Chernobyl

by Frederik Pohl

  The man who got up was hard to recognize at first, in the hospital whites, and then Sheranchuk saw that it was Vladimir Ponomorenko, one of the Four Seasons of the football team. "Autumn!" Sheranchuk cried in shock. "Not you, too!"

  "Oh, no, Comrade Sheranchuk," the football player said apologetically, and Sheranchuk recognized that he was in the whites of a visitor, not the red-striped pajamas of the patients. "The nurses said it was all right for me to eat here, but I'm only here to see my cousins, in case they.can use my bone marrow."

  "Your cousins? Both of them?" Sheranchuk repeated blankly. "But, Autumn, I had no idea. Both Spring and Summer, here in this hospital? Here, let me sit down with you, tell me what's happened to them."

  But none of the news was good. The two who were

  Vladimir's cousins, the fireman, Vassili, who was called "Summer," and the pipefitter, Arkady, who was called "Spring," had both taken serious amounts of radiation. The prognosis for both of them was not good. The fireman did not merely have radiation sickness. He had been badly burned; one foot, at least, was so destroyed that he was almost sure to lose it, and he was so full of morphine that he had not even recognized Autumn beside his bed. And the pipefitter Arkady — when he went back to turn off the hydrogen flare he paid for it. "But he's in my own section," Sheranchuk said, stricken. "I let him go there! And I didn't even know he was here!"

  "He was on another floor," Autumn explained. "They only moved him up here yesterday, when a room became vacant." Sheranchuk winced. He knew how rooms became vacant in this wing of Hospital No. 6. Although he ate all of the good meal — the fish soup, and the shashlik and the cucumber salad and the heavy, dark bread — he hardly tasted any of it. "Volya," he said, "are you finished? Then let's go see Arkady, please. I want to apologize for not coming to him before."

  But when they entered the pipefitter's room, Spring would have none of it. "Apologize for not visiting me? But, Comrade Sheranchuk, I at least knew you were here, so it is I who am at fault for not coming to you." And he grinned, because the plastic pouch of blood that was trickling into his arm was evidence for all that he was not in a position to pay social calls.

  "When you're feeling better we will visit back and forth like grandmothers," Sheranchuk promised.

  But he knew it was not a promise they would be able to keep. The pipefitter was not likely to walk very far. Radiation sickness took different people in different ways, and what it had done to Spring was stop his digestive system. Big, tough, muscular Spring had suddenly become gaunt. He was no longer the flame that licked down the football field. He wasn't the shy, hesitant, preoccupied pipefitter Sheranchuk had worked with all these months, either. As his body grew weak, his spirit had become almost boisterous. He joked and laughed, and winked at the nurses.

  "So you like it here," Sheranchuk offered, feeling like a visitor instead of a fellow patient.

  "Why not? The food is good, the nurses are pretty, and photographers come every day to take my picture. Next they will want me to autograph the photos for them. I may stay right here in Moscow. The Dynamo team can use a few good players!"

  But the nurses would not let them stay very long, and when Sheranchuk walked out with Autumn, the other member of the Ponomorenko family was solicitous. Of Sheranchuk! He said seriously, "You should not be tiring yourself, should you? Let me walk you back to your room."

  "I would like to see your other cousin," Sheranchuk said obstinately.

  "But he is on the first floor. The stairs—"

  "I can manage a flight of stairs," Sheranchuk growled. "In any case, my roommate is having important visitors. It is probably better if I stay away for a while."

  Autumn shrugged. "Imagine," Sheranchuk went on, thinking about the disaster. "Both your cousins in the hospital at once. What a terrible thing! But at least your brother Vyacheslav is not here—" He broke off as he saw the way the football player was looking at him. "What is it? Has Winter been injured too?"

  Autumn said apologetically, "I thought you knew. My brother was in the Number Four reactor room itself. They say he was the first to die, but they haven't been able to find his body. It's still there, they think."

  Smin was dozing lightly when he became aware he had company again. "We didn't wake you, I hope?" said the taller of the two men who had parted his curtains.

