making Eire into a splendid newcenter of Erse culture and tradition--including a reverence for St.Patrick--lay in the belief that some day the snakes would gain apermanent upper hand.
Out near the spaceport there was an imported monument to St. Patrick.It showed him pointing somewhere with his bishop's staff, while lookingdown at a group of snakes near his feet. The sculptor intended toportray St. Patrick telling the snakes to get the hell out of Eire. Buton Eire it was sentimentally regarded as St. Patrick telling the snakesto go increase and multiply.
But nobody dared tell that to Sean O'Donohue! It was past history, in away, but also it was present fact. On the day of the emergency cabinetmeeting it was appalling fact. Without snakes the planet Eire could notcontinue to be inhabited, because of the little dinies. But theRepublic of Eire on Earth would indignantly disown any colony that hadsnakes in it. And the colony wasn't ready yet to be self-supporting.The cabinet discussed the matter gloomily. They were too dispirited todo more. But Moira--the darlin'--did research.
It was strictly college-freshman-biology-lab research. It didn'tpromise much, even to her. But it gave her an excuse to talk anxiouslyand hopefully to the president when he took the Dail Committee toMcGillicuddy Island to look at the big dinies there, while the populacetried to get the snakes out of sight again.
* * * * *
Most of the island lay two miles off the continent named for CountyKerry back on Earth. At one point a promontory lessened the distancegreatly, and at one time there'd been a causeway there. It had beenbuilt with great pains, and with pains destroyed.
The president explained as the boat bearing the committee neared theisland.
"The big dinies," he said sadly, "trampled the fences and houses andate up the roofs and tractors. It could not be borne. They could bedriven away with torches, but they came back. They could be killed, butthe people could only dispose of so many tons of carcasses. Remember,the big males run sixty feet long, and the most girlish females runforty. You wouldn't believe the new-hatched babies! They were a greattrial, in the early days!"
Sean O'Donohue snorted. He bristled. He and the other two of thecommittee had been dragged away from the city of Tara. He suspectedshenanigans going on behind his back. They did. His associates lookedbleary-eyed. They'd been treated cordially, and they were notimpassioned leaders of the Erse people, like the O'Donohue. One of themwas a ship builder and the other a manufacturer of precision machinery,elected to the Dail for no special reason. They'd come on this junketpartly to get away from their troubles and their wives. The shortage ofhigh-precision tools was a trouble to both of them, but they wereforgetting it fully.
"So the causeway was built," explained President O'Hanrahan. "We drovethe big beasts over, and rounded up all we could find--drivin' themwith torches--and then we broke down the causeway. So there they are onMcGillicuddy Island. They don't swim."
The boat touched ground--a rocky, uninviting shore. The solicitorgeneral and the Chancellor of the Exchequer hopped ashore. Theyassisted the committee members to land. They moved on. The presidentstarted to follow but Moira said anxiously:
"Wait a bit. I've something to tell you. I ... said I'd experiment withthe dinies. I did. I learned something."
"Did you now?" asked the president. His tone was at once admiration anddespair. "It's a darlin' you are, Moira, but----"
"I ... wondered how they knew where iron was," said Moira hopefully,"and I found out. They smell it."
"Ah, they do, do they!" said the president with tender reverence. "ButI have to tell you, Moira, that----"
"And I proved it!" said Moira, searching his face with her eyes. "Ifyou change a stimulus and a specimen reacts, then its reaction is tothe change. So I made the metal smell stronger."
President O'Hanrahan blinked at her.
"I ... heated it," said Moira. "You know how hot metal smells. I heateda steel hairpin and the dinies came out of holes in the wall, rightaway! The smell drew them. It was astonishing!"
The president looked at her with a strange expression.
"That's ... that's all I had time to try," said Moira. "It wasyesterday afternoon. There was an official dinner. I had to go. Youremember! So I locked up the dinies----"
"Moira darlin'," said President O'Hanrahan gently, "you don't lock updinies. They gnaw through steel safes. They make tunnels and nests inelectric dynamos. You don't lock up dinies, darlin'!"
