Yellow Blue Tibia

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Did that individual give you directions?’

  ‘There’s no American embassy in Kiev,’ I snapped. ‘Just drive away, before he flags down the Militia and we are all arrested.’

  ‘No American embassy?’ said Saltykov in his implacable voice, pointedly not starting the engine of his taxicab. ‘But that is not good news.’

  I explained the situation to Dora. ‘[Oh no!]’ she said, her flawless brow creasing with dismay. ‘[What can we do? Oh no! And we came all this way!]

  ‘[It would be terrible to think that the deer died in vain.]’

  ‘What did she say?’ Saltykov wanted to know.

  ‘She considers it unfortunate.’

  ‘Indeed. Of course, on the other hand, it was necessary for us to come to the Ukraine, embassy or no embassy. So it is not entirely unfortunate.’

  ‘Necessary?’

  ‘I have already explained,’ said Saltykov. It is crucial that we make our way to the nuclear facility at Chernobyl, not far from here. It must be today. Tomorrow would be too late.’

  ‘You are sure about the date?’

  ‘I am sure of what Coyne told me.’

  ‘We can hardly take Ms Norman to the nuclear facility.’

  ‘Indeed!’

  The man on the pavement was still there. He had tucked his faggot of wooden dowels under his arm and had taken out a notepad and a pencil in order to write down the registration number of Saltykov’s taxi. ‘We must go,’ I said. ‘That man is writing down your numberplate.’

  ‘Get out and remonstrate with him,’ Saltykov told me.

  ‘You do it!’

  ‘But I have a disinclination to interact with strange men, on account of my syndrome. You must do it.’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  Making unhappy noises, Saltykov started his car and drove away. ‘The situation cannot be helped,’ he said. ‘We must take Ms Norman to a hotel. We must book her into a hotel, and then you and I must drive out to Chernobyl.’

  CHAPTER 15

  Ukraine: so here we were. The countryside was one of low hills, but as the road fell into line alongside a lengthy stretch of water, more like a Scottish loch than a normal lake, a vista opened up to the west of open fields. The sky seemed showy, a projection rather than a reality: large irregular flint-coloured clouds against a shining grey expanse. The clouds looked as if painted upon a vast transparency that was being slid slowly from left to right along the backrail of the horizon.

  We were driving to Chernobyl, Saltykov and I. Dora Norman was settled into a pleasant room in a downtown Kiev hotel room. Saltykov’s taxi was not quite the same after its collision with the deer as it had been before. It creaked and rolled awkwardly when taking corners; never a rapid machine, it appeared to have less capacity for velocity now. But it was still working.

  ‘The question,’ I said, ‘is what we do when we get there.’

  ‘There is a conspiracy to blow the facility up. We must find the bomb. Where exactly in the facility the bomb will be - that is the real question.

  ‘The real question,’ I countered, ‘is whether we will get there at all, in this galvanised lizard cock of a car.’

  ‘That is a question on nobody’s lips,’ Saltykov replied in a peevish voice. ‘That is a ridiculous and insulting question. Do not, by talking, distract the driver.’

  The car creaked, and the engine continued making the sound of a man continually throwing up, and slowly, slowly, we followed the road round, and the blocky profile of Chernobyl nuclear facility rose up amongst the trees, shouldering the low hills aside and pushing its roofs towards the sky as we approached.

  Though the guard at the gate was young - no more than eighteen, at a guess - he was nevertheless completely bald. It made him look, oddly, vulnerable. First of all he peered at us through the glass of his little hut. Then he stepped outside, fumbling with his hat, fitting it over his egg against the chill of the early spring air. His face looked like something drawn in felt-tip pen upon an elbow. ‘Pass?’

  ‘Pass,’ repeated Saltykov intently.

  It occurred to me that we ought to have foreseen this eventuality. But the guard seemed disproportionately impressed by Saltykov’s response.

  ‘You’re with the others,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to see your badges?’

  His inflection was such that it took me a moment to understand that he was asking a question. ‘That’s right,’ said Saltykov, quicker on the uptake than I.

  ‘Go in, comrades. You want to go left at the end there,’ he stuck his arm out, ‘and park in Car Park One.’

