Science Fiction - Daily Short Stories

Attention Saint Patrick - Murray Leinster

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Duration:: 47m
Broadcast on:: 22 Jun 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

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So I suggest you sit back, keep your tray table upright, and start getting lucky. Play for free at LuckyLand Sluts.com. Are you feeling lucky? No purchase necessary. BGW can avoid work prohibited by law. 18-plus terms and conditions apply. Attention, St. Patrick by Mary Leinster. Legends do, of course, get somewhat distorted in the passage of time. In the future, the passage across space to other planets may cause a slight modification here and there. President O'Harahan of the planetary government of Eira listened unhappily to his official guest. He had to, because Sean O'Donoghue was chairman of the Doll of Eira on earth, committee on the condition of the planet Eira. He could cut off all support from the still-struggling colony if he chose. He was short and opinionated. He had sharp, gimlet eyes. He had bristling white hair that once had been red, and he was the grandfather of Moiro Donoghue who'd traveled to Eira with him on a very uncomfortable spaceship. That last was a mark in his favor, but now he stood four square upon the sagging porch of the presidential mansion of Eira and laid down the law. "I've been here three days," he told the President sternly, while his granddaughter looked sympathetic. "And I'm of the opinion that there's been shenanigans going on to keep this fine world from becoming what it was meant for, a place for the people of Eira on earth to emigrate to when there was more of them than Eira has room for, which is now." "We've had difficulties," began the President uneasily. "This world should be ready," snapped Sean O'Donoghue accusingly. "It should be waiting for the Casey's and Brady's and Fitzpatrick's and other fine Earth people to move to and thrive on while the rest of the galaxy goes to pot with its new fangled notions." "That's the reason for this world's very existence. What's set aside Eira on earth? Where our ancestors lived and where their descendants are breathing down each other's necks because there's so many of them?" "There was no snakes there," St. Patrick drove them out. "What sets this world apart from all the other livable planets men have put down their smelly spaceships on?" "There's no snakes here," St. Patrick has great influence up in heaven. He knew his fine Earth people would presently need more room than there was on earth for them, so he'd a world set aside and marked by the sign that no least trace of a serpent could exist on it. No creature like the one that Blarney Mother Eve could be here. "No, our troubles been the deanies," began the President apologetically, but he froze. Something dark and sinuous and complacent oozed around the corner of the presidential mansion. The President of Eira sweated. He recognized the dark object. He believed it safely put away in pleasant confinement until the doll committee went away, but it wasn't. It was Timothy, the amiable six-foot black snake who faithfully and cordially did his best to keep the presidential mansion from falling down. Without him innumerable mouse-sized holes, gnawed by mouse-sized deanies, would assuredly have brought about its collapse. The President was grateful, but he'd meant to keep Timothy out of sight. Timothy must have escaped, and as a faithful snake loyal to his duty, he'd wriggled straight back to the presidential mansion. Like all Eira, he undoubtedly knew of the pious tradition that St. Patrick had brought the snakes to Eira, and he wasn't one to let St. Patrick down. So he'd returned and doubtless patrolled all the deanie tunnels in the sagging structure. He'd cleaned out any miniature dinosaur-like creatures who might be planning to eat some more nails. He now prepared to nap, with a clear conscience, but if Sean O'Donnie you saw him. Perspiration stood out on President O'Harahan's forehead. The droplets joined and ran down his nose. "It's evident," said the chairman of the Dahl Committee with truckulence, "that we're a pack of worthless finagling and maybe even Protestant renegades from the ways and the traditions of your fathers. There's been shenanigans going on. I'll find 'em." The President could not speak with Timothy in full view, but then what was practically a miracle took place. A deanie popped out of a hole in the turf. He looked interestingly 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 deanies of Eira were fitted by evolution, or Satan, to plague human settlers. They ate their crops, destroyed their homes, devoured their tools, and when other commestibles turned up they'd take care of them, too. This deanie surveyed its surroundings. The presidential mansion looked promising. The deanie moved toward it, but Timothy, not plans abandoned, flung himself at the deanie like the crack of a whip. The deanie plunged back into its hole. Timothy hurtled after it in pursuit. He disappeared. The President of Eira breathed. He'd neglected that matter for some minutes it seemed. He heard a voice continuing formatively. And I know you'll try to hide the shenanigans that have destroyed all these sacrifices Earth's made to have Eira a true Earth's colony, ready for Earth's lads and Colleans to move to and have room for their children and their grandchildren, too. I know you'll