The Super Olympian- Bloodhound

by Laer Carroll

  Sasha's modest room was clean but slightly musty. The first thing she did when she entered was to cross to the floor-to-ceiling glass-paned double doors onto her balcony and open them. Fresh summer air wafted into her room. On the balcony were two plastic lounge chairs only slightly dusty. She could look west and south out over the river, which was perhaps a hundred yards wide at this point.

  A sense of peace settled in place inside her. She had made it to the Olympics. It had taken her 13 years of nearly unrelenting effort to do it, and it felt as if all that effort had been worth it .

  Sasha quickly emptied her carry-on luggage into the closet and dresser and bathroom. It took longer to unpack the two large trunks she had shipped to arrive a day earlier. Only a few clothing items were wrinkled. Most of her stuff was wrinkle-free fabric.

  Done settling in, she freshened up and changed to lighter clothing suited to the summer day, now mostly gone and cooling but still warm enough to wear a t-shirt and light slacks. Not that severe heat would have bothered her. She would be equally at home naked in arctic or tropical conditions, but she had to maintain the appearance of being an ordinary human.

  Outside she idled along the wide tree-lined street on which the hotel faced, looking in the shop windows. Auto traffic was light; it was not quite quitting time for most people. The area was old but well-kept, a prosperous little city or large town.

  Several blocks along Sasha crossed the street to a restaurant and was seated in the open-air area. She ordered a chilled white wine, then leisurely contemplated the large four-leafed menu while sipping from her lightly frosted glass. She took her time over the large meal, savoring its subtleties and watching the foot and vehicle traffic as the afternoon merged with evening. It was true that food in France was cooked with great care, at least at this restaurant.

  In all she stayed almost two hours as the day waned. She left when the dinner crowd began to pick up, took her time returning to her room. There she contacted her two coaches and set a time to confer with them the next morning. Then she watched French TV for a couple of hours to improve her French comprehension and retired early. The several days before the Olympics opened Friday would be quite busy.

  She ate a buffet breakfast in her hotel, accompanied by the burly man who was her Judo coach and the whip-thin woman who was her shooting coach. They had arrived two days before Sasha and had her Olympic credentials and schedules with them.

  There were only three scheduling conflicts. Sasha selected the events she would miss and thus concede. She selected two shooting competitions and one Judo competition. Neither coach was happy but neither protested too much. They had both been with her for nearly three years and had early learned that Sasha rarely backed down from her decisions.

  Then the three shared a taxi to the Olympic Village. There Sasha was soon involved in briefings for the opening day ceremonies. The French Olympic officials had elaborate and spectacular plans for the three-plus hour event.

  The day of the opening Sasha, along with more than 10,000 other athletes, assembled outside the huge domed stadium.

  They arranged themselves in two spirals, each a dozen or two people wide. Each athlete had a diagram showing where they were supposed to be in the spirals. All were in national costumes. It was six in the afternoon, two hours before the beginning of the ceremonies.

  Many of the athletes sat on the concrete surface surrounding the stadium. It was clean enough, if rough. It had been swept by an army of workers earlier in anticipation of this seating. Periodically some coach or official approached groups of sitters and ordered them to stand. Most athletes obeyed, then sat as soon as they were left alone. Many, from less authoritarian countries, ignored orders, if there were any directed at them.

  People chatted, listened to a motley collection of music, and sometimes danced. The afternoon was warm, the sun at a slant, the angle increasing as the time passed.

  Near eight o'clock people sitting began to stand. Some collected in small shielding groups and peed into bottles, sometimes amid much laughter. Someone in the massively organized Olympic organization had forgotten that even Olympic athletes had bladders.

  Sasha had no need for a bathroom. Her extraordinary body produced small amounts of perfectly clear urine, and often got rid of it by evaporation through her skin.

  A cool wind began to blow. It was very weak, but very definite. Somewhere to the north and west a cool front was sweeping off England and the North sea.

  Sasha hugged a few people close to her, nodded or waved to others further away, and faced toward the line of march. A great sense of exhilaration swept over her as the many thousands of her companions began to move.

  Inside the huge shell of the stadium thousands of seats rose from the floor. Positioned above the seats all around the stadium were huge vision screens. As Sasha marched in parade across the floor she could see images of the marchers from several vantage points on the screens. Amplified music played. Some of the athletes smiled at the cameras and waved.

  About 15 minutes after 8:00, after the parade had been well started, the music stopped. An Olympic official on a far elevated podium formally opened the Olympiad and greeted the world. Well over a billion people, Sasha had read, were watching all around the globe. Many more would watch delayed telecasts in the hours and days to come.

  The parade continued. Music began to play again. Then another official mounted the podium. The new speaker, also brief, was the head of France or her representative.

  After the parade there were events. Some of them were on the floor of the stadium. Some were on platforms kept dark till the time came for performers to perform which returned to the dark as another event was lit and begun. Some were on wires high above the floor, wires colored so they were invisible and the aerialists seemed to fly unsupported.

