“Research? You mean she is running to publicize some theory of yours?”
“I mentioned the project just now,” said Serafin with a click of impatience. “My investigations into human growth.”
The interviewer looked puzzled. “I’m sorry, Dr. Serafin, I’m a little slow. Maybe it’s the time of day. I just don’t see where your theory of growth fits into this.”
Serafin gripped the sides of the chair, plainly in some kind of mental turmoil. “Until this moment I fully intended to make this public only through the scientific press. I gave certain assurances … but now that you raise the matter so directly …” He raised his face suddenly, so that his spectacles flashed in the arc lights. “Goldine is the living answer to my critics, the people who said the human frame had somehow ossified into an immutable size. She is taller by ten centimeters — a full four inches — than conventional growth would have achieved.” He spread his hands dramatically. “She is, in stature, a woman of the future, a century from now. There is no degeneration. She is not brittle-boned or misshapen.” His voice had settled on a shrill monotone. “She has proved herself the fastest woman sprinter in the world. You may ask how this was achieved —”
“Okay,” chipped in the interviewer. “How was it achieved?”
Serafin stopped and looked around the studio in a strange way, as if suddenly reminded that he was speaking not to one man, but millions. He had been on the point of admitting he had injected Goldine with the growth hormone. Now he drew back. “It is too technical to go into here, but I shall publish.”
The interviewer shrugged. “For the present, let’s admit Goldine is just one brilliant runner coached to perfection.”
“No! That is a misrepresentation!” protested Serafin. “She is physiologically unique, a prototype of a generation as yet unborn. The mesomorphic characteristics —”
“You’re so right, Doctor, it is a little technical,” broke in the interviewer. “Maybe if we turned to the Cleveland kidnap incident —”
“So that’s it!” Serafin said hysterically. “You won’t give up until you have got me to admit Goldine is running for profit. If it isn’t to increase my bank balance, it must be to pay back the ransom. Money is all you people are interested in. I tell you the kidnaping was of no importance. I’ve forgotten Cleveland, Goldine has forgotten it, and I suggest you do the same.”
“I guess the gentlemen who put up the ransom haven’t forgotten,” commented the interviewer. “How much was it — a million? There must be a lot of pressure on Goldine to accept commercial offers after the Games are over.”
“What happens after the Games is of no interest to me,” said Serafin loftily. “As a scientist, my concern is with truth, not profit.”
“Truth? Perhaps in that case you could verify something, Doctor. There’s a story that a leading American merchandising agent is ready to launch your daughter on a commercial career as soon as she has finished running here in Moscow.”
Serafin said in a spasm of viciousness, “I don’t give a damn what happens to Goldine after the Games. Do you understand that?”
“I think so,” the interviewer coolly answered. “You put it clearly.”
An expression of pure fright crept over Serafin’s features. He began to blurt cut words. “Don’t get the wrong impression. I was speaking of the girl’s — of Goldine’s — right to decide things for herself. I shan’t interfere. That’s all.” It was unconvincing.
The interviewer levelly asked, “You would deny that you had conversations yourself with this agent?”
“Conversations?” repeated Serafin, stumbling over the word. In the last few minutes his dignity had been ripped away, leaving him old and incoherent. “A man can have conversations with anyone, can’t he? As her father, I have a responsibility …” He took off his glasses and wiped them, as if that would produce more clarity in his responses. “What … what is this? Are you questioning my integrity? I’m a scientist. I live by facts, the truth.” He replaced the glasses clumsily. “Goldine has proved my theory of growth. You can’t shake that. That’s what I stand by.” He seemed to draw strength from his fixation. “You can say what you like about me. She can say what she likes, but the truth is secure.” He was abstractedly examining the back of one of his hands. “I called her Goldine when she was a child, but she is Goldengirl now.”
The interviewer made another try for a rational response. “You mean if she wins her other events she could become a legend, Doctor?”
