Chernobyl

by Frederik Pohl

  "Is it possible that I could be excused for an hour?" she asked. "I do not feel well."

  "Oh? Is there anything I can do?"

  "Simply that I could lie down for a bit," the translator said apologetically. "One hour at the most, then I will be all right."

  "Of course," said Emmaline, and watched the woman put a paperweight on her translation, pick up her imitation-leather pocketbook, and depart. Rima didn't look back. Emmaline listened to her modish heels clatter down the narrow staircase until the bang of the outside door informed her that Rima hadn't gone to the little ladies' room on the ground floor, but outside the building.

  It had been Emmaline's assumption that the Russian woman was having the onset of her period. Now she revised it. More likely she was going somewhere outside to make a telephone call, perhaps to ask for instructions on what to do in the light of the unexpected news. Emmaline sighed, and remembered the cleaning man. Practicing her Russian, she said, "Andrei, can you finish this later on, please? After lunch would be good." And went back to the teletype room to see what else was coming in.

  What else was coming in was scores on yesterday's National League baseball games, the Cubs at Montreal, the Mets at St. Louis. Emmaline waited a moment to see what the Atlanta Braves had done, but it seemed they'd been rained out.

  She went back to her own desk and opened the folder on the American jazz pianist who was being brought in to tour Moscow, Leningrad, and Volgograd, and the novelist who had a special invitation from the Union of Soviet Writers to follow. Her heart wasn't in it. Clouds of radioactive material coming from the USSR was big news.

  Emmaline's first thought, of course, had been the same as everybody else's, namely that the Russians were sneaking in a nuclear test in spite of their self-imposed moratorium. But that made so little sense! The United States was going on with testing whenever it chose. There was nothing to prevent the Soviets from doing the same — except if they were stupid enough to lie about it, in which case whatever propaganda benefits they had gained from their moratorium would be more than wiped out by the deceit.

  Then there was the possibility of an accident of some kind. Warner Borden had told her all about the mysterious Kyshtym event, more than twenty-five years earlier. It seemed that the Soviets had been storing radioactive wastes in Siberia, near the town of Kyshtym, and somehow carelessness had allowed some of them to flow together, reaching critical mass.

  It had never occurred to Emmaline Branford that waste could turn itself into a little atomic bomb, but Borden assured her that that was the best explanation for the — the whatever it was — that had poisoned hundreds of square kilometers of the Siberian landscape, caused the abandonment of a dozen villages and any number of collective farms, poisoned lakes and rivers and even changed the Soviet maps.

  Of course, the Soviets had staunchly denied that anything of the sort had happened. But, of course, they would.

  So when Warner Borden called for her to join him again at the teletypes and said, "I talked to one of the Swedes. They've fingerprinted the cloud, and it definitely was not a nuclear test," her first response was, "Something like Kyshtym again?"

  "No, no, nothing like that. Not a nuclear weapons plant, either, although for a minute I thought that might be it. But the wrong elements were in the gases, according to the Swedes. It's" — he looked around and closed the door—"it's got to be an accident in a nuclear power plant. It could even be a meltdown."

  "Oh, my God," said Emmaline, thinking of the movie The China Syndrome. "But if there were that kind of an explosion—"

  "It wouldn't have to be a big explosion. Anyway, that's what the Swedes are saying — they've tested the cloud, and the proportions of radioactive materials match what the Russians would have if a power plant blew up." He was studying the teletypes eagerly, but all they were producing now were weather reports. "I've checked the maps," he said. "There are two nuclear power plants up on the Baltic. It has to be one of them. Maybe both of them."

  "Two power plants blowing up at once?"

  He grinned at her. He seemed almost happy. "What are you, one of those no-nuke nuts? These are Russian plants. You have to expert they'll blow up now and then."

  He leaned cozily over the teletype next to Emmaline, one hand negligently resting on her hip. She moved patiently away, not willing for a fight just then. (Why were white Georgia boys so often turned on by a black skin?)

