The Power of the Nail

“Stop it, Margret.” That softly. Tired.

“No, I won’t stop it. There’s death all over this world, we’ll die here. This isn’t why I married you…not for this…not out here!”

“There isn’t ‘death all over this world’; stop being so damned melodramatic. That thing I burned, it probably hunts these little ones, it’s a natural thing. They probably have a way of escaping most of the time, but the mollok was drawn to the machinery vibration the same as they were, and they were…I don’t know…something like lulled, hypnotized, involved with vibration…and the thing was able to catch them. That’s the natural order, no more ‘death all over this world’ than it would be for a lion to bring down a gazelle on Earth.”

She stared at him. “I’m going to leave you, Bob.”

He turned away, looking up into the cold hard sky. When he spoke, he smiled. They had agreed on what that smile meant. There was that between them at least. Only…she had said—“Leaving?”

“Margret, we’re here for another sixteen months. The ship doesn’t swing back for pickup for another sixteen months. Now just how in the hell do you plan on leaving me?”

“When we get away from here.”

“Don’t talk stupid.”

“I mean it, Bob. I can’t stand this kind of life.”

“You knew what it would be like when you married me.”

“You never said we’d be in a place like out here.”

“I have to take the assignment I get, Margret.”

“I want a divorce.”

“Okay, okay dammit, you’ll get it, when we get off here.”

“I consider myself divorced right now.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Don’t come near me, Bob. I’ll do what I have to do to keep the situation workable, but don’t try to touch me.”

“Bed.”

“Don’t touch me, Bob. Not as long as you do this thing to me, and keep me out here.”

“Oh, for God’s—” he began, thinking he would never want to touch her again anyway.

“You can call the ship, it can pick us up early, you know that. Don’t lie to me.”

“Only for an emergency. And we don’t have one of those. Why the hell did you ever marry me?”

“I don’t know…now.”

“You thought I was going up in the Rank, didn’t you? You took a gamble, and it didn’t payoff, did it? Jesus Margret, Jesus Christ, what kind of a wom—”

She turned and walked away from him. Her back was very straight. The day suddenly grew cold. The Saquettes trembled toward the unheard sound of the buried machinery. Zagaramendo sat down in the grass, his head slumping forward, his thoughts tumbling and twisting.

“Jesus,” he said, softly.

In the ninth week he witnessed a reincarnation, and he understood why the number of Saquettes was stable. He also saw another attack by molloks, but the Saquettes burrowed into the soil and were safe. The only time they were caught was near the antenna of the buried machinery. There were now seven locations of buried machinery, and every week when he trekked out to check them, he found the locations littered with crushed and popped Saquettes. He ignored it.

And that week he tried to make love to his wife. Out of spite. And she pushed him away. His face flamed and he grabbed her by the hair, throwing her down on the floor of the cabin. They struggled back and forth across the floor, and then he yanked her up and hit her, very hard, just below the left ear. She lolled against his grip, gasping for air, her eyes glazed, and when he saw what he had done he dropped her and ran out into the grassland.

They needed a reading from the place he called Polo Valley. But there was a large colony of Saquettes living there, and he knew what would happen if he planted ecology machinery there.

Molloks lived in the caves on the crags above.

After the fight in the cabin, he coded the squid to carry the machinery, and he took it out to Polo Valley, and he planted it.

He did not tell her about it. Love, hate; he tried to mark distinctions and foundered on his own ignorance. Ignorance and ignore are the same word.

They heard the shrieking in the night.

Coffins, on Saquetta, are round. After the massacre in Polo Valley, it fell to the Earther, Zagaramendo, to build the coffins. The round, little coffins. Like round fruits cut in half, hollow, filled with a boneless corpse and resealed. The coffins were made of something like teakwood, and were nailed together.

It fell to the Earther, for the Earther had done the killing. Not really, yet he had. There had been, in Polo Valley, seven hundred Saquettes.

In the thinly wooded area just beyond the Valley he used his burner and beamed down enough timber to make seven hundred coffins. From the inventory he took nails. And Zagaramendo began nailing up the victims of his need, his helplessness, his weakness. It took him six days.

On the night of the sixth day…

“Margret, pack your nightgown—”

“I haven’t got a nightgown, Bob.”

“Pack up your mother’s silver!”

“You said you’d polish—”

“Finish microfilming my notes. We’re going home tomorrow, I called the ship, they’re coming.” He swayed on the porch, grinning at the disbelief blooming on her face.

He let the handle of the burner clunk against the porch-rail. Then let it go completely. The muzzle clinged on the boards.

“You’re finished? You mean you’ve really finished?”

He reached into the swag pocket of his overalls and pulled out a handful of black, wooden spheres. “Finished. With them, with the Rank, with all of it. We’ll go home, and start again. I’ll tell them no more out here. They’ll have to listen; I’ve got tenure.”

The tentative expression, first. Then the smile breaking. Then her laughter that shattered all the lines of distance the three years as Ecological Observers had strung between them, all the lines separating them during eleven weeks on Saquetta, lines that had been cemented on her face by her belief in the death around them.

She seized his hand, and the laughter shook along her arms so that the spheres rolled in his palm. “Oh, Bob —” Then tears. “I can go home! I am going home.” A pause as she heard herself, then. “We’re going home! You’re finished!” She smiled.

“Well…” He smiled. And smiles suddenly were something neither of them had ever seen before. He looked back across the porchrail at patchwork Polo. “I’ve still got to fasten the last twenty or so together. How are you at hefting a hammer?”

“We’re going home,” she repeated. “Gimme.”

Evening on Saquetta pours green across the crags where the molloks live. (A dark green sea that fills and blots out Polo. And the last of the sun sinking in.) And they held each other’s hand, walking back to the compound.

“I’m going to miss them, a little. They were getting to be cute, scurrying around in the grass—” A harsh sound from her. “Who am I kidding.”

Zagaramendo started up the steps. And suddenly his arm flailed.

Margret jumped back.

His shoulder hit the step, and then he was rolling.

“For God’s sake. Bob! Are you all right—?”

Roll, and drop, roll and drop: the black spheres came down the porch steps. He had left them in the corner beside the burner.