Chernobyl

by Frederik Pohl

  The fourth patient was a woman, with chest pains, perhaps the beginning of a heart attack. She was elderly and conscious; she lay there without speaking, watching Tamara as she tried to deal with the others. When Tamara sat back for a moment, brushing hair out of her eyes and wishing she dared close them for a moment, the woman spoke. "I've seen you before," she said, and when Tamara identified herself nodded. "Yes, to be sure. Don't you remember me? I'm Paraska Kandyba. Deputy Director Smin's secretary."

  "Of course," said Tamara, letting go of the saline stand to reach for her chart. "Yes, and they've given you heparin and nitroglycerine. How are you feeling?"

  "A headache. Nothing more now."

  "Yes, that is from the nitroglycerine. It is unpleasant, but it's better if I don't give you anything for it until you reach the hospital."

  "I don't want anything." The woman added apologetically, "I know it was very foolish of me to try to help out, at my age. But in such a terrible thing—"

  Tamara saw that the secretary was weeping. Yes, certainly it had been very foolish; Paraska Kandyba had been near the plant all day, begging for the chance to get into the administration block to rescue her boss's papers, and what was the importance of that? But all Tamara said was, "It was very brave of you."

  Paraska raised her head to stare at the doctor. "Brave? But not sensible. And Deputy Director Smin is also not sensible! He is not a young man. And yet I saw him in and out of the plant, right with the firemen, until they sent him off to the hospital in Moscow. Oh, he didn't want to go, I can tell you!"

  "No, of course not," Tamara soothed, letting go of the chart to rescue the toppling saline stand again. "Tell me, Paraska," she ventured. "Did you by any chance see my husband today?"

  But Paraska Kandyba only shook her head and continued weeping. It was obvious that her tears and her concern were all for Deputy Director Simyon Smin.

  When they reached Hospital No. 18 in the city of Kiev, Tamara Sheranchuk dragged herself out of the ambulance for the transfer of the patients. She wasn't needed. She stood aside while the hospital's own orderlies took over, efficiently unloading the patients and wheeling them into the receiving room. She was looking forward to the ride back. It would be nearly two hours! Two hours in which she could stretch out in the ambulance and sleep. She leaned against the door of the ambulance, dreaming of that wonderful two-hour trip, when she realized the driver had poked her and said, "Look at them."

  Tamara blinked. "Look at what?"

  "Those people! Look, they are acting as if nothing had happened!"

  It was true. She gazed around the streets of Kiev wonder-ingly. Here in Kiev, at least, it was, after all, a peaceful Sunday afternoon! People were strolling the wide streets, children were laughing as they played, a few early blossoms were on the chestnut trees, the bright posters were everywhere for the May Day celebration. How incredible, Tamara marveled, that all these people could be going about their normal lives, unaware of the hell that was raging less than a hundred and fifty kilometers away.

  "They're lucky," grumbled the ambulance driver, and Tamara shook her head.

  "Not really," she said. "No one is very lucky today. They simply have not yet found it out. Are we through here? Then let's go back to Chernobyl."

  As the ambulance driver, who had had no more sleep than Tamara, wearily started to turn the vehicle around, a man came running out begging for a lift. He explained that he was a doctor trained in radiation sickness, called in from his weekend for the emergency. Tamara made herself stay awake; here was a chance to learn something useful! She asked him about the numbers. "Yes, exactly," he said, "above 500 rads the only hope is to somehow give them living bone marrow."

  "And how is that done?"

  "Fetal liver transplants," he said. "In some places they actually transplant bone marrow — this is done in America sometimes — but there are great problems. First of all, the patient's own bone marrow must be destroyed, otherwise the transplant will be rejected. Then there must be an exact typing match, and it is not easy to type bone marrow — and if that is wrong, the transplant will still be rejected. Of course, that itself is serious; a patient who might otherwise recover could be killed by the rejection process."

  "And what is the fetal liver procedure?"

