Attention Saint Patrick | Page 5

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!"
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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 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