try, but unless I do find out, not another bit of help will this colony get from Earth. No more tools. No more machinery that you can't have worn out. No more provisions that you should be raising for yourselves. Your cold storage plant should be bulging with food. It's nearly empty. It will not be refilled. And even the ship that we pay to have stop here every three months for mail. No ship. "It's the deanies," said the President feebly. "They're a great trouble to us, sir. They're our great handicap." "Blather and nonsense," snapped Sean O'Donahue. "They're no bigger than mice. He could have trapped them. He could have raised cats." "Don't tell me that fancy colored little lizards could hinder a world, especially set aside by the intercession of St. Patrick for the Earth's people to thrive on." The tokens plain. "There's no snakes. And with such a sign to go by, there must have been shenanigans going on to make things go wrong. Until those shenanigans are exposed and stopped, there'll be no more help from Earth for ye blagards." He stamped his way into the Presidential Mansion. The door slammed shut. Moira, his granddaughter, regarded the President with sympathy. He looked bedraggled and crushed. He mopped his forehead. He did not raise his eyes to her. It was bad enough to be President of a planetary government that couldn't even pay his salary. So there were patches in his breeches that Moira must have noticed. It was worse that the colony was as a whole entirely too much like the remaining shanty areas in Era back on Earth. But it was tragic that it was ridiculous for any man on Era to ask a girl from Earth to join him on so on promising a planet. He said numbly, "I'll be wishing you good morning, Moira." He moved away. His chin sunk on his breast. Moira watched him go. She didn't seem happy. Then, fifty yards from the mansion, a luridly colored something leaped out of a hole. It was a demi some eight inches long in enough of a hurry to say that something appalling was after it. It landed before the President and took off again for some far horizon. Then something sinuous and black dropped out of a tree upon it and instantly violent action took place in a patch of dust. A small cloud arose. The President watched with morbid interest as the sporting event took place. Moira stared incredulous, then out of the hole from which the demi had leaped a dark round head appeared. It could have been Timothy, but he saw that this demi was disposed of. That was that. Timothy, if it was Timothy, withdrew to search further among the demi tunnels about the Presidential mansion. Half an hour later the President told the Solicitor General of Area about it. He was bitter. And when it was over there was Moira staring dazed like from the porch, and the Badam snake picked up the demi it killed and started off to dine on it in private, but I was in the way, so the snake waited. Polite with the demi in its mouth were me to move on, but it looked exactly like he brought over the demi for me to admire, like a cattle showed dead mice to a person she thinks will be interested. "Holy St. Patrick!" said the Solicitor General appalled. "What'll happen now?" "I reason," said the President morbidly she'll tell her grandfather and he'll call her somebody and use those gimlet eyes on him. And the poor omodium will blurt out that on era here it's known that St. Patrick brought the snakes and is the more reverent for it. And that'll mean there'll be no more ships or food or tools from Earth, and it'll be lucky if we're evacuated before the planets left abandoned. The Solicitor General's expression became one of pure hopelessness. "Then, the jig's up," he said gloomily. "I'm thinking, Mr. President, we'd better have a cabinet meeting on it." "What's the use?" demanded the President. "I won't leave. I'll stay here alone, though I may be. There's nothing left in life for me anywhere, but at least as the only human left on era I'll be able to spend the rest of my years knocking dinnies on the head for what they've done." Then suddenly he bellowed, "Who let loose the snakes? I'll have his heart's blood!" The Chancellor of the Exchequer peered around the edge of the door into the cabinet meeting room. He saw the rest of the cabinet of era assembled, relieved he entered. Something stirred in his pocket and he pulled out a reproachful snake. He said, "Don't be indignant now. You were walking on the public street. If Sean O'Donnie you had seen you." He added to the other members of the cabinet. The other two members of the Doll Committee seemed to be good, honest drinking men. One of them now, the Ship Builder, I think it was, wanted a change of scenery from looking at the bottom of a glass. I took him for a walk. I showed him a bunch of dinnies playing leapfrog, trying to get one of their number up to a rain spout so he could bite off pieces and drop him down to the rest. They were all colors, and it was quite something to look at. The committee man, good man that he is, staggered a bit and looked again and said grave that whatever of evil might be said of era, nobody could deny that its whiskey had imagination. He looked about the cabinet room. There was a hole in the baseboard underneath the sculptured coat of arms of the colony world. He put the snake down on the floor beside the hole, with an air of offended dignity the snake slithered into the dark opening. "Now, what's the meeting for?" he demanded. "I'll tell you immediate that