Chernobyl

by Frederik Pohl

  The first thing on Emmaline's agenda as she dragged herself out of bed each morning was to start the brewer for that indispensable first cup of hot, black, kick-your-mammy coffee. The second was harder. That was the nasty task of taking out the brush and dustpan (actually that was the lid of a cardboard box, but it worked well enough) to sweep up the morning's accumulation of dead cockroaches. There were only a dozen or so this time, not much for a bright May morning, so Emmaline was into the shower and out of it again by the time the coffee was ready.

  Dressed and ready to go, Emmaline looked out the window of her flat in the foreign ghetto as she finished her grapefruit — the last grapefruit she was going to have, until someone from the Embassy took another courier flight to Helsinki. She was waiting for Warner Borden, the Embassy's Science Attache, to knock on her door. She had not made up her mind what to tell him — whether she would accept a ride to the Embassy in his little red Nissan hotrod or walk it on her own for the sake of the exercise. (At 124 pounds, Emmaline was convinced she'd grown hog-fat over the Russian winter.)

  Then, she hadn't really made up her mind about Warner Borden at all. It was spring. It had been a long winter. It had been a lonely one for Emmaline, and along about March even Borden had begun to seem interesting; there were very few unattached American males in Moscow; and no black ones at all, unless you counted the nineteen-year-old Marine guards at the Embassy. Emmaline was not formally engaged to the guy back in Waycross, and she wasn't constitutionally opposed to a little experimenting around. She wasn't even, really, opposed to Warner Borden. But it took a lot of the fun out of fornication when you knew that the telephone headset, a microphone in the wall, and another in the bathroom were very likely to be faithfully transmitting every moan, gasp, grunt, and babble to someone with a headset and a tape recorder a block away. And the ears under the headset were not necessarily always Russian.

  So (Emmaline being by nature a fair person) the decision to make about Warner was whether to encourage him or not. It was a decision that needed to be made. She thought about it as she was tidying up the remains of her breakfast, everything tightly wrapped to discourage the bugs, and was still thinking about it as she peered at herself in the bathroom mirror. As she gave her teeth a final brushing, she found three more roaches stirring feebly by the toilet. She went back for the brush and cardboard and, of course, that was just when Warner Borden knocked at her door.

  She stood inside the doorway to greet him. "Thanks, anyway," she said, "but I think I'd better walk."

  He did not seem disappointed. "You've got a nice day for it. Can I have a cup of coffee anyway?"

  It was absolutely foolish to be embarrassed about the roaches, which were everyone's cross to carry. "Help yourself," she said, turning away. As she was capturing the last sick bug, cowering behind the toilet but unable to move fast enough to get away, Borden appeared in the bathroom door, holding his cup, to watch her flush them down.

  He said with scientific interest, "You'll be lucky if you don't plug up the pipes with those buggers. What'd you knock them out with?"

  "Rima's grandmother's recipe. You mix boric acid into cold mashed potatoes and roll up little balls. Rima says it makes them thirsty but it keeps them from being able to drink. So they die. Sometimes they do, anyway. I guess that's why they're always around the toilet and the sink."

  Borden grinned. "Hanging around what they can't get. I do the same thing myself."

  Emmaline slammed the toilet lid down to change the subject. "What do you hear from Chernobyl?"

  He said sourly, "Still nothing. They've been having press conferences at the Ministry of Nuclear Energy, but only for the commie countries and Ted Turner. So much for glasnost." He glanced at his watch and swallowed the rest of his coffee. "I've got a meeting in half an hour. Maybe I'll find something out then. Anyway, the cloud's still heading east, so I guess we're okay here."

  Emmaline made an effort to look at the bright side. "If it did come, it might at least kill the damn roaches."

  "Oh, hon, no way. Roaches don't mind radiation. They eat it up. If you went to Chernobyl this morning you'd probably find a bunch of dead people — and about a million happy roaches sitting down to dinner."

  "That many?" she asked, dampened.

  "The million roaches? Oh, you mean the dead people. Well, how are you supposed to know? The Russians've only admitted to two. Everybody in Washington is saying it's a lot more, maybe hundreds — there was a story in New York that said there were fifteen thousand dead already."

  "Which one do you believe, Warner?"

  "Hon," he sighed, turning to rinse out his cup before leaving, "when you're in this place as long as I am you'll learn not to believe anybody."

