Goldengirl

by Peter Lovesey

  “Is there any problem about that?” he cautiously inquired.

  “Just that I had it on very good authority — the London Times, I think — that you were dead.” She held the smile impeccably. “Is it more disturbing, I wonder, to discover that a professor is a female, or that a publisher has risen from the dead? No, that’s a presumption on my part. You haven’t actually said you are Douglas Martindale.”

  It was a silk-glove job, but it was still a very firm put-down. Gulling Stephanie Walsh wasn’t going to be easy. He studied her eyes as they waited evenly for his reaction. He decided he could trust them.

  “Maybe your secretary didn’t catch my name right. It’s Dryden. Jack Dryden.”

  She gave a quick laugh. “I’m prepared to believe that’s not the name she caught, Mr. Dryden. Do you smoke?”

  She picked up a box of cocktail Sobranies from the table. He took a red one. A gold Ronson Varatronic followed.

  “Thanks. Professor, I’m curious to know why you agreed to meet me when you knew Douglas Martindale was dead.”

  She held the lighter flame steady as she thought. “You’re surprised you beat the security? Getting to see a professor shouldn’t really be so difficult, but we do get bothered incessantly by sales reps. They have their job to do, I know, but you can get a little weary of seeing overhead projectors demonstrated, so we put aside a few days in July and invite them all to bring their books and hardware then. It ought to simplify matters, but there are still a few implacable gentlemen.” She shrugged. “So they have to get past the porter first. When I heard the name you gave, I was a little amused, a little intrigued. It isn’t customary for these men to resort to assumed identities. I decided to take my fate in my hands and have a look at you. You don’t have a medical encyclopedia up your sleeve?”

  “Not a single volume,” said Dryden. “I won’t deny that I am in merchandising, but I’m not here to sell you anything.”

  She smiled. “Try a little harder, Mr. Dryden. They all say that.”

  He nodded, grinning. “This is more in the nature of an inquiry. God, there’s another cliché of the trade.” He started again. “My job, Professor, involves managing the contractual arrangements for certain celebrities in sports and show business whose names are used in advertising. I have a client who, happily for both of us, has had a good run of success over the last two years. A fine sportsman, but a little innocent of the world. Easily taken in, I mean. Last week, he told me about a business venture he’s investing prettily heavily in, even by his standards. It’s all terribly sub rosa. In fact, at first I was worried my client was being conned, but now I’m satisfied it’s on the level. There are others chipping in, some hard-bitten characters among them. Now they’re asking me to join them in a promotional capacity. Before I do, I want to know some more about the scheme and the man who dreamed it up. His name is William Serafin.”

  “I see.” She thought a moment, and felt in the box for a cigarette. Dryden supplied a light. “And you suppose I can fill you in on Bill Serafin? Mr. Dryden, before we go any further, how would you have broached this subject as Douglas Martindale?”

  “I would have said we were considering a book Dr. Serafin had submitted for publication. As your English publisher visiting the States, I thought it opportune to visit you and at the same time get some background on your predecessor.”

  She weighed it. “Yes, I’ll buy that. Did you have a title for this mythical work?”

  “Would The Influence of Heredity on Human Growth get by?”

  “His Vienna project. It figures.” She was assessing him carefully before volunteering anything. Her eyes were worth watching. There was pale-green shadow on the lids, a brown liner above the lashes. “You seem to have the essential facts already. How do you suppose I can help?”

  “You worked with him, I understand,” said Dryden. “I find it difficult to credit that four years ago you were a deputy professor, but that’s what Who’s Who in Science states.”

  “I had three years as deputy to Bill,” she said, ignoring the compliment. “I guess that was enough for him. He retired prematurely early in 1978. The chair was offered to me.”

  “Three years,” Dryden mused. “You must have worked closely with him.”