if money's required, it's impractical." President O'Harahan said morbidly. Twas called, it seems, to put the cursive o' Cromwell on whatever let the black snakes loose. But they'd been cooped up, and they knew they were not keeping the dinnies down, and they got worried over the work they were neglecting. So they took turns digging like prisoners in a penitentiary, and presently they broke out, and like the faithful creatures they are, they set anxiously to work on their backlog of deenie catching, which they're doing. They've ruined us entirely, but they meant well. The Minister of Information asked apprehensively, "What will O'Dai you do when he finds out they're here?" "He's not found out yet," said the President, without elation. Moira didn't tell him. She's an angel. But he's bound to learn, and then if he doesn't detonate with the rage in him, he'll see to it that all of us are murdered, slowly, for treason to the earth and blasphemy directed at St. Patrick. Then the President said with a sort of yearning pride, "Do you know what Moira offered to do?" She said she'd taken biology at college, and she'd try to solve the problem of the deenies. "The darling." Being gathered together observed the Chief Justice, we might as well try again to think of something plausible. "We need a good shenanigans," agreed the President unhappily, "but what could it be? Has anybody the trace of an idea?" The Cabinet went into session. The trouble was, of course, that the Earth's colony on-era was a bust. The first colonists built houses, broke ground, planted crops, and encountered deenies. Large ones, fifty and sixty feet long, with growing families. They had thick bodies with unlikely bony expressances. They had long necks, which ended in very improbable, small heads. And they had long, tapering tails, which would knock over a man or a fence post, or the corner of a house, impartially, if they happened to swing it that way. They were not bright. That they ate the growing crops might be expected, though cursed, but they ate wire fences. The colonists at first waited for them to die of indigestion, but they digested the fences. Then between bales of more normal foodstuffs they browsed on the corrugated iron roofs of houses. Again, the colonists eventually expected dyspepsia. They digested the roofs, too. Presently the lumbering creatures nibbled at axes. The heads, not the handles. They went on to plows. When they gathered sluggishly about a groundcar and began to lunch on it, the colonists did not believe. But it was true. The deenies' teeth weren't mere calcium phosphate like other beasts. An amateur chemist found out that they were an organically deposited boron carbide, which is harder than any other substance but crystallized carbon. Diamond. In fact, deeny teeth being organic seemed to be in a especially hard form of boron carbide. Deenies could chew iron. They could masticate steel. They could grind up and swallow anything but tools steel reinforced with diamond chips. The same amateur chemist worked it out that the surface soil of the planet era was deficient in iron and ferrous compounds. The deenies needed iron. They got it. The big deenies were routed by burning torches in the hands of angry colonists. When scorched often enough, their feeble brains gathered the idea that they were unwelcome. They went lumbering away. They were replaced by lesser deenies, approximately the size of kangaroos. They also ate crops. They also hungered for iron. 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 deenies. Ultimately, they seemed to thin out, but once a month was shoot a deeny day on era, and the populace turned out to clear the environs of their city of Tara. Then came the little deenies. Some were as small as two inches in length. Some were larger. All were cute. Colonists children wanted to make pets of them until it was discovered that miniature they might be, but harmless they were not. Tiny deeny teeth smaller than the heads of pins were still authentic boron carbide. Deenies kept as pets cheerily gnawed away wood and got at the nails which their boxes were made. They ate the nails. Then, being free, they extended their activities. They and their friends tunneled busily through the colonists' houses. They ate nails, they ate screws, they ate bolts, nuts, the nails out of shoes, pocket knives, and pants buttons, zippers, wire staples, and the tacks out of upholstery. Knowing even threads and filings of metal away, they made visible gaps in the frames and moving parts of farm tractors. Moreover, it appeared that their numbers previously had been held down by the paucity of ferrous compounds in their regular diet. The lack led to a low birthrate. Now supplied with great quantities of iron by their unremitting industry, they were moved to prodigies of multiplication. The chairman of the Dahl Committee of the Condition of the Planet Era had spoken of them scornfully as equal to mice. They were much worse. The planetary government needed at least a pied piper or two, but it tried other measures. It imported cats, descendants of the felines of earth, still survived, but one had only to look at their frustrated neurotic expressions to know that they were failures. The government set traps. The deenies ate their springs and metal parts. It offered bounties for dead deenies, but the supply of deenies was inexhaustible, and the supply of money was not. It had to be stopped. Then upon the spaceport of