The Good Guys.
His father had been quite mad. He had told Steef that he and Veri were the hope of the future, and that they must go out and find others like them. He had even tried to preach to the Good Guys, but they wouldn’t listen, naturally.
But why, Steef wondered, hadn’t his father seen how wrong he was? The few other men with his father had seen it. One by one they left, sneaking away to join the Good Guys. They couldn’t stand being a Minority, when everyone in the world was a Good Guy. Everyone! That proved how wrong his father was.
“Can’t we try to find some people like us?” Veri asked.
“No!” Steef said again. “They’ll probably take us if we just show we’re Regular.”
She probably still believed some of the things his father had said. Well, he thought, she’d learn, once they were accepted by the Good Guys.
The Good Guys had forgotten about them the next day, and Steef and Veri roamed through the broken, deserted streets until noon. They found them, several hundred strong, in Centrul Park, farming. At least, that was what they called it. They were scratching at the ground, every man watching his neighbor to see how much work he was accomplishing.
“Hi, Friends,” Steef said, walking up to them.
“It’s the Anarkist,” one of them said. Instinctively the Good Guys huddled into a mob.
“If I’m an Anarkist, you’re a Pluterkrat,” Steef said boldly. He had decided that the best way to get along with the Good Guys was to act like one.
“You still look funny,” an anonymous voice from the crowd said.
“He sure does. He don’t look like no Good Guy I ever saw.”
“I am, though,” Steef said. “She is too. And if you take us in, we can help you.”
“How?” several of them asked.
“Tell them, Veri,” Steef said.
“Well,” Veri began hesitantly, “On our island—Steef’s and mine, I mean—we were planting vegetables, and we found that they grow better if you take out the weeds. We know you’re always short of food, so if you took out all the weeds here, you’d—”
“I thought so!” one of the Good Guys shouted. “The scum want Progress!”
Steef realized that they had said the wrong thing.
“They’ll want to lead us next!”
“Want to be Presdent, you vermin?”
“I’m sorry,” Steef said, perspiration rolling down his face. “She was lying, she didn’t mean it. Take us in, please. We won’t bother anyone, and we won’t try to change anything. We hate everyone, just like you. We even hate each other.”
“You do?” A man asked.
“Sure we do!” Steef said. “We don’t want to lead anyone, or be led. We just want the right to hate as we please, just like all the Good Guys. That’s all we want.”
The Good Guys talked and shouted and screamed it over. Steef couldn’t make out whether it was going good or bad for them. So many people were talking at once that he couldn’t make out any sort of trend.
After half an hour someone yelled, “Are you sure you ain’t an Anarkist?”
“I’m sure!” Steef said.
“Livin’ alone on that island, you might be a Pluterkrat, or a Catlik.”
Steef shook his head. It was unfair to accuse him of being any of those ancient races of people. They were so old that their origin had been forgotten, in most cases. But they were still hated. Steef remembered that his poor father had been proud—proud of being called names.
“It is true,” his father had said. “We few are the Catholics and the Negroes, the Poles and Italians and Germans. We are all the people who have ever been hated. We say this proudly!”
Steef wasn’t proud of it. He thought pityingly of his father’s insanity, and the insanity of anyone, anywhere, who wasn’t a Good Guy.
The Good Guys seemed just about ready. Steef felt a thrill of expectation run through him. It would be so wonderful for both of them if they were accepted. Then there would be no more Minority. They would be just like anyone else, hated like brothers instead of outsiders. They would belong.
“Hey, Guy,” one of the Good Guys said, “We made up our minds. Didn’t we, vermin?”
“Yeh, you moron, we made up our minds,” someone said. “I’ll tell him.”
“The hell you will,” another answered. “Who do you think you are? A Dictor or something?”
“I’m no bloody Dictor,” the man said, “but you can’t stop me from talkin’ if I want to. You greasy blob.”
“You hairless hog!”
Steef listened in admiration to the ancient, powerful names. He wondered if he would ever be able to reel them off with such proficiency.
