Chernobyl Read online

  Sheranchuk knew before he turned that it was the Director of the First Department, Gorodot Khrenov. "I am helping shut down this reactor," he said.

  "Yes, yes," Khrenov said absently. The liquid brown eyes seemed clouded, and the man's expression was detached. "You appear to have given orders in matters that don't concern you," he observed, gazing around the room. The operators stood watching the encounter.

  "He only told us to do what we have orders to do anyway in such a case," one of them called.

  Khrenov's eyes swept over the man, whose face stiffened. Sheranchuk spoke up to draw the fire to himself. "The Ministry must be notified at once," he said.

  Khrenov's eyes widened, but the operator spoke again. "That's been done. I telephoned a report to Moscow myself."

  "Ah," said Khrenov, nodding. "Someone else who takes responsibility onto himself. And what did you report, then?"

  "That Reactor Number Four had exploded, of course. I know," the shift man added apologetically, "that that is the duty of the Chief Engineer, but I couldn't find him."

  Khrenov said thoughtfully, "Chief Engineer Varazin felt that he had the obligation to make sure our guests were safe. I believe he is in Pripyat with them now. Well. Let us get on with controlling this — accident. And remember, at all costs, we must avoid panic."

  Avoid panic? Yes, of course, Sheranchuk kept telling himself. That was absolutely essential.

  But it was also impossible. A dozen times there flashed through Sheranchuk's mind a schooldays parody of an English poem — was it by Rudyard Kipling? — that went:

  If you can keep your head when all about you

  Are losing theirs,

  Then you probably simply haven't understood what has been happening.

  The difficulty for Sheranchuk was that he understood what was happening all too well. It terrified him in ways he had never expected to feel. It was not simply that he himself might have been in danger, it was the ending of an age. Helping once more with the endless task of aiding the casualties to the never-caught-up shifts of ambulances, he could hardly remember that peaceful time, not yet six hours ago, when he had in calm and leisurely fashion left his flat to look in on the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station.

  There was no calm at the Chernobyl station now, nor leisure either. Sheranchuk was astonished, as he passed by a cluster of fire-brigade commanders, to learn that they had declared the fire officially out an hour before. True, little blazes were springing up now and then, where hot bits from the core continued to try to ignite whatever they touched. Certainly the core itself was not out, looked as though it never would be out as its blue-white glare starkly illuminated the charred walls around it. And certainly nothing seemed to halt the steady trickle of wounded and sick men. There were still burns, still sprains and worse as the firemen slipped and fell on the sticky, slippery roofs, but more and more of the men were simply exhausted, pale, sweating, sometimes vomiting uncontrollably.

  One of them was the man from his own department, the pipefitter called Spring. "Sorry," he apologized as Sheranchuk spoke to him. "I just feel sick — but I got the hydrogen flare out for them, Leonid."

  "I was certain you would," said Sheranchuk, and gazed thoughtfully after him as he climbed by himself into an ambulance and was taken away. But there were others to claim his attention. A tall, slender man was moaning as he sat clutching at his burned feet; for a moment Sheranchuk thought it was the operator, Kalychenko, but it turned out to be a fireman named Vissgerdis. As Sheranchuk turned away, someone grabbed him and shook him roughly. He did not recognize the woman at first. "Fool," she was screaming at him. "Where is your protective clothing? Do you want to die for nothing?"

  He had forgotten about radiation.

  And it was not until he was pulling the hood over his head that he realized that the woman had been his wife.

