Attention Saint Patrick | Page 5

day the snakes would gain a permanent 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
looking down at a group of snakes near his feet. The sculptor intended
to portray St. Patrick telling the snakes to get the hell out of Eire. But
on Eire it was sentimentally regarded as St. Patrick telling the snakes to
go increase and multiply.
But nobody dared tell that to Sean O'Donohue! It was past history, in a
way, but also it was present fact. On the day of the emergency cabinet
meeting it was appalling fact. Without snakes the planet Eire could not
continue to be inhabited, because of the little dinies. But the Republic
of Eire on Earth would indignantly disown any colony that had snakes
in it. And the colony wasn't ready yet to be self-supporting. The cabinet
discussed the matter gloomily. They were too dispirited to do more.
But Moira--the darlin'--did research.
It was strictly college-freshman-biology-lab research. It didn't promise
much, even to her. But it gave her an excuse to talk anxiously and
hopefully to the president when he took the Dail Committee to
McGillicuddy Island to look at the big dinies there, while the populace
tried to get the snakes out of sight again.
* * * * *
Most of the island lay two miles off the continent named for County
Kerry back on Earth. At one point a promontory lessened the distance
greatly, and at one time there'd been a causeway there. It had been built
with great pains, and with pains destroyed.
The president explained as the boat bearing the committee neared the
island.

"The big dinies," he said sadly, "trampled the fences and houses and ate
up the roofs and tractors. It could not be borne. They could be driven
away with torches, but they came back. They could be killed, but the
people could only dispose of so many tons of carcasses. Remember, the
big males run sixty feet long, and the most girlish females run forty.
You wouldn't believe the new-hatched babies! They were a great trial,
in the early days!"
[Illustration]
Sean O'Donohue snorted. He bristled. He and the other two of the
committee had been dragged away from the city of Tara. He suspected
shenanigans going on behind his back. They did. His associates looked
bleary-eyed. They'd been treated cordially, and they were not
impassioned leaders of the Erse people, like the O'Donohue. One of
them was a ship builder and the other a manufacturer of precision
machinery, elected to the Dail for no special reason. They'd come on
this junket partly to get away from their troubles and their wives. The
shortage of high-precision tools was a trouble to both of them, but they
were forgetting it fully.
"So the causeway was built," explained President O'Hanrahan. "We
drove the big beasts over, and rounded up all we could find--drivin'
them with torches--and then we broke down the causeway. So there
they are on McGillicuddy Island. They don't swim."
The boat touched ground--a rocky, uninviting shore. The solicitor
general and the Chancellor of the Exchequer hopped ashore. They
assisted the committee members to land. They moved on. The president
started to follow but Moira said anxiously:
"Wait a bit. I've something to tell you. I ... said I'd experiment with the
dinies. I did. I learned something."
"Did you now?" asked the president. His tone was at once admiration
and despair. "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. "But I
have to tell you, Moira, that----"
"And I proved it!" said Moira, searching his face with her eyes. "If you
change a stimulus and a specimen reacts, then its reaction is to the
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 heated
a steel hairpin and the dinies came out of holes in the wall, right away!
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 was yesterday
afternoon. There was an official dinner. I had to go. You remember! So
I locked up the dinies----"
"Moira darlin'," said President O'Hanrahan gently, "you don't lock up
dinies. They gnaw through steel safes. They make tunnels and nests in
electric dynamos. You don't lock up dinies, darlin'!"
"But I did!" she insisted. "They're still locked up. I looked just before
we started for here!"
The president looked at her very