  "In the embryo," he said, "it is the liver cells that perform the functions of the adult bone marrow in manufacturing blood cells. So from aborted fetuses we extract the liver, purify the cells, and inject them into the patient." He hesitated. "That, too, has a poor success rate," he admitted, "but for patients with more than 500 rads there is, after all, no choice."

  "Ah, yes," said Tamara, "but how do you know what the exposure has been, since not all the victims are thoughtful enough to carry dosimeters?"

  The young specialist said enthusiastically, "That is the key, of course. The doctor in Hospital Number Six in Moscow, where I trained, has developed a procedure. We take blood counts at two-hour intervals and compare them with a standard profile. We can see how rapidly the cells deteriorate, and from that we can determine what the exposure has been. .."

  But by then Tamara was asleep beside him.

  Tamara had almost allowed herself to hope that by the time she got back the fire would be under control, the emergency over. But it seemed it was worse than ever. Pripyat had been evacuated. (And where had her son, Boris, gone?) The ambulance was sent on to Chernobyl town, thirty kilometers away from the reactor. It was, it seemed, as near as was really safe, and so now there was talk that everyone, everyone, within that thirty kilometer radius of the plant was to be ordered away. And where would they find places for all these people to stay? There were a dozen villages and nearly thirty collective farms in the area; where would they all go?

  It was not just the people now. Half the farms in the area raised livestock, cattle mostly, but any number of sheep, pigs, goats, even a few horses. Many of the animals came from the kolkhozists' private ventures, which made their owners doubly desperate to save them.

  As they circled around the town of Pripyat and the stricken plant, Tamara looked longingly out of the back of the ambulance. Sheranchuk was there. Doing, Tamara was sure, something doggedly heroic and certainly dangerous. If only she could take him and Boris and run away!

  It did not occur to her that this was almost the first time she had been separated from her husband when her principal worry had not been that he might be with another woman.

  When they reached the town of Chernobyl they were directed to the bus station.

  There Tamara Sheranchuk set up shop, but she had no more than entered the room set aside for the medics than her boss, the chief of surgery from the Pripyat clinic, wrinkled her nose and scowled. "When did you change your clothes last?" she barked. "Go at once. Shower. Eat something. Get cleaned up. Don't come back for one hour."

  "But there are so many patients—"

  "There are plenty of doctors now, too," said the elder — woman. "Go now."

  And indeed when Tamara came back in a clean white gown, her hair still damp but pulled neatly to the back of her head, there were four strange doctors taking their turns with the influx. Two were from Kursk, one from Kiev, the dark, small, Oriental-looking woman all the way from Volgograd.

  "But they must have emptied out every hospital in the Soviet Union," said Tamara.

  The woman from Volgograd said, "No, the hospitals are all fully staffed. It is people like us who were off duty, now we give up our Sunday to come here to help."

  "And are the people in Volgograd so concerned about an explosion in the Ukraine?"

  "The people in Volgograd know nothing about an explosion in the Ukraine. Neither did I. I was simply told to report to the airport at nine this morning, Sunday or no, and here I am. What is holding up the line? Send in the next patient!"

  Even the patients were easier to deal with here. Triage had already been done — again, by teams of fresh doctors brought in from everywhere, taking their turns at the medicpoint in the Chernobyl
town bus station. The seriously injured ones had already been sorted out and sent off to hospitals elsewhere. The ones that were coming through were lightly injured, or not injured at all. For most of them all Tamara had to do was a quick physical check — the eyes, the pulse, the blood pressure, the inside of the mouth; a quick questioning about symptoms and a few cc's of blood drawn for a lab somewhere to make a count. Then she passed them on. Most of them went directly onto buses or trains, for those who were able to travel were counted at once as evacuees.

  "Mother," said a voice from the next queue, and when she looked up from her patient she saw that it was a young boy. His face was filthy and he wore an outsized Army blouse, not his own; it took a moment for her to realize that it was her son.

  "Boris! Are you all right?"

