Race riots -- Fiction; Racism -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Space colonies -- Fiction
"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."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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