Chernobyl

by Frederik Pohl

  That statement was distressingly validated. Nikolai could not helping the freezing of the expression on his face as he got a good look at his father. Suddenly Smin was an old man, and one apparently close to a repulsive death. What were those awful pus-filled black blobs on his face? What were the red sores on his neck and shoulders that wept colorless fluid? And that unpleasant smell?

  "Don't touch me, Kolya," Smin said. "Kiss the air for me and I will kiss it back."

  Nikolai did as he was ordered, but protested, "I'm not afraid of catching something from you."

  "But I am afraid for you. Also, it hurts if you touch me."

  "At least you are, well—" Nikolai fumbled, looking for something positive to say.

  "Conscious? Lucid? Yes, Kolya, for sometimes half an hour at a time, so please let's not waste it with pretending. I am wonderfully pleased to see you, my son. Was it bad where you were?"

  Nikolai hesitated, choosing his words. "It is not that dangerous to be flying an MI-24 gunship in Afghanistan, Father. But it is dirty and boring, and no one but a lunatic loves shooting at civilians from the air. It is true that some of those civilians shoot back, but none have come close to me."

  "And when you are done here you will go back to Afghanistan?"

  Nikolai looked rebellious. "Of course," he said.

  "I see. Still, your mother said something about volunteering to fly in the helicopters that are dropping things over the reactor—"

  "It was an idle thought. They have no further need for pilots to drop dirt on your reactor, Father, so they have discontinued the drops."

  "Oh?" said Smin, interested. "Then the core is completely safe now?"

  "I think," Nikolai said, "that it is at least safer to continue to deal with it by other means than to have pilots dodging that stack. I have seen the photos, Father; it is not what a helicopter pilot likes to find in his path. Anyway, they've stopped. Then I asked if there were any other flying jobs in the area. They said not. Or almost none; the only flying missions related to what happened to your plant are now Yaks dropping iodine crystals into the clouds before they get to Chernobyl, so they won't rain on the plant. But unfortunately they don't need me for that."

  "Unfortunately," Smin repeated. "Why unfortunately?"

  Nikolai shrugged morosely. "No, really," his father insisted. "I would like to understand what you feel. Are you determined to retrieve the family honor? Do you think the accident was my fault and you must do something heroic to make up for it?"

  Nikolai pondered for a moment. "I don't know what I think about that," he said at last. "Does it matter? At least I am here now."

  "And I am grateful," said his father, willing to let the subject be changed. "I appreciate that you are here to try to save my life."

  "If I can. I am to be tested this afternoon." The young man swallowed involuntarily, and Smin noticed.

  "It isn't pleasant, what they want you to do," he said gently. "I am sorry to have to ask you to do it. And even sorrier that it is necessary. Kolya? Are you ashamed of your father?"

  "Ashamed? But, Father! You did your best!"

  "I thought that was what I was doing, yes," Smin agreed.

  "No, really! My mother and Vassili have told me all about it. In the past three years you have made everything work so much better—"

  "In three years, yes. And in another five years, perhaps, I would have finished the task and Chernobyl would have been fully up to standards in every respect. It is a pity, but I didn't have those five years."

  "No," said Nikolai loyally. "So it is not your fault. Still—"

  Smin waited. "What, then, Kolya?" he asked.

  "I should be going for my test, not worrying you with silly things when you aren't feeling very well."

  Smin actually laughed — not "feeling very well!" But it hurt him to laugh, and all he said, with great patience, was: "Tell me what you were about to say, Kolya. Fathers and sons should speak honestly to one another."

  "Well— Only— The thing is," Nikolai went on, picking up speed, "there are such terrible stories! Concrete that crumbles into sand, walls that fall down!"

  "Those are true stories, Kolya. I accepted many substandard products."

  "But why, Father?"

