"We're going to swap life stories, Remo Black," she said, "but my mouth is going to be full so tell me yours first."

Remo did. He made it all up. He invented a family and a hometown and a past and told her that he had always wanted to complete in the Olympics but it wasn't until he had hit the state lottery of ten thousand dollars that he was able to quit his job in the auto junkyard and go into training.

"Sure, I'm older than the rest of the runners, but I don't think that's going to stop me from making a good showing," he said.

"I admire you," she told him, chewing unabashedly. "You know what you want and you're not letting anything stop you from trying to get it." Which Remo knew was a crock because what he wanted was to yank the bowl of noodles with sesame

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paste away from her and drop it into his mouth in one large sticky lump, and he was letting just the memory of Chiun's training stop him from doing that.

He contented himself with, "How about you? Do you know what you want?"

She nodded. "I'm an Indian. I want to give my people something to be proud of."

"What tribe?"

"Blackhand. A reservation in Arizona." She looked upward toward the ceiling as if her life's memories were written on the grease-saturated Celotex. "You know what it's like. People who are-well, limp. Even the children. Once warriors. Now they make a living selling junk blankets and doing phony rain dances for tourists. I can't change that, but maybe I can give them something to hang their pride on." She looked at Remo with an almost-electric intensity. "I want that gold medal. For my people."

Remo felt something close to shame. Here was a woman-not a girl like most of the other competitors but a woman-who had spent God knows how many years trying to get to the Olympics, and to him it had all been a piece of cake. Winning a gold metal would be no more difficult for Remo than walking across an empty street.