  Really, there was not much left for someone like Leonid Sheranchuk to do — the professionals had taken over — but he could not help trying to do something anyway. When there were enough trained medical personnel on the scene to do a better job helping the injured than he could, he went back inside the buildings, once more looking for any possible wounded or simply dazed people who might have crawled away into one of the storage areas or workshops. There weren't any, as far as he could tell. He was alone. It was hard and hot work, and not without danger — he searched the entire building of Reactor No. 3. Inside it was dark, and even with the flashlight he had managed to cling to all this time he was constantly stumbling over debris. Only a wall was between him and the fulminating ruin of No. 4, and No. 4 sounded at every moment as though it were trying to come to him right through the wall. Even the cracked walls radiated heat, soaked up on one side from the 4000-degree graphite and sent on to him from the other. He peered out at the roof, where there were no visible fires anymore, but still plenty of firemen, almost ankle deep in the syrupy bitumen, still playing hoses on the smoldering embers.

  Sighing, he made his way back down to ground level. He wondered if anyone had told those firemen that it was not only heat and smoke and burns they faced, byt the invisible, lethal storm of radiation that billowed up at them with the smoke.

  In the four months Sheranchuk had been at Chernobyl he had diligently studied all the literature on nuclear power plants. He had understood the special dangers of a core meltdown, and the particular risk of a graphite fire in an RBMK — after all, there had been experience of it abroad. The British had had one of their own, at a place called Windscale, decades before. But nothing in his reading or imagination had prepared him for this. It occurred to him almost to wish that Smin had never telephoned him with the unexpected job offer; certainly nothing in the burning of peat could have produced this particular nightmare.

  But he had no time for such thoughts. No one had time for anything in this endless night in which every second was filled with a new alarm or a new task. Yet Sheranchuk never forgot that he was Simyon Smin's Comrade Plumber. He kept an eye on his own special charges whenever he could spare a thought from the urgencies of his rescue work. His pumps and pipes and valves were still doing as much as possible of their job. Cooling water still flowed out of the pond; in the two working reactors, the circuits were still pumping through the cores.

  Firefighting was, after all, a matter of plumbing. When he saw the huge hoses that were sucking water from the pond for the firemen, swearing men holding the intake ends of the hoses underwater, he almost wondered if they would pump the pond dry. But that was only a fantasy fear. The locks to the river were wide open, and they would not pump the Pripyat empty in a thousand years. There were firemen there now from, it seemed, scores of communities; even Kiev was not the farthest. There were militiamen to reinforce the plant's security forces from as many; ambulances from he could not guess where were screaming in with doctors and medical assistants, and roaring away again with the injured. Tank trucks of gasoline were refueling the firemen's pumpers as they worked. And the noise was endless and indescribable.

  At some point someone thrust two tin cups into Sheranchuk's hands. One cup was of hot, concentrated tea, the other pure vodka. Sheranchuk slumped to the ground for a moment as he swallowed them both, turn and turn, gazing upward. He had not paused to see what the pyre looked like before. What it looked like was terrifying. A red-bellied smoke cloud was shooting straight up from the burning reactor, only bending away toward the north and east when it was so high that it was almost out of sight. The stars were gone; the smoke obscured them.

  But Sheranchuk had no time to gaze; already someone was shouting for him, waving him toward the perimeter fence, where the latest batch of injured firemen were groaning on the ground. These, he saw, had been fighting the fire from the top of the turbine building next to the shattered reactor, and they, too, had been grievously harmed by its smoldering tar surface. He helped carry two men with severe foot burns away, and as he deposited the second one at the foot of a thick, short man in enveloping hood and coveralls, the man said so
ftly, "Well, Comrade Plumber Sheranchuk! We've made a mess of it this time, haven't we?" And he saw the man was Simyon Smin.

  Chapter 7

  Saturday, April 26

  Simyon Smin's wife, Selena, could not be said to be a bad woman. No one would deny, however, that she is a collector. A humbler Soviet woman would be the kind who never left home without her little string bag, the avoska, "just on the chance" that she might happen somewhere to find something worth the trouble of buying. Selena, as the wife of the Deputy Director of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, does not have to do that. She gets what she wants, or nearly. More nearly than most. She has special stores to shop in, though she must go to Kiev or Moscow for the best of them. She even has the "distribution," that special perk of the high in rank that allows her to order food over the telephone — and not just what the local gastronom might carry, but high-quality food from the listed stores — and have it delivered to her flat or dacha. This is a source of great pleasure to Selena, who was a not quite successful dancer when she married Simyon Smin. There were no such luxuries in Selena's early life. She has eaten well since then, and if she no longer has a dancer's figure, Smin does not seem to mind. Selena has a job of her own, of course; she is in charge of cultural and physical fitness matters at the Chernobyl plant, and often, at eleven in the morning and one in the afternoon, when the handsome young couple in leotards do their daily exercises on the television to the accompaniment of a 78 FREDERIK POHL