  On this pleasant May morning, the air, as Emmaline walked from the foreign compound past the walled Sovkino motion-picture studios to the Kiev railroad station, was just cool enough to be comfortable. The sun was bright. Still, she was glad she'd taken a sweater. There were traces of dirty snow at the bases of the tallest north-facing walls. Some of it had been there since October and was not yet melted away, but the trees were in leaf and green things were popping out of the ground.

  Her mind was full of Warner Borden and Chernobyl. It was a little annoying that he hadn't seemed crushed when she refused his ride. Well, she told herself, the man was busy. His first appointment that day was to make another offer of American technical assistance to the Soviet authorities at the Ministry of Nuclear Energy, and his thoughts were obviously more on his appointment than her bod.

  All the same, he hadn't even tried to grope her. She was piqued. It was certainly her privilege to make him leave her alone, but she hadn't counted on his giving up so easily.

  And then she saw she was approaching the Metro station by the Kiev railroad terminal, and she forgot about Warner Borden, because she remembered what was happening there this day.

  As she was heading toward the terminal, staring, she was stopped by a woman in slacks as well cut as her own, with a camera slung around her neck. "Excuse me," the woman said, "but you're an American, aren't you? What's going on?"

  Emmaline had already seen the reason for the question. The Kiev railroad station was noisier and more crowded than ever, and the number of police, in uniform or not, at least ten times the normal quota. "They're bringing in children from Kiev," she said. "They've been evacuated."

  "Oh, my Lord," breathed the woman, moving aside to get out of the way of a little procession of young evacuees. They seemed to be eight or ten years old, twenty or thirty of them in disciplined lines supervised by a pair of schoolteachery women. The children were obviously overtired, and not as clean as they might have been, but they were orderly and quiet as they walked toward a waiting bus. Each one of them clutched a bag of possessions and most were holding an apple that they had just been given by their surrogate parents. "We were just going to our hotel," the American woman said absently, her face worried. "That's the Hotel Ukraine, you know? And we took the subway to this station, and— Listen, is it safe here? We keep hearing all kinds of stories."

  "As far as I know," Emmaline said carefully, "you're perfectly safe here in Moscow. The city shouldn't be affected at all. Your hotel is over that way, across the big boulevard they call Kutozovsky." She pointed, excused herself, and turned to see what was going on for herself. A Reuter's newsman, looking sweaty and harassed, hailed her. "Do you know anything I don't know?" he demanded.

  "I don't know that much. Have you been talking to the children?"

  "Talk to them! I can't even get near them without some KGB yobbo telling me I'm in the way of the evacuation. You're a dip, love. Walk right in there to the trains and take me along, there's a dear."

  "Not a chance," Emmaline said firmly. "Tell me what's happening, though."

  "Ah," the man said in disgust, "they've rounded up every little kid in Kiev and shipped them up here. They're supposed to be going to Young Pioneer summer camps outside of Moscow somewhere, but what I really want to
know is what it's like in Kiev now and they won't let me talk to any of them. Listen, your Russian's better than mine. See that bunch of kids waiting to get into the W.C.? Let's see if we can just idle by and strike up a chat."

  But Emmaline was shaking her head. "Another time, okay? I've got to get to work."

  By eleven o'clock Emmaline had her desk clean, her telegrams dispatched, her day's program confirmed, and a car and driver ordered for the Rossiya Hotel at one. Warner Borden looked in. "Stonewall," he reported. "They thanked us for our kind interest but did not care to accept any offers of aid. What do they need the Embassy for, anyway, when they've got Armand Hammer's Occidental Oil?"

  "Have you talked to the doctors they sent over?"

  "Nobody has. They've been kept busy — I'd really love to get a word with one of them, just to find out how the Russians are doing with their radiation medicine. But even the Occidental Oil office hasn't seen them; it was all handled directly between Armand Hammer and, I guess, Gorbachev himself. The thing is," he said, sliding into the chair next to her desk, "I was wondering if you had any information on this man Smin."

  "Who's Smin?"

  "He's one of the patients in the radiation hospital, in bad shape; they say he was one of the biggies at the Chernobyl plant. Only I can't get a handle on him. Take a look at these."

  He dropped a couple of photographs on Emmaline's desk. Three had been copied from newspapers and were very poor; the fourth showed several men at the Moscow airport, welcoming the IAEA man from Vienna, Blix. "We think Smin's one of these," he said.

