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 John McCullough's house. McCullough was in at the start of it, and he was in at the end.

Sunday is thirty hours long on Centaurus II, as are all the other days of the week, of course; and in summer, at the latitude of Port Knakvik, the afternoons are very long indeed. John McCullough that Sunday had finished hanging the windows in the log house he was building, and now he was relaxing on the back stoop with a bottle of local whiskey. The whiskey was distilled from a native starchy root, and had a peculiar taste, but it was alcoholic, and one got used to it.

In the kitchen McCullough's wife was getting Sunday dinner on the new inductor stove, still marvelling at its convenience—back on the farm they had cooked with wood. The two children were playing in and out of the house. His neighbors, Henry Watts from across the street, and Pete Tallant from next door, had been helping him with the windows, and now they were helping him with the bottle. They were discussing the native question. In a way, this was the beginning of the riot.

"It's not that I got anything against them, in their place," Henry Watts 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 natives than there is Earthmen, then you just watch out. They're snotty enough already in their sly way, you let them get the upper hand once, mark my word, 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-settled country where the first colonists had been brought two generations before to form the nucleus of an agricultural community. He had never seen more than half a dozen native Centaurans until he came down to Knakvik to work on the spaceport the new federal colonial government was building, and it was not his nature to worry about problems which did not directly concern him. Mostly, he liked to mind his own business, it was characteristic of McCullough that his friends came to visit him at his house, he did not go to visit them.

"What the government ought to do," Watts said, "it ought to take the whole bunch and round them up and put them away on a reservation somewhere. You can't civilize a grayskin, they ain't even human to start with, so why try?"

"Nuts," Pete Tallant said. Where Watts was a redneck miner and construction worker; and McCullough a farmer picking up a little easy money on a temporary job; Tallant was an intellectual, a dark restive young Earthman working his way around to see how Earth's far colonies looked. Watts' yapping irritated him, but there was no point in arguing against that sort of brainless conviction, he knew. He stared gloomily off at the mountains across the river, rising clean and snow-capped above the shanties and garbage piles of the transient workers who had overflowed the city to camp on the flats along the river; thinking:

Just over a hundred years ago this planet was first discovered by men. Less than sixty years ago the first colonists were brought here. They came to a brand-new planet, almost as naked as the day they were born—two hundred pounds per colonist, including their own weight—with a free hand to build a new world as they pleased. And already the same old pattern, hate and distrust and envy, greed and oppression. How many men on Centaurus II? Perhaps a hundred thousand. How many native Centaurans? Perhaps five million, on a planet larger than Earth. But not enough room for both—

"You think I'm prejudiced," Watts said heavily, the need of the frontiersman to justify his opinions before the cosmopolite rankling in his voice. "Well, I ain't. I just know those buggers, that's all. You greenhorns come out here from Earth, you figure you got an answer to everything, just because we don't have the schooling you got, we're a bunch of fools. Ain't that right, John?"

"Yeah, I guess," McCullough said absently. The next thing to do, he thought, now that they had inductor power from the central station, was to get running water in the house. Plastic bubbles and tents and shanties and hauling water from the pump were well enough for bums and single men, but a family man might as well be building a decent home while he was about it. There would always be rental value in a good house here in town, especially with the new spaceport and the government moving here; and later, when the kids had to go to high school, it would be handy. Some day, too, he would be retiring, turning the farm over to Jimmy, he and Mary would need a place to live then.

"The old ones ain't so bad," Watts said. "They know their place, and they remember what happened at Artillery Bluff. But some of these young bucks, especially the smart-alecky kind the government has been sending to school—" He shook his head forebodingly.

"Nuts," Tallant said wearily. "Let's talk about something we can all be stupid about, huh? Women or baseball or something."

Watts flushed. "I know what I'm talking about now, and I didn't get it out of books, either, I've lived with the buggers. You greenhorns read all this sob stuff in the high-brow magazines back on Earth about the noble Centaurans, and you figure we're a bunch of jerks because we don't slobber all over them too. Noble Centaurans! Jesus! Dirty, sneaking non-humans, that's what." He lifted the bottle and drank deeply, tilting back his head and letting his eyes rove. "There," he said abruptly. "There's your noble Centaurans, look at 'em!"

A group of natives were coming up the alley—in Port Knakvik, natives did not walk in the street—shuffling along with downcast eyes. They were a small gray-skinned people, roughly humanoid, viviparous but not mammalian. There were five males followed half a dozen steps behind by a female carrying an infant on her hip.

