Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net 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 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.