Attention Saint Patrick | Page 6

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 hopefully forward, and another. The dinies were not bright. The three committeemen and two members of the cabinet were thigh-deep in water when the boat came back. They still whacked valorously if wearily at intrusive diny heads. They still had made no progress in implanting the idea that the dinies should go away.
The men from the mainland hauled them into the boat. They admitted that the president had returned to Tara. Sean O'Donohue concluded that he had gone back to supervise some shenanigans. He had. On the way to the mainland Sean O'Donohue ground his teeth. On arrival he learned