“You pushed me, you toad!” A man shouted. He swung his fist at the man behind him, taking care to miss.
“Why, you slime!” The man behind him swung back, missing by a foot. Immediately, five more men were swinging at each other, flailing the air wildly. None of the Good Guys ever hit each other, Steef knew, for fear of being hit back, perhaps injured fatally.
“Anyhow,” a man shouted out of the melee, “you’re in!”
Steef let out a yell, leaping in the air for joy. That was all it took. Just that one little word made all the difference between being a detested outsider, or a hated, friendly insider. He was in.
He started forward, to take his rightful place in the pack, beside the sweaty Good Guys.
“Come on,” he said to Veri. “Hurry up before they change their minds.”
“Hold it!” a man shouted. “You’re in, guy, but she’s not.”
“What?” Steef said, stopping.
“She ain’t Regular,” one of the men said. “You can see that for yourself. She ain’t swore once.”
“No, and I’ll bet she don’t hate nobody, neither.”
“That’s a lie!” Steef shouted, tears in his eyes. “Tell them, Veri. Tell them how much you hate them. Tell them. Tell them you hate me.”
Veri turned her face away. Steef grabbed her by the shoulders.
“Tell them!”
“I—I—” Veri began. “I can’t, Steef. I don’t hate anyone!”
The colossal stupidity of women, Steef thought. After all the time he had spent with her, explaining how important hate was. How they couldn’t be accepted into the Good Fellows unless they hated, hated, hated. And now she did this to him.
“Besides,” one of the Good Guys said. “We thought it over, and if we take both of you, we ain’t got no Minority. That’s no good.”
“There’s always been a Minority.”
“So we gotta keep her out. She’s a Catlik, anyhow.”
“The hell she is! She’s an Anarkist!”
“Pluterkrat!”
“Grik!”
“She’s all of them. She’s the Minority! Come on, guy.”
Steef looked at the Good Guys, in their sneering, cursing pack. He longed to go with them, to be alone no longer. But Veri was standing there, her pale face turned away.
“Show them, Veri,” Steef pleaded. “Swear at them. Call me a pig. Prove you’re a Good Guy.”
“I can’t,” she said, crying.
“You must!”
Suddenly she faced him, and her back was erect. She wiped her eyes with her forearm and looked at him intently.
“You—are—wrong,” she said in a low voice, pronouncing the words very carefully. She turned and walked off.
“Veri!” Steef didn’t know what to do. This was the moment he had waited for, the acceptance. He could belong to the Good Guys—
But Veri was walking off.
“Forget the pig,” a man counselled him, grinning.
“She’s a Grik. Forget her, Chum,” another said.
“She’s not a Grik,” Steef said.
“Whatsa matter with you, rat?” one of his new friends asked. “You sound almost as if you don’t hate her.”
“You gotta hate her. She’s the Minority!”
Steef hesitated for another long
second, then ran after Veri. Behind him, the Good Guys screamed and shouted, waving their arms but not hitting anyone.
“Where are you going?” he panted, catching up with her.
“To find the others,” Veri said.
“You don’t know where any others are.”
“I’ll find them.”
He walked with her to the boat.
“Why not back to the island?” Steef asked, glancing back over his shoulder at the Good Guys.
“We’ll never go back to the island,” Veri said.
She had said “We.” How had she known he was going with her, Steef wondered.
“But how about the books? The books with the ancient cursewords?”
“We won’t need them,” Veri said.
Steef helped her push the rowboat into the water, and climbed in after her. He shook his head sadly, looking back at the Yawk shore. It had been so close! Now his chance for belonging was gone, and nothing would turn out right.
But looking at Veri’s determined face, he wasn’t sure. And suddenly, he wasn’t sure about anything.
SKULKING PERMIT
Wanted: one man to do a totally impossible job. Salary: the knowledge that a planet’s life depends upon his being able to do it!