Era, a certain Captain Patrick Brannikut of Boston Earth descended. It was his second visit to Era. On the first he'd learned of the trouble. On his second he brought what still seemed the most probable solution. He landed 1,800 adult black snakes, 2,000 teenagers of the same species, and two crates of soft-shelled eggs he guaranteed to hatch into fauna of the same kind. He took away all the cash on the planet. The government was desperate. But the snakes chased deenies with enthusiasm. They pounced upon deenies while the public watched. They lay in wait for deenies. They publicly digested deenies, and they went pouring down into any small hole in the ground from which a deenie had appeared or into which one vanished. They were superior to traps. They did not have to be said or emptied. They did not need bait. Except that snakes went over fed tend to be less romantic than when hungry. In ten years a story began, encouraged by the Ministry of Information, to the effect that St. Patrick had brought the snakes to Era, and it was certain that if they didn't wipe out the deenies they assuredly kept the deenies from wiping out the colony. And the one hope of making Era into a splendid new center of Earth's culture and tradition, including a reverence for St. Patrick, lay in the belief that someday the snakes would gain a permanent upper hand. Out near the spaceport there was an imported monument to St. Patrick. It showed him pointing somewhere with his bishop's staff while looking down at a group of snakes near his feet. The sculptor intended to portray St. Patrick telling the snakes to get the hell out of Era, but on Era it was sentimentally regarded as St. Patrick telling the snakes to go increase and multiply. But nobody dared tell that to Shawn 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 Era could not continue to be inhabited because of the little deenies. But the Republic of Era 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 darling, 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 Dahl Committee to McGillicuddy Island to look at the big deenies 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 carry back on Earth. At one point a promontory lessened the distance greatly, and at one time there had 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 deenies, he said sadly, trampled the fences and houses and ate up the roofs and tractors. It could not be born. 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'Donoghue 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 Earth's people like the O'Donoghue. One of them was a shipbuilder, and the other a manufacturer of precision machinery, elected to dowel 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'Harahan. We drove the big beasts over and rounded up all we could find, driving 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 Deenies. I did. I learned something." "Did you now?" asked the president, his tone at once, admiration and despair. "It's a darling, 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," 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." Hey there, it is Ryan Seacrest with you. You wanna make this summer unforgettable? Join me at Chumba Casino. It's this summer's hottest online destination. They are rolling out the red carpet with an amazing welcome offer just for you. So don't wait. Dive in now and play hundreds of social casino games for free. Your chance to redeem real prizes is just a spin away. Hey, can you join me? "sponsored by Chumba Casino, no purchase necessary, VGW Group, void were prohibited by law, 18-plus terms and conditions apply." President O'Harahan blinked at her. "I heated it," said Moira. "You know how hot metal smells? I heated a steel hairpin and the deanies 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 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 deanies." Moira darling said President O'Harahan gently. "You don't lock up deanies. They gnaw through steel sates. They make tunnels and nests in electric dynamos. You don't lock up deanies, darling." "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 you be mistaken? Keeping deanies locked up is like bottle and moonlight, or writing down the color of Moira O'Donohue's eyes, or..." he stopped. "How'd you 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 deanies. 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." "Torpid. They just lay still, till you let them warm up again to room temperature." The president of the planet, Airy, 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 got to get back to Tara, immediate. You've done it, my darling. You've done it, and it's a great day for the Irish. It's even a great day for the earth. 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'Donahue. It's a fine grand marriage will be having." 