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 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. 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. 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!" [Illustration] 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.