TOM Fisher had no idea he was about to begin a criminal career. It was morning. The big red sun was just above the horizon, trailing its small yellow companion. The village, tiny and precise, a unique white dot on the planet’s green expanse, glistened under its two midsummer suns.
Tom was just waking up inside his cottage. He was a tall, tanned young man, with his father’s oval eyes and his mother’s easygoing attitude toward exertion. He was in no hurry; there could be no fishing until the fall rains, and therefore no real work for a fisher. Until fall, he was going to loaf and mend his fishing poles.
“It’s supposed to have a red roof!” he heard Billy Painter shouting outside.
“Churches never have red roofs!” Ed Weaver shouted back. Tom frowned. Not being involved, he had forgotten the changes that had come over the village in the last two weeks. He slipped on a pair of pants and sauntered out to the village square.
The first thing he saw when he entered the square was a large new sign, reading: NO ALIENS ALLOWED WITHIN CITY LIMITS. There were no aliens on the entire planet of New Delaware. There was nothing but forest, and this one village. The sign was purely a statement of policy.
The square itself contained a church, a jail and a post office, all constructed in the last two frantic weeks and set in a neat row facing the market. No one knew what to do with these buildings; the village had gone along nicely without them for over two hundred years. But now, of course, they had to be built.
ED Weaver was standing in front of the new church, squinting upward. Billy Painter was balanced precariously on the church’s steep roof, his blond mustache bristling indignantly. A small crowd had gathered.
“Damn it, man,” Billy Painter was saying, “I tell you I was reading about it just last week. White roof, okay. Red roof, never.”
“You’re mixing it up with something else,” Weaver said. “How about it, Tom?” Tom shrugged, having no opinion to offer. Just then, the mayor bustled up, perspiring freely, his shirt flapping over his large paunch.
“Come down,” he called to Billy. “I just looked it up. It’s the Little Red Schoolhouse, not Churchhouse.”
Billy looked angry. He had always been moody; all Painters were. But since the mayor made him chief of police last week, he had become downright temperamental.
“We don’t have no little schoolhouse,” Billy argued, halfway down the ladder.
“We’ll just have to build one,” the mayor said. “We’ll have to hurry, too.” He glanced at the sky. Involuntarily the crowd glanced upward. But there was still nothing in sight.
“Where are the Carpenter boys?” the mayor asked. “Sid, Sam, Marv—where are you?”
Sid Carpenter’s head appeared through the crowd. He was still on crutches from last month when he had fallen out of a tree looking for threstle’s eggs; no Carpenter was worth a damn at tree-climbing.
“The other boys are at Ed Beer’s Tavern,” Sid said. “Where else would they be?” Mary Waterman called from the crowd.
“Well, you gather them up,” the mayor said. “They gotta build up a little schoolhouse, and quick. Tell them to put it up beside the jail.” He turned to Billy Painter, who was back on the ground. “Billy, you paint that schoolhouse a good bright red, inside and out. It’s very important.”
“When do I get a police chief badge?” Billy demanded. “I read that police chiefs always get badges.”
“Make yourself one,” the mayor said. He mopped his face with his shirttail.
“Sure hot. Don’t know why that inspector couldn’t have come in winter . . . Tom! Tom Fisher! Got an important job for you. Come on, I’ll tell you all about it.”
He put an arm around Tom’s shoulders and they walked to the mayor’s cottage past the empty market, along the village’s single paved road. In the old days, that road had been of packed dirt. But the old days had ended two weeks ago and now the road was paved with crushed rock. It made barefoot walking so uncomfortable that the villagers simply cut across each other’s lawns. The mayor, though, walked on it out of principle.
“Now look, Mayor, I’m on my vacation—”
“Can’t have any vacations now,” the mayor said. “Not now, He’s due any day.” He ushered Tom inside his cottage and sat down in the big armchair, which had been pushed as close to the interstellar radio as possible.
“Tom,” the mayor said directly, “how would you like to be a criminal?”
“I don’t know,” said Tom. “What’s a criminal?”
