Goldengirl

‘Why not? That is to say, she has a personal companion, who must be present — a chaperon, so to speak. Yes, it sounds démodé, but in a community such as this, with a dozen men living in close proximity to her, I think you must agree that it is a necessary precaution. It is an inviolable rule that nobody except her companion is ever alone with Goldengirl in her quarters. Rest assured that you may speak with perfect frankness about any aspect of the project. The companion is not likely to betray confidences.’

‘Does Miss Fryer have a chaperon, too?’ asked Dryden casually.

‘No, Mr. Dryden, she does not. If Melody regarded herself as unprovided for in that respect, I should certainly engage one.’ Serafin peered over his glasses. ‘She has not raised the matter yet.’

In the lounge, Valenti was practicing shots at the pool table, too engrossed to acknowledge the others’ arrival. Serafin crossed the room to a framed Playmate dressed only in white suede boots, and touched a concealed switch in the gilt molding. A back projection displaced the girl for a blond without boots, varnishing her toes. Clicking his tongue in annoyance, Serafin pressed the switch again. This time a small, immaculately hand-drawn grid appeared in the frame.

‘Examine it at your leisure,’ he told Dryden. ‘If you would like coffee or tea, there is a dispenser in the next room. In an hour, I should like you to come with Mr. Valenti to the gym. I’ll pick you up at four.’

Dryden traced his finger along the grid to 1600 on Friday. ‘Ergogenics,’ he read aloud. ‘That’s new to me. I’ll be there.’

Before Dryden had finished inspecting the schedule, Serafin withdrew, or he would certainly have been asked questions. Some entries were self-explanatory and might have appeared on any athlete’s training schedule. Others took a few moments’ application to interpret. He soon realised that the letters below each activity represented the location and the staff required to be present. CR was the conference room; SKR stood for Serafin, Klugman and Robb. But what such jargon as REACTION TG and ERGOGENICS meant in human terms he was interested to discover.

Some things he now knew for certain. Project Goldengirl was a fact. Thousands of dollars were invested in plant and personnel. As a business proposition it was still bizarre in the extreme, but the possibility that it was a hoax could be dismissed.

Goldengirl herself had impressed him. He had no idea if she was capable of realizing Serafin’s dream of three gold medals, but her exhilaration in the stimulation session had been riveting. It had definite commercial possibilities. If she wanted work on television he could fix it, never mind her six foot two.

But that was evading the real issue. He must soon decide what his objections were to the project. One that didn’t trouble him was the English obsession with fair play. He would never have climbed the business ladder if he hadn’t abandoned that at the outset. He wasn’t wasting his sympathy on athletes disadvantaged by Serafin’s planning. Nor was he troubled by the spirit of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic movement. As anyone but the members of the IOC would admit if they studied the development of the Olympics, the ideals that launched the Games in 1896 had been sold out to commerce by 1900, when the second Olympics formed part of a trade fair. If the show had been handed over to businessmen then for perpetuity, it might not have been a bad thing. Unhappily, the politicians had jumped on board. Eighty years later, every team that would march its banner around the Lenin Stadium on August 10 had been nurtured for months on government funds, with the object of wresting national prestige from the Baron’s brainchild. Why shouldn’t private enterprise take them on?

If the real winners in the Olympic Games were governments and corporations, the losers were the athletes, persuaded or compelled by the prospect of gold and glory to sacrifice years of their lives to something they started out believing was sport. Slaves of the stopwatch, bloated by steroids, boosted with blood transfusions, vitaminised, immunised, screened and sponsored, they drove themselves to the point of agony training, lifting weights, endlessly lapping tracks and baring their lives to the scrutiny of the media. With what result? In most cases, to be beaten by millimetres or microseconds, robbed of victory because someone else’s masters had developed a new refinement — an undetectable drug, an unimaginable technique, a more torturous form of training, a new argument to resolve the medical and legalistic objections attendant on any real improvement in performance.