. My clothes were still wet, and I was cold. That's why we were inside the den, in bed . . . well, anyway. I guess the jackets were outside, and we couldn't hear your hails." Tom sighed and shook his head sadly. "Your timing could've been worse, but not by much."

The captain addressed the Doctor and Kes. "This is to remain just between us, a strictly confidential matter, is that understood?"

The Doctor answered her with confidence, "Of course, Captain. That's what I already told everyone."

At Kes' dismayed look, Captain Janeway realized that she had not yet gotten the entire story.

"Everyone?"

Kes responded. "Captain, several of the crew had been in Sickbay being treated for injuries from a holodeck accident. They had been playing hoverball with the safeties off, and there had been a collision. They were just leaving when Tom and B'Elanna were beamed in."

"Dalby, Henley, Chell, and Golwat. Some of the biggest gossips aboard ship. The story will be all over Voyager in an hour, if it isn't already." Tom's bitterness was painful to hear.

The captain went over to Tom and patted his shoulder. "I'm sorry, Tom. I think you're probably right about that." She shook her head. "Well, Lieutenant, I will need a full report about your stay on Tantrum, but it goes without saying that you may eliminate anything . . . personal. What you've already told me is complete enough."

"Tantrum, Captain?"

"We named the star that, Tom. Your report should be about your stay on the planet Tantrum IV.'"

"The name fits too well, Captain." His voice was expressionless, as if he were still in shock at what had happened.

"Well, we're finished here with the clavicle repair, Lieutenant, and I think we've healed all of the bite marks, too. Let us know if we missed any. Kes, will you please contact Lt. Torres and have her come back to Sickbay. I still need to do her medical scan."

Tom looked from the Doctor to the captain. "Can't I go to her and do that for you, Doc? I need to talk to her anyway, and I am a field medic. We didn't have it too bad down there, Captain; I'm sure that there isn't anything so serious that I can't handle the scan myself."

The Doctor shrugged his shoulders. "I would prefer that she come in here, but if you insist, Captain . . . "

"I do, Doctor."

"Well, then. Kes, if you will replicate the Lieutenant some clothing, he can take care of that medical scan for me."

The Captain was extremely concerned about Tom's state of mind as she watched the dull way he accepted one of the larger medical tricorders used in Sickbay from the Doctor. By the look on Kes' face as she handed Tom the uniform that she had already replicated for him, the Captain could see that she was just as worried about him.

As Tom stood up, the sleeping bag still wrapped around him, he said, "By the way, Captain. There's a lot of those roots and some other things in that cave. One afternoon B'Elanna and I combed through the talus from where we mined the dilithium out of the cliff and found some good-sized chips of dilithium that we had missed. We added them to the bag of dilithium crystals that was left behind when Neelix and Larson were transported up to Voyager. You might want to beam that up. There are some leaves that Kes might want to plant in the hydroponics bay, too. They made a pretty good drink."

"Of course, Tom," she said kindly. "Is there anything else you would want from down there?"

"No, Captain. Everything I want is up here now."

Kes put out her hand and grabbed one of his. Tom returned a feeble smile to her before going behind a screen to dress.

"Well, then, is someone going to clean up that mess over there? It's extremely unsanitary to have all that dried vegetation in here," complained the EMH.

"I'll send someone in, Doctor." The captain looked at the bed of straw as she left Sickbay. 'What tales that hay could tell,' she thought sadly.

B'Elanna stalked out of her bathroom, dressed in a terry robe and worrying her hair with a terrycloth towel. Try as she might, she could not remove the sensation of being dirty. Her humiliation was complete. Chell, Dalby, Henley, Golwat. Old gossips, the lot of them. She would never be able to show herself outside of her quarters again without someone sniggering behind her back.

"Go away," she yelled out to whoever was already at the door of her quarters, no doubt to gloat and/or to pry.

"It's me, Tom. The Doctor sent me to . . . ."

"I don't want to talk to you, Paris. Ever again."

"B'Elanna, it's going to be even worse for us if someone comes by now with me outside your door. Please let me in, B'Elanna, we need to talk."

She did not want to talk to him, but he was right. Having him hover outside of her door all day would leave them open to even more rumors if anyone saw him. "Enter."

He walked in haltingly. From the strand of straw sticking in his hair behind his ear and the beard still on his face, she could tell he had not gone back to his own quarters yet. He was the one person who could come into her quarters now who would not be prying or gloating about what had happened; and they did have to talk.

"I'm sorry I hit you. Did I do any damage?"

"Just a broken clavicle. The Doctor fixed me up. He said that if it was our wedding night, it would even be good luck." His attempt at humor must have sounded weak even to him, as he was having a difficult trying to smile.

"I am sorry, Tom. I just got so angry at all of them looking at us like that, the way we were . . . undressed, like that." She closed her eyes. "You know what they are going to be saying to everyone. By the time they're finished, everyone will have heard we were having sex in the middle of Sickbay!"

"B'Elanna, we knew that they were assuming that we were doing . . . what we were doing. It'll blow over. Everything does, eventually."

"I don't care that they were assuming that we were sleeping together! As long as they couldn't prove it, we could ignore the whole thing! I can't stand the idea of being the jokes of Voyager, can you?"

"So, I have the solution. Marry me. No one is very interested in the sex lives of married people, only the participants. It's expected - boring, even. The whole thing will die out in no time. And then the broken collarbone will be good luck for us."

"Don't be ridiculous, Paris. Us, married?"

"We seemed to get along pretty well down there on Tantrum IV, B'Elanna. That's, uh, what they called the planet."

"We were alone, Paris. There was hardly anything to fight about."

"If we could get along down there, doing what we had to in order to survive and supporting each other when our lives were at stake, I should think we would have a pretty good shot at being happy here on Voyager."

"Don't be absurd." She paced around her quarters, her anger building. "What are we going to say, Paris? They'll never let this go."

His mouth thinned to a grim line. "Oh, I'm sure you can think of something to tell them, Lieutenant. How about, 'It was a matter of survival, that's all. I'd do anything to survive, even sleep with Tom Paris.' Plenty of people will believe you," he said, bitterly.

Her temper flared. "Is that what you're going to say? I'd even sleep with Torres?"

"I don't plan on saying anything at all, B'Elanna. It isn't anyone's business but ours. And I guess, maybe Captain Janeway's and the Doctor's, but they already know what they need to know about it. I love you, B'Elanna. I said that down there on the planet, but I don't think you realize how much I meant it. The last thing I'm going to do is cheapen the best experience I ever had by telling jokes about it, especially since I'd be lying if I said it was anything but a fantasy come true." He looked down at the floor, as if to gather his courage, and said, "B'Elanna, I really do love you. Anything you want from me, I'll do. And I am asking you to marry me - not just because of Klingon custom, but because I really want to marry you."

Tom walked over to B'Elanna, hoping he could calm her down. Lifting his arms, he tried to put them around her, but B'Elanna was in a dangerous mood. She would not be comforted and slapped his hands away, yelling "Go away, Paris!"

Seeing it was a lost cause, Tom headed for the door, leaving the device he was carrying on her table as he passed it. "Fine, then, if that's the way you want it, I wouldn't dream of bothering you anymore. Here's the medical scanner, Lt. Torres. Either take the readings yourself, or go to Sickbay and have the Doctor do it, but one way or the other, it has to be done. The Doctor needs the information for his records."

When Tom reached the door, he hesitated as he was about to leave. Turning his body to look at her from over his shoulder, he said, wistfully, "And B'Elanna, if you ever change your mind about my . . . what I just said, you know how to find me."

Her back was to him. When she did not turn around, Tom faced reality and walked out the door.