Chernobyl

by Frederik Pohl

  When Kalychenko's fiancee, Raia, trudged back to the village, she went to the hut Kalychenko shared instead of the one where the three single women had been assigned. She was not surprised that he wasn't there. She wasn't surprised, either, at the fact that none of the repairs had been done, and nothing had been cleaned, although the empty vodka bottles on the table did raise her eyebrows.

  Still, she told herself, setting about trying to restore order, you could not expect a man like Bohdan Kalychenko to turn into a housewife.

  Raia did not have very many illusions about the man she intended to marry. It was his pale skin and his blue eyes that had made her willing to go to bed with him, not his character. True, his job at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station was socially well above her own status — Raia worked as a conductor on the town buses — but in Pripyat there were plenty of young men with good jobs. Only they didn't look like Bohdan Kalychenko.

  She knew quite well that Kalychenko was scared. She saw no reason to mention it to him. There was no way she could reassure him, because he had every reason to be afraid. There was inevitably going to be an enormous investigation of the disaster at Chernobyl, and her fiance had nominated himself for the position of major scapegoat by running away from his post of duty.

  Raia didn't excuse him for that. She didn't bother blaming him, either. Certainly it must have been terrifying to be right on the scene when Reactor No. 4 blew itself up. She simply accepted as a fact of life that there was a real chance that when her child was born, its father might be five thousand kilometers away, chopping logs to lay across some Siberian permafrost. This did not make Raia reluctant to marry him. It made her want to get the ceremony performed — soon — right away, in case one night the organs appeared and the next morning he was on his way to Lefortovo Prison. As to the possibility that her son might suffer any effect from radioactivity, after her first horrid vision of a child with no eyes, Raia had simply dismissed any such idea. After all, she was healthy. It could not happen to her..

  Raia paused and lighted a cigarette, frowning at the stove that would not give up its coat of grease.

  It was necessary, she thought, to make alternative plans in case the worst happened.

  Raia's capacity for reasoning was excellent. She perceived that she had four alternatives. First, she could marry Kalychenko and bear his child; that was the best thing, if it could be made to happen. Second, she could bear the child unmarried. A poor second choice; a single woman with a child would never marry, and Raia definitely wanted, if at all possible, to have a home and a husband. Third, she could have an abortion — but that she simply ruled out, not by logic but only because she could never do such a thing.

  There remained a fourth possibility.

  There was Volya Kokoulin, her fellow bus conductor, who had let her know very clearly that nothing would give him more delight than to steal off into the woods with her and make love.

  If Kalychenko were taken away before they married, it would not be hard, Raia thought, to discover where Kokoulin had been evacuated to. She could find him. Having found him, it would be quite easy to sleep with him, to inform him a few weeks later that he had made her pregnant, and to marry him. There might be some unpleasantness about dates when the child was born, but by then what would it matter? And if Kokoulin were as hungry for her flesh as he indicated, he should be easy enough to convince that premature babies ran in her family.

  She was smiling to herself, perched on the edge of the table, when Kalychenko came unevenly in the door. She threw her arms around him in real pleasure. There was nothing feigned about it; this was the man she intended to marry — if at all possible — because really, when you came right down to it, all of Kokoulin's virtues did not outweigh the fact that Kalychenko was tall, blue-eyed, and graceful, and Kokoulin was ugly.

  When Kalychenko stumbled back to his cottage to find Raia entering just before him, he was glowing all over with his news. "Really, my dear," he said at once, "this Yuzhevin is not such a bad place after all."

  His fiancee was flushed and sweaty, with two filled string bags still on the table. Kalychenko peered into them even as he greeted her with a cheerful kiss. "Ah, my darling," he said fondly. "You've had a long walk, I'm afraid. But I have good news! I've been offered a job driving a tractor here! No, no, don't look so disapproving. Wait till you hear what they pay tractor drivers! Why, this head driver, Kolka Yakovlev, he has that big house just outside the village, you know? With fruit trees all around it? And the Volga parked in the backyard? Sixteen thousand rubles he paid for that car, that's what kind of money a tractor driver earns in Yuzhevin, because everyone with skills runs off to the city!"