  “That’s debatable. Bill Serafin ran his department on a unilateral basis. He was one of the old school of academics. Anyone who questioned his interpretations could go look for a job elsewhere. Plenty did, before I ever arrived at the Institute. Frankly, Mr. Dryden, I wouldn’t have tolerated him any longer myself, but it happened that he resigned before I got my letter in. There was nobody else at senior grade with the right experience, so that’s how I got to be professor at thirty. If you’re asking me whether Bill would be reliable with other people’s money, I believe he would. I never had reason to doubt his integrity.”

  “That’s reassuring,” said Dryden. “The disagreements were mostly academic?”

  She looked at her cigarette, thinking. Then she said, “If you want more information, Mr. Dryden, you must give some. You’ve told me Bill Serafin wants you and your client to join him in a business venture. I’ve given you my opinion that he would make a trustworthy partner. I don’t see any reason yet to expand on what I’ve told you.”

  It was Dryden’s turn to take a moment out to think. She was telling him, in effect, that there was more to Serafin than she had said, but it had to be coaxed from her. “I understand your discretion, Professor. I really am honor-bound not to say anything about the project. I think what interests me is what motivates Dr. Serafin. I’ve reason to think this is more than a straight investment to him. That’s slightly baffling, a little unnerving to a businessman. Would it be too much to ask whether you’d consider him an idealist?”

  “I knew him professionally,” answered Professor Walsh. “Ideals don’t come into anthropometry, that I’ve noticed.”

  There was only one way he was going to achieve anything here, and that was by coming to the point. “He was a young man in Austria at the time of the German occupation. Things he has said make me suspect he has retained some of the Nazi ideology, in particular the theories about race.”

  She frowned and shook her head. “That doesn’t sound like Bill Serafin. The work we do in this department draws certain physical distinctions between races, apart from the obvious one of skin pigmentation. I’ve never heard him make any kind of subjective comment about one ethnic group in relation to another. No, Mr. Dryden, I think you may have that a little wrong.”

  “He wouldn’t have an interest in demonstrating the physical superiority of one race over all others?”

  “My God, Mr. Dryden, where did you dredge these ideas from? Bill held certain theories about the human physique, but don’t make him into a racist. Anyone pushing that line wouldn’t last ten minutes in this place, let alone get to be professor. It’s an insult to the man’s intelligence. Physical superiority — what does it mean? The average American is several centimeters taller than the average Chinese. So what? He’s physically superior at reaching books off the top shelves of libraries, but he won’t lick the Chinese at reaching the ones below.”

  Dryden nodded bleakly. The theory had seemed quite plausible on California 99. “I’m not doing too well, am I?”

  She returned a quick smile. “At least you’re not trying to sell me encyclopedias.”

  He tried again. “You said he held certain theories about physique. Would it be unprofessional to ask what they were?”

  “Not at all,” she said. “He made no secret of them. He devoted the greater part of his career to investigating the characteristics of human growth. His comparative study on two generations of German women was quite a seminal piece of research. It confirmed a trend noted in a number of other studies this century: that average stature appears to be increasing at the rate of about one centimeter per decade. It was important because Bill’s results were taken from subjects measured at maturity. Previous research relied heavily on military statistics
, and since young men tend to be conscripted at eighteen, and growth is incomplete in many males of that age, some physiologists argued that the figures were more indicative of the earlier onset of puberty than a significant increase in stature. The tendency for puberty to begin earlier is not disputed; the average age now is below thirteen in America, whereas eighty years back it was around fifteen. The controversy arises when you consider the implications of the human race growing indefinitely larger.”

  “And ending like the dinosaurs?” said Dryden.

  Professor Walsh smiled. “You’ve got it. If we extrapolate from Bill’s figures, and mankind survives the next two hundred years, everyone should be twenty centimeters, or eight inches, taller. It’s an open question whether the human skeleton is structured to cope with such an increase.”

  “Perhaps we’ll level out before then.”

  She paused to consider the point. “Quite probably. I think Bill Serafin might admit that. But he’s still convinced that average height will increase for several decades yet.”

