e out and like the faithful
creatures they are they set anxious to work on their backlog of
diny-catchin'. Which they're doin'. They've ruined us entirely, but
they meant well."

The minister of Information asked apprehensively: "What will O'Donohue
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 Erse and blasphemy directed
at St. Patrick." Then the president said with a sort of yearning pride:
"D'ye know what Moira offered to do? She said she'd taken biology at
college, and she'd try to solve the problem of the dinies. The
darlin'!"

"Bein' gathered together," observed the chief justice, "we might as
well try again to think of somethin' plausible."

"We need a good shenanigan," 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
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. They had thick bodies with
unlikely bony excrescences, 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 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 vengefully expected dyspepsia. They digested the
roofs, too. Presently the lumbering creatures nibbled at axes--the
heads, not the handles. They went on to the plows. When they gathered
sluggishly about a ground-car and began to lunch on it, the colonists
did not believe. But it was true.

The dinies' 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, diny teeth, being organic, seemed to be an
especially hard