  "I'd better get back to work," she said, and returned to her office. Rima was back, diligently working away on letters in her own room. She didn't look up. Emmaline paused at the window by her desk, looking out on the broad, traffic-filled Tchaikovsky Boulevard. Didn't those people know that their power plants were blowing up? Shouldn't someone tell them? She sighed and sat down.

  And there on her desk was an opened copy of a magazine.

  She had not left it there. She picked it up and discovered it was something called Literaturna Ukraina. Emmaline's Russian was more or less adequate, or at least as good as anyone else's after taking the crash foreign-service course, but this magazine was not published in the Russian language. It was in Ukrainian.

  Most of the words were nearly the same, but with distinctively Ukrainian twists. Emmaline frowned. The article seemed to be about deficiencies in a nuclear power plant, but it wasn't about a plant located on the Baltic. She looked across the hall at Rima Solovjova, but the translator did not look up. Emmaline thought of asking Rima if she had put the magazine there, but if she intended to say so, she would have done it already. But why was Rima — or someone — giving her an article about a place called Chernobyl?

  Chapter 19

  Monday, April 28

  Vremya, the nine o'clock television news broadcast, is a Soviet institution. It is watched by tens of millions of people every night, but not very attentively. Generally it is what would be called in America a "talking head" show; the real news is read by a man at a desk, briefly and unemotionally, and there is not a great deal of it. The only film clips are generally of collective farmers bringing in a record harvest, or shipyards launching a new icebreaker. Russians joke that one can always tell when the news comes on, because one hears through the thin apartment walls the sounds of neighbors walking about and flushing their toilets as they leave the television set after the night's film or sports event or concert.

  In just that way, when the news came on that Monday night, Igor Didchuk got up to go to the kitchen for a cold drink of mineral water from the refrigerator, and Oksana would no doubt have done the same if she had not been occupied in finishing the last row of her knitting. The ballet on television that night had been the Bolshoi company itself, in a production called The Streets of Paris—nothing like La Boheme or Gaite Parisienne, but a sober, stirring dance drama about the French Commune of two centuries before. "But the dancing was beautiful," Oksana said to her husband as he returned.

  "Of course," he said with pride. The Bolshoi was a Russian company, not Ukrainian, but Didchuk considered himself a truly internationalist Soviet man. In his view, the Bolshoi troupe was Soviet—and one day, just possibly, their own daughter, Lia, already getting solo parts in the dance academy where she attended school for two days of each week, might well be the Plisetskaya of the year 2000. Lia was nine, and already sound asleep in her "room" — actually, just an extension of the flat's central hall. Oksana's parents were rustling around the living-dining area which was also their bedroom, and it was, after all, time to go to sleep.

  Didchuk paused to glance at the news broadcast when his wife said, "Yora? Did I tell you? That Bornets boy came in today with a temperature of thirty-eight, can you imagine?"

  "No, you didn't mention it," he said.

  "And when I made him go to the clinic, he came back with a note saying that the doctor was not in today. Called away on some emergency."

  "I suppose," said Didchuk amiably, "that she is getting ready for May Day, like everyone else. What did you do?"

  "What could I do? I couldn't send h
im home. His parents would both be at work. So I made him lie down in the teachers' lounge but, really, Yora, that isn't fair to the other teachers. And suppose I brought home some virus to our own family?"

  "You look healthy enough to me," he said. "Well, let's go to bed." And he was reaching out for the knob on the television set when the announcer put down one sheet of paper, picked up another, and read, without change of expression: "There has been an accident at the Chernobyl power plant in the Ukraine. People have been injured, and steps are being taken to restore the situation to normal."

  There is a conversion table that Soviet people apply to government announcements of bad news. If the news is never broadcast but only a subject of rumor, then it is bad but bearable. If the event is publicly described as "minor," then it is serious. And if there is no measure assigned to it at all, then it calls for resorting to "the voices."