  ‘Reactor One is where we’re going,’ I said, as my elderly brain caught up. ‘To join our colleagues.’

  The guard stepped back and raised the barrier, and we drove through. I turned my head as we drove off, watching him scurrying back inside his little booth. Saltykov followed the road left and drove past the hangar-shaped enormity of the first reactor. ‘But we don’t want Reactor One,’ I said.

  ‘No. We want Reactor Four. So you said.’

  ‘I only know what Coyne told me.’

  ‘His dying words.’

  ‘How do we tell,’ I asked, ‘which reactor is which?’

  ‘Are you asking,’ he growled, as we drove past the ranks of parked cars, ‘whether the reactor buildings have large numerals painted upon them? If you are, then the answer is: no they don’t.’

  ‘I can see that they don’t.’

  ‘Then perhaps you would limit yourself to useful questions?’

  ‘I would ask a useful question,’ I said, sourly. ‘But I wouldn’t want to distract the driver.’

  We exited the far side of the car park and drove along one-track tarmac, round a bend and between two separate huge cubes of architecture. ‘That’s One,’ I hazarded, tipping a thumb behind us, ‘so this must be Two.’ The road turned again, flanking the second reactor, and past a fumble of low buildings. We passed a second, less crowded car park. The road went through a copse of trees, and then ran alongside a pond. ‘That pond will supply cooling for the reactors,’ noted Saltykov.

  ‘Won’t that make it radioactive?’ I asked.

  ‘Everything in the world is radioactive,’ said Saltykov, with a humourless chuckle in his throat, ‘to one degree or another. You learn that when you are educated about nuclear power, as I have been. There’s no getting away from radiation.’

  ‘There are, I assume however, degrees.’

  ‘Indeed. A little radioactivity is fine. A lot is not fine.’

  I peered at the pool with suspicious eyes. The water, perfectly still, looked like mahogany in the grim light. We were moving slowly enough for me to note that carp were crowding the pond. A single fin was unzipping the surface of the water.

  ‘Radioactive fishes,’ I said.

  Then we turned again and Reactor Three filled our windshield, like a grey iceberg. We drove round it and yet another huge shed loomed into view.

  ‘That one, then,’ said Saltykov.

  We followed the road round until it decanted us into another car park. It was almost wholly unoccupied: a few cars, but then nothing more than the white-painted sets of IIIs and Es on the ground, like a giant practising his lettering. Saltykov parked, and we got out. I rubbed life back into my stiff old legs. Saltykov was spryer than I.

  ‘So here we are,’ I said. ‘Reactor Four. It’s hard to believe.’

  ‘Things are either believable or they’re not,’ said Saltykov, pursing his lips. ‘Belief is not something that admits of degree.’

  ‘How true. For example, I believe,’ I said, ‘that you are the single most annoying human being on the planet. I also believe that you’re quite mad.’

  ‘By no means! My syndrome is a thing apart from insanity.’ He locked the driver’s door, and unlocked it. Then he locked it again, and unlocked it. Lock, unlock, lock. ‘Perfectly sane,’ I agreed.

  As we walked towards the main entrance, I said, ‘It is strangely deserted.’

  ‘And why
should it be crowded? Didn’t you hear the guard at the gate? Everybody is with our colleagues in Reactor One.’

  ‘Whoever our colleagues are.’

  ‘Whoever,’ agreed Saltykov.

  ‘And you, as an expert, will tell me it’s safe to leave a nuclear reactor untended like this?’

  ‘These things run themselves,’ said Saltykov. ‘The best thing to do is leave them alone. The last thing you want is some foolish operator tinkering with the controls.’

  The reactor building itself loomed over us as we approached. The air was colder in its shadow. I felt a tingle of dread. More than a tingle: a tang. ‘It looks,’ I noted, ‘like a pastiche of an aristocratic country house. Two wings, one on either side. A main entrance. But all in concrete, and with hardly any windows. And so much bigger - it must be ten floors high. Like a country house built by giants as a satire on bourgeois wealth.’

