He saw that her suitcase had shoved all his trays of slips over to one side of the pilot berth.They were for a book he was working on and one of the four long card-catalog-type trays wasby 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 adjusted the sliding rest inside each tray so that it was tight against the slipsand they couldn't fall out. Then he carefully pushed the trays back into a safer place in therear of the berth. Then he went back and sat down again.It would actually be easier to lose the boat than it would be to lose those slips. There wereabout eleven thousand of them. They'd grown out of almost four years of organizing andreorganizing and reorganizing so many times he'd become dizzy trying to fit them all together.He'd just about given up.
Worry about dropping a tray of slips and needing to reorganize them.