Free Crompton Divided by Robert Sheckley Page A

was that?’
    ‘I wanted to be a lifeguard at the Aaia Country Club. I’ve always envied and admired lifeguards. They get all the action. It’s such a beautiful job. There you are, all alone above the crowd, wearing nothing but trunks, sandals, and a white pith helmet. And of course you’ve got a shiny brass whistle around your neck! Naturally you get a fantastic tan. And the action? A lifeguard is a seminaked authority figure as well as a symbol of summer sensuality. I attained that job in my seventeenth year, after working as busboy and waiter. It was really fantastic.’
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘One of those things. One day, after I held the job for two years, there was an emergency. Somebody was in trouble out beyond the marker buoys. I got in my boat and rowed out. It was a very fat woman from Earth. I tried to get her into the boat, but she panicked and capsized me. I struggled with her, trying to tow her to the overturned boat, begging her to keep still while I got us back to shore. But she was out of her head crazy with hysteria and she had a stranglehold around my neck. I realized that the only thing I could do was clip her one on the jaw and tow her in like a stranded whale. Before I could do that, however, she clipped me – a roundhouse right with her three hundred-odd pounds of berserk strength behind it. I went out like a light. Luckily, people had noticed my difficulties and sent out another boat. It was just one of those things that could happen to anybody.’
    ‘But the management didn’t see it that way?’
    ‘They accused me of not knowing how to swim! If you can believe that! Me, who had been their lifeguard for two years!’
    ‘Surely you could prove to them your competence in that department?’
    ‘Frankly, I wouldn’t lower myself to it. If that was what they thought of me, to hell with them. I resigned my position.’
    ‘What did you do then?’ Crompton asked.
    ‘I considered my situation.’
    ‘For how long?’
    ‘About a year.’
    ‘How did you live during that time?’
    ‘Fortunately I had a sponsor – Miss Suzy Gretsch. That was the woman who had cost me my job. She was grateful to me for having saved her life –’
    ‘But you hadn’t saved her life!’
    ‘In her opinion, I had. She was a generous woman, with a certain flair for sexuality belied by her ungainly body. She was the first person to find artistic talent in me, and to wish to develop it.’
    ‘What artistic talent did she find?’
    ‘I’ve always had a facility for sketching quick caricatures. She made me see that I had serious talent there, one worthy of development. Under her sponsorship I enrolled in art school.’
    ‘You were living with her at the time?’
    ‘Of course. She was so lonely, poor thing. It was the least I could do for her. And it was really quite pleasant. I gave that woman the best time she ever had in her life. The small sums that I required for my clothing and odds and ends were nothing to her. We were quite devoted to each other. She even wanted to marry me.
    ‘So what happened?’
    ‘Poor Suzy! She became pathologically, irrationally jealous.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘She had the silly suspicion that I was playing around with the models at art class.’
    ‘Were you?’
    ‘Well, of course. But I was doing it all so cleverly that she could never find out a thing. And since she had no real evidence, her jealousy was irrational. All might still have been well if she hadn’t hired that detective. He couldn’t find anything really incriminating, either; but to save his reputation, he framed me. He bribed three models to swear that they had had relationships with me, singly, ensemble , and with others. The damnable thing was that it was true, but he hadn’t caught me at it. Still, the technical fact of it having actually happened prevented me from showing Suzy that I had been framed. … It resulted in quite a nasty scene, as you can imagine. I gave her back her ankle bracelet and left her