"Steven Gould - Jumper 03 - Griffin's Story" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gould Stephen Jay)

sand settling around me as I fumbled with the gate.
By the time Dad had hiked back down I'd changed into the coveralls and the goggles and I
had the face mask hanging loosely around my neck. When he came trudging across the sand and
gravel, I was laying out the paintball gun and the hopper full of rounds and the Co2 cartridges.
 He took a drink from the water bottle and offered it to me. While I drank he put on his
own goggles and loaded the gun.
"Don't wait for me to fire. This is pretty fast–maybe two hundred feet per second–but you
could still jump before it arrived if you were far enough away. But bullets travel thousands of
feet per second. You wait till they fire, and you'll be dead.
"Don't let anyone even point a weapon at you."
I was just seating the face mask when he shot me, point–blank, in the thigh.
"Fuck!" I yelled, grabbing my leg. The paint was red and I put one of my hands right in it.
"What did you say?" Dad looked half mad, half amused. I could swear he was trying not to
laugh.
I blinked, looking down at the red paint on my hand. My leg hurt. It hurt a lot, but I wasn't
supposed to use that word. I opened my mouth to reply but Dad said, "Never mind," and lifted
the gun again.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice .. .
The paintball splattered across the gravel, but I was twenty feet off to the side. Dad twisted
and got off a quick shot but the reason it didn't hit me was that he missed, not that I'd jumped
in time. I felt the wind of the projectile go past my head but then I was on the far side of the
truck and the second shot passed through empty air, before tumbling through the branches of a
creosote bush.
"Okay," he yelled. "Hide–and–seek, unlimited."
I turned around and began counting loudly. I heard his feet crunch across gravel and then
nothing. The second I counted thirty, I jumped sideways, thirty feet, expecting to hear the
poooof of the paintball gun, but Dad was nowhere in sight.
There were several stretches of sand in the wash and one of these had a fresh set of widely
spaced tracks leading across it. I jumped to the stretch of sand without crossing the gravel and
followed them.
I had to find him without getting shot. But I could jump as much as I wanted. Around a bend
in the ravine, the tracks were closer together but they went another fifty feet and stopped in
the middle of the wash. Stopped.
Dad wasn't there, either, and there wasn't anything nearby he could have stepped onto. For
just a second, I thought, Maybe ... maybe Dad could–
The paintball caught me on the butt. It didn't hurt near as much as the last one but it hurt
my pride. I spun and jumped at the same time, sideways, ten feet, sloppy–there must've been
ten pounds of dirt falling away from me and jump rot hanging in the air where I'd been.
Twisting, fading jump rot.
Dad was stepping out from behind some scrub. The gun hung loosely at his side.
I pointed at the line of tracks in the sand. "Did you jump?"
He laughed, almost a bark. "Don't I wish! I just turned around and walked back in my
tracks." He pointed at some rocks near his hiding place. "Stepped off the sand there and Bob's
your uncle." He pointed his finger at the ground and twirled it like he was stirring a drink.
"Again."
I turned around and started counting loudly. As he ran off he shouted over his shoulder,
"Look for more than tracks in the sand!"
And that's the sort of thing we did for the next hour. We did hide–and–seek, limited
(where I couldn't jump until I saw him), and tag, where I had to jump close enough to touch
him and get away without getting shot, and closed room, where we drew a big square in the