She grabbed at the bed, flailed wildly around for something to hang onto and was rewarded with a strong wrist to grasp. But for that hand, she was lost in a nightmare of stretch, strain, pant and gasp, of a body that was not hers, that responded to primal urgings. The comforting hand, the reassuring voice were part of it and apart from it. The rhythm increased, unbearable, constant, exhausting, and then, wrenched by a terrible spasm, her body arched. She was sure she had been torn apart.

The pain was gone. Sweat dripped into her eyes. She felt almost lifeless, certainly weightless but… serene, strangely enough. Her legs were spread wide, the thigh muscles ached, her vagina throbbed, and all pain was replaced by the languor of exhaustion. She became conscious of movement within the room, of a harsh breathing, a wet splat, and then the tiny gasp as infant lungs sucked in air and complained mewlingly.

She raised herself on her elbow, one hand reaching for the sound.

"Roy?" She dashed sweat and damp hair from her eyes.

Roy's back was to her. When he turned, she was startled to see a surgical mask across his face, the translucence of plastic gloves high up his muscled forearms. And, dangling from his left hand, a tiny, armwaving inverted form, the cord still attaching it to her.

"Oh, God, Roy, give him to me."

Roy's eyes were full of tears as he laid the child on her belly.

"I have delivered my son," Roy said in the gentlest voice. "Don't touch him," he added, knicking her hand away with the bare part of his forearm. "You're not sterile."

"He's mine, too," she protested, but did not reach out.

She watched as Roy deftly tied on the umbilical cord, swabbed the child's mouth, painted his eyes. As he tenderly oiled the reddish skin, Claire craned her neck to glimpse with greedy eyes at the perfection of the tiny form.

And the baby was perfect, from the delicate kicking feet to the twitching fists. His head bones were still pointed, but there was a fineness about the angrily screwed features. Despite the unconventionality of his birth, he was alive and obviously healthy. She did not protest when Roy swathed the child in a receiving blanket and laid him in the portable crib that he pushed gently to one side of the bed.

"Now, you." Again all emotion was leached from his voice.

With the heel of his hand, he pressed into her flattened belly. She screamed for the pain of it and was seized, to her horror, with another contraction that brought a flood of tears to her eyes.

"You leave me alone!" she cried, feebly batting at his arms.

"The afterbirth!"

And it was delivered.

Utterly exhausted, she lay back. She felt but did not move as he sewed the torn skin of her, only vaguely wondering that he knew how. She was too weary to help as he cleaned her, changed the soiled sheets. She was only grateful that the pain and the shame were over as he covered her tightly bound body with a light blanket. She could hear the baby snuffling somewhere in the room and his continuing vigor was more reassuring than anything else. She felt herself drifting off into sleep and tried to fight it. She must stay awake. She couldn't afford to sleep. He might try to leave her now he had the child he had wanted so desperately.

And that thought stuck in her mind. The child Roy wanted so desperately was born. That was why he had acted so rashly. His child. His child! She had, after all, and however deviously, become the mother of his child.

A tiny voice, insistent and undeniable for all its lack of volume, roused her. She felt hands turn back the covers that lay so comfortingly around her. She felt her upper body lifted, supported with pillows. Drowsily, she evaded full consciousness until she felt her arm crooked, felt the scrape of linen against her skin, the warmth of a small rounded form, hands against her right nipple, the coolness of a wet sponge, then the fumbling of small wet lips and the incredible pleasurable pain caused by a suckling child.

She opened her eyes to the dim light. Roy was sitting on the edge of her bed, his hand securing her lax hold on the child. She was fully aware in that instant, aware and awake. She glanced down at the tiny face, eyes tight, lips working instinctively for the nourishment she could feel it drawing from her breast.

Roy did not remove his hand, yet it was not as if he did not trust Claire. And suddenly she understood all that must have been driving him since she had blithely announced her desire to have his child first. She had taken him, of them all, by surprise. She had astounded and startled him. She had given him a hope,

II? a promise that Roy Beach had never even considered, given the circumstances of his sexuality. She had given him the child of his own flesh, yet she had not soiled him with her femininity.

She understood now why he had been unwilling to trust anyone but himself with the responsibility of delivering his child.

The pressure in her other breast was painful. She disengaged the nipple from the searching, protesting mouth and quickly shifted the babe, taking a sensuous delight in the tug and pull of the eager lips as they fastened on the new food source.

Then she looked up at Roy. She smiled at him as their eyes met. She felt that she saw directly into his heart and soul for the first time in their long association. With her free hand, she reached for his and placed it on their son.

"I called Chess, and told him where you are. He said Ellyot made him understand."

Claire tried to tell him with her eyes that she did, too, but all she could say was, "Does he plan to come here?"

There was a quick start in Roy's body and his eyes plowed deep into hers as if he, too, had to know her heart, at least this once.

"It would be more peaceful," she added, holding onto his gaze, "to have the first few days alone, if you can stand it."

"If I can stand it…"

Claire had to close her eyes against the look of intense joy, of almost painful jubilation in Roy's face. She felt him lean toward her, across the child, so that the baby kicked against the constriction. She felt his lips on hers, her body responding unreasonably to his benediction.

When she opened her eyes again, he was smiling down at the babe with untroubled pride and affection.

And that was how it must be forever, Claire reflected and deliberately put aside that brief, tantalizing glimpse of the forbidden paradise.

"Weather on Welladay" stands alone. Judy-Lynn del Rey when she was Galaxy Magazine's energetic Gal Friday'Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday, gave me a future cover for the magazine around which to write a story. Not as easy as it might seem. A helicopter and a tall man stood among what looked like Christmas-tree decorations on the deck of a great whaleboat. Surrounded by lots of water! So pick up the ball and throw it, because you have to account for every element in that cover somewhere in your story.

It was a mystery to me how to do it, so I made the story a mystery.