Attention Saint Patrick | Page 8

him. The chief justice ran like a deer.
But he wasn't leaving anything behind but the smell. Everything else
was close on his heels.
A multicolored, multitudinous, swarming tide of dinies filled the
highway from gutter to gutter. From the two-inch dwarfs to the
purple-striped variety which grew to eight inches and sometimes fought
cats, the dinies were in motion. They ran in the wake of the chief
justice, enthralled and entranced by the smell of hot sheet iron. They
were fascinated. They were bemused. They were aware of nothing but
that ineffable fragrance. They hopped, ran, leaped, trotted and galloped
in full cry after the head of the planet's supreme court.
He almost bumped into the stunned Sean O'Donohue. As he passed, he
cried: "Duck, man! The dinies are comin' tra-la, tra-la!"
But Sean O'Donohue did not duck. He was fixed, stuck, paralyzed in
his tracks. And the dinies arrived. They ran into him. He was an
obstacle. They played leapfrog over each other to surmount him. He
went down and was merely a bump in the flowing river of prismatic
colorings which swarmed after the racing chief justice.
But there was a limit to things. This was not the first such event in Tara,
this day. The dinies, this time, filled no more than a block of the street.
They swarmed past him, they raced on into the distance, and Sean

O'Donohue struggled to a sitting position.
His shoes were shreds. Dinies had torn them swiftly apart for the nails
in them. His garters were gone. Dinies had operated on his pants to get
at the metal parts. His pockets were ripped. The bright metal buttons of
his coat were gone. His zippers had vanished. His suspenders dangled
without any metal parts to hold them together, nor were there any pants
buttons for them to hold onto. He opened his mouth, and closed it, and
opened it again and closed it. His expression was that of a man in
delirium.
And, even before the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the solicitor
general could lift him gently and bear him away, there came a final
catastrophe, for the O'Donohue. The snakes who had watched events
from the curbs, as well as those which had gazed interestedly from aloft,
now began to realize that this was an affair which affected them. They
came out and began to follow the vanishing procession, very much as
small dogs and little boys pursue a circus parade. But they seemed to
talk uneasily to each other as they flowed past Sean O'Donohue, sitting
in the dust of the street, all his illusions vanished and all his hopes
destroyed.
But the people of Tara did not notice. They cheered themselves hoarse.
* * * * *
President O'Hanrahan held himself with some dignity in the
tumble-down reception hall of the presidential mansion. Moira gazed
proudly at him. The two still-active members of the Dail Committee
looked uncomfortably around them. The cabinet of Eire was assembled.
"It's sorry I am," said the President of Eire, "to have to issue a defiance
to the Eire on Earth we owe so much to. But it can't be helped. We had
to have the black creatures to keep the dinies from eating us out of
house and home altogether. We've been fightin' a rear-guard battle, and
we needed them. In time we'd have won with their help, but time we
did not have. So this mornin' Moira told me what she'd done yesterday.
The darlin' had used the brains God gave her, and maybe holy St.

Patrick put a flea in her ear. She figured out that dinies must find metal
by its smell, and if its smell was made stronger by simple heatin' they'd
be unable to resist it. And it was so. Ye saw the chief justice runnin'
down the street with all the dinies after him."
The two members of the committee nodded.
"He was headin," said the president, "for the cold-storage plant that
Sean O'Donohue had twitted me was empty of the provisions we'd had
to eat up because of the dinies. It's no matter that it's empty now though.
We can grow victuals in the fields from now on, because now the cold
rooms are packed solid with dinies that ran heedless into a climate they
are not used to an' fell--what was the word, Moira darlin'?"
"Torpid," said Moira, gazing at him.
"Torpid," agreed the president. "From now on when there's too many
dinies we can send somebody runnin' through the streets with a hot
plate to call them into cold storage. We've pied pipers at will, to help
out the black creatures that've done so much for us. If we've offended
Eire on Earth, by havin' the black creatures to help us, we're sorry.