Chernobyl

by Frederik Pohl

  Finally Candace ventured, "I don't see why she didn't want us to stop at the monument."

  "One moment," Didchuk said politely, and exchanged a few words with Aftasia. "She says the monument is all very well, but it comes a bit late. It was erected only eight years ago, and the plaque does not even mention Jews. That is what she says," he finished, his voice reedy with strain. "May I tell Mrs. Smin that you have understood what I have been telling you?"

  "Damn right we have," said Garfield, shaking his head.

  Aftasia rattled another sentence, and Didchuk translated. "In that way, Mrs. Smin says, we Soviet people learned not to trust foreigners. We discovered that the Germans were not interested in — she says, in 'liberating' us. They did not come to do us good. They were thieves, brigands, rapists; they were murderers."

  Aftasia nodded and added a sentence more. Didchuk hung his head as he translated. "And we Jews, she says — I am speaking as Mrs. Smin says, you understand; I am not myself Jewish — we Jews learned not to trust even our neighbors."

  Chapter 28

  Thursday, May 8

  Giving bone marrow is not an enjoyable process. A sort of hypodermic the length of a pencil is stabbed into one of the donor's largest bones — the hipbone is usually the easiest to reach. Marrow, which looks like blood, is sucked out, a teaspoonful at a time, until a pint or so has been accumulated. This is actually about a tenth of all the bone marrow an adult human has, but if he is reasonably healthy, he will regenerate it in a few weeks. The process of extraction takes an hour or more. Then the extracted marrow is centrifuged — whirled at high speed — to separate the lighter cells from the larger, older, useless ones. The light ones are then transfused into the patient from a bag hanging beside his bed, through a needle taped into the veins of his arm.

  This procedure is not new. The first researches into curing radiation disease through bone-marrow transplants began in the United States in 1945, when the American nuclear bombs dropped on Japan caused some researchers to wonder what would happen if someone dropped similar bombs on America.

  Thirteen years later the procedure was tried for the first time on human beings, when five Yugoslavs, exposed to radiation in a nuclear accident, were given marrow from the bones of relatives. Four of them survived, in spite of the fact that the odds against a successful transplant of unmatched marrow are around ten thousand to one, and at that time no one knew how to perform the special typing (it is called "HLA matching") necessary. There are really only two possibilities to account for the survival of the four Yugoslavs. Either they were not really all that sick to begin with and would have recovered anyway. Or they were miraculously, unbelievably lucky.

  Whether Leonid Sheranchuk was going to have to test his luck or not was a very open question. Although his blood count was low, it was not critical. His estimated radiation intake was only marginal, so it was not certain that he was going to need a bone-marrow transplant. It was a lot less certain, even, that he would be able to get one if he did. His only near blood relative was his son and Boris's cells did not match.

  The fact of the matter was that Sheranchuk did not think much about his own survival. If it happened, it happened. There were others a lot closer to death than he. Some had died already. A second Ponomorenko, the fireman Vassili, the one known as Summer — they had had to take off that leg after all, and he had been too weak to survive the operation. The third of the Four Seasons, his own pipefitter, Arkady Ponomorenko, seemed to be sinking fast. The doctors hadn't been able to find any bone marrow that was good for him, not even his cousin's, and so they had given him a fetal liver transplant. Whether that would save Spring's life was very doubtful. What was certain was that it had put him into a state of half-waking delirium, so that he raged at his cousin, Autumn, for ten minutes at a time with Sheranchuk sitting wordless beside them; and then, collecting himself, cracked jokes and chided poor Autumn for looking so depressed.

  What worried Sheranchuk most was that he had been the one who had ordered — at least, permitted — Arkady Ponomorenko to expose himself to the radiation that was killing him. Sheranchuk could not forgive himself for that. It would have been just as effective for him to have sent the pipefitter safely to explore the ruptured pipes under the turbine room while he himself took on the more dangerous task of shutting off the hydrogen flare. He was older. He was more experienced. He could have done the job faster, he had no doubt of that, and got away with only a little radiation…

  Or he, too, could have been dying now.