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 Doll on the Condition of the Planet era explored McGillicuddy Island. They saw the big Deenys, 60 footers and 50 footers and lesser ones. The Deenys 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 planably, "but even when I was dreaming I didn't believe it." Two youthful Deenys they would weigh no more than a couple of tons of peace 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 Dini dozed off. His teeth had cut distinct curved grooves in the stone. The manufacturer of precision machinery back on earth turned pale. "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'Donahue, in a voice that would have curdled sulfuric acid. "I warned him no shenanigans." The dirty young pog-trotters left us here to be eaten up by the beasts. The solicitor general said hastily, "The devil a bit of it, sir, where his friends, and he left us in the same boat." No, he left us out of the same boat. It must have 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 Dini's 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 thinking, you've iron in your shoes and mainsprings in your watches and maybe pocket knives in your pockets. The Dini's have a long and for iron, and they go after it. They'll eat anything in the world that's got the barest bit of taste of iron in it. Oh, it's perfectly all right, of course, but you'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 them get behind you." "Yee will," roared the Solicitor General, vengefully, "take that! Whack!" Trying to take something out of the gentleman's hip pocket and aimin' to grab the rump beyond it just to make sure! Whack!" A large head moved plaintively away, but another reached totally forward, and another. The Dini's 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 valoriously if wearily add intrusive Dini heads. They still had made no progress in implanting the idea that the Dini's 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 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 Dini 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 near 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 Doll Committee, too. The cars slowed because the pavement was bad to non-existent. Trees lined the way. An overhanging branch passed within two yards of Moyer's grandfather. Something hung on it in a sort of graceful drapery. It was a black snake. On era! 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 power 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 cars 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 Doll 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 motion Sean O'Donohue got out of the enforcently 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 into 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'Harahan 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-faced, 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 Era 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 demis filled the highway from gutter to gutter. From the two-inch dwarves to the purple striped variety which grew to eight inches and sometimes fought cats, the demis 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 Supreme Court. He almost bumped into the stunned Sean O'Donahue. As he passed, he cried, "Duck, man! The demis are coming tra-la, tra-la!" But Sean O'Donahue did not duck. He was fixed, stuck, paralyzed in his tracks, and the demis 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 demis this time filled no more than a block of the street. They swarmed past him. They raced on into the distance and Sean O'Donahue struggled to a sitting position. His shoes were in shreds. Deenies had torn them swiftly apart for the nails in them. His garters were gone. Deenies 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'Donahue. The snakes who had watched events from the curbs, as well as those which had gazed interestingly 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'Donahue, 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'Harahan 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 Doll Committee looked uncomfortably around them. The cabinet of O'Harahan was assembled. "It's sorry I am," said the President of O'Harahan. "To have to issue a defiance to the O'Harahan Earth we owe so much to, but it can't be helped. We had to have the black creatures to keep the deenies from eating us out of house and home altogether. We've been fighting a rear guard battle, and we needed them. In time we'd have one with their help, but time we did not have. So this morning Moira told me what she'd done yesterday. The darling had used the brains God gave her and maybe Holy St. Patrick put a flea in her ear. She figured out that deenies must find metal by its smell, and if its smell was made stronger by simply heaten, they'd be unable to resist it. And it was so. Yee saw that Chief Justice running down the street with all the deenies after him. The two members of the committee nodded. He was headened, said the President, for the cold storage plant that Sean O'Donohue had twitted me was empty of the provisions we had to eat up because of the deenies. 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 deenies that ran heedless into a climate they are not used to and fell. What was the word Moira darling? Torpid, said Moira gazing at him. Torpid agreed the President. From now on, when there's too many deenies, we can sense somebody running 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 have done so much for us. If we've offended Arrow on Earth by having the black creatures to help us, we're sorry, but we had to. Till Moira and doubtless St. Patrick gave us the answer he saw today. If we're disowned, we damned if we don't hang on. We can feed ourselves now. We can feed some extra mouths. There'll be a ship dropping by out of curiosity now and then, and we'll trade with them. If we're disowned, we'll be poor. But when were the Irish ever rich? The committee man, who was a manufacturer of precision machinery, mopped his forehead. "We're rich now," he said resigningly. "You'd be bound to