"You see that kish there with her fotin?" Watts asked. "Lemme show you something, you probably wouldn't believe this if I told you, these grayskins are just like animals, they got no decency at all." He stood up and waved an arm in a beckoning gesture. "Hey, you kish, come over here," he called.

The female Centauran paused uncertainly, looking at him with frightened eyes out of a small triangular noseless face.

"Yes, you," Watts barked. "Come here!"

She glanced at the males ahead of her, who had also stopped and were looking at Watts from the corners of their eyes. One mumbled something to her. She began to shuffle slowly across the yard toward Watts, looking at her feet. Watts took a steel five-dollar piece from his pocket and held it out toward her.

"Here, you kish," he said, "feed baby, viptiv fotin, get money."

The native took the coin and looked doubtfully at the three men. "Viptiv?" she asked in a light high voice.

"That's right," Watts said. "Viptiv fotin." He grinned at Tallant. "Watch this, kid, you want to see your noble Centauran do something'll really make you gag."

"Oh, for Pete's sake," Tallant said. "I know these people feed their young by regurgitation. So it's disgusting to mammals? So what?" He jumped down from the stoop and took the Centauran mother's arm and turned her gently around. "No viptiv," he said. "Run along."

Watts' face was almost purple now. "What the hell you think you're doing?" he shouted. He grasped the female's other arm. "Viptiv," he gritted in her face. "You took my money, now viptiv!"

"Let go that woman," Tallant said, "or I'll push your face in." He turned toward the group of males, who still stood stupidly staring. "Come on over here," he called. "Take your woman and get out." One of them started reluctantly across the yard. Tallant dropped the native woman's arm and stepped past her to face Watts. "I told you to let go," he said.

Watts thrust his face out. "Make me, wise guy."

Tallant hit Watts in the face with his fist.

Watts was a big man, and tough. He shook his head, wiped his nose, looked incredulously at the blood on his hand, and let out a roar of rage. It was not much of a fight. Watts' first blow dazed Tallant, the second knocked him down, and before he could get up Watts stepped in and kicked him in the head.

The Centauran woman still stood where the men had left her, wide-eyed with confusion. She ran awkwardly over to Watts, shoving in between him and Tallant's prostrate body, and pushed the five-dollar piece at him, chattering excitedly in her own tongue. Watts twisted the money from her fingers and shoved her roughly down on top of Tallant. "There, you goddam native-lover," he roared, "get a real good whiff of one once, see how you like it."

She was still carrying the baby, she tried to shield it as she fell, but her body twisted and she came down heavily on it. The baby screamed, a high-pitched, nerve-tearing sound. The male who had started back to get her pulled a long sharp knife from somewhere beneath his rags and broke into a trot, his eyes beadily intent on Watts.

McCullough had started down off the porch when Watts put the boot to Tallant. He changed his intent and ran in behind the native, and hit him solidly with his fist in the back of the neck. The native went sprawling and his knife flew out of his hand.

People were turning to look and popping out of tents and shelters all around now.

"Why, that dirty native," Watts bellowed, "he tried to knife me!"

He stepped over to the Centauran and kicked him savagely several times. The other four males had been watching open-mouthed. They turned abruptly and started back down the alley the way they had come, but there was a small knot of men there, watching them. The natives paused uncertainly. One broke away and ran toward the street, between McCullough's house and Tallant's tent, and the others followed.

Most of the Earthmen had no idea what was happening. The closer ones could see a couple of natives and a man lying on the ground, another man with a bloody face shouting something about knifing, and four natives running.

"Head 'em off!" someone called. "They'll get away in the street!"

That was how the riot at Port Knakvik started.

Watts ran off after the mob chasing the natives, perhaps with some idea of explaining, more likely not—he was in a half mindless rage of excitement with the whiskey and the fighting. McCullough was left alone with Tallant and the two natives. The native woman seemed unhurt, she was picking herself up and examining the infant, which still whimpered. Tallant was unconscious. McCullough picked him up and carried him into the house.

His wife was standing white-faced at the door.

"Get some water," he said. He laid Tallant on a cot and began to wipe off his face. There was a scalp cut where Watts' boot had clipped him, most of the blood was coming from that; but it was high and it did not feel like a fracture. Presently Tallant groaned and shook his head and opened his eyes. The pupils did not look bad.

"How do you feel?" McCullough asked.

"Rough," Tallant mumbled. "Rough. Side ... hurts...."

McCullough pulled up the shirt and looked. There was a swelling purplish bruise on the chest. He touched it gently and drew a gasp of pain.

