Attention Saint Patrick | Page 6

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
we did experiments on frogs. They're cold-blooded just like dinies. If
you let them stay lively, they'll wear themselves out trying to get away.
So you put them in a refrigerator. In the vegetable container. They don't

freeze there, but they do ... get torpid. They just lay still till you let
them warm up again. To room temperature."
The president of the planet Eire stared. His mouth dropped open. He
blinked and blinked and blinked. Then he whooped. He reached
forward and took Moira into his arms. He kissed her thoroughly.
"Darlin'!" he said in a broken voice. "Sit still while I drive this boat
back to the mainland! I've to get back to Tara immediate! You've done
it, my darlin', you've done it, and it's a great day for the Irish! It's even a
great day for the Erse! It's your birthday will be a planetary holiday
long after we're married and our grandchildren think I'm as big a
nuisance as your grandfather Sean O'Donohue! It's a fine grand
marriage we'll be havin'----"
He kissed her again and whirled the boat about and sent it streaking for
the mainland. From time to time he whooped. Rather more frequently,
he hugged Moira exuberantly. And she tended to look puzzled, but she
definitely looked pleased.
* * * * *
Behind them, of course, the Committee of the Dail on the Condition of
the Planet Eire explored McGillicuddy Island. They saw the big
dinies--sixty-footers and fifty-footers and lesser ones. The dinies
ambled aimlessly about the island. Now and again they reached up on
elongated, tapering necks with incongruously small heads on them, to
snap off foliage that looked a great deal like palm leaves. Now and
again, without enthusiasm, one of them stirred the contents of various
green-scummed pools and apparently extracted some sort of
nourishment from it. They seemed to have no intellectual diversions.
They were not interested in the visitors, but one of the committee
members--not Moira's grandfather--shivered a little.
"I've dreamed about them," he said plaintively, "but even when I was
dreamin' I didn't believe it!"
Two youthful dinies--they would weigh no more than a couple of tons

apiece--engaged in languid conflict. They whacked each other with
blows which would have destroyed elephants. But they weren't really
interested. One of them sat down and looked bored. The other sat down.
Presently, reflectively, he gnawed at a piece of whitish rock. The
gnawing made an excruciating sound. It made one's flesh crawl. The
diny dozed off. His teeth had cut distinct, curved grooves in the stone.
The manufacturer 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
curdled sulphuric acid. "I warned him no shenanigans! The dirty young
bog-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 his
friends and he left us in the same boat--no, he left us out of the same
boat. 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 produced 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 herd of several hundred elephants of all the colors of the rainbow,
with small heads wearing plaintive but persistent expressions. Long
necks reached out hopefully.
"The devil!" said the Chancellor of the Exchequer, fretfully. "I'm just
thinkin'. You've iron in your shoes and mainsprings in your watches
and maybe pocket knives in your pockets. The dinies have a longin' for
iron, and they go after it. They'll eat anything in the world that's got the
barest bit of a taste of iron in it! Oh, it's perfectly all right, of course,
but ye'll have to throw stones at them till the boat comes back. Better,
find a good stout stick to whack them with. Only don't let 'em get
behind ye!"

"Ye will?" roared the solicitor general, vengefully. "Take that!" Whack!
"Tryin' to take somethin' out of the gentleman's hip pocket an' aimin' to
grab the rump beyond it just to make sure!"
Whack! A large head moved plaintively away. But another reached