The Professor sat back some time later, pushing his books slightly away from him on the small table, and Skipper was at his side immediately. Skipper had been pacing back and forth between Gilligan and the Professor for the last hour. "Do you have anything, Professor?" he demanded.

"Maybe." The Professor looked around. Ginger and Mary Ann were seated on either side of the bed, talking to Gilligan and, at the moment, singing to him. The Howells were out taking a walk and getting a few minutes of respite and comfort; Mrs. Howell had broken down in tears a little while ago, and her husband had suggested with that gentleness that belied his crusty reputation that they take a break. Professor nodded toward the chair on the other side of the table. "Sit down, Skipper." Skipper obeyed, and he dropped his voice. "I don't really want to get everybody's hopes up when I can't do anything for several more hours yet."

"Do what?" Skipper asked, his own bass growl much softer than usual.

"Apparently, you can counteract the effects of curare with an anticholinesterase inhibitor."

Skipper frowned. "A what?"

"Never mind. The thing is, there are several plant sources of it. The best one is a herb from China, so it's not around here. But some of the species of senna have anticholinesterase properties, and senna does sometimes grow in the Pacific Islands. The trouble is, we will have to be very sure to get only one of those specific types, and it's dark out in the jungle. If I weren't afraid of picking the wrong thing, I'd go out with a torch anyway, but I need full daylight and a close examination to be sure I was harvesting the right plant."

Skipper nodded. "Of course you can't go until daylight. It's dangerous out there at night, Professor. There's the quicksand, for one. All sorts of other things. None of us need to be out there at night." He looked back over to Gilligan. "I just hope he stays stable."

"Fortunately, he seems to be extremely stable so far. Not good, but stable." The Professor sighed and ran a hand over his eyes. "It's the only thing I can find in the books that might help. Actually, there are several foods that have anticholinesterase qualities, such as potatoes. Coffee is also a good one. However, giving him anything orally at the moment would almost certainly lead to aspiration with his reflexes so suppressed. Causing pneumonia isn't going to help him any."

Skipper considered. "Could you possibly inject somebody with coffee?"

The Professor shook his head. "Very bad idea. Actually, patients have been killed a few times in hospitals by accidental injection with IV coffee. It isn't healthy by the direct route. Of course, there's also the fact that what we have isn't technically coffee, just the closest approximation we've been able to come up with through experimentation. That adds yet another unknown into the equation. I'm not about to inject him with proxy coffee." He sighed again. "Hopefully he will stay stable through the night, and I can go out looking for senna in the morning."

"Or he'll wake up and you won't need to," Skipper suggested.

"Oh, I'd definitely prefer that option more than anything." He looked back over at Gilligan, still lying motionless as the two women sang to him.

"This wasn't your fault, Professor," Skipper reassured him again. "You couldn't know he'd react differently to it. This was an accident."

"No, it wasn't." The Professor's voice was still soft but intense, full of all the frustration he felt at the moment. "Skipper, I knowingly injected a man with a deadly poison. That wasn't an accident; it was deliberate. If I did have a medical license, which I don't, I ought to lose it if a case like this came up before the medical board."

"What else could we have done? You had no choice, Professor."

"We could have fought the natives, like we were planning to at first."

Skipper gave an exasperated smile. "You know good and well Gilligan wouldn't have let us do that once he knew we were planning to. He probably would have walked straight into the natives' camp and given himself up."

"Yes, he probably would." The Professor closed his books. "I just feel so helpless. I never trained for this situation."

"I think I know how you feel," the Skipper replied. "I get so frustrated myself at times, thinking about the shipwreck. All of you, including him, were my responsibility. We shouldn't even be here. And everything that I try to do to get us rescued always backfires." He looked over at his Little Buddy. "And to be honest, not all of those failures are his fault."

"I know. The phosphorescent dye, for instance. I set a bowl down beside him without saying what it was and then even told him to keep eating. He was hardly to blame for obeying me. Also the glue. It's not his fault that didn't work."

"Yes." Skipper took off his hat, twisting it in his hands again. "I've been a lot harder on him since we've been here, taking out my frustration. I can hardly do that on the passengers. But a lot of it is just feeling helpless because we're trapped here, and I feel like I've let you all down. I ought to be nicer to him."

"We all should," the Professor agreed.

"Yes. But even though I haven't been fair to him since we've been here, I've still never broken my promise to him. There's at least that."

"What promise?" the Professor asked.

Skipper jumped, caught thinking out loud. "I -" He looked over at the girls, who still were totally focused on Gilligan, and dropped his voice even lower. "Do you know how Gilligan and I met?"

"In the Navy, right?"

Skipper nodded. "He was a recruit. All heart and intentions, but he would trip over things, you know. He loses track of where his body is sometimes, and it's worse the harder he's trying."

"He definitely has poor proprioception," the Professor agreed, "and yes, it gets worse when he's nervous. But what promise?"

"One day the recruits were training, and he tangled up his feet and totally fell over, knocking into some ropes and knocking them all askew. I'll admit, I was mad. It had been a rough day already, nothing to do with him, and that was the last straw. I reached down and jerked him straight up onto his feet, and I wasn't being gentle about it. I was ready to lay into him."