  "I think so. Only they are sending all the Komsomols away now."

  "And quite time for it, too! But where are you going?" she demanded.

  "Oh, to a summer camp, Mother! A good one! Maybe Artek, down on the Black Sea — and, oh, Mother," he said joyfully, "it isn't going to cost us a kopeck!"

  Chapter 17

  Sunday, April 27

  Smoke does not last very long in the air. What makes a column of smoke visible are the tiny particles of soot and other things that it contains, and they are transitory. The larger particles fall fairly quickly to the ground; the others fall more slowly, or are washed out of the air by rain, and in any case, diluted by the air they float in, quite soon, they can no longer be seen. The gases that go with the smoke, however, remain. In the gases from the nuclear accident are many which are invisible but not undetectable. Chemical analysis will spot them readily, but if it took a laboratory to detect them, they would not cause much concern. Unfortunately they announce themselves in a different, and much more alarming, way. That is by the radiation they give off.

  The first person to observe anything amiss in the air about him was a Finnish soldier. There was no smoke left by the time the Chernobyl cloud reached the Finnish border, so he saw nothing. His instruments told the story. The soldier's duty was to supervise a radiation-detection station on the border between Finland and the USSR, and what his instruments noticed was a small but unexplained increase in the normal background radiation. The soldier reported it at once to his superiors, of course.

  They puzzled worriedly over the information, but, for the

  time being, they decided to keep it to themselves. There was a political problem they had to take into account. Finland is not part of the Warsaw Pact, but all the same, Finnish leaders have iearned a good deal of discretion. It was possible, they thought, that the radiation came from an unannounced Soviet nuclear bomb test. Disturbing reports about nuclear events in their Soviet neighbor are not broadcast indiscriminately in Finland.

  Finland, however, was not the only foreign country to discover that there was something wrong with the air on that otherwise peaceful Sunday in April. It was only the first of them. At two o'clock that afternoon, in the Swedish nuclear power plant at Forsmark, a worker coming off shift went through a radiation scan. The test was pure routine, but the results were not.

  The man's shoes were radioactive.

  Sweden does not take the discovery of unexplained radioactivity lightly. There is a powerful antinuclear movement among the Swedish people. Everything that happens at an atomic power plant is scrutinized at every step with great care. So this information was reported on the nationwide alert network at once. It caused immediate concern, multiplied when other stations reported that their air, too, was unexpectedly as radioactive as after a nearby bomb test. Or even after a real bomb.

  The first thought (after they decided that the Swedish plants themselves were innocent) was a terrifying one. Most of Scandinavia's air comes from the west and south. (It is for that reason that the smoke from England's factories kills Swedish lakes; the British got rid of their pea-soup fogs with huge stacks that export the pollution to Scandinavia.) So their first thought was that the source of the radiation was in the United Kingdom. Was it possible that England had suffered a nuclear attack? But the English radio stations were still prattling away. Alternatively, could the English, the Germans, or the Dutch have — totally unexpectedly — set off a nuclear bomb test? Then meteorologists traced the recent movements of the air masses over Sweden, and informed the nuclear authorities that the patterns were a bit unusual. It was not from the west that the radioactive cloud came; untypically, the most recent incoming air had originated to the south and east.

  It had come from the Soviet Union.

  The Swedes are as conscious of their Soviet neighbor as the Finns, but less careful about Soviet sensibilities. They saw no reason to keep the matter secret. The news services were informed. The report made instant headlines. In an hour most of the world knew that something big and nuclear had happened in the USSR.. almost all of the world, in fact, except for the USSR itself.