learn it. Do you know what the deenies teeth are made of?" "It's been said," said President O'Hannraham, "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 committee man 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 being disowned," he said mournfully. "It would be a fine thing to be able to tell the grandfather air is 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 you," he said, warmly. "It's the O'Donohue who's been battling to keep the colony going against the politicians that wanted to economize. He's made a career of believing in this world. He's ruined if he stops, so it might be that a little bit of blarnian with him, desperate to find reasons to stay friends, black creatures or no black creatures." The president took Moira's hand. "Come, my darling," he said sadly. "We'll reason with him." Long, long minutes later he shook his head as Sean O'Donohue stormed at him. "The back of my hand to you," said Sean O'Donohue in the very quintessence of bitterness. "And to Moira, too, if she has more to do with you, I'll have not to do with shenanigans and renegades and blasphemers that actually import snakes into a world St. Patrick had set off for the Earth from ancient days." It was dark in the old man's room. He was a small and pathetic figure under the covers. He was utterly defiant. He was irreconcilable, to all seeming. "Renegades?" he said indignantly. "Snakes," he said. "The devil is snake there is on era. I'll admit that we've some good black creatures that in a bad light and with prejudice he might mistake. But snakes?" Yib might as well call the Dini's lizards, those same Dini's that are native Eren porcupines. Bad luck to them. There wasn't a astounded silence from the bed. "It's a matter of terminology," said the president sternly. "And it's not the name that makes a thing but what it does." Octio-sequitur essay, as the saying goes. "You'll not be denying that." Now, a Dini hangs around a man's house and it eats his food and his tools and it's no sort of good to anybody while it's alive. Is that the action of a lizard? It is not. But it's notorious that porcupines hang around men's houses and eat the handles of their tools for the salt in them, ignoring the poor man whose sweat had the salt in it when he was laboring to earn a living for his family. And when a thing acts like a porcupine, a porcupine it is and nothing else. So a Dini is an Eren porcupine, native to the planet, and no man can deny it. And what then is a snake, demanded President O'Hanrahan or rhetorically? It's a creature that sneaks about upon the ground and poisons by its bite when it's not blarney and unwise females into tasting apples. Do the black creatures here do anything of that sort? They do not. They go about their business plain and open, given a half of the road and a howdy do to those they meet. They're sober and they're industrious. They mind their own business, which is killing the Eren porcupines we inaccurately call by the name of Dini's. It's their profession. Did ye ever hear of a snake with a profession? I'll not have it said that there's snakes on Eren and I'll denounce ye as a conscious list politician if ye dare to put such a name on an honest, friendly, industrious, Eren porcupine eaters that's up to this moment have been the saving of the colony. I'll not have it. There was a long silence. Then Sean O'Donohue spoke dryly. Porcupine eaters, you say. Not snakes? Not snakes, repeated the President defiantly. Porcupine eaters. Hmm, said Sean O'Donohue. That's better. The dolls not immune to Blarney when it's needful to accept it, and Eren back on earth is hard put for breathing room you say can be had from now on. What would be the reason for Moira standing so close to you? "She's marrying me," said President O'Hanrahan firmly. Sean O'Donohue's voice was waspish. "But I forbid it," it said sharply, "until I'm up and about and able to be given her in marriage as her grandfather ought to be doing. You'll wait the few days till I'm able. Understand?" "Yes, sir," said the President. "Meekness seemed called for." "Then be gone," snapped Sean O'Donohue. Then he added sternly. "Remember, no shenanigans." The solicitor general watched them depart on a wedding journey to a cottage in Ballyhanich, which was on Donigal Peninsula, fronting the Emmett Sea. He waved like the assembled populace, but when they were out of sight he said darkly to the Chief Justice and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. "I didn't have the heart to bring it up before, but there's the devil of a problem building up against the time he comes back." "Which problem?" asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Warely. "It's the sn—the porcupine killers," said the solicitor general. "Things look bad for them. They're out of work. Even Timothy. There's no deenies to speak up for them to earn a living by killing. It's technological unemployment. They earn their way faithfully, doing work they knew and loved." "Now they're jobless." "There's no work for them. What's to be done?" "Put them on retirement?" "There was a pause," the solicitor general said firmly. "I mean it. They've a claim on us. A claim of the highest order. They can't starve. It's sure. But would you have them have to hold mass meatens and set up picket lines and the like to get justice done them?" "Ah," said the Chief Justice, "some way we'll turn up to handle the matter. 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