  pianist and the orders of a trainer, Selena joins the workers and leads their calisthenics. Her position technically puts her in the First Department of the plant, under the direction of Gorodot Khrenov, but Khrenov never interferes with the wife of the Deputy Director. He only makes sure that the Deputy Director knows that.

  There was not much sleep on that Saturday morning for Selena Smin. At six she got up and dressed slowly, wondering what the urgent summons from the plant had meant. At seven, while she was having a cup of tea with her mother-in-law, there was another knock on the door, and this time it was a telegram:

  remaining here. request you and vassili stay in kiev for weekend. smin.

  "But I can't do that," complained Selena. "I have things to do, and the boy should not miss his school."

  "He has missed it already," said old Aftasia Smin practically. That was true enough; Vassili was still curled on the couch, blond head buried under the blankets as the women talked softly. But still! Remain in Kiev to do what? Without a car, without even a telephone? "I can't even call him to find out what this is all about," she complained.

  "You can do as I do," Aftasia said. "The Didchuks have a telephone."

  "The Didchuks have one! And we do not! I will certainly speak to Simyon about this again." Selena thought for a moment. "And which apartment are they in, then?" she asked.

  It was only one floor below. Two minutes later Selena had descended the dark stairs and knocked politely at their door. The Didchuks were at home — all of them, for it seemed that there was a child and a couple of grandparents in the flat as well as the teachers themselves. They were all awake. They were not fully dressed — the woman had her hair in curlers, the man was wearing a robe over his trousers — but they were, of course, quite polite, even welcoming, and certainly she could use their telephone.

  But then it seemed she could not, really, because all of the lines to the plant were engaged. They remained engaged, were engaged on the first time she tried them and on the fifth. The

  Didchuks politely went about their morning business, stepping around her when they had to come into the little living room with its small TV set and worn, brocaded couch and window that had thin, bright drapes. The old father greeted her in a mannerly way on his way to the bathroom. The old mother came out of the kitchen and offered her breakfast, which she declined graciously, but accepted a cup of tea, brought to her by the ten-year-old daughter of the teachers. Even the telephone in her own flat in the town of Pripyat did not answer; it was not engaged, but it rang uselessly until she put it down. So Smin, wherever he was, was at least not at home. "Well, what a nuisance," she declared, smiling at the young woman. "But what pretty drapes! You have done so much with this room!"

  The woman said modestly, "It is difficult when we both work."

  "For me too," Selena agreed, and chatted amiably with the young woman and her tiny, blonde mother-in-law while, in her mind, she tried fretfully to decide what to do with this day. A day in Kiev with the car, yes, that was always quite useful. In fact, it was a treat. There were places to go and stores to visit, and then one could count on finding a friend or two at the club for lunch. But without the car—

  The thought of the club gave her an idea. "One more call, if you don't mind," she begged prettily, and dialed the Great Gate Hotel. But the operator could not find any Mr. and Mrs. Dean Garfield from America on the roster.

  "You must have a room number," the operator explained. "One cannot complete a call without a room number, of course."

  Selena exploded, "What nonsense! I am Selena Smin and I am making this call for S. M. Smin, the Director of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station."

