Attention Saint Patrick | Page 4

roofs, too. Presently the lumbering creatures nibbled at axes--the heads,
not the handles. They went on to the plows. When they gathered

sluggishly about a ground-car and began to lunch on it, the colonists
did not believe. But it was true.
The dinies' teeth weren't mere calcium phosphate, like other beasts. An
amateur chemist found out that they were an organically deposited
boron carbide, which is harder than any other substance but crystallized
carbon--diamond. In fact, diny teeth, being organic, seemed to be an
especially hard form of boron carbide. Dinies could chew iron. They
could masticate steel. They could grind up and swallow anything but
tool-steel reinforced with diamond chips. The same amateur chemist
worked it out that the surface soil of the planet Eire was deficient in
iron and ferrous compounds. The dinies needed iron. They got it.
* * * * *
The big dinies were routed by burning torches in the hands of angry
colonists. When scorched often enough, their feeble brains gathered the
idea that they were unwelcome. They went lumbering away.
They were replaced by lesser dinies, approximately the size of
kangaroos. They also ate crops. They also hungered for iron. To them
steel cables were the equivalent of celery, and they ate iron pipe as if it
were spaghetti. The industrial installations of the colony were their
special targets. The colonists unlimbered guns. They shot the dinies.
Ultimately they seemed to thin out. But once a month was shoot-a-diny
day on Eire, and the populace turned out to clear the environs of their
city of Tara.
Then came the little dinies. Some were as small as two inches in length.
Some were larger. All were cute. Colonists' children wanted to make
pets of them until it was discovered that miniature they might be, but
harmless they were not. Tiny diny-teeth, smaller than the heads of pins,
were still authentic boron carbide. Dinies kept as pets cheerily gnawed
away wood and got at the nails of which their boxes were made. They
ate the nails.
Then, being free, they extended their activities. They and their friends
tunneled busily through the colonists' houses. They ate nails. They ate

screws. They ate bolts, nuts, the nails out of shoes, pocket knives and
pants buttons, zippers, wire staples and the tacks out of upholstery.
Gnawing even threads and filings of metal away, they made visible
gaps in the frames and moving parts of farm tractors.
Moreover, it appeared that their numbers previously had been held
down by the paucity of ferrous compounds in their regular diet. The
lack led to a low birth rate. Now, supplied with great quantities of iron
by their unremitting industry, they were moved to prodigies of
multiplication.
The chairman of the Dail Committee on the Condition of the Planet
Eire had spoken of them scornfully as equal to mice. They were much
worse. The planetary government needed at least a pied piper or two,
but it tried other measures. It imported cats. Descendants of the felines
of Earth still survived, but one had only to look at their frustrated,
neurotic expressions to know that they were failures. The government
set traps. The dinies ate their springs and metal parts. It offered
bounties for dead dinies. But the supply of dinies was inexhaustible,
and the supply of money was not. It had to be stopped.
Then upon the spaceport of Eire a certain Captain Patrick Brannicut, of
Boston, Earth, descended. It was his second visit to Eire. On the first
he'd learned of the trouble. On his second he brought what still seemed
the most probable solution. He landed eighteen hundred adult black
snakes, two thousand teen-agers of the same species, and two crates of
soft-shelled eggs he guaranteed to hatch into fauna of the same kind.
He took away all the cash on the planet. The government was
desperate.
But the snakes chased dinies with enthusiasm. They pounced upon
dinies while the public watched. They lay in wait for dinies, they
publicly digested dinies, and they went pouring down into any small
hole in the ground from which a diny had appeared or into which one
vanished. They were superior to traps. They did not have to be set or
emptied. They did not need bait. They were self-maintaining and even
self-reproducing--except that snakes when overfed tend to be less
romantic than when hungry. In ten years a story began--encouraged by

the Ministry of Information--to the effect that St. Patrick had brought
the snakes to Eire, and it was certain that if they didn't wipe out the
dinies, they assuredly kept the dinies from wiping out the colony. And
the one hope of making Eire into a splendid new center of Erse culture
and tradition--including a reverence for St. Patrick--lay in the belief
that some