"Looks like maybe you got a cracked rib," he said. "Get me some tape, will you, Mary?" He took the roll of tape and wound it tightly about Tallant's chest.

"That'll hold till you get to a doctor," he said.

Tallant drew a light experimental breath. "Feels better," he said. "What the hell happened anyway?"

McCullough told him.

"That's bad," Tallant said. "That fool Watts could touch off a real riot, there's plenty more around here with no more brains than he has, and just spoiling for trouble. Somebody ought to get the marshal's office working on it before things get out of hand." He took the wet rag he had been holding to his head away and examined the cut with squeamish fingers. "Have to get this stitched up too, I guess, before it sets up hard. Look, could you back my truck out into the street? I don't feel up to driving, but if I get it in the street, it can take me in to the dispensary on auto, and I can call Administration from there."

There were very few private vehicles in Port Knakvik, or indeed anywhere on Centaurus II; but Tallant, who was an electrician, had a company panel which he drove to and from the job. Though it was chemically powered—the new inductor station was the first nuclear installation on the planet—it had the same cybernetic controls as any Earthside vehicle. They worked fine on paved roads. On Knakvik streets, however—

"I don't know," McCullough said dubiously, "You think you can make it on auto? Suppose you get stalled?"

Port Knakvik lay on a silty alluvial plain. In the downtown area, the streets were stabilized, but back along the river where the shanties of the construction workers sprawled, they were simply ruts punctuated at frequent intervals by chuckholes where churning wheels had ripped off the overburden, exposing the bottomless muck beneath.

"I'd go with you," McCullough said, "except I kind of hate to leave Mary and the kids right now—I tell you, maybe I could find somebody else. You lay down for a minute, take it easy, I'll look around."

Tallant seemed to have guessed right about the riot, there were people running by outside toward a commotion at the lower end of the street where the native shanties clustered. McCullough saw a man he knew from the job. "Hey, George," he called, "you got time to do a little favor?" He explained about Tallant.

The man had not yet been in any fighting, he was simply curious about what was going on, and this was part of it. "Sure, John," he said. "Be glad to."

They helped Tallant into the truck. George backed it out into the street on manual. "What's the dispensary coordinates?" he asked.

"Three-two-three, oh-one-five, local," Tallant told him.

George pushed the keys and they started off toward town.

McCullough turned to see what he could make out of the excitement at the other end of the street. There were two columns of smoke billowing up now, and scattered shots. Two men came back up the street helping another with his trouser leg split away and a bloody bandage about his thigh.

"What's it all about, John?" A man called across the street to him.

"Don't know. Fighting with the natives, I guess. Henry Watts and some other fellows chased a couple of them down there. Looks like they mean to clean the whole bunch out."

"Dammit, that's not right," the man across the street said. "The natives got a right to live too, they had a village here before we came. Somebody ought to do something about it."

"Pete Tallant just went into town to tell the marshal."

"Yeah, well, I wouldn't holler copper on my neighbors myself, but I won't have anything to do with killing those poor natives either. They can get along without me." The man went back in his house and closed the door.

McCullough walked a few steps out into the street to get a better view. The riot was none of his business, and he had no intention of getting mixed up in it, but the idea of the fighting excited him and made him nervous. He could not see much, except that there was a lot of activity.

He shook his head helplessly. My God, he thought, all this from two men with nothing to do on a Sunday afternoon but get half-drunk and start arguing....

Someone screamed—Mary's scream, suddenly choked off!

McCullough ran back across the yard and up the steps, raging at himself for having left Mary and the children alone in the house. There was no one in the front room, but through the kitchen door he could see a native with his back turned, peering out the kitchen window.

McCullough's gun was hanging over the door, on pegs set into the logs, a gun made from the first steel smelted on Centaurus II. He reached down the gun as he stepped in the door.

There were two natives in the kitchen; one with a roughed-up look who might have been the one Watts had kicked, watching Mary as she huddled in a corner by the stove with her arms about the two children; the other still looking out the window. Both spun around to face him as McCullough burst into the room.

For a moment they eyed each other in silence, the two Centaurans and the Earthman.

"You hurt, Mary?" McCullough asked.

She was frightened almost speechless, but she managed a squeak and a negative shake of her head.

McCullough took his eyes from the natives for a moment and studied her searchingly. "You sure?" he asked. She nodded. Some of the color was coming back in her face again now, and she looked all right.

