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"But what could it be? Has anybody the trace of an idea?" The cabinet went into session. The trouble was, of course, that the Erse colony on Eire was a bust. The first colonists built houses, broke ground, planted crops and encountered dinies. Large ones, fifty and sixty feet long, with growing families.
In ten years a story began encouraged by the Ministry of Information to the effect that St. Patrick had brought the snakes to Eire, and it was certain that if they didn't wipe out the dinies, they assuredly kept the dinies from wiping out the colony. And the one hope of making Eire into a splendid new center of Erse culture and tradition including a reverence for St.
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.
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.
A diny popped out of a hole in the turf. He looked interestedly about. He was all of three inches long, with red eyes and a blue tail, and in every proportion he was a miniature of the extinct dinosaurs of Earth. But he was an improved model. The dinies of Eire were fitted by evolution or Satan to plague human settlers.
To them steel cables were the equivalent of celery, and they ate iron pipe as if it were spaghetti. The industrial installations of the colony were their special targets. The colonists unlimbered guns. They shot the dinies. Ultimately they seemed to thin out. But once a month was shoot-a-diny day on Eire, and the populace turned out to clear the environs of their city of Tara.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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