RACE RIOT
BY RALPH WILLIAMS
McCullough was not a native lover, nor was
he particularly bull-headed. He just felt there
was a certain difference between right and wrong
and nobody was going to change his mind.
Take that Sunday afternoon....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1955.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The riot started late Sunday afternoon, in the alley back of JohnMcCullough's house. McCullough was in at the start of it, and he was inat the end.
Sunday is thirty hours long on Centaurus II, as are all the other daysof the week, of course; and in summer, at the latitude of Port Knakvik,the afternoons are very long indeed. John McCullough that Sunday hadfinished hanging the windows in the log house he was building, and nowhe was relaxing on the back stoop with a bottle of local whiskey. Thewhiskey was distilled from a native starchy root, and had a peculiartaste, but it was alcoholic, and one got used to it.
In the kitchen McCullough's wife was getting Sunday dinner on the newinductor stove, still marvelling at its convenience—back on the farmthey had cooked with wood. The two children were playing in and out ofthe house. His neighbors, Henry Watts from across the street, and PeteTallant from next door, had been helping him with the windows, and nowthey were helping him with the bottle. They were discussing the nativequestion. In a way, this was the beginning of the riot.
"It's not that I got anything against them, in their place," HenryWatts said. "Their place just ain't in an Earthman's town, that's all.They keep crowding in, first thing you know there'll be more nativesthan there is Earthmen, then you just watch out. They're snotty enoughalready in their sly way, you let them get the upper hand once, mark myword, it won't be safe for a woman to walk down the street."
"Yeah, I guess so," McCullough said. He was really not much interested.His people were from the flats upriver from Knakvik, a long-settledcountry where the first colonists had been brought two generationsbefore to form the nucleus of an agricultural community. He had neverseen more than half a dozen native Centaurans until he came down toKnakvik to work on the spaceport the new federal colonial governmentwas building, and it was not his nature to worry about problemswhich did not directly concern him. Mostly, he liked to mind his ownbusiness, it was characteristic of McCullough that his friends came tovisit him at his house, he did not go to visit them.
"What the government ought to do," Watts said, "it ought to take thewhole bunch and round them up and put them away on a reservationsomewhere. You can't civilize a grayskin, they ain't even human tostart with, so why try?"
"Nuts," Pete Tallant said. Where Watts was a redneck miner andconstruction worker; and McCullough a farmer picking up a little easymoney on a temporary job; Tallant was an intellectual, a dark restiveyoung Earthman working his way around to see how Earth's far colonieslooked. Watts' yapping irritated him, but there was no point in arguingagainst that sort of brainless conviction, he knew. He stared gloomilyoff at the mountains across the river, rising clean and snow-cappedabove the shanties and garbage piles of the transient workers who hadoverflowed the city to camp on the flats along the river; thinking:
Just over a hundred years ago this planet was first discovered byme