  But, Sheranchuk asked himself, what did that matter? If you did your job, you took the risks involved. If the dice fell against you, you had no right to complain.

  What mattered most of all to Sheranchuk was Deputy Director Simyon Smin, and it seemed very clear to him that Smin was dying.

  For Sheranchuk this was an acute and always present pain, far worse than the bruises where the bitch Akhsmentova insisted on stabbing him for more blood six times a day. He did not want the old man to die. Sheranchuk didn't think of Simyon Smin as a father — he was not so presumptuous as that — but no filial feeling could have been stronger. He owed Smin for giving him the chance at the Chernobyl plant. He admired Smin for the way in which he got his job done, no matter what obstacles were put in his way. His throat closed up with pity and respect as he saw how courageously Smin accepted his own responsibility and the nastiness of his physical state. It did not occur to Sheranchuk to add all these feelings together, but if he had, he would have been forced to give them a name: what he felt for the old man was simply love.

  And every day Smin grew weaker.

  When Sheranchuk ate his lunch that day he barely noticed what it was — borscht, the good Ukrainian kind, with garlic, specially made because so many of the patients were Ukrainian, with lamb to follow. He ate quickly, talking to no one. There were in truth not very many fellow patients left to talk to, since a few had been released and a good many were now too sick to come to the dining room. Then he skipped the fruit compote that was meant to be their dessert and hurried back to the room he shared with Smin, hoping to tempt the old man to eat, spoonful by spoonful.

  Trying to make the Deputy Director eat was really the only service he could still offer to Smin. Even that was seldom successful. The old man would swallow a few mouthfuls as a courtesy, then he would shake his head. "But I have always been too fat, Leonid," he would say seriously. "To lose a few kilos is no bad thing." And then he would ask Sheranchuk, very considerately and politely, to draw the curtains again, please.

  Smin spent most of his time now behind the curtains. Sometimes he was being sick, and then the nurses would come to help. Sometimes he was sleeping — Sheranchuk was glad for those times, though always with the fear that the sleep was, finally, something worse than mere sleeping. Often Sheranchuk could see through the gaps in the curtain that Smin was writing, writing, writing — writing something on a lined schoolboy's pad that he never showed to Sheranchuk, and shoved under the pillow when someone came near. His memoirs? A confession for the GehBehs? A letter to someone? But when Sheranchuk ventured to ask, Smin said only, "It's nothing, simply some things I want to put on paper — my memory may not be so good anymore."

  But it was not simply his memory that Smin was in the process of losing.

  This time there had been no need for Sheranchuk to cut his meal short to help Smin eat, for when he got to the door of their room, he saw that Smin's wife and younger son were there. The boy was standing by his father's bed, a plate in one hand and a spoon in the other, looking unsure of himself. "It's all right, Vassili," Serena Smin whispered to her son. "He did eat quite a bit, and now he needs to sleep." Then she saw Sheranchuk hovering in the doorway and smiled a welcome.

  To Leonid Sheranchuk, Smin's wife had always been above criticism, simply because she was Smin's wife. To himself, at least, he might have admitted that he found her rather self-centered and perhaps just a bit proud. He did not think that now. She was quite an exceptionally han
dsome woman — hadn't she been a dancer once? And so much younger than her husband — but what he saw as he looked at her now was a wife and mother whose love for her family was written achingly all over her face.

  He stepped courteously aside as she and her son came out of the room, but she paused to talk to him. "Vassili got him to eat nearly all of his lamb." She reported the small triumph with unreasoning hope shining through the desperation in her eyes. "I minced it up for him first. I tasted it myself; it was really quite good."

  "They feed us well here," Sheranchuk agreed. Then he said, "Mrs. Smin? I've been wondering if having me here in the room isn't really a bit too much for him."

  "No, no, Leonid! He is grateful for your company. Don't think he hasn't told us how much you do for him."

  "I wish I could do more!"

  "You do everything anyone ever could," Selena Smin said firmly. "I think he will sleep now, and so we will leave him for a bit in your good hands."