He looked back at the two natives. He should have them arrested, he supposed, but to file a complaint meant going to court and losing a day's work. It did not even occur to him to hold them for the mob.

He gestured with the gun muzzle. "OK," he said roughly. "Get out of here, now. Get!"

The natives looked at each other. Outside, there was a rattle of shots in the alley, and several high-pitched screams. The native by the window wet his lips and shook his head, and the other turned back toward McCullough. He had a knife in his hand, which he swung menacingly.

"No," he said. "No go outside. Kill."

It was not clear if he meant the verb passively or actively, but with the knife not six feet from Mary and the children, it did not seem a proper time to discuss fine points of grammar. McCullough shot him in the belly. At that range, the charge almost tore the slight native in half.

The other Centauran turned and came lunging toward him, and McCullough fired again. The native stumbled and fell in a heap in the middle of the floor, half across the body of the first.

McCullough stepped over them to the back door and glanced out, dropping fresh charges in the gun as he did so. There were no natives in sight but several white men were in the alley, looking around, trying to decide where the shots had come from. Henry Watts was with them. He saw McCullough at the door and called out to him: "You hear those shots? Two of 'em ran back up this alley. You see them?"

"They came in my house," McCullough said. "I shot both of them."

"Good, by God," Watts yelled. "That's two we don't have to worry about."

"There's one more left," another man called from up the alley. "He ducked around through Gordon's lot."

The men ran off up the alley on the new scent, and McCullough turned back into the kitchen. Mary had collapsed into a chair and was sobbing with her head in her arms. The two children clung to her, staring wide-eyed at the bodies of the natives.

McCullough walked over and patted her on the back. "It's OK now, Mary," he said. "It's OK, nothing to worry about now." His wife went on crying, and he stood there awkwardly, not quite knowing what to do.

He noticed that the dark purplish blood of the natives, almost black, was spreading in little rivulets and pools over the kitchen floor. The floor was of sanded white wood, and stained easily. There were some folded tarps in the lean-to where McCullough kept his tools. He got one and rolled the bodies over onto it. As he did so, he saw that one of them, the second one he had shot, was still alive. The shot had gone low and mangled the native's upper leg. He stared up at McCullough with opaque expressionless eyes, slowly bleeding to death.

It was an embarrassing situation. McCullough was not any more callous than the next man, but he found himself wishing his aim had been better. He could hardly allow the Centauran to lie there and bleed to death while he watched, but neither did he feel any particular responsibility in the matter. The native had got what he was asking for, and that was that.

Finally he took the native's leather belt and tightened it around the leg for a tourniquet, got another tarp and spread it on the cot, and laid the native on it. The corpse he rolled in the first tarp and pushed under the cot. Throughout the injured Centauran said nothing, either in thanks or protest, although the leg must have been painful.

He had just finished when he heard voices in the front yard.

Henry Watts was there with half a dozen other men carrying guns and clubs, all looking the worse for wear. Two were dragging a Centauran corpse by the pants legs.

Watts mopped at his sweaty, blood-stained face with his shirt-tail. "You still got those two grayskins in there?" he asked.

McCullough nodded.

"Fine, we'll take 'em off your hands now." Watts half-turned to the men behind him. "Come on, give me a hand to drag 'em out." He started up the steps.

"Wait a minute," McCullough said. He did not move out of the door, he was not quite sure why, a moment ago he had been wondering what to do with the natives, and here was Watts offering to take them. It may have been the way they were dragging the Centauran, face down in the mud, that bothered him. "What you going to do with them?" he asked.

"We got a use for 'em," Watts said with relish. "We're going to drag all the bodies up in front of Dubois' place and string 'em up to poles there, for a warning. We'll learn those grayskins what to expect, they come messing around here any more. Come on, toss 'em out, we'll take these two along with the rest."

"Well, I don't know," McCullough said. "One of these is still alive, I didn't kill him, just crippled him."

Watts showed his teeth. "That won't be a problem," he said.

McCullough shook his head slowly. He had counted Henry Watts as his friend, but he was not so sure now that he liked him. "No," he said. "I think we better just leave them till the cops come."

Watts laughed. "Cops? There ain't going to be any cops coming. We're handling this ourselves. Don't worry about the cops, even if they could get an indictment, there ain't a jury in this town would convict for killing a native."

"I'm not worrying about that," McCullough said stolidly, "but I don't like what you fellows are doing, I might as well say right now, and I'm not going to be a party to it. Those natives stay right where they are till the law comes and gets them."