  "It's a pleasure to know that I can still wake up," Smin said, nodding to them. "Fedor Vassilievitch Mishko. Andrei Pavlovich Milaktiev. I am honored to be visited by two members of the leadership."

  "By two old friends, Simyon Mikhailovitch," Mishko corrected. "If not friends, at least men with whom you have worked in the past. Are you feeling well?"

  "I am feeling very poorly," said Smin, his smile now an uncomfortable grimace. "I would feel a little better if I knew whether you were here to inquire after my health or to tell me I am in disgrace."

  "Unfortunately, both," Milaktiev said heavily. He was a slim old man except for a pot belly that his expensive, Western-cut clothes nearly succeeded in concealing. His hair was still dark and so was his thick, bristly mustache — almost a Stalin mustache, Smin thought.

  "Nevertheless," Mishko added, "also as friends. I hope you believe that, Simyon Mikhailovitch."

  Smin thought that over carefully. The men had pulled the curtains behind them, but they had taken chairs in with them. They had seated themselves, waiting patiently for his answer. "I believe," he said at last, "that my mother had the very highest regard for your father, Fedor Vassilievitch."

  Mishko grinned. He was taller than his partner, and dapper in a pale tan sports jacket and paisley tie. "In fact," he said, "if my father had not been purged in the Stalin years, you and I might now be stepbrothers."

  "So my mother has told me," Smin said. "She has spoken often of the Stalin years."

  "Which, I am sure, she never wants to see return."

  They had been speaking softly in any case, but Mishko both lowered his voice still more and glanced at the gap in the curtains as he spoke. So even a member of the Central Committee wondered who might be listening at times! "I do not suppose," Smin said, "that you came here to discuss the cult of personality with me. Would you mind telling me what you want?"

  Mishko sighed. "Actually we have two purposes. The official one is to ask you some questions about the accident."

  "The GehBehs have already asked me."

  "And no doubt they will ask you more." Mishko nodded. "The organs are still thorough. But it is, after all, a serious matter, Simyon Mikhailovitch. I suppose you know that every RBMK generator in the Soviet Union has been shut down?"

  Smin was shaken. "I didn't know that."

  "The economic consequences are serious. We've lost export sales of food because the foreigners think our tomatoes will make them glow in the dark. Production is down in the factories requiring electrical power. Tourism, of course — there is no tourism now. And I do not even speak of the loss of life."

  "Am I charged with sabotage?"

  "Simyon," the other man said gently, "you aren't being charged with anything. Do you mind if I smoke?"

  There were Ne kurit signs all over the room, but Smin shrugged. "I wish I could join you."

  Milaktiev lighted up before he spoke. He considered for a moment. Then: "When the Party entrusted you with a very high position, it expected you to live up to its responsibilities. Have you given your people good leadership?"

  "I gave them good food, good housing, good pay, fair treatment — as much as I could, with the First Department breathing down my neck. I don't know how to measure leadership."

  "One way to measure it," said Milaktiev, "is by the number of shift chiefs, engineers, and others who deserted their jobs. There were one hundred fifty-eight of them at the Chernobyl Power Plant."

  "And nearly three thousand others remained for duty," Smin replied.

  "What about defective materials?"

  "There were some, yes. I have reported this in full. They were not in essential places. After the
article in Literaturna Ukraina appeared — I believe you are familiar with it—"

  "Oh, yes," Mishko smiled, answering for both of them.

  "— I instituted a complete inspection of all essential systems. Where there were faults, I replaced them. In any case, if anything failed and so helped to cause the accident, it probably was the instrumentation."

  "The instrumentation?"

  "Which was imported from France and Germany," Smin pointed out. "Go sue the French."

  The man from the Central Committee said, "We are not speaking of lawsuits, Simyon Mikhailovitch. We are speaking of faults in the management of the plant. If you say to me, 'I did everything correcdy,' then I say to you, 'But still it happened.' "

  Smin shrugged. "I was only Deputy Director."

  Mishko sighed. "The Director will face prosecution," he

  said.

  "And will I?"

  "I hope not, Simyon Mikhailovitch. Of course, you are likely to be dismissed from your post. You may also, of course, be expelled from the Party."