  "That's very nice," Raia said, gazing out the cottage door with sudden intensity.

  "And if you're not too tired tonight, he has invited us to come to his house to watch some American films! He has television tapes of all sorts of things—The Wizard of Oz, and motion pictures with Clark Gable and even Mickey Mouse! Oh," he said apologetically, "but, of course, you're worn out carrying those things. It's my fault. I went to meet the bus, but—"

  "I did not come on the bus; I missed it. I came in a car, Bohdan. Two men gave me a ride almost to Yuzhevin."

  "Well, that was lucky," he beamed.

  "No, Bohdan," she sighed. "It wasn't really lucky, I think. The men didn't say much to me, but I didn't think they were coming quite to the village. Only there is their car, just across the square. Do you know what I think, Bohdan? I think those men came here to interview evacuees like us. I think they are from the organs."

  Chapter 25

  Tuesday, May 6

  Within large continents, air generally moves across the surface of the Earth from west to east, with a slight curve toward the poles. For that reason, the weather in Chicago usually comes from somewhere in California, and Moscow gets a large part of its weather from Spain or France. At any particular place or time, however, the winds can be quite fickle. If the Soviet air masses had been moving in the prevailing direction in April and May of 1986, the gases from the Chernobyl explosion would have been carried out over Siberia and the Pacific. They weren't. First they moved north. Then east. Then everywhere.

  The first stops for the wandering witches' brew from Chernobyl were Poland and eastern Scandinavia. The invisible cloud was greeted with confusion and panic. In Poland, the official press was reassuring. The underground press, which was what the Polish people read to find out what is going on, was not. So Polish pharmacies were sold out of potassium iodide overnight, for the scariest ingredient in the cloud was its radioactive iodine-131. The trouble with the radioactive iodine was that every human being has a thyroid gland, and every thyroid gland has an insatiable appetite for iodine. If the iodine happens to be the radioactive isotope, the gland swallows it anyway. There the iodine stays, ceaselessly bombarding the victim from within with its radiation. Cancer of the thyroid is one of the commonest consequences of exposure to radioactive leaks.

  Before long the winds took Chernobyl's gases south and east, to blanket most of the European continent, but by then iodine-131 was no longer the greatest fear. Radio-iodine has at least one virtue. It is short-lived. In only eight days half of it decays into something else. Two other isotopes were by then more worrisome, and they were xenon-133, a gas, and cesium-137, normally a solid. (But, like the iodine, volatile enough so that large amounts went up with Chernobyl's smoke and remained in its cloud as finely divided particles.) The xenon, being a gas, is particularly troublesome. Rain won't wash it out of the air; it is there to be breathed until it, too, decays. The cesium is even worse. It takes thirty years for half of it to decay. When it finally falls to the ground, it remains in the soil and water for a long, long time.

  Of course, even after the thirty years of xenon's half-life have passed, not all of it will be gone. Half will still be there; that's what "half-life" means. If one were to follow the history of one small patch of someone's backyard onto which one million atoms of radioactiv
e cesium from Chernobyl had fallen, by the year 2016 five hundred thousand atoms would still be there. There would still be over sixty thousand radioactive atoms of the stuff by the beginning of the twenty-second century. Sooner or later, of course, it would all be gone from that little patch, and the last of those million atoms would have turned into something else. That should happen somewhere around six centuries from now.

  When the little particles of radioactive cesium finally settle out from the sky, they cling to whatever they land on. Some of them have landed on farms of lettuce and spinach (which people eat), or on grassy pastures (which cows eat, and turn into cesium-bearing milk for people).

  So all over Europe governments ordered, or people simply decided on their own, that fresh milk and leafy vegetables should be removed from the daily diet. That was nasty for parents of small children. It was even worse for farmers. Exports of any of those things from Eastern Europe were refused at the borders. When the cloud reached as far south as Italy, the authorities banned the sale of even locally grown leafy vegetables and Italian farmers, broken-hearted, saw their crops dumped into fields to rot.

