by Various
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!"
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 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 wa
y to the mainland Sean O'Donohue ground his teeth. On arrival he learned that the president had taken Moira with him. He ground his teeth. "Shenanigans!" he cried hoarsely. "After him!" He stamped his feet. His fury was awe-inspiring. When the ground-car drivers started back to Tara, Sean O'Donohue was a small, rigid embodiment of raging death and destruction held only temporarily in leash.
On the way, even his companions of the committee were uneasy. But one of them, now and again, brought out a small piece of whitish rock and regarded it incredulously. It was not an unusual kind of rock. It was ordinary milky quartz. But it had tooth marks on it. Some diny, at some time, had gnawed casually upon it as if it were soft as cheese.
* * * * *
Faint cheering could be heard in the distance as the ground-cars carrying the committee neared the city of Tara. To those in the vehicles, it seemed incredible that anybody should dare to rejoice within at least two light-years of Sean O'Donohue as he was at this moment. But the cheering continued. It grew louder as the cars entered a street where houses stood side by side. But there came a change in the chairman of the Dail Committee, too.
The cars slowed because the pavement was bad to nonexistent. Trees lined the way. An overhanging branch passed within two yards of Moira's grandfather. Something hung on it in a sort of graceful drapery. It was a black snake. On Eire! Sean O'Donohue saw it. It took no notice of him. It hung comfortably in the tree and looked with great interest toward the sounds of enthusiasm.
The deathly pallor of Sean O'Donohue changed to pale lavender. He saw another black snake. It was climbing down a tree trunk with a purposeful air, as if intending to look into the distant uproar. The ground-cars went on, and the driver of the lead car swerved automatically to avoid two black snakes moving companionably along together toward the cheering. One of them politely gave the ground-car extra room, but paid no other attention to it. Sean O'Donohue turned purple.
Yet another burst of cheering. The chairman of the Dail Committee almost, but not quite, detonated like a fission bomb. The way ahead was blocked by people lining the way on a cross street. The cars beeped, and nobody heard them. With stiff, jerky motions Sean O'Donohue got out of the enforcedly stopped car. It had seemed that he could be no more incensed, but he was. Within ten feet of him a matronly black snake moved along the sidewalk with a manner of such assurance and such impeccable respectability that it would have seemed natural for her to be carrying a purse.
Sean O'Donohue gasped once. His face was then a dark purple. He marched blindly into the mob of people before him. Somehow, the people of Tara gave way. But the sides of this cross street were crowded. Not only was all the population out and waiting to cheer, but the trees were occupied. By black snakes. They hung in tasteful draperies among the branches, sometimes two or three together. They gazed with intense interest at the scene below them. The solicitor general, following Sean O'Donohue, saw a black snake wriggling deftly between the legs of the packed populace--packed as if to observe a parade--to get a view from the very edge of the curb. The Chancellor of the Exchequer came apprehensively behind the solicitor general.
Sean O'Donohue burst through the ranks of onlookers. He stalked out onto the empty center of the street. He looked neither to right nor left. He was headed for the presidential mansion, there to strangle President O'Hanrahan in the most lingering possible manner.
But there came a roar of rejoicing which penetrated even his single-tracked, murder-obsessed brain. He turned, purple-face and explosive, to see what the obscene sound could mean.
He saw. The lean and lanky figure of the chief justice of the supreme court of the Planet Eire came running down the street toward him. He bore a large slab of sheet-iron.
As he ran, he played upon it the blue flame of a welding torch. The smell of hot metal diffused behind 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. But we had to--till Moira and doubtless St. Patrick gave us the answer ye saw today. If we're disowned, bedamned if we don't hang on! We can feed ourselves now. We can feed some extra mouths. There'll be a ship droppin' by out of curiosity now and then, and we'll trade with 'em. If were disowned--we'll be poor. But when were the Irish ever rich?"
The committeeman who was a manufacturer of precision machinery mopped his forehead.
"We're rich now," he said resignedly. "You'd be bound to learn it. D'you know what the dinies' teeth are made of?"
"It's been said," said President O'Hanrahan, "that it's bor ... boron carbide in organic form. What that means I wouldn't know, but we've got a fine crop of it!"
"It's the next hardest substance to diamond," said the committeeman dourly. "It's even been guessed that an organic type might be harder. It's used for the tools for lathes and precision machinery, and it sells at close to the price of diamonds of industrial quality--and I'll make a deal to handle all we've got. What Earth don't need, other planets will. You're rich."
The president stared. Then he gazed at Moira.
"It's a pity we're bein' disowned," he said mournfully. "It would be a fine thing to be able to tell the grandfather Eire's rich and can feed more colonists and even maybe pay back what it's cost to keep us here so long. It would be a fine thing to hire colonists to build the houses they'll be given free when they're finished. But since Sean O'Donohue is a stern man----"
The ship owner scratched his head. He'd paused on the way to the presidential mansion. He'd had restoratives for his distress. He'd looked at the bottom of a bottle and seen the facts.
"I'll tell yea," he said warmly. "It's the O'Donohue's been battlin' to keep the colony goin' against the politicians that wanted to economize. He's made a career of believin' in this world. He's ruined if he stops. So it might be that a little bit of blarneyin'--with him desperate to find reason to stay friends, black creature or no black creatures----"