Something's wrong with this picture (desolé j'ai pas les photos...) . But it's certainly not the view. The impossibly gorgeous Swiss hamlet of Trübbach, tennis wunderkind Martina Hingis's adopted hometown, is nestled in the Rhine Valley in the shadow of the Alps, an hour east of Zurich and just a mile from the Liechtenstein border. Trübbach (pop. 1,245) looks as if it could be the cover illustration for a dog-eared copy of Heidi. But don't expect to find this village's heroine wearing her hair in braids, sipping from bowls of warm goat's milk or skipping blissfully through Alpine meadows.

In recent years Trübbach has been the springboard for Hingis, 16--who on March 31 became her sport's youngest top-ranked player--and her hard-driving mother-coach, Melanie Molitor, 40, in their extraordinary and relentless quest to scale the summit of women's tennis. And yes, it is their quest, one that began back when Melanie was pregnant with Martina in their native Czechoslovakia. Their mission, and it didn't really matter if little Martina chose to accept it, was officially launched when Molitor placed a sawed-off wooden racket in the tiny hands of her two-year-old daughter and hit balls to her every day for 10 minutes. "Since I was in her stomach, she was thinking I was going to be a great tennis player," says Hingis of her mom, who played professional tennis in Czechoslovakia for nine years and was ranked as high as 10th in her country. "She never thought I maybe wouldn't have the talent. In the beginning she wanted it more than I did."

These days it's hard to tell who wants it more. Molitor, who named her daughter after her idol, Martina Navratilova, is as fiercely ambitious as the most notorious tennis father. But Hingis appears to have absorbed Molitor's dream and made it her own with no trace, at least so far, of the angst that has plagued tennis daughters like Jennifer Capriati or Mary Pierce. "If I had a daughter, I would try to hold her back from playing so much so early," says Navratilova, who retired in 1994, shortly after Hingis turned pro. "But her mother has been very smart with Martina. She's given her a balanced life. Martina is a tennis daughter, but she's a daughter first."

Hingis agrees with that assessment. "I had days when I didn't want to play tennis," she recalls, "but I'm glad I stayed with it because now I have a great life."

That great life includes Hingis's jet-set touring schedule, endorsement deals like her $10 million contract with the Italian clothing company Sergio Tacchini and a growing fame that has made her recognizable from Melbourne to Manhattan. "They knew me when I was walking down Broadway and even when I was in the All-Star Cafe!" says Hingis, letting loose one of her trademark husky giggles. "I didn't have to pay for anything. The bigger you are and the richer you are, the less you have to pay."

Of course, in life--as in sports--the bigger and richer you are, the more you have to lose. "The trend of younger and younger champions is developing idiot savants," says Julie Anthony, a former pro tennis player and coach who is now a sports psychologist in Aspen. "Tennis has become big business, and these kids are under pressure to play more tournaments and bring in more money. You wind up with children traveling all over the world looking very sophisticated, often supporting their parents, when in fact they are still children and very vulnerable."

Not to worry, say Hingis and Molitor, who both repeatedly insist that they have a "great relationship" that helps them withstand the stress of world-class tennis. "I don't feel that much pressure," Hingis says. "It's because I've been doing this for so long it seems normal." They point out Molitor's unorthodox (at least for a single-minded tennis mom and coach) child-rearing methods. With Molitor's encouragement, Hingis skis, swims and plays basketball and soccer. She also blithely indulges in risky activities like in-line skating and horseback riding, often right before big matches. She was thrown from a horse while in Melbourne for the Australian Open in January. She still won the tournament.

Seated in her small living room in Trübbach, dressed casually in a T-shirt and sweats that don't hide her surprisingly solid 5'6", 115-pound physique, Hingis patiently explains what she sees as the secret to her success. "People say I seem so normal," she says, gesturing out the window at the neat white houses, grazing cows and breathtaking, snow-covered peaks that seem close enough to touch. "Just look. It's like going back 50 years in time. So peaceful. How can you not be normal when you come back from a tournament and look around at all this?"

Normal? Peaceful? Maybe. Then again, maybe not.

It is morning at the modest home Hingis and her mother share in Trübbach. Only the tennis court in the backyard distinguishes the house from its neighbors. Hingis, fresh from her victory over Anke Huber in the final of the Paris Open on Feb. 16, is sipping apple juice in the living room. Suddenly the phone rings, and Molitor bolts out of the bathroom, straight from the shower, to pick it up. She is dripping wet and naked except for a towel that barely covers her torso. Within two seconds, she is bellowing angrily into the phone in Swiss German.

Hingis regards her mother with a mixture of detached amusement and the slight embarrassment that teenagers reserve for their parents. Molitor, seemingly oblivious to the reporter who's interviewing her daughter and the accompanying photographer and stylists trooping through the house, starts to yell even louder. The towel drops nearly to the floor. It is impossible to hear Hingis over the din, which continues at even higher decibels for nearly 10 minutes. "Family problems," Hingis whispers awkwardly. It turns out that the man at the other end of the line is Molitor's second husband, Andreas Zogg, whom she divorced recently after eight years of marriage. He is still living in the house and refuses to leave. Even odder is the fact that Zogg, a Swiss computer salesman, has commandeered the spacious 4 1/2 rooms in the front of the house, leaving Hingis the millionairess and Molitor in the 2 /2 cramped rooms in back. And get this: Hingis paid for the house and owns it free and clear. "It's kind of a bad situation," says Hingis. "We're hoping he goes pretty soon, but we're not sure what's going to happen."

Hingis and her mother have always been confident about what was going to happen with Martina's tennis career: She's been winning tournaments since age six, and she became the youngest juniors champion at a Grand Slam event when she won at Roland Garros when she was 12. "We've adhered to a strict schedule for 14 years," says Molitor. But the course of their personal lives, shaped by anti-Communist politics in Czechoslovakia, has been more convoluted.

When she finally sits down for an interview, Molitor isn't eager to discuss her past. Even with her wild, frizzy hair blown into submission by a stylist and her face fully made up for a photo shoot, her intense drive is palpable, almost frighteningly so. She is not warm and friendly, like her daughter, but she doesn't duck the hard questions. "People say that I ruined Martina's childhood and that I only want the money and to satisfy myself," she says wearily. "That's not true. I pursued this so Martina could have a chance in life. It hurts me to hear what people say, but I just continue to follow my own path."

Molitor's path was forged in the small town of Roznov in what is now the Czech Republic. She began playing tennis at age seven and started watching Navratilova at local tournaments when they were both in their early teens. Molitor never played against Navratilova, who defected to the U.S. at 18, and the two did not know each other. But Molitor admits that she watched Navratilova enviously when she left the country. "Tennis was a way to escape from Czechoslovakia," says Molitor, "but not that many of us were good enough."

Molitor had good reason to want to leave. Her father, a landscape architect and an ardent anti-Communist, was sentenced