SQUIRMING uncomfortably in his chair, the mayor rested a hand on the radio for authority. “It’s this way,” he said, and began to explain. Tom listened, but the more he heard, the less he liked, It was all the fault of that interstellar radio, he decided. Why hadn’t it really been broken?
No one had believed it could work. It had gathered dust in the office of one mayor after another, for generations, the last silent link with Mother Earth. Two hundred years ago. Earth talked with New Delaware, and with Ford IV, Alpha Centauri, Nueva Espana, and the other colonies that made up the United Democracies of Earth. Then all conversations stopped.
There seemed to be a war on Earth. New Delaware, with its one village, was too small and too distant to take part. They waited for news, but no news came. And then plague struck the village, wiping out three-quarters of the inhabitants.
Slowly the village healed. The villagers adopted their own ways of doing things. They forgot Earth.
Two hundred years passed.
And then, two weeks ago, the ancient radio had coughed itself into life. For hours, it growled and spat static, while the inhabitants of the village gathered around the mayor’s cottage, Finally words came out: “. . . hear me, New Delaware? Do you hear me?”
“Yes, yes, we hear you,” the mayor said. “The colony is still there?”
“It certainly is,” the mayor said proudly. The voice became stern and official.
“There has been no contact with the Outer Colonies for some time, due to unsettled conditions here. But that’s over, except for a little mopping up. You of New Delaware are still a colony of Imperial Earth and subject to her laws. Do you acknowledge the status?”
The mayor hesitated. All the books referred to Earth as the United Democracies. Well, in two centuries, names could change.
“We are still loyal to Earth,” the mayor said with dignity. “Excellent. That saves us the trouble of sending an expeditionary force. A resident inspector will be dispatched to you from the nearest point, to ascertain whether you conform to the customs, institutions and traditions of Earth.”
“What?” the mayor asked, worried.
THE stern voice became higher-pitched. “You realize, of course, that there is room for only one intelligent species in
the Universe—Man! All others must be suppressed, wiped out, annihilated. We can tolerate no aliens sneaking around us. I’m sure you understand, General.”
“I’m not a general. I’m a mayor.”
“You’re in charge, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then you are a general. Permit me to continue. In this galaxy, there is no room for aliens. None! Nor is there room for deviant human cultures, which, by definition, are alien. It is impossible to administer an empire when everyone does as he pleases. There must be order, no matter what the cost.”
The mayor gulped hard and stared at the radio.
“Be sure you’re running an Earth colony, General, with no radical departures from the norm, such as free will,, free love, free elections, or anything else on the proscribed list. Those things are alien, and we’re pretty rough on aliens. Get your colony in order, General. The inspector will call in about two weeks. That is all.”
The village held an immediate meeting, to determine how best to conform with the Earth mandate. All they could do was hastily model themselves upon the Earth pattern as shown in their ancient books.
“I don’t see why there has to be a criminal,” Tom said.
“That’s a very important part of Earth society,” the mayor explained. “All the books agree on it. The criminal is as important as the postman, say, or the police chief. Unlike them, the criminal is engaged in anti-social work. He works against society, Tom. If you don’t have people working against society, how can you have people working for it? There’d be no jobs for them to do.” Tom shook his head. “I just don’t see it.”
“Be reasonable, Tom. We have to have earthly things. Like paved roads. All the books mention that. And churches, and schoolhouses, and jails. And all the books mention crime.”
“I won’t do it,” Tom said.
“Put yourself in my position,” the mayor begged. “This inspector comes and meets Billy Painter, our police chief. He asks to see the jail. Then he says, ‘No prisoners?’ I answer, ‘Of course not. We don’t have any crime here.’ ‘No crime?’ he says. ‘But Earth colonies always have crime. You know that.’ ‘We don’t,’ I answer. ‘Didn’t even know what it was until we looked up the word last week.’ ” Then why did you build a jail?’ he asks me. ‘Why did you appoint a police chief?’ ”
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