  The operator retreated. For quite a while, leaving Selena to hold the whispering, hissing phone while she thought wistfully how nice it would have been if she could have invited the Americans not merely to lunch at the club — pleasant though the club was — but to their own home in Pripyat, to see how a decent Soviet family lived in a decent home, not this Khrushchev tenement. (But, of course, that was only a fantasy, since one did not invite foreigners to Pripyat.) And then when the operator returned she said only, with some satisfaction, "The Americans you speak of are no longer in the hotel."

  "But of course they are in the hotel! I saw them only last night!"

  "They have departed," the operator said triumphantly. "Perhaps if you were to consult Intourist, they could inform you of their itinerary."

  "Ah, well," sighed Selena to the young couple, who were beginning to glance surreptitiously at their watches — they would have to leave for their Saturday morning classes. "Simply one more call, if I may, just to call for a taxi."

  But where was she to go in the taxi? To the club? And do what there, especially with Vassili? Who should, in any case, be on his way to school by now. And as she looked out the window, she heard distant thunder and saw that it was beginning to rain.

  Chapter 8

  Saturday, April 26

  A Saturday in the Soviet Union is not quite like a Saturday in London or New York. The Soviets do not work a five-day week. Schools are in session. The working force works. But a Saturday is still, after all, part of a weekend, even in the Soviet Union, and those who are in a position to get away for some relaxation generally do.

  In Moscow this Saturday, for instance, the telephone rang from Chernobyl. The duty officer at the Ministry of Nuclear Energy heard the voice say, "This is Vitaly Varazin, Chief Engineer at the Chernobyl Power Station," and the officer exploded.

  "At last! What has been going on? We had a call that there had been a serious accident, nothing more, and no one answers your telephones?"

  "Yes," said Varazin, "Quite a nuisance that was. Communications have been interrupted because of a fire in a generating unit. But emergency crews responded at once."

  What the duty officer responded was not quite audible. It was definitely obscene, for he had spent a nasty hour in the middle of the night trying to track down his superior. Unfortunately his superior had left the night before for his dacha at Peredelkino, and so the duty officer had been forced to act on his own. He groaned as he thought of what those actions had been. "The situation is under control, then?" he demanded. "Quite under control, yes."

  "Then tell me something," the duty officer snarled."What are you going to do with the planeload of experts in the special commission that is even now on its way to Kiev?"

  There was a pause on the line. "A special commission?" Varazin asked.

  "Twenty-four people," the duty officer
said grimly. "All woken up in the middle of the night on the basis of the first report from Chernobyl. Their plane left Moscow at six."

  "I see," Varazin said faintly. The duty officer waited him out, drumming his fingers on the desktop.

  "Well," Varazin said at last, "it was quite a serious fire, to be sure. Certainly we can use guidance from the Ministry."

  "Certainly you are going to get it," snapped the duty officer, "because the first echelons will be helicoptered to your plant in the next hour or so."

  "Thank you," said Varazin softly, and hung up.

  His voice sounded unhappy to the duty officer, which gave the officer some satisfaction. Actually he was feeling much better. His worst fears were allayed, responsibility for the twenty-four man commission was off his back, and now he lifted the phone again and called off the search for his chief. It would be time enough to disturb the highest authorities, he decided, when the full report was in. And with any luck, he'd be off by then, anyway.

  In Novosibirsk, at the headquarters of the All-Union Ministry of Power Plant Structures, they took the call more seriously — until they found that the Yemeni visitors had left before it happened. At least, they reassured one another, there had not been the embarrassment of seeing one of their plants wreck itself in the presence of three potential foreign customers.

  In Kiev it was another matter. The load dispatcher was shocked. "Yes, all right, two of your units are damaged. Naturally they can't generate power — but, really, why must you shut the other two down as well? A precaution? Precautions are very good, but do you have any idea what sort of trouble that makes for me?" And when he hung up he was swearing; Chernobyl was the plant he could always count on, and where on a Saturday morning was he going to find three or four thousand megawatts of electrical power to replace it?

  When the phone rang in the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Authority in Vienna it might have caused more action, except that this particular call was not to give information but to ask for some.