Watts' grin faded. "John," he said, "we ain't fooling. I know you're no native-lover, but we're going to clean those devils out once for all. If you won't let us in for them, we'll come in anyway and take 'em."

McCullough shook his head again. "This is my house. Henry, you've been my friend, but I just shot two people for coming in here without knocking."

Watts looked around at the men behind him. Most of them knew McCullough. They did not seem taken with the idea of breaking into his house. Watts swung back to McCullough. "John," he said ominously, "you're just making trouble for yourself, that's all."

McCullough simply shook his head and stood blocking the doorway.

Watts glanced around at the other men again. One of them shrugged self-consciously and turned away, and after a moment the others trailed after.

"All right," Watts growled. He shook his fist under McCullough's nose. "All right, John McCullough, I'll remember this, and I'll be back. Native-lover!" He spat on the step and went off after the others.

McCullough watched them go, uneasy under his surface stolidity. He liked to be on good terms with his neighbors, not enough to give in to them on anything he felt strongly about, but he knew this would be held against him, and it worried him, more for the sake of Mary and the kids than for himself.

He sensed his wife standing behind him.

"What did they want?" she asked.

He told her.

"But, John, why? Haven't we had enough trouble today? Do you have to get in a fight with your neighbors over a stupid native? What difference does it make to you?"

McCullough shook his head helplessly. "I don't know. I just don't like the idea, that's all."

His wife stared wordlessly at him for a moment. She went into the kitchen and sat down at the table and began crying again. The children ran to her and began whimpering also. McCullough prowled restlessly about the living-room, stooping now and then to peer out the windows as men shouted and ran by. The native lay silent on the cot, unmoving except for his eyes which followed McCullough.

McCullough stopped and studied the Centauran resentfully. Goddam natives, he thought, all they cause is trouble. He bent over and loosened the strap on the leg until fresh blood started to ooze out and then tightened it again. The Centauran winced a little and closed his eyes briefly, but made no other sign. Ought to have morphine, McCullough thought, but would morphine work on a Centauran? He didn't know.

He pulled a chair over to the window, where he could watch both doors and the cot, and sat down with the gun across his knees. The riot was apparently still booming along. Men trotted by outside now and then, singly or in little groups, calling to each other. Once several went by with another Centauran corpse slung hand and foot to a pole. There were no women or children in sight, those houses with blinds had them down, the tent-flaps were tightly drawn. There was no indication of any attempt by the authorities to halt the riot. Possibly Tallant had not gotten through, or possibly Watts was right, the Administration was keeping hands off.

After a while Mary came in and stood by the chair. Her eyes were still red, but she was no longer crying. "You want something to eat now?" she asked dully. "The roast is done."

"Yeah, I guess so," he said. He avoided her eyes.

She fixed a plate and brought it to him and sat down to watch him eat.

"You think there'll be more trouble?" she asked. "They surely won't bother us again, will they?"

McCullough chewed thoughtfully. He thought there would be more trouble, but he did not like to worry his wife unduly. "Well," he hedged, "that Henry's kind of a bull-headed fellow."

"Don't you be bull-headed too, John. I know you have to do what you think is right, but please be careful."

He reached out and took her hand in his. "Honey, I'm sorry. I know it's mighty tough on women sometimes, but a man just can't give in on some things, that's all." He looked down, pleased as always by the contrast of her small, pale, delicate fingers lying in his large blunt chocolate-brown hand. The contrast seemed especially important today, for reasons he could not quite place.

Was there some special significance in a black man married to a white woman, a black man setting his will against white men, not as an enemy, but as an equal? Back a couple of hundred years ago, he knew, on Earth—but the thought eluded him, he was not a very articulate or subtle thinker and he could not pin it down.

"Don't you worry, Mary," he said, "it'll turn out all right."

It was almost sundown when Watts came back. McCullough was checking the tourniquet on the native's leg when he heard a commotion in the street outside.

"John McCullough," a voice bellowed. "Come out!"

Watts' voice, McCullough thought. He picked up his gun, but then he thought he would not feel right facing the men outside, who were after all his neighbors, with a gun in his hands. He looked around. The double-bitted axe he had been using to trim the logs around his window-frames leaned against the wall by the door.

"Get in the bedroom, Mary," he said. "Pull the mattress off the bed and lie down behind it with the kids."

He took the axe and walked out the door onto the steps, squinting his eyes against the setting sun. The street was full of men in front of his house, perhaps half a hundred or so. Watts and a short stout man stood halfway up the path to the door. McCullough studied them in silence.