  Finally there was the relay which brought the Olympic torch into the stadium. As the runners trotted through the ranks assembled on the floor the massive clamshell of the oval dome split and rolled majestically back to reveal a starlit sky.

  Fireworks above the stadium bloomed and sparked and swirled, high enough to be seen by much of Paris. And from space. Four of the wall screens showed from orbit the fairy lights of Paris at night, with the colored extravaganza in the center.

  The last relay runner received the torch and bounded up a spiral staircase. She plunged the torch into the waiting beacon and it came alight. At the same moment all other lights went out.

  A great roar and clapping like thunder greeted the moment. The latest Olympiad had begun.

  Sasha was up at dawn and dressed in a blue sweat suit with blue-and-grey running shoes, the style of clothing recommended by the Paris Olympic management. At the hotel buffet dining room she ate a couple of croissants stuffed with eggs and bacon, accompanied with orange juice.

  Drawing on a lightly stuffed backpack she exited the hotel under grey skies to jog to the Village Olympique ten miles to the east. Following directions she first jogged south through a quiet residential area for a quarter of a mile. Near the Seine river she crossed a street parallel to the river which seemed little used. A sandy path about a hundred feet long led her through weeds to a packed-earth footpath almost on the verge of the Seine, which was perhaps a hundred yards wide here.

  She turned left, eastward, and increased her speed. To her right the Seine flowed serenely toward the sea, behind her, its waters grey under the grey skies. Even at this hour there was river traffic in both directions. Occasionally she received boat whistles, not a surprise seeing as she was an attractive young female. She waved back at the whistles but otherwise ignored them.

  Near the Village the Seine made a wide loop to the south. There she encountered a high chain-link fence which surrounded the entire Village. On the inside was a large area with building equipment and stacked wood and metal and other supplies which would be used to complete the Village after the Olympics.

  Leaping the fence would have been as easy for her as stepping over a pebble. I
t was only a dozen feet high. But she did not want to take the chance of being seen doing an inhuman feat.

  At the nearest entrance to the Village was an opening in the fence. It reminded her of the entrances to subway trains which she had seen in New York City, but above ground. There was a line of vending machines backed against the fence. The line was broken by an entrance blocked by turnstiles. Above the turnstiles was an arch labeled VILLAGE OLYMPIQUE and a number.

  Visitors could buy one-day to two-week electronic passes which would let them through the turnstiles. Sasha used her Olympic badge with its photo id instead. She did not bother taking it from the lanyard around her neck. She just leaned over far enough so that the nearest turnstile could read the radio id embedded in the badge.

  Inside was a wide walkway, lined on her right with a wall fronted with white-washed plywood which hid the construction equipment near the river. On her left was the side of a building, the first of many which ran northward. At a T-junction with the walkway Sasha stopped and looked in that direction.

  She could see the fronts of many low buildings running into the distance, fronted by an extension to the walkway which formed a wide pedestrian boulevard also running straight north. Opposite the buildings was a green. She knew if she continued on the pathway she would come to the pedestrian boulevard on the other side of the green. From there would be another line of buildings running northward.

  Instead she turned onto the boulevard, in company with a small stream of other pedestrians. At this hour she was sure most of them were workers in the shops inside the buildings. A few were athletes like herself dressed in blue. But she also saw a small group which must be a family, with a mother, father, and three young children, who were early-bird visitors to the Olympics.

  Sasha smiled, imagining the loud complaints of certain members of her family if woken this early for any reason whatsoever.

  Many of the buildings were not yet occupied, but a few buildings along she came across one which housed a café serving breakfast. She rewarded the enterprise of the owner by buying a second breakfast. It was not a whim. Her extraordinary body and its extraordinary abilities also demanded extra food.

  Sipping a hot chocolate as she continued her walk she could see perhaps a half-mile ahead one tall building. The white spire of over a hundred stories was a new four-star hotel, doing business for the first time the last few months as temporary residence to workers at the Olympics.

  She could also see the top of a matching spire rising to her right above the green. The spire was part of the same hotel, separated from its twin by the green but connected underground by an all-weather concourse. It was empty of people and furnishings. A labor dispute had delayed its construction.

  When she neared the hotel she also saw scaffolding which supported an awning colored forest green. It covered a walkway which ran from an entrance to the hotel across the boulevard and through the green to the twin of the hotel entrance on the other side of the green.

  When she arrived at the walkway she could see that the green was cut by an even greater obstacle—a four-lane street. It was empty of traffic because the Village was still blocked off from its surroundings. Looking left and right at the curb, she could see that the two main entrances to the hotel faced onto the street. After the Olympics taxis and other vehicles would be able to pull up in front of the entrance to let passengers in or out the vehicles.

  On a whim Sasha trod the walkway east to the twin hotel tower. A workman was just entering it carrying a box of tools. The glass of the doors and windows was lightly tinted. She peered in, shifting the frequency of light she saw to better see inside. There was a lot of work going on. Apparently the owners of the hotel wanted to get the twin tower in operation as soon as they could.

  Turning she crossed the empty street and continued north. Perhaps a mile ahead the white dome of the athletic stadium rose above the Village.