Skipper paused for a moment, looking back over at his best friend. The Professor waited this time, and Skipper continued after the silence had lengthened. "The expression on his face, in his eyes, stopped me in my tracks. In that moment, the kid was scared, and I don't mean scared like a recruit is when he's about to get dressed down by the chief. He was honestly terrified that I was about to hurt him, physically or - or even in other ways."

The Professor felt his blood run cold. "You mean, somebody had -"

"Right. It actually distracted me from what I'd been planning to do, which was just chew him out and scare him a little. But not like that. I never meant to scare him like that. I wound up just continuing the drill, but I told him to come see me after we got off duty. I wanted to make sure that - well, that whoever was or had mistreated him wasn't still actively doing it on the ship, that it was something in the past. Being tough on recruits is one thing, but nobody should have to go through - well, anyway, Gilligan reported as ordered, and I tried to talk to him. Mind you, I didn't get the whole story from him that night. He didn't know me that well yet. But I did try to reassure him. I made him a promise that night. I told him that I do have a short fuse, and I bluster and go off sometimes, and people expect the chief to chew out recruits now and then, but I assured him that I never would do anything more physically than just hit him with my cap."

The Professor straightened up, enlightened. "So that's -"

"Right. It doesn't really hurt." The Skipper reached across and whacked the Professor with his cap on the arm. The blow was startling, but painful, no. "I also told him that if anybody on my ship, anyone at all, was ever mistreating him either physically or - or worse, to come tell me, and I would deal with it. I've never forgotten his expression at that. Half hope, half disappointment. He said, 'You wouldn't believe me,' and I knew the way he said it that somebody else hadn't believed him. I promised him that I would. Absolutely gave him my word, as sincere as I could, trying to convince him he could trust me. Two weeks later, the little guy came to me and said that they wouldn't stop giving blanket parties to him." He stopped, seeing the Professor's look of confusion. "It's a type of hazing in the military. A blanket party is when the others pin somebody down in the barracks, put a blanket over him, and then hit him while holding him captive there."

The Professor shuddered. "Yeah," Skipper agreed. "Technically, it's not supposed to happen, but most people it does happen to are not going to report it. In fact, the others usually threaten worse things if you do report it. Nobody ever tried it with me, and I've never taken part in one, but yes, they do occur, and you can see where Gilligan would be an even bigger target than usual for bullies. He said he'd been through several and just putting up with it, but they were starting to do more than just hitting him and getting into touching him."

The Professor shook his head. "Poor Gilligan."

"That's another day I'll never forget, the look when I told him I believed him. He still hadn't been sure I would; he was just at the end of his rope putting up with it. When I did believe him and got mad at the others, you should have seen the little guy's face light up like a Christmas tree. I promised to put a stop to it, and that night, I waited outside the door of barracks and came in just as they were threatening him to get him warmed up before they started." Skipper gave a nod of satisfaction. "Gilligan never had any problems with any of his fellow recruits after that. I would have done a lot more than cap slap them, and they knew it. Nobody wanted to take me on. So, I took him under my wing after that, and he would have followed me around like a puppy dog if he could have. A few days later, that depth charge broke loose, and he saved my life. He got hurt in the process himself and was med boarded out of the Navy, and I retired at the same time and looked him up, because I still wasn't sure who else - originally, I mean - had been mistreating him, and I didn't want him to have to go back home if he didn't want to. He was pathetically relieved not to go back and to have another option, and I got the whole story from him eventually. I was trying not to push, but he had a nightmare one night, and he was so upset when he woke up that he talked to me."

"His father?" the Professor asked.

"No. Well, his father sure didn't help. It was an uncle. He'd been abusing Gilligan every way he could while the kid was a boy, and unfortunately, he lived close. Often volunteered to babysit." The Skipper's tone gave the word a whole different meaning. "He was around regularly. He threatened Gilligan, of course, to keep him quiet, but one day, Gilligan did get up the courage to tell his father."

"He didn't believe him," the Professor realized.

"Right. He thought he was making all of it up, and he actually punished Gilligan for telling lies. Made him promise to never breathe a word of that made-up story to his mother, because the uncle was one of her brothers, and he would just upset his mother with that tall tale. Gilligan's father wasn't technically abusive, but he was disappointed in his youngest, and he made no bones of that fact. Gilligan never tried telling anybody again. So that was the background he came from. He joined the Navy the first day he could, trying to escape home. And when I told him that day that I'd never beat him and that I would believe him if he told me about anything anybody else did, it was like seeing a whole new world. He was afraid to believe me, and he waited several days, but I'm glad he had the courage to actually come to me and give me a chance to prove I meant it after he hadn't been protected all his childhood."

Skipper wiped his eyes. "I didn't mean to get into all that, Professor. Don't tell the others."

"I won't. You can trust me." The Professor was fighting down his own anger at the family who had so completely let down such a sweet, gentle child. His anger against himself for the curare was forgotten temporarily against such larger and deliberate failures.

"He's like a son to me by now. I know I don't always act like it, but I love that boy."

"I know. He knows it, too." The Professor recalled all the times that Gilligan, when extremely agitated by something, would jump straight into Skipper's arms. At that moment, he was clearly finding comfort in the father, in the family, in the protection he had never received in his youth.

"I hope so. I am going to try to do better at not taking my frustrations out on him when he wakes up. If he wakes up."

"He will, Skipper," the Professor said with new iron behind it. "He's obviously a lot stronger than he looks. He'll come through this somehow. And at daylight, I'll go out looking for senna."