  ‘It sounds,’ said Saltykov, ‘as if you are groping towards a description of the Revolution itself.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Come! Revolution is a giant enterprise. A giant construction. A satirical reworking of bourgeois life on a larger scale.’

  ‘Just when I think you’re some kind of idiot savant, comrade,’ I told him, ‘you surprise me with a sudden perceptiveness.’

  ‘I am highly intelligent,’ he said blandly.

  There was nobody at the entrance; although there were two porter’s lodges immediately inside the door, one on either hand. We stepped into a capacious hallway, battleship-grey walls and linoleum underfoot. Despite the cold of the morning it was, inside, warm as a Crimean summer. There was a curious, not unpleasant odour. I couldn’t place it.

  ‘So where now?’

  ‘We need to find the main reactor pile. If somebody has planted a bomb, that’s where they will have done it.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said, displaying again my characteristic belatedness, ‘we should have armed ourselves? What if we surprise the bomber in the act of planting the bomb? Wouldn’t a gun be useful?’

  ‘I do not possess a gun,’ said Saltykov. ‘Do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You accuse me of insanity, and then rebuke me for not bringing something neither of us possesses.’

  It took us fifteen minutes of trying doors (some locked, some not), of ascending and descending stairways, of pausing for me to catch my breath, of making our way along corridors and through rooms before we found ourselves back where we had started.

  ‘I thought you knew about these reactors,’ I snapped, crossly.

  ‘I know the science,’ he retorted, crosser than I. ‘Not the individual architectural layouts. I know how the machinery works, that is all.’

  We tried again. This time we spent out energies climbing an endless series of flights of stairs. I began this process resting at the top of each flight, to regain my breath; but after half a dozen flights I was driven to sitting on the stairs halfway up as well as at the top of each flight, puffing. Finally we reached a lengthy corridor, and along this, slowly, Saltykov increasingly furious at the delay represented by my exhaustion, we went. There was a door about halfway along with MAIN REACTOR posted above it.

  ‘At last,’ I growled.

  And through we went.

  There was no doubt that we were indeed inside the main reactor hall. It was huge: a four-storey-tall open space, longer and wider than a football pitch. Despite the chill outside, and the prodigious size of this interior space, the air here was warm. It smelt, oddly, if faintly, and in a metallic way, of honey.

  Saltykov took it all in. ‘We’re looking down upon the top of the reactor,’ he said, pointing to the left at an inset grid that stretched from wall to wall. And over there,’ he said, pointing to two Olympic-sized swimming pools away to the right, ‘are the spent fuel pools.’

  ‘And where is the bomb?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘Imagine you’re a terrorist. Where would you want the brunt of the explosion to be?’

  ‘Comrade, a bomb, even a small bomb, set anywhere in here would cause catastrophic damage. The core is filled with uranium wands’ - I remember distinctly that he used that term, wands, as if he were talking about a wizard’s props - ‘that have to be kept at precise distances from one another and cooled to a precise temperature, or they will go bababoom.’

  ‘They will go what?’

  ‘Baba,’ he said, widening his eyes for effect, ‘boom.’ And with the last syllable he threw his arms wide, to imitate the action of an explosion.

  ‘That’s a rather peculiar word to use, comrade,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Boom is enough to communicate what you wish to say,’ I said. ‘The baba is superfluous.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ he insisted, stubbornly. ‘Bababoom is perfectly expressive.’

  ‘It’s decadent.’

  ‘It’s expressive.’

  ‘Expressively decadent.’

  ‘Why are you chaffing me?’ he asked. ‘Do not chaff me. It serves no purpose. We have a bomb to find. Concentrate upon that, instead of upon twitting me.’

  ‘But to find it - how? You are saying it could be anywhere hereabouts.’

  ‘Say rather: we are standing inside a bomb. The core? It is cooled by water injected through it. This water is steam, at a temperature of three hundred degrees. You can imagine the pressure such a thing puts on the pipes. Severing any of these pipes would result in—’

  ‘Yes yes,’ I said. ‘Boombaba!’

  ‘Boombaba,’ he scowled, ‘is just stupid. You say it only to chaff me. Why do you waste our time chaffing me?’

