Jumper 1 - Jumper Read Online Free PDF Page A

around himself, but he wasn't lying down yet. I wondered if someone was going to steal it from him before morning.
    As I neared the street, two men, dark figures silhouetted by the streetlights, blocked my path.
    I looked over my shoulder so I wouldn't be taken by surprise again.
    "Give us your wallet and your watch." There was the gleam of a knife in the streetlight; the other man hefted a length of something heavy and hard.
    "Too late," I said. And jumped.
     
    I appeared in the Stanville Library, back in front of the shelf that went from "Ruedinger, Cathy" to "Wells, Martha." I smiled. I hadn't had any particular destination in mind when I'd jumped, only escape. Every time I'd jumped from immediate, physical danger, I'd come here, to the safest haven I knew.
    I mentally listed all the places I'd teleported to and considered them.
    They were all places I'd frequented before jumping to them, either recently, in the case of Washington Square and the New York hotel, or repeatedly over a long period of time. They were places I could picture in my mind. I wondered if that was all it took.
    I went to the card catalog and looked up New York. There was a listing under guidebooks, Dewey decimal 917.471. This led me to the 1986 Foster's Guide to New York City. On page 323 there was a picture of the lake in Central Park, in color, with a bench and trash can in the foreground, the Loeb Boathouse to one side.
    When Mom and I were touring New York, she wouldn't let us go farther into Central Park than the Metropolitan Museum on the park's east side. She'd heard too many stories of muggers and rapes, so we didn't get to see the boathouse. I'd never been there.
    I stared at the picture until I could close my eyes and see it.
    I jumped and opened my eyes.
    I hadn't moved. I was still standing in the library.
    Hmph.
    I flipped the pages and tried the same thing with other places I hadn't been—Bloomingdale's, the Bronx Zoo, the interior of the base of the Statue of Liberty. None of them worked.
    Then I hit a picture of the observation deck of the Empire State Building.
    "Look, Mom, that's the Chrysler Building and you can see the World Trade Center and...
    "Shhhh, Davy. Modulate your voice, please."
    That was Mom's expression, "Modulate your voice." Much kinder than saying "Shut up" or "Pipe down" or my dad's "Shut your hole." We'd gone there the second day of that trip and stayed up there an hour. Before I hit the picture I hadn't realized what an impression it made on me. I thought I only had hazy memories of it at best. But now I could remember it clearly.
    I jumped and my ears popped, like they do when you take off and land in an airliner. I was standing there, the cold wind off the East River blowing my hair and ruffling the pages of the guidebook I still held in my hands. It was deserted. I looked down into the book and saw that the hours were listed as 9:30 to midnight.
    So, I could jump to places I'd been, which was a relief in a way. If Dad could teleport, he wouldn't be able to jump into my hotel room in Brooklyn. He'd never been there.
    The view was confusing, all the buildings lit, their actual outlines nebulous and blurring together. I saw a distant green floodlit figure and things fell into place. Liberty Island was south of the Empire State and I looked down Fifth Avenue toward Greenwich Village and downtown. The twin towers of the World Trade Center should have clued me in.
    I could remember Mom feeding quarters into the mounted telescope so I could see the Statue of Liberty. We didn't go out to the island because Mom was queasy on boats.
    I felt a wave of sorrow. Where had Mom gone?
    I jumped, then, back to the library and replaced the guidebook on the shelf.
    So, was it just any place I'd been?
    My granddad, my mother's father, retired to a small house in Florida. My mom and I visited only once, when I was eleven. We were going to go again the next summer, but Mom left in the spring. I had a vague memory of a brightly