  Smin sighed. "Do they teach you nothing in the Air Force of what the world is like? Let us pretend, Kolya, that you are the director of a cement factory. Each month you have a plan to fulfill. Perhaps your plan calls for the production of ten thousand tons of cement and, look, it is the twenty-fifth of the month and you have only produced four thousand. But if you don't fulfill your plan, there are no bonuses for the workers, no commendations for you; you may even be reprimanded. Or worse than reprimanded. So what do you do, Kolya? You do what every other factory manager does. You put all your workers on overtime, with orders to storm six thousand tons of cement in five days. Can they do it? Certainly — if they slop the work through any old way; and on the last day of the month you have fulfilled your plan… Of course, those six thousand tons are useless."

  "But then you don't have to accept them, Father!"

  "Yes, exactly," his father agreed. "One should reject them at once. But then what? Chernobyl did need cement. The cement maker needed not only to complete his plan, but to sell the production. So he says to me, 'You want some good cement, very well, I will give you all you need. But you must also take this other batch.' And I have no choice, Kolya. I take the bad, because if I don't, someone else will, and then he will get the good cement I need desperately. And with steel: the plan for the steel mill calls for another ten thousand tons, let us say; that is easy enough to make, if you make only mild, low-grade steel. But I need better! So to get the steel I need for my reactors I must persuade the steel man to make it, and to do that I must also buy a few thousand tons that are useless. Or I must bribe someone with money or even a car. Or I must send out expediters — expediters! They are gangsters, really. Flatterers. Toadies. Even pimps. And I send these slimy individuals out to wine and dine the suppliers and coax them to send me the things I really need instead of the trash they want to get rid of.. and, even so, usually they will send me both."

  "That is shameful," his son said harshly. Then he added quickly, "Excuse me, I don't mean you, I mean—"

  "Mean me, Kolya," Smin said gently. "I could have done things properly, after all. It is only that I do not think Chernobyl would have been producing four thousand megawatts of electricity for the network if I had."

  Nikolai muttered something under his breath. "What was that?" Smin asked sharply.

  "Nothing, Father. I must go now for my appointment. I will come back later." And this time he did, carefully but firmly, rest his hand on his father's for a moment before he left; but Smin did not respond. He was too busy wondering if he had been right in what he thought he heard.

  To have a few minutes to himself when his head was clear — that was a precious thing for Simyon Smin. He did not waste it. He pulled out the pad on which he had been writing the letter to Mishko and Milaktiev, but after only a line or two his arms wearied and his vision blurred. There was the question, too, of how he was going to get it to the people who had asked for it. Would they come back? Probably yes, he told himself, but would it be while he was still in a position to hand it over? And he would not consider giving it to either his wife or his younger son to pass on; what if they were caught with it?

  Kolya, yes. Perhaps. It was at least a possibility; Kolya was a grown man and by now, after eleven months of shooting Moslem tribesmen in Afghanistan, a reasonably tough and resourceful one. But there was the worrisome thing Kolya had said. Would he, after all, be the right one to trust with such a letter?

  Which left only Smin's mother.

  Smin lay back, slipping the pad under his pillow, thinking about his mother. At this very moment, he knew, she was somewhere in the hospital, doing what Kolya was doing, namely having her breastbone pierced with a great sharp knife to take a sample of marrow. For him. Always for him. Since t
he first days he could remember, for him. He remembered his mother in the village, when he was in school, when he was a Young Pioneer, when he went off at twenty to do his military duty (an annoyance at most, really; who would dare attack the Soviet Union in 1940, when the only other powerful state in Europe had sworn an unbreakable treaty of non-aggression?) — and had the good sense, or good fortune, to choose to serve in tanks. So when Adolf Hitler broke the unbreakable treaty and shoved his irresistible armies across the border a year later, young Junior Lieutenant Simyon Smin was not poured with two million other green recruits into the first terrible meatgrinder, because he was studying advanced armored tactics four thousand kilometers away.

  He shook himself awake, sweating and almost ready to scream aloud; he had been dreaming; flames had been licking over him and his T-34 had been hit.

  He took a deep breath to calm himself. Perhaps he was dying now, but at least he had not died then. As so many others had. He had been given forty extra years of life, and so he was owed nothing at all.

  He hadn't wasted those years. Out of them he had married two good women, and had two good sons to show for it. It was a pity that it should end badly, but it was still more than he could have hoped for as he tried to claw his way out of the burning tank.