  "Of course," said Smin bitterly. "Now, if you will excuse me, I would like to vomit."

  The two men looked at each other. Then Milaktiev, stubbing out his cigarette, leaned forward and spoke more softly still. "If you must vomit, do it. But now we're finished with the official part of our visit, and there is another matter to discuss."

  "And what is that?" asked Smin, fighting against fatigue; there was something going on here, and he had to know what it was.

  "Would you, Simyon Mikhailovitch, make a complete statement for us of what happened at Chernobyl? I don't mean the accident. I mean before the accident. We are asking you to describe everything that made it difficult for you to run the plant properly. Directives which could not be complied with, or which did actual harm. Political pressures. The appointment of a Director who was incompetent. The corruption. The drunkenness and absenteeism. The interference from the First Department. Everything. Do you understand what I mean by 'everything'? I mean everything."

  Smin was feeling really faint now. The sober old face grew fuzzy before him. "I don't follow you," he said faintly. "I've already given all this to the organs."

  "Who may or may not pass it all on to us. We want it all."

  "Do you mean that you want me to put on paper everything that is kept secret?"

  "Exactly that, yes."

  "And—" Smin licked his sore lips. "And if I do, what use will you make of it?"

  They looked at each other again. Then, "I cannot say. I don't know," said Milaktiev. "Yet."

  When Leonid Sheranchuk finally came back to his room, he saw that the curtains around Smin's bed were still drawn. Someone was there, because Sheranchuk could hear an almost inaudible mutter of voices. And when he bumped against his bed, a head popped out of the curtains to stare at him. It withdrew in a moment, and he heard one of the voices say to another, "Smin is almost asleep, anyway. We'll come back another time." But Sheranchuk thought that that head had looked familiar, and when its owner came out with another man, nodding politely to him as they left, he thought the face on the other man looked familiar too. Not as friends. Not even as someone he had run across in a casual meeting; as a face he had seen in a newspaper or on television. He lay down on his bed, pondering the question. Then he got up. Tired as he was, he hobbled to the open window and peered out at the courtyard.

  Sure enough, a few moments later, there they were, tan sports coat and conservative gray, appearing on the steps below. From the other side of the little grove of trees in the courtyard a car purred forward from its parking niche to meet them.

  The car was a Zil.

  Sheranchuk stared at it as it spun away, traffic miraculously opening before it. He had never been in the presence of two members of the Central Committee before.

  Chapter 27

  Wednesday, May 7

  Smin's mother, Aftasia Smin, is four feet ten inches tall and weighs less than ninety pounds. At one time she was taller, though not much. Then old hunger and later osteoporosis knocked a few inches off her height.

  She is eighty-six years old — the same age as the century, she says. Aftasia celebrates her birthday on the first of the year. That is really only a guess, since it was not the custom in the shted at the turn of the century to pay much attention to recording the birth of Jewish female babies.

  Although she was never very big, she carried a rifle in the Civil War from 1918 until, seven months pregnant with Simyon, she left her husband to pursue the last of the White forces in the Ukraine. Aftasia returned to the shtetl to give birth. She still has a puckered scar, very high on the inside of her right thigh, where a bullet from the Czech legion put her out of action for two cold, painful, hungry months. The fiery young revolutionary husband she had left the shtetl to marry was later captured by Kolchak's forces. He was executed, after some barbaric questioning, the week after Simyon was born. Simyon was a year old before Aftasia learned that her husband was dead. She never found out where his body was buried.

  What Aftasia Smin represented to her downstairs neighbor, Oksana Didchuk, was hard to define. To Oksana, the frail old woman was a bit of a conundrum, and a rather worrying one sometimes. There were some very good and neighborly things about Aftasia Smin. She was a generous acquaintance who always had something for the Didchuks' little girl on New Year's Day, and not just a chocolate bar or a kerchief but even things like a pretty, flaxen-haired doll from the Children's World store in Moscow, or even wonderful sugared almonds that had come all the way from Paris. Nor was it only the daughter who benefited from Aftasia's largesse. Let Oksana happen to mention that she had been unable to find plastic hair curlers in the store, say, and old Aftasia was likely to turn up the next day with a box of them, saying that her son had brought them back from a trip to the West, like the sugared almonds, and after all what did an old woman like herself want with such things?