  The Judo trials were held in a large building halfway to the stadium. Above the outside entrance was the name and logo of a major department store chain. Inside it had been converted into a dojo of a dozen mats or so. Around the mats were a raised judges' platform, several TV camera setups, and bleachers angled upward on all sides .

  Sasha had two matches. She won them easily, pretending to considerable effort to honor the skills and will of her opponents. She was bored, but did not let it show.

  Later Sasha began her shooting competitions. There were no surprises. She entertained herself, as in the Judo competitions, by seeing how precisely close she could score and just barely fail to break records. She wanted to set no impossible bars for merely human athletes.

  Eight days later Sasha was done. She swept all the shooting competitions, earning gold medals in each. This was not a surprise to most of the people in the shooting community. They knew how she had done in lesser competitions.

  She was also the gold medallist in Judo in her weight class. This was big news. America had rarely done well in Judo. It was Japan who usually won the top spots, with China well behind them.

  She was interviewed a dozen times, twice by Japanese entertainment and sports channels. That she spoke limited Japanese pleased the Japanese interviewers. One of them, a former Judoka of high reputation, paid her a great compliment when he discussed her art and mildly praised her.

  Her coach, while praising Sasha also, had a cynical interpretation of the Judoka's praise.

  "Losers like to brag on the ones who beat them. It's backward praise of themselves. They have to be really good if only a hero can beat them."

  One interviewer asked her what her plans were now that the Olympics were over, for her.

  "I'm going to see as many events as I can. I may never have the chance to do so again. "

  Did that mean she would be retiring from competition?

  "I'll be going to college soon. I don't want to give less than my best to my education. And anyway the next Summer Olympics are four years from now."

  That answer was good for several stories in the newspapers and magazines with sports sections. Sasha Canaro to Retire? or some variation on it was a typical headline.

  Several companies wanted Sasha to endorse their products. She was now a client of the Felice Modeling Agency and so let them handle the bargaining and other details.

  With her part of the Olympics over Sasha could now "fraternize with the enemy"; she and Saya renewed their friendships.

  Sasha and Saya and other athletes partied in the evenings. Sasha struck up a mild flirtation with an attractive gymnast and began edging toward having sex.

  Mid-day Friday of the second week of the Olympics, with only two days before its end, she put those plans on hold. For disaster struck.

  Sasha was returning from lunch with her boyfriend Glenn at an upscale French restaurant halfway between the hotel and the stadium, near what would be a movie theatre complex, when the two of them noticed people rushing into and out of a tavern beside the proto-theatre. Glenn grabbed the arm of a woman clad in a blue warm-up suit. What was the fuss all about?

  The woman spoke poor English but passable French, so between their shared languages Sasha was able to get the story, just a bare sketch. Glenn waited impatiently for the two women to finish talking. The woman rushed off someplace .

  "Terrorists have taken hostages. They're demanding a big ransom."

  Glenn turned pale. His lips tightened. "I have to call my coach! See if she and my parents are all right."

  Sasha nodded and pulled out her own cell phone. Her two coaches and their mutual friends at the Olympics were all right. But Saya did not answer her phone.

  Glenn said, "They're all right. What about you?"

  Foot traffic on the pedestrian walkway was increasing, in speed and numbers. Sasha pulled him with her toward a seat on a bench in the green spine of the Village. But another group of people gotten there first.

  She sank down onto the grass and Glenn sat half-facing her, half-facing the walkway.

  "Everyone is
fine. Except Saya. She's not answering her phone."

  "Oh, God, do you suppose she got caught up in this?"

  "I'm going to call her coach."

  Glenn looked torn. "I need to get to my family. Would you be all right—?"

  "Yes, of course. Go. Go."

  He hesitated. "You'll call me later? When you know something?"

  She kissed him on a cheek, smiled, then hit a quick-dial key and put the phone to her ear. He got up quickly and hurried off.

  A call to Saya's coach went to voice mail. Sasha left a message and went to the tavern to see what news was showing on the big-screen TV in the bar.

  The news was not good. There had been casualties during the hostage-taking. A security guard had been shot dead and several other people wounded. Among them was Saya, badly.

  Nearly an hour later Sasha got a phone call. It was Saya's mother. Her daughter was in critical condition at a nearby hospital. Sasha had already gotten in touch with her own family and coaches. She told Saya's mother she would be right there, then called her own family, coaches, and Glenn to let them know she would be spending time at the hospital.

  A cab ride later she was at the hospital, hugging or clasping the shoulders or hands of those who cared about Saya. Along with her verbal assurances she added esoteric commands to the bodies of the people she touched to make them stronger physically and emotionally. Then she asked to see Saya.

  The nurses and then a doctor would not let her. Even Saya's family was not being allowed in the intensive care unit.

  Sasha nodded abruptly and walked off.

  Minutes later she left a restroom very changed. She now looked East Indian and moved differently. Her blue Olympic jump suit got only a glance or two. There were other Olympic athletes visiting the hospital. She walked right by Saya's coach and he paid no attention to her.