  It was then, in the hospital, that his mother had asked him if he would really mind if she were to marry again.

  Such a possibility had never occurred to young Simyon Smin. He was aware that his mother was quite a good-looking woman still, though a bit over forty. But to marry? And to marry so high a Party official? For Vassilievitch Mishko was second only to Nikita Khrushchev in the Party organization of the Ukraine, now just being won back from the Fascists.

  He had given his approval at once, however. He hadn't been selfish. He had even been pleased to think of his mother having a life of her own again, without him to raise or a war or a purge to make everyone's life a misery; and it would have happened if F. V. Mishko had not happened to displease J. V. Stalin and wound up shoveling gold ore in Siberia. It did not surprise Smin that his mother had elected to live very quietly for the rest of her life. She had seen what happened when a person became too public.

  "Are you awake, then?" a voice called softly from the gap in the curtains.

  Smin shook himself. "Of course, Comrade Plumber," he said, working to create another smile. "What's the news outside?"

  He was really glad to see Sheranchuk. He tried to listen while Sheranchuk told him his stories — the good news, his wife appearing unexpectedly at the hospital; the bad news, one of the Four Seasons dying, and another in delirium and pain. "I'm surprised you didn't hear him," Sheranchuk said. "He was shouting quite loudly a little while ago, but now he is quieter."

  "Yes, yes," Smin said absently.

  "And your older son came to see you. That's good news, of course."

  "I suppose it is," said Smin, and his tone made Sheranchuk look more closely at him.

  "Is something wrong?" he asked worriedly.

  "What should be wrong? — No, Leonid, it is a bit of a worry. Kolya said something. We were talking about what was wrong at the plant — I don't mean the accident, I mean the difficulties with materials and personnel. He became quite indignant. Then he said — I think he said—'It would be better to have Stalin back.' "

  "I see," said Sheranchuk.

  Smin looked up at him. "Do you?"

  "Well, yes, I think so," Sheranchuk said uncomfortably.

  "He is a military man, after all. There are many who think the leadership has wasted too much time in Afghanistan."

  Smin said in sorrow, "Are you saying that you, too, think Mikhail Gorbachev is too liberal?"

  "No, no! Nothing like that. What do I know of such things, after all? I am merely saying that I have heard people say that sort of remark. There is, really, a great deal of waste and corruption."

  "But under Stalin we had the same kind of inefficiency, Leonid, only then it was called 'sabotage.' And also we had the purges."

  "I don't remember Stalin times very well," Sheranchuk apologized.

  "Unfortunately, my son Kolya doesn't either. He has never had to worry about a knock on the door at two a.m. Now they are much more considerate, the GehBehs. They come only during business hours. Leonid? Have you been questioned yet?"

  "Well, yes, a little. I simply told them that I was not on duty at the time of the explosion and that, as far as I know, it was Chief Engineer Varazin who insisted on pushing the experiment through without safeguards. With the encouragement of Gorodot Khrenov, of course." Sheranchuk paused, looking at Smin's face. "What's the matter?"

  "Leonid! What did you say about Khrenov?"

  "Only that. I simply told the truth."

  "You told what you think is the truth. You told it about Khrenov," Smin said patiendy. "Khrenov is with the organs. Do you think the organs wish to report that one of their own was involved, even only to encourage?"

  "They did seem quite concerned about that," Sheranchuk admitted.

  "Leonid, are you insane? Are you even right? How do you know what Khrenov did?"

  "I know he hung around the Chief Engineer like a shadow," Sheranchuk said doggedly.

  "That is what he is paid to do, Leonid. Why do you say 'encourage'? Were you present when Khrenov 'encouraged' Varazin to go ahead?"

  "No, but he did!"

  "How do you know that? You were not present," Smin insisted. "Believe me, the organs know well what Khrenov did and Khrenov will answer for it to them. But not in public. So if there is a hearing, as there will be, and if you testify, as you must, you will simply speak the truth about what you saw and what you did. Not about what you think you know from some other person's reports." He hesitated, and then said sofdy, "All of these things are on the record."