  On the other hand, there were things about Aftasia Smin that were troubling to her neighbors from the floor below. It was not simply that Aftasia appeared to be, in some sense, Jewish. There was nothing really wrong with being Jewish, provided you didn't actually become religious about it. Aftasia had never shown any signs of observing the Saturday Sabbath or of creeping off to Kiev's only functioning synagogue. (Though it was true that the Didchuks had been quite shocked to find that the meal she had invited them to on April 25th had been taken by the Americans to have some ritual significance in the yid faith.)

  It was certainly not disturbing that Aftasia was an Old Bolshevik. Actually, it was quite an honor to know such a person. She had personally known some of the great heroes of the Revolution! She still knew some of their sons and grandsons, it seemed. But really, the Didchuks had often asked each other, if she is what she is, why does she live as she does?

  To that the Didchuks had no answer. But when she asked them for any sort of favor, to use their telephone (but why didn't the woman have one of her own?), or to translate for those fascinating American cousins, the Didchuks were happy to oblige. And when she knocked on their door this worrying May morning, with all of Kiev in an uproar, they were downcast to be unable to agree at once. "But, you see," Oksana

  Didchuk said sadly, "today they are sending all the children away from Kiev for a bit — purely as a precaution, of course. We would certainly be glad to help you get your American cousins to the airport, but we must get our own daughter to the train station. Also I must go to the market to buy some food for her to take on the train. Also there is some mixup with her papers for the trip, so really my husband and I should go to the station now to straighten it out."

  But Aftasia Smin said crisply, "Leave that to me, please. My cousins don't leave until this afternoon. There's plenty of time to get to the station. To buy food first? Why not? If you will let me use your telephone, I'll simply have the car come a bit early and we'll go to the Rye Market together."

  And so Oksana Didchuk found herself in the backseat of a handsome new Volga, with Aftasia
Smin perched in front, next to the driver, ordering him to take them to the market and wait while they made their purchases. It was certainly a great improvement over standing in line for a bus, especially on this particular Wednesday, when everybody in Kiev seemed to be trying to get somewhere else. The radio and television broadcasts had been very specific. The city was not being evacuated; only foolish people and rumormongers would say such things. It was only that on the very remote chance that the levels of radiation might rise, it would be better for the young children, who were most at risk from such things, to be somewhere else. So there was no reason for anyone to be afraid.

  It was astonishing, however, to see how many of the people on the street looked that way anyway.

  Even the old Rye Market looked strange that morning. Ordinarily the vendors would not only fill the hall but overflow into the streets outside, on so beautiful a spring day, with all the fruits and vegetables coming in from all the private plots around Kiev. Not today.

  Looking down on the trading floor from the balcony, Oksana Didchuk saw gaps in the usually shoulder-to-shoulder line of white-capped farm women standing before their wares. In the aisles were plenty of shoppers, but they didn't seem to be buying much. More than once Oksana saw a customer pick up a couple of tomatoes or a clump of beets, peer closely at them, even sniff them and then reluctantly put them back.

  "Well, then," said Aftasia Smin. "What is it you wish to buy?" She listened courteously while the mother explained what she wanted, and then corrected her plans. "Cheese, yes, but an old one — from milk taken before the accident. And, all right, a sausage, and bread, of course. And a herring, I think. There is nothing wrong with the oceans yet, at least!"

  And when Oksana tarried before the slabs of snow-white pork fat and the naked-looking skinned rabbits, thinking of the supper she would have to make for her husband and parents that night, Aftasia vetoed those too. "Sausage again, if you please — and again an old one. Inspected? Yes, of course they are inspected— " For they could not have missed the long lines of vendors waiting their turns to put their strawberries and fresh hams under the radiation detectors so they could get a permit to sell them if they passed. "But if I were to stay in Kiev, I would not buy fresh meat just yet. Let the situation settle down a little."