  “Is there any reason why it shouldn’t?” asked Dryden.

  “A whole lot of people think it won’t. They argue that the apparent increases this century are exceptional. They say the present average, that’s one hundred and seventy-three centimeters, or five feet eight, is just about the optimum, and they have evidence to show that the size of the human frame hasn’t changed much since the Stone Age. Measurements of skeletons show Old Stone Age man as averaging five feet nine, Neolithic five-six, Bronze Age five-eight, Iron Age five-six, Anglo-Saxon five-seven.”

  “When did the shrinking set in?”

  “Almost certainly in the industrial revolution. Urbanization brought about a deterioration in living standards. People were literally stunted by the conditions. The theory is that it’s taken over a century to recover from that, but now we’re back to what the good Lord intended us to be.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” said Dryden. “What does Serafin say about that?”

  “He won’t admit the validity of the measurements of primitive man. Only the strongest and tallest specimens would have survived to maturity, he says, so it’s futile making comparisons with civilized times, when life is held precious even for the weakest. He contends that the average man today is the tallest in history. And he refuses to accept that we’ve reached the limit. The human frame has the structural capacity — I believe I’m quoting him accurately — to absorb the anticipated increase for at least the next six decades. By the year two thousand the average will be up another inch.”

  In the film at Cambria Pines, Serafin had presented Goldengirl as a prototype of the woman of the twenty-first century.

  “Is it important?” Dryden asked.

  “It is to Bill Serafin,” Professor Walsh said emphatically. “His Vienna research is the main thing in his life. He sees it as the bedrock of his theories — I’m calling them his, but many others share them. In his years here, he submitted numerous papers to the scientific press. Few, I’m afraid, ever got into print. He got the reputation of being obsessed with this theory of increasing growth, without ever adding anything of substance to his research in Vienna. And a lot of people, including close colleagues, I may say, began to wonder, like you, if it was important.”

  “It was, I expect, if you had to work with the man.”

  She nodded. “You must understand this, Mr. Dryden. Medical history rings with the names of men and women who devoted the greater part of their lives to investigating some hypothesis, often counter to the orthodoxy of current practice. As working associates, people like that can be extremely tiresome to get along with, but there’s always the chance they will make a breakthrough that transforms our thinking. Yet I suppose for every one who makes it, there are scores who never do. Where fulfillment might have been, there is emptiness, a vacuum. Bill Serafin, I think, fits that category. He left this place an embittered man. The morale among the rest of us was pretty low when I took over. I had to make it clear from the beginning that I saw the role of professor differently. This room used to be his office. It didn’t look like this. He would shut himself in here with his books and write papers no journal wanted to publish. Rightly or wrongly, the rest of the staff forgot about him. The department was managed by his secretary, a formidable character. I made it a condition of my appointment that she be transferred, and she was. Now she runs Bio-Engineering instead. I could see, too, that if I moved in here, where Bill used to shut himself away, I’d be sunk. Things wouldn’t alter. So I took over a small office up the corridor nearer the rest of the staff, and had this place decorated and furnished as a general-purpose tutorial room. I use it as well for receiving VIP visitors, like publishers back from the dead.”

  Dryden grinned, but thought fast. She was rounding off the interview. There was something else to confirm. “Before I cap that by floating gently out of the window, may I ask a damn-fool question about Dr. Serafin’s theory? He has to prove the human skeleton structurally capable of accepting an increase in size, is that right?”

  “That has to be faced, if his ideas on growth are valid. Scientists from Galileo onward have argued that nature can’t construct an animal beyond a certain size without altering the proportions and materials that give it its characteristic appearance.”

  “Well, what’s to stop him pointing out that there are plenty of tall people around without apparent difficulties? Fellows of seven feet and upward are pretty common in basketball, and they’re not on crutches, that I’ve noticed.”

