Lifeguards

(dedicated to my dear friend Martina, who gave me most of the plot!)

Alone, alone, all alone

Alone on a wide, wide sea

And never a saint took pity on

My soul in agony.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

The castaways watched in horror as the disarmed missile sped past them into the lagoon with Gilligan trapped on board. Their frantic, incoherent cries all ran together under the rocket's roar.

"He's still in there, that boy!"

"He never had a chance to get out!"

The missile shot round the bend in the lagoon and out towards the open sea.

Gilligan had fallen over and been knocked unconscious during the mad ride through the jungle. Now as he stirred, groaning, he groped wildly for a handhold as his steel prison soared up a great height, standing almost perpendicular, and then tumbled headlong down, down, as though on a roller coaster. Nauseous and frantic, he saw water pouring in the sides of the open hatchway.

"Aaagh!" Gilligan crawled towards the hatchway and desperately launched himself through. He slipped against the missile's slippery steel hull and fell into the blue green trough of an enormous ocean swell. The empty missile bobbed and toppled at the huge crest of the swell, and then vanished over the other side. Gilligan looked around and blanched with horror. He could see no island.

Instead, he was surrounded on all sides by colossal moving mountains of water. They rolled and heaved and pitched at impossible heights, their primordial strength dwarfing Gilligan's tiny frame. Instinctively he plunged forward in a blind panic, desperate to reach one of the mighty crests and catch a glimpse of land. With a Herculean effort he tried to fight his way to the top of a towering blue-green wall, but it mocked him in its vastness. Again and again he tried, but the crests swept over his head, dark and rumbling. Again and again he emerged, gasping and blinking, only to fall back into a nightmare world of massive waves and vast blue chasms. The wind howled through them in a terrible, ghostly whisper, chilling him and mocking at his helplessness. There was no knowing in which direction to go.

Lost in panic, Gilligan began to scream. "Skipper! Skipper, help me! Where are you?"

And somehow a familiar, booming voice echoed in his memory. "Now hear this! Seaman Recruit Gilligan!"

"Aye aye, sir!" Gilligan gasped, hand momentarily snapping up in a salute, before it fell back to plash desperately at the water.

"This is a review of the emergency swimming instructions from your Navy Third Class Swim Test! In the event our destroyer is ever sunk by enemy fire, this training could save your life!"

And it all came back to Gilligan: the grey deck of the destroyer, his shipmates in their snowy white bell-bottoms and tunics, and the tall, burly bear of a man in a khaki uniform who was to become his dearest friend. "Seaman Recruit Gilligan! What do you do if you are adrift at sea without a flotation device?"

Gilligan answered aloud, into the comforting past. "Swim for shore, sir!"

The Jonas Grumby of Gilligan's memory rolled his eyes. "Of course you do! But shore may be a long way off, boy! How do you keep from becoming too tired to reach it?"

Gilligan answered almost without thinking. "Tread water, sir! Conserve energy, sir!"

"That's right!" The vision began to fade into the monstrous present, but the voice called one last time, "Now don't let me catch you panicking again – and that's an order!"

And again he was ringed by massive waves that towered above, threatening to engulf him. Gilligan took a deep breath and fought down the impulse to swim like a madman. Instead he swam in smooth strokes, trying to ride the rhythm of the waves. "Aye aye, Skipper! I won't panic again – I promise!"

"I see him! He's alive!"

High on the top of one of the island's leafy green hills, the castaways of the Minnow stood frantically grouped around the bamboo telescope and tripod. The wind whipped the tropical foliage into a wild dance and blew the girls' hair around their faces. The Skipper, trying to hold the telescope steady, could barely steady his own trembling hands.

"Are you sure, Skipper?" cried Mary Ann.

"Thank goodness for that red shirt! Yes, it's him all right! He got out of the missile in time!"

"Is he close enough to swim back to the island?" asked the Professor, shading his eyes and squinting fiercely into the swells.

"Yes – ep – it's an awfully long way out. But my little buddy's a good swimmer. He was one of the best on our whole destroyer…" the Skipper's voice caught at how elegiac his comment sounded. "Hang in there, little buddy! Now if he only—oh, no!" The Skipper looked blankly up from the telescope, his face gone grey.

"What is it, Skipper?" Without ceremony the Professor pushed him out of the way and bent to the telescope. The Skipper stared out at the sea, clenching his hands in helplessness. When the Professor finally captured the image of the young first mate, he too exclaimed in dismay.

"What is it, Professor?" the others cried.

"Gilligan can't see the island. The swells are too big! He's going the wrong way! He's swimming straight out to sea!"

With a strength born of desperation the Skipper turned and began ripping up young trees and tearing down vines. He knelt on the ground, fumbling with the trunks in an attempt to lash them together.

The Professor stared at him. "Skipper, what are you doing?"

"I'm going to make a raft and go and get my little buddy!"

"Skipper, are you out of your mind? It's useless! You'll never reach him in time!"

The Skipper was yanking the vines so hard he nearly snapped them in two. "I am not going to stand here and watch him die out there!"

"Neither are we, Skipper! But let's do something that will actually help him, otherwise he's going to run out of time!"

The Skipper flung down the vines and trunks with a curse. "What, Professor? What can we do?"

The Professor stared out to sea. "Attract his attention somehow! You said he's a strong swimmer! He can reach us if he knows where we are!"

"But how can we get his attention?" cried Ginger. "Gilligan accidentally blew up all of our signal flares months ago!"

"A fire!" cried Mary Ann. "We'll send up a smoke signal! He should be able to see that, even above all those waves!"

"That's it!" cried the Skipper. He caught Mary Ann up in the air and kissed her. "Little sweetheart, you're a genius! The way he's tossing about, even if he is aimed the wrong way he should be able to see it sometime!"

"Absolutely!" said the Professor. "And girls, you two run back to camp and bring our conch shells. That'll be our plan B, just in case. If we can't make him see us, we'll make him hear us!"As the two young women turned and fled down the hill, the Professor turned to the Howells. "Mr. Howell, we need fuel for the fire. Mrs. Howell, you man the telescope. Keep us informed of Gilligan's progress!"

The danger to Gilligan had jolted the Howells out of their usual distaste for manual labour. "Aye aye, Professor," they both chorused. Mrs. Howell bent to the telescope, adjusting the lens for her poorer vision. Meanwhile, the three men

dashed about gathering branches, bamboo, leaves and cones and throwing them on an ever growing pile. At last, when it had reached a height of four feet, the Professor set it alight. It smoldered briefly, snuffling in the wind, and then began to catch and crackle, sending threads of white smoke drifting into the air.

"Come on, little buddy!" cried the Skipper, waving his cap desperately in the air.

Mrs. Howell waved her handkerchief. "We're over here, dear boy! Keep swimming!"