  "And the record will remain forever in the files of the GehBehs," Sheranchuk said bitterly, because suddenly he was afraid.

  Smin paused. After a moment he said slowly, "Not necessarily. Remember Khrushchev's speech on the excesses of the Stalin regime. It is possible that everything will come out in some way." Then he shook his head and grinned, a woeful sight in that damaged face. "In any case — wait, what's that?"

  Sheranchuk heard it too. He said worriedly, "I'm afraid Arkady Ponomorenko is shouting again. But what is it you were going to say?"

  "Only that, in any case, perhaps we will all be lucky enough to die here in Hospital Number Six. But go to your friend; he sounds as though he needs someone."

  At the door of the pipefitter's room a nurse stopped Sheranchuk. "Where are you going?" she scolded. "Can't you see he's in no shape to have visitors?"

  "But I am not a visitor but a fellow patient. In any case he needs someone."

  "And what good do you think you can do him now?" she asked bitterly. Behind her, "Spring" had stopped screaming at least, but was now addressing sober, thoughtful remarks to the air above his bed. "Well," she said, softening, "I suppose it can do no harm, at least until his cousin comes back."

  But if Volya Ponomorenko didn't come back soon, Sheranchuk was sure, he would not see his cousin alive. The pipefitter was gasping for breath as he spoke. He was telling the air that the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station had no right to be where it was. "It is the Russians, you see," he said dreamily, gazing at the ceiling. "They're the ones who need it, not us. We have farms in the Ukraine! We grow food, the best in the world; we don't need their factories or their power plants. If we want electrical power, we have the Dnieper River!

  Already there are two dozen great dams on the Dnieper, so why bring in these atomic contraptions?"

  "Shhh," said Sheranchuk nervously. "You should rest, please, Arkady."

  The pipefitter gave no sign of hearing him. He addressed the ceiling reasonably. "So why do we have this nuclear power station at all? Because the Russians want it, you see. It is not a thing for Ukrainians at all. It is so the Russians can turn on the lights in Moscow and sell electricity to the people in Poland and Bulgaria. Let t
hem make their own!"

  "Please rest," Sheranchuk begged, glancing toward the door. Where were the doctors when you wanted them?

  "But no!" cried Ponomorenko, suddenly loud again. "The Russians insist, and what can we do? Can we say no to them? Can we ask them please to make their filthy atomic messes somewhere else? Can we live freely in our own dear Ukraine, that Bogdan Khelmnitski freed from the Poles? Can we even speak the truth when we want to? No, we cannot, and do you know why? I'll tell you why!" he shouted.

  "Please!" cried Sheranchuk, and then to the door, "Nurse!"

  "This is why!" Ponomorenko cried, raising himself on his elbows. "Because we are prisoners1. The Russians have taken us captive, and now we can't get free. My only wish—"

  He burst out in a fit of coughing and fell back. And what his only wish was no one would ever know, because the way his head hit the pillow, the way one eye was half open and the other shut, the way his jaw hung slack, they all told the story: the brave pipefitter and daring football player, the "Spring" of the Four Seasons, Arkady Ponomorenko, was dead.

  Chapter 29

  Thursday, May 8

  Emmaline Branford is a conspicuous figure on the streets of Moscow, not only because she is a woman who wears fashionable American slacks and sometimes listens to her Walkman as she strolls, but because she is black. That is not the color of her skin, which is a pleasing caramel; it is her ethnic description. She knows that it is also the reason she has the career-building Moscow posting, since the U.S. State Department, like any other American employer, needs to burnish its equal-opportunity image. Her gender helped in this, too, of course; as Cultural Attache, she is the second-highest ranking woman in the Moscow Embassy. Emmaline is a pretty woman, with a master's degree in sociology and a minor in Slavic languages. Her mother did not want her to go to Moscow. What Emmaline's mother wants is for her to take a teaching job in Waycross, Georgia, get married and get on with producing a grandchild. Emmaline's boyfriend wants pretty much the same thing; but, at twenty-seven, Emmaline is not yet ready to settle down.