  "Thank you," Sheranchuk said, awkward as he wondered whether to shake her hand or not, but she setded the matter by leaning forward and kissing him on the cheek. He gazed after her admiringly and hardly noticed when a doctor came up to him, hooded, booted, and robed in white. When the physician addressed him by name, Sheranchuk was astonished to find that she was his wife.

  Tamara Sheranchuk reached up to kiss her husband, a feathery, distant kiss on his cheekbone — as much as was advisable, he knew, since even the tiny salt flakes from his sweat might also be radioactive, not to mention his saliva if they had kissed on the lips. "Isn't this great luck?" she cried in delight. "How am I here? Well, partly because my own count is a bit low, and partly because I am to learn how they test blood to determine the extent of radioactivity — just for forty-eight hours, I'm afraid. But most of all, I am here because you are here, my dear, and I asked for permission."

  Sheranchuk looked at her in distress. "Your count is low?"

  "Oh, quite marginal," she assured him. "No, my dear, it is you who are the patient here, not I. I have had a look at your charts with the other doctors. They're a bit puzzling."

  "So they have told me. I am not as sick as I ought to be."

  "Did they explain to you about Dr. Guskova's system? Since we don't know how much radiation you received, she has worked out a method of deducing it from the way your blood count falls off— "

  "I have heard everything there is to hear about Dr. Guskova's system. But she did not tell me how much of a dose that was, and neither did anyone else."

  Tamara hesitated. "Perhaps one hundred rads," she said reluctantly. "It is possible that it is more."

  "And that means?" he demanded.

  "In your case, my dear," she said, "it is difficult to say."

  "I see," he said, thinking. Then, remembering how she had appeared from nowhere and made him put on coveralls, "It would have been more if it hadn't been for you."

  "So I am good for something as a wife," she said. It was a light remark, but her tone was not light. He opened his mouth to ask if anything was wrong, but she was going right on: "Deputy Director Smin may not have had much more, but as you see, he is very ill and you are — not?"

  "I feel all right," he said, stretching the truth. In fact, he felt tired much of the time and sometimes a bit feverish. But nothing like Smin, of course.

  His wife sat down next to him on the bed, prepared to lecture. "The etiology of radiation sickness," she said, "is quite well known. Simyon Mikhailovitch doesn't fit the curve. He is getting worse faster than he should. He—"

  Suddenly remembering, she glanced apprehensively at the closed curtains. "He's asleep," Sheranchuk assured her. "I heard him snoring a minute ago."

  "Well," she said, lowering her voice, "your blood count is not dropping off as fast as his, or many of the others."

  "Doctor talk again," he complained. "Which means what?"

  "Which means we don't know what," she said. "Perhaps it means that all of your exposure was from external sources— dust and smoke on your skin, that was washed off. Smin, on the other hand, may actually have swallowed some, or breathed it. The radioisotopes are still in his body."

  Sheranchuk was puzzled. "But I was exposed as much as he! I was in the area longer, even; he was away when the explosion occurred. We breathed the same air, ate the same food—"

  "But such a little difference can make such a big effect, Leonid. You were within buildings much of the time. He may have been outside. It could be as small a thing as a stack of bread that was left too long on a table. Perhaps he had the top slice, and you only one from lower down."

  Sheranchuk said, making his tone calm, "Does that mean that I will—"

  He didn't finish the sentence. "It means that your chances are better," she said; and then, strongly, "Leonid! I think you will recover completely!"

  Sheranchuk turned and raised himself on an elbow to study his wife. He had never been her patient before, except now and then for a headache or a sore wrist. Was this how she always talked to those under her care? It was not at all the same free and easy way they spoke in their kitchen, or their bed.

  "You do go on talking like a doctor," he complained.

  "But, Leonid, I am a doctor. And, oh," she went on, "I'm sure of it! Especially with those American doctors here! You would not believe how good they are! Just this morning the hospital centrifuge broke down, and in just a few hours they had packed everything up and moved it to another facility. And their own instruments! They have a machine, you put into it a sample of blood, whisk, click, and in just a few seconds you have a blood cell count printed out, with every number! While for us it is necessary to put each blood sample under a microscope and someone must count every individual cell — half an hour at least, and after a technician has counted a dozen samples his eyes are weary and his attention flags, and how likely it is to make mistakes!"

