In six months Lindy was ready to stay forever. She was weary of sailing; she dreaded the day they must leave. But Mitch was getting bored.

Mitch sat at the salon table, one fan breathing down his bare neck and another, across the cabin, pointed at his face. On the opposite bunk lay Lindy, reading a paperback. Before him sat his portable typewriter, charged with paper. Stacked neatly on its left were a dozen sheets of plain bond, to be the quota for today. Face down on its right lay fifty pages of Impossible Dream, a chronicle of their voyage. He had begun it to placate his conscience for six months’ idleness. He had been shooting pictures for it since the start of the cruise. He was tired of that, and of the writing too.

The first fifty pages had got them as far as Lindy’s illness in Taio Hae Bay. Now Linda Lee seemed destined to lie anchored on the page forever, with the other boats frozen in limbo under the crags and Lindy in the hospital. He had not written a word in the last three days. It was simply too damn hot. He had no incentive, and he would rather be sailing. It was time to move on, but Lindy liked life along the quay and he had no heart to prod her loose.

He rattled off a sentence. His typing sounded impressively professional in the tiny cabin, but two out of three yachtsmen along the seawall seemed to be writing the same sort of thing. He stopped and read. "The no-noes descended on the hospital room in an invisible, lethal cloud; we would not know for eight hours just how lethal..."

Crap! Just crap! He ripped out the sheet. If he knew who might publish it, if he needed the money, if he even knew for sure that someone other than he and Lindy would ever read it, he was sure he could go on. He probably wouldn’t.

Still, the world was stuffed with armchair adventurers, thirsting for word from Paradise. Pan-Am flew them in, the affluent ones, every day, by the score, a thousand bucks a head round-trip. The quay above him was doubtless crowded with them this very moment. There had to be a market, in the dreamers left at home, if only in Yachting Magazine.

He began to feed in another sheet. Its whiteness depressed him. How did you start? There were no guideposts, rules of procedure, no prior decisions. And everything he wrote read like plagiarism. Reducing the color around him to words was turning it all black and white; even freezing the locals in his camera was a species of murder or, at least, crass. Every time he pressed the shutter he felt like a potbellied tourist. He should be heading west, away from the air routes, into the real Pacific.