“Fact,” answered Serafin in a preoccupied way. “Not legend. A truth, secure for the rest of time.”
What had shaped up as riveting television was becoming diffuse. The second camera caught the interviewer signaling to the control room.
“The truth is greater than Goldengirl,” Serafin maundered on. “Science is greater than any individual. What are athletes but freaks and monsters? Give them a chance, and they will deform themselves to achieve success …” His words faded, but his lips still moved.
The shot switched to the interviewer, glancing up from his clipboard. “The, er, point that emerges is that in 1980 no athlete seriously pitching for gold medals can remain an amateur in the old-fashioned sense of the word. It just can’t be done on weekends and evenings. You need long periods to train, specialized coaching. And for that you must have financial support, whether it comes in state aid or from private sources. In a free society such as ours it’s up to individual athletes to get what assistance they can. You’d go along with that, Doctor?”
Serafin didn’t look up. He was talking to himself.
The interviewer wrapped it up as fast as he decently could. “I’d like to underline that nobody condemns Goldine or her father for being realistic about the financial involvement necessary to Olympic success. We just like to face facts. Well, it’s nearly 6 A.M. here in Moscow, and the city is waking up to what could be a great day for young Goldine Serafin in the Lenin Stadium. We’ve heard from her father. Now let’s look in again on the press conference Goldine gave after her victory in the one-hundred-meter dash on Saturday …”
*
The schedule for Wednesday, August 20, was a repeat of the final day in Eugene, with the 200-meter Semi-Final, 200-meter Final and 400-meter Final packed into a single afternoon. The world press had crystallized it into a duel between two girls. They were pictured like contestants in a big fight, compared inch for inch, record for record Only the special souvenir edition of Sovietsky Sport mentioned anyone else for honors, making Muratova one of the “Big Three” in the 200 meters, a compliment she justified by equaling her Olympic Record in the first Semi-Final, defeating Krüll by two meters. But it didn’t require a deep knowledge of track to see that the East German was coasting, and had more in reserve for the Final than Muratova.
Goldine was equally undemonstrative in the second Semi-Final, easing into overdrive only in the last twenty meters to make sure of third place, then trotting straight through the competitors’ tunnel and back to the medical unit.
Dryden could have gone down to get a progress report from Dalton and Nagel, but he decided against it. There was no more he could do to guarantee success; it was up to the doctors. Besides, he could not predict what effect his appearance in the room would have on Goldine. He dared not risk provoking an outburst at this stage of the game.
“Don’t give yourself ulcers over this,” cautioned Melody. “She has it all wrapped up. This isn’t the crunch.”
*
At 3:50 P.M. the phone rang in the U.S. Team Headquarters. McCorquodale took the call. He didn’t say much, except to mutter “I see” a couple of times. When he put the phone down he was ashen.
“Jesus,” he said. “That really does it. Goldine’s old man is dead. Killed himself. Jumped out of his hotel window, twelve floors up. Bloody hell, why did he want to do a dumb thing like that?”
Nobody in the room had seen the TV interview. They learned about that from Klugman when they called him in. “Didn’t see it myself
, but I heard he took a mauling. You going to tell her?”
“Someone has to,” said McCorquodale. “There’s over an hour to the Finals. She’s going to hear it someway before then. Yeah, she has to be told. We thought maybe …”
Klugman nodded. “I figured you would come to that.”
“We thought she’d take it better from you, being her coach. This is going to shatter the kid. Too bad about those Finals. She’ll be in no state to run after this … will she?”
Klugman shrugged. “Who knows?”
“Say now,” said McCorquodale after a judicious pause, “you might try putting it to Goldine that the old man wouldn’t have wanted her to cop out now. She could go in the Finals as a kind of tribute to his memory.”
“It’s a thought,” said Klugman, looking at the ceiling.
He found Goldine limbering up in the covered area. He took her to sit on a bench.
“What is it?” she asked. “You know I should keep moving.”
