(An unsent letter from the Chief Medical Officer to the First Officer of the Enterprise.)

STARDATE: 4019.6

DEAR SPOCK, (How you will cringe at that salutation!)

The purpose of my writing this to you is that there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time.  I couldn’t tell you in person – I’d be too embarrassed.  And if you were an emotional being, you would be too.  That’s the point, I mean the crux, of what I wanted to say to you.

I know I’ve teased you a lot, grumbled about it, but the truth of the matter is, Spock, that I really do admire and envy your logical, non-emotional approach to life.  As a man of science, I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit that yours is a better way than ours.  We humans go charging off helter-skelter, guided by our feelings in every crisis we face, while you remain cool and unemotional, logically taking all the right actions.  Take, for instance, that time on Vaal’s planet.

I would never have been able to assimilate all the data, arrive at such a logical conclusion and take such an unemotional action as quickly as you did.  You saw that the thorns from that plant were aimed right at the Captain.  You realized that if Starfleet had so much invested in you, they must have even more invested in him, so logically he must be the more valuable one to save.  And you reasoned if you just shouted to him he may have delayed a second and the thorns would have still hit him.  So your only logical course of action was to remove him physically.  Completely unemotional action! I admire that!

And then there was that time on Janus VI when we didn’t know what kind of creature the Horta was.  All we knew was that it was killing our people.  But you, always the scientist, had pointed out to Jim that, if it were the last of its race, it would be a shame to kill it.  I remember even the Captain was worried that you might take an unnecessary risk to yourself to keep it alive.  So, I can appreciate the logic and reasoning it must have taken for you to completely reverse your thoughts when you learned the Captain was trapped alone in the tunnel “only ten feet away” from the creature.  Your unemotional, “You must kill it, Jim!” only serves as a tribute to your ability to correlate all the facts and arrive at so swift a decision.  My unbound compliments to you, Spock!’

Time and again, you have astounded us with your astute logic and taught us how efficient unemotionalism can be.  A Captain tortured by thoughts of a lost love would not be 100% effective, so the logical thing for you to do would be to touch his mind and cause him to “forget”.  I can understand that.  And how many times you’ve volunteered for hazardous duty because you’ve logically pointed out that a First Officer is more expendable than a Captain or Chief Medical Officer.  And of course, we all understood that you were motivated by pure logic the time you kidnapped Captain Pike, stole the Enterprise and headed for Talos IV without telling Captain Kirk, so that he wouldn’t be implicated.

I must admit, I stand in awe of your explanation when you lost the shuttlecraft Galileo.  You managed to save our lives by “logically reasoning that it was time for an emotional outburst.” Now, that was a gem!

And speaking of emotional outbursts, I really believed you were going to have one once.  The time you thought you had killed the Captain in the duel on Vulcan and then found out you hadn’t.  I had to drug him to get you both out alive.  I thought for a minute you were going to really let go, but then you very unemotionally explained it was merely your relief in learning that Starfleet had not lost a valuable officer—

In a Pig’s Eye!

Illogically Yours,

Leonard McCoy