  Chapter 26

  Tuesday, May 6

  Moscow's Hospital No. 6 takes up most of a large city block. The hospital is not entirely devoted to patients who suffer from radiation sickness. If that were so it would be nearly empty nearly all the time; Chernobyls are rare. But when a Chernobyl happens, Hospital No. 6 is ready, for it is there that the USSR has concentrated the best doctors specializing in that ailment. It is a very good hospital. The wing devoted to radiation disease is built to an old-fashioned plan, with high ceilings and large rooms, and in this warm May the sun floods in. The wing has a total of 299 patients flown in from the Chernobyl explosion. These are the worst cases, the ones who have taken the most radiation. They are getting the best care possible, but for many of them it is not enough.

  When Leonid Sheranchuk got there, however, he was protesting that it was more care than he needed, and more than he really wanted by far. The admitting doctors paid his arguments no attention. Since he was there, he would stay until released; but they did allow him one boon. Most of the patients were in private rooms, but they granted his plea to share the room of Deputy Director Leonid Smin, and that kindness made him stop protesting.

  Sheranchuk was not at all sure, however, that it was a kindness to Smin. The Deputy Director had certainly wel-corned his company. But the Deputy Director had been fading rapidly ever since then. On the first day Smin had been alert, if very sick; he had even greeted his Comrade Plumber and joked about his own internal plumbing. But now, as Sheranchuk could hear, Smin's internal plumbing was giving him trouble again. After the bone marrow, the next targets that radiation destroyed were the soft tissues of the mouth and the intestinal tract, and one of the most unpleasant effects of an overdose was the terrible bloody diarrhea that resulted.

  When the nurse came out, carrying the covered bedpan with respect because what came out of Smin's body was not only unpleasant but contaminated with radioactivity, Sheranchuk asked, "How is he?"

  She said, "I think he will sleep for a while. How about yourself? How are you feeling?"

  "I am feeling quite well," said Sheranchuk automatically. It was almost true, not counting the aches and twinges where needles had been stuck into him. He was even thinking of getting up for a visit to some of the other patients, although he felt, as always, a bit fatigued.

  She nodded, not even listening — after all, she knew his condition better than he did. "Do you need anything?"

  "Only to get out of here." He grinned. "Preferably alive."

  "You have a very good chance," she said strongly. "And in any case, you have a new doctor. Four or five of them, if you count the Americans, but one doctor in particular I am sure you will be glad to see."

  "And who is that?" asked Sheranchuk, but she only smiled and left him.

  Sheranchuk picked up a magazine, shifting uncomfortably in his bed. A voice from behind the curtain said softly, "She did not tell you the truth, you know."

  "Deputy Director Smin?" Sheranchuk cried. "But I thought you were asleep."

  "Exactly, yes. You thought that because that nurse told you I would be, but, as you see, I am not."

  "Let me pull the curtain back," said Sheranchuk eagerly, swinging his legs over the side of the bed.

  "No, please! Don't exert yourself. I am not at my most handsome just now, as you may suppose, and I prefer not to exhibit my wretchedness. We can talk perfecdy well this way."

  "Of course," said Sheranchuk.

  There was a silence for a moment. Then Smin's Voice said gravely, "I am told you behaved with great courage, Comrade Plumber."

  Sheranchuk flushed. "They needed to get concrete under the reactor. Someone had to do it. I hope only that they have succeeded."

  "At least it is well begun," Smin said, and paused to cough for a moment. Then he said, "I spoke to the plant on the telephone last night. It is going well. They decided they needed to drill a tunnel under the core to get the concrete in, but the mud was too soft. Then they found an engineer from the Leningrad Metro to show them how. They froze the mud with liquid nitrogen, and now the concrete is in place."

  "So everything is safe now."

  There was a long silence from Smin. "I hope so, Comrade Plumber," he said at last. "Isn't it almost time for the doctors' morning rounds? I think I will sleep a little until then, after all."