“Something has come up. Bad news.”
“I drew inside lane in the two hundred?”
“No. It’s Doc. He’s dead, Goldine. Killed himself.”
She said nothing.
Tracksuited runners continued to jog around the circuit.
“They want me to say you should still run,” said Klugman presently. “Don’t let this throw you. He’d want you to run. You’ll be doing it for him.”
She caught her breath sharply, turned and spat hard in Klugman’s face. “Punk! I’m doing nothing for him. I don’t give a shit what he would want. Get this straight. I’m running for myself. No one else. Okay, Doc’s dead. So what? I don’t want to know how or why. I’m indifferent. This is my day, okay?”
Klugman took out a handkerchief and wiped his face. “You should keep moving, then.”
*
The eight finalists for the 200 meters slipped into the arena at five-fifteen, while a men’s track final was in progress. They walked as a group toward the start on the far side of the field, carrying their sports bags, not speaking, nor attempting communication, insulated from each other by the need to focus the mind. No group at all, really: eight lonely girls with eight dreams.
Dryden watched the limbering-up through his field glasses, calisthenics interspersed with frenetic bursts of running, apparently improvised, but familiar from earlier rounds as fixed, elaborate rituals. Krüll went in for repeated knee-raising, hopping and jumping in series, while Goldine favored lying and sitting exercises followed by short, swift dashes along the turf.
The starter ordered them to prepare.
They peeled off superfluous layers under the inspection of the TV cameras and moved onto the track.
When the crowd became quiet and the runners flexed from the hunkered position to the forward tilt ordered by “Gotovo,” Dryden’s field glasses focused not on Goldine, but Ursula Krüll. That Cassandra-like pronouncement of Melody’s — “This isn’t the crunch” — had nagged at his brain, refusing to be subdued. Melody had always fatalistically accepted what Dryden had only dared by degrees to consider as a possibility: that Goldine would win her three gold medals. In Melody’s mind the Games were a bore, a formality to be got through. Dryden had never been confident enough to think like that; each heat was a hazard, each final an ordeal. He had never projected his thoughts beyond Moscow in the way Melody had, because so much hinged on the achieving of those three victories. Now, two short races from realization, it came to him with paralyzing clarity what this was really going to achieve. He saw what Melody had seen from the start, and he recoiled. Goldine was poised to win her second gold, and if she beat Krüll now, the third would surely follow.
A defeat would sacrifice a fortune, undo the work of weeks, but what was the alternative?
Goldengirl.
He saw her as Melody had always seen her. Saw a monster. Saw himself.
He wanted Krüll to win.
The gun fired and they were moving, Krüll on the inner lane, Goldine out in 4, but Dryden kept the glasses on the German. She had got a smooth start and was running the bend, angled over the white curb, stride measured to take the strain without loss of power. Each time the back leg straightened, sharp lines defined the muscle tissue of thigh and calf, but it was unforced movement. He could see the soft side of her face ripple, her chest bob with the rhythm.
And she was overtaking other runners. Through the glasses he saw her reach and pass the Cuban girl in lane 2. Others successively came back to her as the bend unwound and the inequality of the staggered start was corrected. An Australian with the diagonal green stripe. Muratova, overstriding. The crowd roared its support, but Krüll went past.
Into the extreme right of Dryden’s field of vision, level with Krüll’s track shoes, came a blur of gold, the airborne mass of Goldine’s hair. She was about a meter and a half clear, and because she was several lanes closer to the glasses it looked as if Krüll’s shoes were reaching out to claw the shimmering hair. They were reaching it. Sheer strength was bringing the German level.
Ursula, come on!
The finish line couldn’t be far away, and the blue of East Germany was edging ahead. Angles can be deceptive, but at the moment they passed level with the glasses, Krüll was decisively coming through. Her arms reached up in triumph as she crossed the line.
