"You might," The Doctor ventured slowly, "take a vacation."

I giggled. A vacation felt better already. But a cure?

"We would have to act quickly. But I can get you out of this orbit, shift you to a much more eccentric ellipse. You'd start by diving in toward the sun, perhaps to about Mercury's orbit. This should burn off the surface infestation in a few months, along with most everything else on your skin. Then you swing a billion miles out past Saturn and freeze anything that might have survived the heat. Three orbits like that and you'll be ready for a nice comfortable circle again."

I could feel it already, that warmth from Sol growing as I dive, the sluggishness from the growing heat, with no relief as I come screaming in to searing nuclear fire that would incinerate the damned bugs, sear every living thing on me, boiling away much of my precious oceans, leaving me a scorched hunk of rock like my poor naked moon.

And I knew it would be far worse than anything my imagination could conjure.

The best part was that it would be over in a few months. Then all I could look forward to was a long, achingly cold winter with little to do but slow down as I got farther from Sol and listen to Saturn prattle about her fancy rings.

"I guess that would kill off just about everything," I said.

The Doctor's voice returned slowly. "Yes. You'd be as lifeless as some of your brother planets. But you'd keep some of your atmosphere. Some life could return in just a few thousand years, but it would take you millions more years to regenerate complex life and return you to healthy vitality.

"But I must warn you that once your condition is the same as it was a billion years ago, that eventually something similar could start the process all over again."

I thought of the work I had done in the past billion years, of the place I made for these lives that I spawned, these incredible parasites that had the wherewithal to rape me as they pleased. And I thought of these astonishing creatures, born of my water, soil and air, who had dared to venture even beyond that.

"These humans, I take it, have intelligence?"

The Doctor grunted. "In a manner of speaking."

"Then why don't we just ask them to leave?"

I heard The Doctor chuckle, with the same warm tone that made it so easy for me to trust him. I felt his smile.

"Why not?" he said. "But they have nowhere to go. It is you who sustains them."

"And they who show such undying gratitude." I sobbed. A tidal wave crashed into my Asian shores. "Do you suppose we could make a deal with them?"

It was The Doctor's turn to sigh. "It may be our only hope."

Joe Gold is a freelance writer in San Francisco. He is at times a journalist, a technology marketing strategist, advertising copywriter, broadcast producer, teacher and father of two grown children. He lived for 29 years in Tucson, both soaking up the culture and letting the sun get to his head. He launched his own ad agency, taught college marketing and yes, he was a manager at the Lamp Post Motel.