  When the doctors came through, they kept Smin's curtains closed, and Sheranchuk sat on the edge of his bed, kicking his heels irritably against the metal legs, listening. There was not much to hear. All the resources of Hospital No. 6 were not making Smin better. He was weaker today than he had been when Sheranchuk was admitted. As the doctors moved about and the curtains parted a bit, Sheranchuk could see how bad the old man was. His skin looked like — like — like a leper's, Sheranchuk decided, though he had never seen a leper. It was blotchy. Under the dressings were sores that ran. The part of his chest that was not covered with the great old burn scar now was dotted with the little pink blossoms of burst blood vessels the doctors called "petechiae." Reminded, Sheranchuk examined his own chest and arms, but there were none of the things there.

  He really was not, he told himself again, sick enough to be in this place.

  When it was Sheranchuk's own turn, the doctors were more relaxed. It was only, "Open your mouth, please" and "Please, if you will just remove your pajama bottoms" — so they could poke around his balls — and then they peered at his charts for just a moment.

  "I should be sent away from here," he told them. "I'm taking up space others need more."

  "We have plenty of space, Leonid," the head doctor smiled. "We also have plenty of doctors — even some new ones coming from America, soon."

  But actually Sheranchuk thought they already had all too many doctors, especially the radiation hematologist, Dr. Akhsmentova. He did not care for the woman, and was not pleased when she stayed on after the other doctors had left. "Just a few more drops of your blood, if you please, Comrade Sheranchuk," she requested. She didn't wait for permission. She had already pushed him back on the bed and seized his arm.

  "The nurses are gentler than you," Sheranchuk complained as she stabbed once more into the heart of the bruises left from other needles.

  "The nurses have more time. Stop wriggling, please." He glared silently at her. Glancing at his bright steel teeth as she withdrew the needle, she said, "And one other thing. When the American doctors see you, try not to smile. We do not want them to think so poorly of Soviet dentistry."

  When she had gone, Smin said from behind the curtains, "I hope the Americans don't see Dr. Akhsmentova at all, because we don't want them to have a poor opinion of Soviet hematologists."

  His words were cheerful enough, but his tone so faint that it alarmed Sheranchuk. "Please, Simyon. Don't tire yourself talking."

  "I am not tired," Smin protested. "Weak, a little, yes." He stirred fretfully
; through the gap in the curtains Sheranchuk could see him trying to adjust the sheet more comfortably over his body. "Although perhaps you are right and I should rest again. I am told that I am to have distinguished visitors today, and I should try to be alert and witty for them."

  The GehBehs again! Couldn't they leave the poor man alone? Sheranchuk begged, "Then do it, please. And try to eat your lunch when they bring it." But he heard the anger in his voice, and to account for the bitterness in his tone he added, "But it is true that I should not be here."

  "Leonid," Smin said patiently, "you are here because you are a hero. Do you think everyone has forgotten what you did under the reactor? You are a precious person, and everyone wants to make sure you don't die on us because you foolishly did one heroic thing too many. Now go and eat your lunch."

  The patients' dining room was half the floor away, and as he walked down the hall toward it, Sheranchuk peered into each room he passed. To have the Deputy Director call him a hero! But everyone in this place was a hero — the firemen, the operators who had stayed steadfast, the doctor who had come back and back to help the victims until he became a victim himself — not least among the heroes was Deputy Director Simyon Smin himself, if it came to that! And almost all of them were far worse off than Leonid Sheranchuk, who had merely been weak enough to faint from exhaustion.

  The patients' dining room proved that. There were hardly more than a dozen patients at the tables that could have seated dozens more. It was not that there was any shortage 'of patients to fill the room. It was simply because so many of them were too sick or too weak, or merely too encumbered with pipettes and catheters and tubes of trickling medicines to get up and walk to their meals.

  Sheranchuk paused in the doorway to sniff at what was offered. Fish soup at least, he thought approvingly; say what you will, the food was better here than in any other hospital he had ever heard of. He looked toward one of the tables by a window and was surprised to hear his name called.