But this anticipation of success was miscalculated. Sensing victory in the last strides, she had imperceptibly eased. Goldine had galvanized, forced herself into contention again, and dipped for the tape. There was no question that she had won.
“Two up,” said Melody indifferently. “Or two down, depending on your point of view.”
“What do you mean?” said Dryden. He hadn’t said a word to Melody about his support for Krüll.
“Down.” She held out a hand toward the finish area. “Prostrate. Flat on the grass. Got it?”
Both girls were supine after their efforts, lying almost side by side, gasping to reclaim the oxygen, indifferent to the clamor around them.
The result was posted before they were on their feet.
200 METER FINAL
1 SERAFIN USA 21.88 NWR
2 KRÜLL GDR 21.89
3 MURATOVA URS 22.45
“World record!” said Melody. “How about that?”
“Who cares?” said Dryden.
Melody simply raised her eyebrows.
*
Between the Finals of the 200 and 400 meters was a half-hour interval. When Goldine sat up and learned she had set a new world record, it pleased her, but she wasn’t surprised. It had felt fast, and she had expected to run inside twenty-two seconds to defeat Ursula Krüll. She glanced across at the German, got to her feet and held out her hand to help her up.
“Come on. One more to go.”
Krüll took the hand as if it was another challenge, and got up, rather red around the eyes, but straight-faced. “Congratulations. You surprised me.”
“Surprised a lot of people, I guess,” said Goldine. “Care to walk over to the other side with me?”
One of the U.S. team officials pushed through the cameramen and said he had come to escort Goldine to the medical unit.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll look after myself. I plan to spend some time out here.”
“But Dr. Dalton instructed me —”
“Well, he won’t instruct me,” said Goldine petulantly. “So you can take a message right back to him. If he wants to send his musclemen to drag me over, they can try, but it won’t look pretty, will it? Come on, Ursula.”
They jogged together the long way around the track, receiving the crowd’s applause. Several times children ran out with bunches of flowers. Goldine made sure Ursula had as many to hold as she. They couldn’t speak much for the cheering. Other athletes kept running forward to shake her hand.
When they had reached their warm-up suits and put them on, it was time to join the other finalists warming up for the 400 meters. Goldine was confident. The physicians would think it was mean i
gnoring them after all they had done through the week, but she didn’t need them any more. All she had to remember was to take the two glucose tablets in the pocket of her warm-ups. They would raise the bloodsugar level and prevent the risk of insulin reaction. That was what the doctors would have suggested anyway, for all their mumbo-jumbo. Two glucose tablets: that was all they ever prescribed.
Near the start, they were joined by Janie Canute.
“Hi,” said Goldine.
“Hi, Goldengirl,” said Janie with a smile.
That was good to hear. There had been some awkwardness earlier in the week about that. This was Janie’s way of saying she was sorry.
“Got any tips for me, Janie?” Goldine magnanimously asked. “Last time, you told me about those two speedburners, remember? We let them scorch the first two hundred and they got clean away.”
“No tips,” said Janie. “You’re the girl to beat.”
“Ursula holds the record,” Goldine pointed out.
Janie gave the right answer. “She’s not Goldengirl, is she?”
The signal sounded to bring them under starter’s orders. Goldine unzipped the ankle fastenings of her warm-up suit without hurrying. This was her moment. She would be the last to go to her mark. She watched Krüll, making sure she went first. The German was taking her time, tucking her trackshirt into her shorts.
Just in time, Goldine remembered her tablets, picked up the sweat pants and felt in the pocket for them. No sweat, they were there, two of them in their paper wrapping. She took them out.
“Hey!”
Goldine turned. Janie Canute was behind her, wagging a finger.
“Uppers aren’t allowed, Goldengirl.”
Ursula Krüll had turned to see what was happening.
Goldine stood with the tablets in her palm. She could have said “Glucose” and swallowed them. Goddamn it, she was Goldengirl. She had been conditioned to function in disaster and finish in style.
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