ported 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 dinies ate their springs and metal parts. It offered
bounties for dead dinies. But the supply of dinies was inexhaustible,
and the supply of money was not. It had to be stopped.

Then upon the spaceport of Eire a certain Captain Patrick Brannicut, of
Boston, Earth, descended. It was his second visit to Eire. On the first
he'd learned of the trouble. On his second he brought what still seemed
the most probable solution. He landed eighteen hundred adult black
snakes, two thousand teen-agers 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 dinies with enthusiasm. They pounced upon
dinies while the public watched. They lay in wait for dinies, they
publicly digested dinies, and they went pouring down into any small
hole in the ground from which a diny had appeared or into which one
vanished. They were superior to traps. They did not have to be set or
emptied. They did not need bait. They were self-maintaining and even
self-reproducing--except that snakes when overfed 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 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.
Patrick--lay in the belief that some day 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 Eire. But
on Eire it was sentimentally regarded as St. Patrick telling the snakes
to go increase and multiply.

But nobody dared tell that to Sean 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 Eire could not
continue to be inhabited, becaus