  The only radio the Didchuks owned was not in the kitchen with the television set; it was in the other room, where the grandparents were preparing for bed. Didchuk knocked on the door and excused himself. "The radio," he said. "I think we should listen for a moment."

  "At this hour?" his mother-in-law demanded, but when she heard about the news announcement, she said, "Yes, I understand now. That Mrs. Smin Saturday morning, it was clear that she was concealing something. But please, not too loud for the voices."

  Didchuk didn't need to be told that. He turned on their Rekord 314 radio, the size of a baby's coffin, and waited patiently for the tubes to warm up. The volume he set only to a whisper. It is not exactly illegal to listen to the Voice of America and the other foreign broadcasts beamed into the USSR, but it is not something most citizens want to advertise.

  There did not seem to be anything coming in from abroad in Russian, and most of the other foreign stations, of course, were jammed. All they could find was the broadcast from France. That, for reasons no one had ever explained, was almost never jammed; but it was also in French, and none of the Didchuks spoke that language.

  But even they were able to pick a few phrases out of the rapid-fire announcements, and those included "deux milles de morts" and "«« catastrophe totale."

  "But the Chernobyl power plant is more than a hundred kilometers away," Oksana protested, her face pale.

  "Yes, that's true," her husband agreed somberly. "We are very fortunate to be so far. They say that radiation can be very dangerous, not only at once but over a period of many years. Cancers. Birth defects. In children, leukemia…"

  And they looked at each other, and then into the hall, where Lia lay peacefully asleep, with her head on her fist and her lips gently smiling.

  Chapter 20

  Tuesday, April 29

  The control point for fighting the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station is no longer at the collective farm. There are far too many people now to be held in a farm village, and so it has been moved to the town of Chernobyl itself, thirty kilometers away. The evacuation of the town of Pripyat has been expanded to include every community within that thirty-kilometer ring. Where more than a hundred thousand people lived seventy-two hours earlier, there is now no living person except firefighters, emergency workers, and medics. Two squadrons of heavy-lift Soviet Air Force helicopters have joined the damage-control forces, and day and night they load up sandbags and nets filled with bars of metal, take them on the five-minute flight to the reactor, dump them into the white-hot glow, and return for another load. The helicopter cabins have been lined with sheets of lead, which seriously cuts down the loads they can carry, and their pilots are working twelve-hour days. The crews battling the accident on tne ground are allowed only three two-hour shifts out of the twenty-four. Even so, each man is stuck twice a day to yield a blood sample so his white corpuscles can be counted, and when the count is down, he is out of business entirely.

  Sheranchuk understood the reason for the two-hour shifts

  perfectly, but no one told him what to do in the six-hour

  stretches when he was forbidden entry to the zone. What he did, mosdy, was try to sleep. When that failed, he ate, and smoked feverishly, and made a nuisance of himself.

  He knew that he was being a nuisance, because he had been told so when he visited the Chernobyl town hospital to see how his wife was getting along ("Well enough, my dear," she told him, "but really, we're very busy here."), and when he tried to call the hospital in far-off Moscow to check on Deputy Director Smin. ("His condition is being carefully monitored; he is conscious; and, please, don't tie up our telephone lines at this time!") He couldn't help it. He missed Smin. All these new experts and volunteers from all over the USSR were well enough, but after all, the graphite core was still burning, was it not?

  He was pacing back and forth, scowling at the distant smoke on the horizon, when the armored personnel carrier pulled up outside the Chernobyl town bus station. He jumped in to join the fourteen others ready to take their turns.

  It was a half-hour ride to the plant, and none of them spoke much. On the way they all pulled on their radiation coveralls, checked one another's dosimeters, made sure the hoods were fastened. As soon as the personnel carrier came to a stop, Sheranchuk trotted right to the closed-circuit water system to check the Bourdon-gauge pressure readings.

  Overhead he heard the choppers flutter in and swoop away. One came in just overhead. It looked like an airborne whale, with a rotor on top and the revolving flukes of the tail assembly. He could see someone kicking a bag of something— sand, no doubt — out of the door.