  Directly in front of us, thirty feet away or so, was a gigantic concrete column that supported the distant roof. It was wrapped around with a spiral stairway like the snake on Asclepius’s staff, and this staircase lead up to various massy and inconceivable gantries and platforms overhead. And down this stairway a man was descending: a sack-bellied comrade, unshaven and unhappy looking. His cream-coloured, lumpy bald cranium was fringed from left to right round the back with a strip of lank black hair that rather resembled a spread of galloons, or pompons, or tassels. There was a starmap of grease spots across the front of his overalls.

  ‘I’m going, comrades,’ he announced.

  ‘Going?’ I repeated. I had the notion that he was leaving in disgust at our bickering. But that was not it.

  ‘I got the message,’ he said. ‘Same as everybody else.’ He stepped from the stairs and started towards us across the floor. ‘Was just finishing something up.’

  ‘Message?’ asked Saltykov.

  ‘Don’t worry, comrades,’ he said, holding up his hands as he trotted forwards to display two palms like a gigantic baby’s. ‘I work in a nuclear power station. I understand the importance of looking after your health. I mean to look after my health.’

  ‘Of course you do,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said again, approaching. ‘KGB is KGB. Prying into the business of KGB is certainly worse for your health than radiation.’

  ‘It’s a view,’ I said.

  He passed us. ‘Reactor One,’ he said. ‘Straight there. Did they send you to fetch me? That’s like them. Go fetch Sergei, is that what they said? He’s probably napping - was that it? Comrade, I was wide awake. There’s work to do. I’m a skilled technician, I do more work than three of that lot together - yes, yes,’ this last in response to what he fancied was a disapproving expression on my face, although in fact I was merely bewildered, ‘yes comrade, I’m going right now. Off to join the jolly party. Reactor One, yes yes.’

  He burlied out of the room. We two were now entirely alone in that cavernous space.

  Saltykov and I looked at one another. ‘Unmistakably KGB,’ I said. ‘Apparently.’

  ‘You look more KGB than I do,’ he observed, sharply.

  ‘By no means.’

  ‘Let us continue this demeaning, childish fight no longer,’ he said, briskly. ‘Please under
stand the urgency of our situation. To answer your earlier question: there are half a dozen places in this reactor where even a small bomb would result in disaster. Do you understand? High pressure superheated steam; a large quantity of active uranium, and a larger quantity of spent fuel, which though spent is still prodigiously dangerous. If this building goes up,’ and he threw his right arm in the air, adding actorly emphasis to his declamation, ‘then it will destroy the land for miles around. It will spread a plume of lethal radiation across the whole of Europe - Russia too, depending on the prevailing winds. It could, for an example, poison the Mediterranean for half a dozen generations. It might turn Germany and Belarus and Poland into wastelands. It might sweep back and swallow Russia and Georgia. It would depend upon the wind. Did you happen to notice the prevailing winds, as we were coming in?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope it doesn’t matter. If I say millions of lives depend upon this, then I’m not exaggerating. Do you understand?’

  ‘Comrade Saltykov,’ I snapped, ‘please stop asking whether I understand. May we agree to assume, from now on, that I do understand? Can we take that as read?’

  He looked at me. ‘We have known one another for a very short space of time,’ he said, in an exasperated voice, ‘yet we bicker and snipe at one another like an old married couple.’

  ‘We are the only two individuals in the entire USSR,’ I said, ‘who do not drink vodka. Ours is therefore a unique bond.’

  ‘I’m going downstairs. If I were going to place a bomb, I would put it in one of the chambers downstairs abutting the reactor itself. For maximum damage. You - you just search about up here.’

  ‘What am I looking for?’

  ‘You were in the army, weren’t you? A bomb! A bomb! Look for a bomb!’ He stomped towards the door.

  ‘I’ll wait for you here then, shall I?’ I said. ‘I mean, we’ll rendezvous here, shall we? In?

  ‘In!’ he echoes. ‘In? In!’

  ‘I meant in half an hour, for instance,’ I shouted, growing angry myself. ‘That’s what I meant. I meant, in half an hour, let us rendezvous again here.’