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en, I'm awfully tired," Moira complained piteously, late that night.

"Let's just go over it once more. There has to be some way. He still isn't talking to you?"

"I haven't felt anything from him for the last twenty minutes. I think he's asleep."

"All right, let's suppose he isn't going to listen to reason—"

"I think we'd better."

Len made an incoherent noise. "Well, okay. I still don't see why we can't write the last chapter ourselves. It'd only be a few pages."

"Go ahead and try."

"Not me. You've done a little writing. Damned good, too. And if you're so sure all the clues are there—Look, if you say you can't do it, all right, we'll hire somebody. A professional writer. It happens all the time. Thorne Smith's last novel—"

"It wasn't Thorne Smith's and it wasn't a novel," she said dogmatically.

"But it sold. What one writer starts, another can finish."

"Nobody ever finished The Mystery of Edwin Drood."

"Oh, hell."

"Len, it's impossible. It is! Let me finish—if you're thinking we could have somebody rewrite the last part Leo did—"

"Yeah, I just thought of that."

"—even that wouldn't do any good. You'd have to go all the way back, almost to page one. It would be another story when you got through. Let's go to bed."

"Moy, do you remember when we used to worry about the law of opposites?"

"Mm?"

"The law of opposites. When we used to be afraid the kid would turn out to be a pick-and-shovel man with a pointy head."

"Uh. Mm."

He turned. Moira was standing with one hand on her belly and the other behind her back. She looked as if she were about to start practicing a low bow and doubted she could make it.

"What's the matter now?" he asked.

"Pain in the small of my back."

"Bad one?"

"No...."

"Belly hurt, too?"

She frowned. "Don't be foolish. I'm feeling for the contraction. There it comes."

"The—but you just said the small of your back."

"Where do you think labor pains usually start?"