  Then he was at the pipes, and he didn't look up at the helicopters again, not even when he felt a rusdy patter of dust on his helmet and knew that one of the bags had come apart as it was dropped. It was only loose sand, after all. If he had been hit by one of the bags, or by one of the falling sacks of lead shot, he would not need to look up. He would be dead — as had happened already to at least one of the firemen whose work kept them closer to the drop point.

  That was the good part of Sheranchuk's immediate task, which was to free the great water valves to the steam system. They were in a sheltered location that kept him out of the direct range of the helicopter dumps. The bad part of the job was that the valves didn't want to be freed. The electric motors that were meant to drive them had shorted and burned themselves out when applied, because something inside the valves was jammed. The control wheels outside failed to move the giant leaves within. When Sheranchuk reached the scene, he saw that his relief crews had tried a different tack. They had drained the system of cooling water from the pond in order to attack the valves with crowbars; but that hadn't worked, either, because the steam system had run so hot that there was little liquid water in the pipes. It was now nearly steam all the way through; no one could work in that heat, and so they had to open the dikes and let the cooling water in again. By the time Sheranchuk got back with the new crew, the action had shifted to the external valve wheels again.

  Sheranchuk saw that the previous shift chief had rigged up a system of crowbars interlocked in the wheels, and the crew was trying doggedly to move the valves with the added leverage.

  Sheranchuk saw at once that it was risky. The great danger was not only that it probably wouldn't work, but that if too much force were applied, it might merely snap the shaft, sturdy forged steel though it was. So when Sheranchuk took over, he urged the crew to be gentle: "No battering-ram stuff, now! A steady push — go! Keep it going! All your weight—" And when that effort accomplished nothing, he tried backing the wheel off a little for another attempt. It almost worked. The wheel moved, grudgingly, a few centimeters of a revolution; and back and forth, back and forth, they kept up the hard work, sweating inside their coveralls, in the noise of the helicopters overhead and the rattle of dropped sand and metal bars, and the rumble of fire pumps and the hoarse cries of the men.

  Sheranchuk was astonished when someone laid a hand on his shoulder. He blinked up at his relief. Had two hours gone by already? And what had been accomplished?

&nbs
p; He knew the answer to that one, anyway.

  At least now they were no longer alone. It wasn't just the forces of the Chernobyl Power Station that were fighting the accident, not even just those of the region or of the whole Ukraine. Help came in from everywhere, by every means possible. By road, convoys of trucks pounded toward Chernobyl from every quarter of the compass. By air, there were planes to the little field outside the town of Chernobyl and helicopters besides. Barges came into the port at Chernobyl town, trains chugged into the Yanov railroad station — and these were not just ordinary goods trains, with a packet or two for the firefighters; they were dedicated trains, their cargoes reloaded into expendable flatcars at the edge of the evacuated zone and pulled back to the plant itself by locomotives that would never leave. Doctors, firemen, engineers, militiamen, soldiers — half the Soviet Union seemed to be descending on the Chernobyl Power Station in its agony.

  It was a truly impressive effort. The only question in Sheranchuk's mind was whether it was going to be enough.

  They were ordered to shower without fail every time they came in off duty, and as often as possible in between times, just to make sure. As soon as Sheranchuk was out of his protective clothing and had allowed another few drops of his blood to be siphoned out, he headed for the showers, rubbing the inside of his elbow. The medics were finding it harder and harder to pick a spot on his arm not already sore from taking the blood samples. They looked tired too. So was Sheranchuk. He pushed his way through the other tired, naked men waiting their turn and let the cold water pour over him. He soaped well, wondering what load of radioactive poison was in the water itself. But that was a useless worry. They had to shower, anyway. And besides, those moments under the shower were the only ones he had to relax and think about his wife and his son. The last word from Tamara was that Boris was already on his way to a Komsomol camp on the Black Sea with twenty other young people from Pripyat. Sheranchuk took consolation in those good thoughts. At least his family was out of danger…