  Chapter 18

  Monday, April 28

  The Embassy of the United States of America in Moscow is on the ring boulevard, in the section of the boulevard named after the composer Tchaikovsky. The Embassy isn't a single building. It is a collection of several structures, linked together in a ramshackle red-brick compound. At every entrance to the compound a couple of uniformed KGB guards loiter, smoking cigarettes and chatting to each other, until someone approaches: then they interpose themselves in front of the door and request U.S. passports or hotel cards. When the documents are found to be in order, the KGB guards then say, or the more polite ones say, "puzhalsta," which means "please," and perhaps they even touch the visors of their caps as they step out of the way. (There have been times when they have been less polite and a very great deal more energetic, especially when, as has now and then happened, some desperate Soviet citizen has tried to hurl himself past them to sanctuary.)

  Really, the American Embassy in Moscow is a slum. It should have been abandoned at least a dozen years ago, but the chilly state of U.S.-Soviet relations has caused endless bickering and delays over every detail, and so plans for the splendid, modern new embassy building have remained incomplete. Its best feature is its cafeteria. There the American staff can get the only authentic hamburgers, French fries, and milk shakes to be found anywhere in Moscow. Its worst feature may well be that of its scores of drivers, telephone operators, translators, kitchen workers, and cleaners, almost all are locally employed Soviet nationals and nearly every one of those is known to have a second career — or, really, a first one — as an officer in the KGB.

  Warner Borden, the assistant Science Attache at the Embassy, was yelling at Emmaline Branford, the Press and Cultural Affairs officer, about the fact that the astonishing news was coming in over the open teletypes. "Keep the nationals out," he said angrily, meaning the translator and the cleaning man.

  Emmaline Branford looked at him in astonishment. "But all we've got here is the open news services, Warner. There isn't anything secret about it."

  Lowering his voice, Borden hissed, "Sometimes we talk in here, don't we? Keep 'em out till I come back!"

  "Are you going to check the code room?" Emmaline asked, and Borden gave her a mock frown.

  "See what I mean?" he asked, and then, "I'm gone." Emmaline sighed as he dashed off toward the secure teletypes in another part of the Embassy, with their Marine guard always at the door. At least, she reflected, he hadn't patted her bottom this time.

  Across the narrow hall her translator, Rima, was bent over her morning Pravda, meticulously putting a story about fisheries production goals in the Baltic Sea into her careful English. Rima had a last name — it was Solovjova — but for most of the American Embassy staff most of the Russians had only one name, like plantation hands in old Dixie. For Emmaline, a black woman, some of whose ancestors had been named Cuffee, Napoleon, or Jezebel, the practice was unpleasing. But the Russians themselves seemed to prefer it that way. Perhaps that was because they didn't enjoy American attempts to pronounce names like "Solovjova." Emmaline
stopped beside her and said, "Look, Rima, we'd better do what he says."

  Rima said, looking down at her desk, "It is no problem, Emmaline."

  If the Russian woman had any interest in this nuclear radiation flap that was burning up the teletypes, she was keeping it to herself. Emmaline tarried for a moment, thinking. She wanted to ask Rima Solovjova if there were anything at all in Pravda about unexplained radioactive emissions, but she already knew there was not. Emmaline herself had already scanned the paper. Although her command of Russian was still a long way from easy, she would not have missed a story like that— not even in, or actually especially not in, the short paragraphs on an inside page where any kind of bad news was usually to be found.

  Of course, Rima could not have missed hearing something about what was going on. There had been plenty of talk in the teletype room, just as Borden had said. The simplest thing would be to come out and ask her what she'd heard and what she thought, but nothing was that simple in the relations with Soviet nationals. The relations between Emmaline and her translator were friendly enough. Certainly they did friendly things. Emmaline saw no harm in an occasional gift to Rima of a box of American tampons or a shopping bag advertising Macy's or Marshall Field's. And Rima was helpful beyond the call of duty in locating off-the-books painters, plumbers, and carpenters, and supplying Emmaline with homemakable recipes to replace the things that even the hard-currency stores always seemed to be out of — roach spray, for instance. Still, Emmaline had not been stationed in Moscow long enough for them to become anything like close enough to bring up politically embarrassing subjects. While she was debating whether or not to try it anyway, Rima Solovjova looked up, her face drawn.