  "That sounds wonderful," said Sheranchuk.

  She pursed her lips, preparing to announce some surprising news. "And did you know, Leonka, that one of them is not an American at all, but from Israel?"

  That was astonishing; Israel and the USSR had no diplomatic relations at all. Therefore no Israeli citizen could possibly get a visa to enter the Soviet Union — unless, of course, someone very high up ordered that the laws be forgotten for this case. "That is even more surprising than a machine," he conceded. "Still, we've given the Israelis plenty of people, they can lend us one in return."

  "The American doctor even said that in his country a hospital like this would be air-conditioned!"

  "The Americans," Smin grinned, "will be air-conditioning their cars next." His arm was getting tired. He sank back on his bed, curled facing his wife as she went on describing the technological wonders that had flown in from California. Her manner was, after all, a bit puzzling. He welcomed the conversation because he didn't have many visitors and it was tiring to hold a book to read, but were these the subjects a wife would normally discuss under these circumstances? Was it possible she was keeping something from him? What could it be? "What about Boris?" he asked suddenly.

  She broke off. "Boris?" she said, as though trying to recall who he was talking about. "Well, yes. It is a pity, but his cells do not match yours. Still, you may not need a transfusion at all—"

  "I already know that," he grumbled. "I was asking if you had heard from him since he left."

  "Oh, but of course I have," she said penitently. "He has been evacuated to the Artek camp — on the Black Sea — the very best Komsomol camp in the whole country, and it's all free for him."

  "I have been told that too. I asked if you had heard from the boy himself."

  "Certainly! Oh! I was forgetting — he even sent some photographs — look," she said, fumbling some out of her bag, "these were taken on a trip to Yalta." While Tamara was proudly telling him how Boris was actually learning to ride a horse, Sheranchuk gazed at the color prints. There was Boris on a beach, his arm on the shoulder of another teenage boy Sheranchuk had never seen bef
ore. Both were in swim trunks, grinning into the camera. Behind them was a gaggle of stout, middle-aged women in bikinis, industriously tossing a volleyball. One had a huge caesarean scar across her belly.

  "Can you trust him around such bathing beauties as these?" Sheranchuk smiled.

  She took the pictures back, studying them for a moment before putting them away. "In a summer camp one can be tempted," she sighed.

  Sheranchuk smiled a real smile. That at least was more like the old Tamara. "Or in a hospital, perhaps? So you think I am misbehaving with Dr. Guskova? She is a bit old for me, as well as a trifle heavyset for my taste. But there is a nurse on the night duty—"

  But Tamara only pouted instead of railing back at him. "I saw that Serena Smin was here," she said.

  "She has been very good with her husband," Sheranchuk said. "I admire her a great deal."

  "Yes, and I saw that she admires you as well," his wife said flatly.

  "Oh," said Sheranchuk, understanding at last. He grinned at his wife. "You saw her kiss me. Yes, of course; she and I have been doing all sorts of things here, with her husband asleep in the next bed and her son standing guard in the corridor."

  "I do not like to joke about these matters," Tamara said.

  Sheranchuk groaned faintly. Was it possible that she was being seriously jealous again? He opened his mouth to reassure her, and then he caught a flicker of motion.

  He turned to the door. A sunburned young man in Air Force blue was standing there. "I am Senior Lieutenant Nikolai Smin," he announced. "Is my father here?"

  "Yes," Tamara Sheranchuk began, "but you must wear a robe if you want to—" And she was interrupted by a voice from behind the screens.

  "Is that my son? Put the nightshirt on him, please, and let him come in!"

  Nikolai Smin took the visitor's chair from beside Sheranchuk's bed, now politely empty as Sheranchuk let his wife escort him out of the way of the reunion, and put it next to his father's. He started to pull the screens away, but his father stopped him. "Leave them," he ordered. "You don't want to see me too well."