The trial date was postponed. Mitch fell off his Honda, hillclimbing with his son and the local teenagers. He burned his calf and sprained a wrist, precipitating a hassle with Lindy, but refused to sell the bike.

The trial date was reset again. Their German shepherd, the soul of patience, snapped at a newsboy and had to be checked for rabies. Lindy’s brother and his wife had a baby girl.

The trial date was firmed. His partner Bernie hired a receptionist who tried to seduce Mitch and then settled for Bernie. Her typing was terrible. Her diction was worse. They wanted to fire her and flipped to see who would do it. Bernie lost, and refused anyway. They carried her on the payroll until she got married and left.

With the trial a month off, Mitch began to awaken earlier and earlier every morning. He had never had insomnia before. He lay staring at the ceiling, attacked by nameless apprehensions that he and Lindy began to call “the wamblies.” Even sex didn’t help. He was suddenly crummy in bed. He couldn’t understand it. Lindy remained warm and eager and never complained, though she seldom had orgasms any more. He resolved, after the trial, to ask her about it and maybe see an MD. If there were any doctors who would take him, once they won.

Suddenly they were into the week before the trial. The defendents, to his surprise, seemed to want to take it to the wire. The tide of Mitch’s own affairs ran suddenly on a particularly tight schedule, as if the benevolent programmer who seemed at times to have written his life had grown impatient and speeded the tape.

Saturday, with the trial scheduled Monday, the red ketch had sailed into his life. He and Lindy had been crewing with her brother on her father’s sloop in San Francisco Bay. Puffy clouds scampered above the Bridge, burgees and pennants snapped in a force-four wind, the racing fleet drove under full sail toward the starting line.

The red ketch was a double-ended Atkins of brutal grace and beauty. She was low-slung, compact, and curiously evocative. In case he might not notice her, the celestial programmer apparently impelled his father-in-law to very nearly ram her amidships.

The ketch had been cutting scornfully through a mob of competitors jostling for the upwind end of the line. She was no racer. She was bound on business of her own, on a starboard tack, secure in her right-of-way. Lindy’s father, cutting toward the start, had muttered something and driven obstinately onward. In his pre-start fever, he would have splattered them all on the plates of the Queen Mary before he gave an inch.

Lindy, manning the jibsheet, saw the threat and groaned. Her brother Bobby, crouched with his curls blowing at the windward winch, cringed. Mitch, holding a stopwatch, squinted over a stanchion to get a quick bearing. The bearing did not change.