Refugee by Piers Anthony Read Free Book Online Page B

this area, barely covert, and it was said that modern pirates of space had influence in the Halfcal government.
    Certainly there was a lot of pirate money around from the illicit drug trade, and we all knew the corrupting power of money. So it was not surprising that officials winked at innocuous or even illegal activities. I doubted that pirates were actually involved in refugee bubbles, for there could not be much money in that, but certainly individual entrepreneurs could be.
    “You would go on such a bubble, rather than to the coffee dome?” my father asked, and I grasped now that he had not really been surprised by the suggestion. Adults, too, had their private sources of information.
    “Oh, sure,” Spirit agreed immediately. “It would be fun!”
    Oh, my Lord, how little she knew!
    “There could be danger and discomfort,” my father warned.
    “But if the family stayed together—” my mother said.
    That was, I believe, the turning point. After that we found ourselves committed to the exodus.
    We would flee Callisto!

Bio of a Space Tyrant 1 - Refugee
    Chapter 4 — FLIGHT INTO VACUUM
    I have only an inkling of what my father did to organize for our horrendous trek across the surface of Callisto. (I have not run a dateline for this entry because it follows the last without change of locale. A foolish consistency, as Señor Emerson said many centuries ago, is the hobgoblin of little minds.) Probably he did not want us to know, for it could hardly have been completely legal. Officially, we were preparing to vacate the premises; actually, we meant to vacate the planet.
    All of our private holdings were liquidated on the gray market and the money used to buy third-hand surface suits for each of us, together with compact food packs and water filters. There was enough left over to cover the down payment on a junky low-gravity transporter.
    That was all. We could not keep our toys and dolls and treasured books. Surface suits had very little room for extra things, even if we hadn't needed the pittances the sale of those things brought. Spirit tried hard to conceal her tears, no longer quite so thrilled about the journey, and I went bleakly about the business of cashing in. We knew what was at stake.
    I kept the laser pistol, however, squeezing it into an exterior pocket, and I knew Spirit kept her finger-whip.
    As far as I know, no final payment was made on the mortgage. It was not that we sought to cheat Colonel Guillaume, who had done the best he could for us within the limits of his philosophy, but that the foreclosure already represented a fair profit for him, since we had built up a fair equity over the years which he would not have to transfer to the coffee-plantation residence. Perhaps he knew what we intended and did not report us to the authorities for that reason. As long as his hands were technically clean and he made a fair profit, he did not mind our effort to seek a better life elsewhere. Certainly he could have stopped us, had he wished to.
    We left at night, in order to avoid any police watch. Again, it would not have been possible to escape the dome of Maraud if the authorities had really cared to prevent us. But we were only peasants; they were hardly concerned if we took it upon ourselves to depart the good life we supposedly had here.
    I should explain that leaving a dome is no simple matter. Callisto is an airless world, terraformed only in particular spots. It is the same with all the moons of Jupiter, and indeed throughout the Solar System other than Earth. The domes are made of huge bubbles grown in the massive atmosphere of Jupiter, floated to the local surface by means of standard antigravity shields, cut in half, and cemented to surface plates. The fit had to be strong and tight, or the pressure of the air inside would blow the dome apart and right off Callisto. So entrance and egress were only by air locks, and these were not carelessly supervised. The city-dome of Maraud is 1.3 kilometers in