"Steven Gould - Jumper 02 - Reflex" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gould Stephen Jay)

He winced. "You said we could take some time, first."

"It's been ten years!"

He looked at his watch again. "Look, I've got to go, or I'll be late. We canтАФ"

She turned her back. "Oh, just go!"

"Millie...."

She shook her head. "Go, dammit!" Then she thought better of it and turned back to him, but
he'd taken her at her word.

Davy was gone.



Of course she couldn't sleep.

When did I become an appendage? There was a price to be paid, being married to the world's
only teleport. It was like being a Saudi wife, unable to travel anywhere unless accompanied by a male
relative.

An appendage.

She'd accepted this, she realized, quite a long time ago, trading her own independence for the
benefits, but she was beginning to feel that something was atrophying. If not my legs, then my
spiritual wings.

And even Saudi wives can have children.

She alternated between blaming him and blaming herself, with brief stints of blaming Mr. Brian
Cox of the National Security Agency. The real blame, she knew, if it was going to rest on anyone,
belonged to Davy's father, who was an abusive alcoholic when Davy was growing up, but even he'd
changed, having gone through treatment and now a decade of grumpy and uncomfortable sobriety.

Deciding who to blame wasn't going to give her a child. But she wasn't willing to raise a child
without a partner's help. Davy's help.

For the millionth time she wished she could jump, like Davy, so she could go after him, to finish
this argument, or at least defuse it. She regretted their decision to live here, hidden, instead of in
Stillwater, where she could expose him more to her friends' kids, to family settings totally unlike his
own childhood.

Instead, they commuted, Davy jumping her in and out of the condo in Stillwater, usually from the
Texas cliff house, though there were extended periods of living in Tonga, Costa Rica, and one
glorious spring in Paris. Still, they always came back to the cliff house. It was the only place Davy felt
safe.