"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.