Novels by Observer

My father was no expert driver, since few peasants ever got much practice with vehicles of any type, and his legs had to be tired from all that pedaling, but he was strongly motivated.Spirit and I came to the brink of the mine and watched the action. There were roads winding around and down past tiers of blank ice walls, and the whole cavity was like a giant inverted dome, with high ridges of ice-rock projecting between many of the levels and spires rising where there were turn arounds.Any of these could smash up the saucer pretty badly, if it happened to be unlucky enough to collide with them. The gravity lens made the saucer light, but it could not change its mass; a crack-up would be just as devastating as one in full gravity.The winding roads were designed for exactly the kind of vehicle my father was driving, by no coincidence, so now he had the advantage of the terrain. He wheeled around the spires, dragging the saucer alon

Belatedly I remembered that capsules were color-coded in an obvious manner, as it could be exceedingly awkward to open them in a vacuum to check their contents. Glaring orange was the code for explosives.Explosives are normally used for excavation work. It is not feasible to light fuses or whatever in a vacuum—oh, yes, they do have a fuse that burns in empty space, with its own oxygen built in—but it takes special equipment to start it going. So most small explosives are contact-detonated.The effect of this one did not seem great, but of course this was a mini-charge, and the debris settled out almost instantly, because there was no air to buoy it. Had that bomb struck our transporter, those of us who were not directly injured would have died from suit destruction. Even a little bomb is devastating when it detonates in your face! My father had caught on and swerved just in time; we had struck no craterlet.The saucer swerved to ge

I have only an inkling of what my father did to organize for our horrendous trek across the surface of Callisto.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.

Place: CallistoDate: January 2nd, 2615They came resplendent in the military uniform of the Maraud police, delivering the foreclosure on our property. I mentioned the debt and mortgage our father took on to insure an education for his children. He was in arrears on the payments, of course, because all peasants were. That was the way of life on Callisto.My father, Major Hubris, was an intelligent man with minimal formal education. He knew very well that the big landowners were systematically cheating the peasants, but didn't know how to stop it. I had progressed far enough in my education to have a fair notion of the situation, and was confident that by the time I reached maturity I would be able to set about reversing the downward trend for our family. But until that time, the Hubrises were vulnerable—and that vulnerability had abruptly been exploited.Foreclosure—that finished us before we could begin to fight back.W

Place: My Home, Callisto,Date: January 1st, 2615My sisters and I walked home together after school, because there was a certain safety in numbers.But my elder sister Faith, eighteen years old, resented this; she claimed her social life was inhibited by the presence of a skinny fifteen-year-old little sibling. Yet she smiled as she said it, deleting much of the sting, and I think there was some merit to her complaint.It is true that a fifty-kilo sibling is not much company for a fifty-kilo girl. Our weights were similar, in full Earth gravity, but the distribution differed substantially. Faith was about as pretty a girl as one might imagine, with the rich ash-blond tresses and gray eyes that made her face stand out among the darker shades that predominated in our culture, and a generously symmetrical figure and small extremities.I was young and not versed in social

Place: Jupiter's OrbitDate: August 2nd, 2615The wall of the ship was opaque, for it had to be thick and solid to contain the pressure of air and to insulate against the cold of empty space.But there were portholes, multiply glazed tunnels that offered views outside, and naturally I was interested.The view really wasn't much. Jupiter, the colossus of the system, dominated as it always did, about the apparent size of my outstretched fist. Its turbulent cloud-currents and great red eye were looking right back at me. The planet was almost full-face right now, because the sun was behind us.Our progress toward the planet was so slow that the disk seemed hardly larger than it had been when we started three days before. But giant Jove was always impressive, however distant and whatever the phase."Ship ahoy!" our temporary navigator cried. I didn't know whether this was standard space procedure, but it was