  She shook her head. “That’s missing the point. We’re not talking about extremes. You’re in merchandising, you said, so I guess you know all about graphs. If you plot the distribution of human stature, you get a normal curve, the bell shape, with the lip of the bell taking in your basketball players on one side, and midgets on the other. Unless some form of genetic selection is introduced, the graph will always look that way. Bill’s theory says, in effect, that the entire bell is edging toward the right. Your seven-foot men won’t look so tall in the year twenty-one hundred; they won’t even make the basketball team. But giants don’t prove anything. We’re concerned with the norm; an increase of one centimeter per decade might not seem significant on present average height, but it could be too much for certain types of physique. The bell won’t necessarily chip at the edge; it could crack in the center.”

  “So that’s the point he has to answer if his hypothesis is correct?”

  “He’s been trying to answer it these last ten years,” said Professor Walsh. “Sadly for him, it’s in the area of speculation. Only time will tell us if he was right.”

  Dryden saluted this assessment with a philosophic nod. He wasn’t making the mistake of leaping at the chink of light it revealed. “I suppose there’s no way of inducing growth artificially?”

  She gave him a long look, then shook her head. “You’re thinking of anabolic steroids? They add muscular mass to the body, but there’s no effect on height.”

  He nodded again. “You said only time would tell. There’s no way around that?”

  “You mean by augmenting growth?”

  “Something like that.”

  “The process of growth is still a biological enigma, Mr. Dryden.”

  “I thought perhaps there might be a hormone …”

  She hesitated. “That’s in the area of biochemistry.”

  “But growth is governed by hormones, isn’t it?”

  She nodded. “From the pituitary gland. Somatotrophin — the human growth hormone. We generally call it HGH. But if you’re suggesting Bill Serafin —”

  “Without suggesting anything,” cut in Dryden, “what would happen if you administered HGH artificially?”

  “It’s already used as a treatment to remedy a certain type of dwarfism. The pioneering work was carried out in the sixties at Tufts University, Boston. HGH was extracted from the pituitary glands of corpses at autopsy and administered to children with arrested growth. It proved successful with the Lorain
type of dwarf, that is the well-proportioned small human being. We have a unit working here at the Institute.”

  “What happens if you administer it to normal children?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I have no idea. I can think of no reason why anyone should want to do that.”

  “Of course not.” He reached for the ashtray and made a performance of stubbing out his cigarette. “It might make them taller at maturity.”

  She didn’t comment.

  “Of course, it’s a grotesque idea, pumping growth hormones into normal children,” he went on. “Nobody would do such a thing. If they’ve got a deficiency, okay, but not if they’re normal. Maybe it’s been tried with laboratory animals?”

  She said in a voice that was thinking of other things, “In 1921, two American researchers administered a bovine pituitary extract to young rats, continuing through their normal period of growth to adulthood. The results were dramatic: giant rats, with a normal body configuration and without obesity, twice the weight of untreated controls. But before you draw any conclusions from that, Mr. Dryden, you should know that the rat has a built-in capacity for growth. Its epiphyseal discs, unlike ours, don’t ossify. If that’s blinding you with science, maybe I’m doing you a service. You’re on very doubtful ground.”

  “Thanks for the warning. I was thinking aloud. Bad habit. Perhaps there are more natural ways of stimulating growth. Does exercise have any effect?”

  “Very little, that we know,” said Professor Walsh. “It possibly encourages some acceleration of growth. I believe there was some Swedish research carried out on girl swimmers in the twelve-to-sixteen age group which showed that their height as a group was accelerated above established norms, but that’s not what you’re interested in, is it? You want to know if there is any way of producing people taller than they would normally grow by natural means.”

  “That sums it up,” admitted Dryden.

  She stood up. “Mr. Dryden, I don’t know what this project is of Bill Serafin’s, and I don’t wish to know. If you and your client are sponsoring research intended to substantiate theories about growth, there is one other thing I would care to say to you. There’s a way of increasing people’s stature that’s been known for hundreds of years: the medieval torture rack. They justified its use as a means of discovering the truth. Think about that.”