"But I did!" she insisted. "They're still locked up. I looked justbefore we started for here!"
The president looked at her very unhappily.
"There's no need for shenanigans between us, Moira!" Then he said:"Couldn't ye be mistaken? Keepin' dinies locked up is like bottlin'moonlight or writin' down the color of Moira O'Donohue's eyes or----"He stopped. "How did ye do it?"
"The way you keep specimens," she told him. "When I was in college wedid experiments on frogs. They're cold-blooded just like dinies. If youlet them stay lively, they'll wear themselves out trying to get away.So you put them in a refrigerator. In the vegetable container. Theydon't freeze there, but they do ... get torpid. They just lay stilltill you let them warm up again. To room temperature."
The president of the planet Eire stared. His mouth dropped open. Heblinked and blinked and blinked. Then he whooped. He reached forwardand took Moira into his arms. He kissed her thoroughly.
"Darlin'!" he said in a broken voice. "Sit still while I drive thisboat back to the mainland! I've to get back to Tara immediate! You'vedone it, my darlin', you've done it, and it's a great day for theIrish! It's even a great day for the Erse! It's your birthday will be aplanetary holiday long after we're married and our grandchildren thinkI'm as big a nuisance as your grandfather Sean O'Donohue! It's a finegrand marriage we'll be havin'----"
He kissed her again and whirled the boat about and sent it streakingfor the mainland. From time to time he whooped. Rather more frequently,he hugged Moira exuberantly. And she tended to look puzzled, but shedefinitely looked pleased.
* * * * *
Behind them, of course, the Committee of the Dail on the Condition ofthe Planet Eire explored McGillicuddy Island. They saw the bigdinies--sixty-footers and fifty-footers and lesser ones. The diniesambled aimlessly about the island. Now and again they reached up onelongated, tapering necks with incongruously small heads on them, tosnap off foliage that looked a great deal like palm leaves. Now andagain, without enthusiasm, one of them stirred the contents of variousgreen-scummed pools and apparently extracted some sort of nourishmentfrom it. They seemed to have no intellectual diversions. They were notinterested in the visitors, but one of the committee members--notMoira's grandfather--shivered a little.
"I've dreamed about them," he said plaintively, "but even when I wasdreamin' I didn't believe it!"
Two youthful dinies--they would weigh no more than a couple of tonsapiece--engaged in languid conflict. They whacked each other with blowswhich would have destroyed elephants. But they weren't reallyinterested. One of them sat down and looked bored. The other sat down.Presently, reflectively, he gnawed at a piece of whitish rock. Thegnawing made an excruciating sound. It made one's flesh crawl. The dinydozed off. His teeth had cut distinct, curved grooves in the stone. Themanufacturer of precision machinery--back on Earth--turned pale.
"L-let's get out of here!"
The committee and the two members of the cabinet returned to the shore.There was no boat. It was far away, headed for the mainland.
"Shenanigans!" said Sean O'Donohue in a voice that would have curdledsulphuric acid. "I warned him no shenanigans! The dirty youngbog-trotter's left us here to be eaten up by the beasts!"
The solicitor general said hastily: "Divvil a bit of it, sir. We're hisfriends and he left us in the same boat--no, he left us out of the sameboat. It must've been that something important occurred to him----"
But it was not convincing. It seemed highly unconvincing, later,because some long-delayed perception produ
ced a reaction in the dinies'minuscule brains. They became aware of their visitors. They appeared,in a slow-motion fashion, to become interested in them. Slowly,heavily, numbly, they congregated about them--the equivalent of a herdof several hundred elephants of all the colors of the rainbow, withsmall heads wearing plaintive but persistent expressions. Long necksreached out hopefully.
"The devil!" said the Chancellor of the Exchequer, fretfully. "I'm justthinkin'. You've iron in your shoes and