He guessed it couldn’t beso bad, though. Just a couple of days into Manhattan and then she would begone. No harm done.

He saw that her suitcasehad shoved all his trays of slips over to one side of the pilot berth. Theywere for a book he was working on and one of the four long card-catalog-typetrays was by an edge where it could fall off. That’s all he needed, he thought,about three thousand four-by-six slips of note pad paper all over the floor.

He got up and adjustedthe sliding rest inside each tray so that it was tight against the slips andthey couldn’t fall out. Then he carefully pushed the trays back into a saferplace in the rear of the berth. Then he went back and sat down again.

It would actually beeasier to lose the boat than it would be to lose those slips. There were abouteleven thousand of them. They’d grown out of almost four years of organizingand reorganizing and reorganizing so many times he’d become dizzy trying to fitthem all together. He’d just about given up.

Their overall subject hecalled a Metaphysics of Quality, or sometimes a Metaphysics of Value, orsometimes just MOQ to save time.

The buildings out thereon shore were in one world and these slips were in another. This slip-worldwas quite a world and he’d almost lost it once because he hadn’t written any ofit down and incidents came along that had destroyed his memory of it. Now hehad reconstructed what seemed like most of it on these slips and he didn’t wantto lose it again.

But maybe it was a goodthing that he had lost it because now, in the reconstruction of it, all sortsof new material was flooding in — so much that his main task was to get itprocessed before it log-jammed his head into some kind of a block that hecouldn’t get out of. Now the main purpose of the slips was not to help himremember anything. It was to help him to forget it. That sounded contradictorybut the purpose was to keep his head empty, to put all his ideas of the pastfour years on that pilot berth where he didn’t have to think of them. That waswhat he wanted.