  "So? How would I know?"

  "Maybe the same way you tipped us off on Chernobyl," said Borden. "Your credit's sky-high right now, you know. You were the first one to point out that the station in the Ukraine might be where the stuff came from, when we were all looking toward the Baltic. If your sources could help out here—"

  "I'll see what I can do," Emmaline said. The truth, however, was that she didn't know what she could do, and didn't know if she wanted to ask her "sources" — there was really only one source, sitting concentratedly over her copy of Trud at her desk — to involve herself further. Had there been any risk to getting that copy of Literaturna Ukraina for her? For that matter, was it really Rima who had put it there? Rima had never said… the other side of that coin, though, was that Emmaline had never come right out and asked her.

  Emmaline sighed and got ready to leave for her one o'clock appointment. She went as far as she was willing to go. That is, as she left she stopped at the translator's desk. "I'm off to meet Pembroke Williamson," she said. And, "Oh, by the way, there are some pictures on my desk you might want to look at."

  Emmaline walked over to the Metro and took the train to Marksiya, one of the complex of underground stations at the heart of Moscow. Why did Borden want to know about Smin?" If the man was in the hospital he ought to be left alone. As she listened to the train conductor announce their arrival at her destination, she wished that not only Smin could be left alone, but maybe everyone in the Soviet Union could be left alone with this terrible and strictly internal disaster. They deserved a chance to try to heal themselves, didn't they?

  But it was not merely an internal disaster anymore. Not with the cloud of radioactive gases wandering over half of Europe.

  The quickest way to her meeting with the novelist at the Rossiya Hotel was to take the bus that circled around Red Square, but her watch told her she was early. On impulse, she walked through the crowded GUM department store and out onto Red Square, her heels catching in the cobblestones, eavesdropping on the Soviet tourists strolling by.

  It was as normal as any May morning in Moscow ever had been. If Chernobyl was on anyone's mind, they were not discussing it where Emmaline could hear. A father with two young girls at his side was pointing at the spot over the Lenin Mausoleum where the great ones of the Party leadership had stood, just one week earlier, to watch the May Day parade roll through.

  A family from one of the Eastern republics was gawking at the Spassky gate as a long, black Zil sedan came roaring out of the walled Kremlin, its curtains drawn and who could know who inside? Three separate queues of schoolchildren waited their turn to enter the candy-topped St. Basil's Cathedral, and two newly married couples were having their pictures taken at the mausoleum. The brides, elegant in white gauze and braided flowers in their hair, were placing their cellophane-wrapped bridal bouquets on the low wall before the tomb, under the expressionless eyes of the uniformed KGB guard. Emmaline tarried to study the bridal couples. In her experience, all brides looked rapturous and all grooms shared the same three-martini unfocused beam of tentative happiness. These two looked a little different. Both the grooms had identical slyly eager looks.

  Emmaline understood at once. It was spring for them too. Whatever private encounters that particular he and that particular she had managed for the past six months, they had been severely circumscribed by shared flats, by parents who were always present and, most of all, by snow. There were no romantic trysts in the woods around Moscow in January. Or in April, for that matter.

  So there were floods of pent-up hormones begging to be released, and what each of those men was dreaming of was the night ahead, with the parents for once bundled off to stay with relatives or even — oh, what luxury! — perhaps a round-trip ticket on the Red Arrow night train to Leningrad. That meant a whole day to see the great art gallery, the antireligion museum in what used to be St. Isaac's Cathedral, and the cruiser Aurora in front of the Winter Palace, but most of all it meant two whole nights in a private compartment with a lock on the door and no one to knock!

  Emmaline was astonished at the quick rush of feeling in her own belly; it had, indeed, been a long winter.

  The Rossiya Hotel is advertised as the second largest in the world (the first largest is also in the Soviet Union), but Emmaline had learned her way around it by now. She flashed her card, unnecessarily, to the factotum at the door and headed for the elevators.

  The novelist's name was Pembroke Williamson, and he wasn't in his hotel room. Tipped off by the ever-vigilant concierge, Emmaline walked down to the end of the long corridor and, peering over the stair rail, saw him nursing a cup of tea and curiously counting over his change in the hotel's corner buffet.

  "You've got American newspapers," she said at once, catching sight of the pages sticking out of his shoulder bag. "May I?"

  While Pembroke tried to total up the English ten-penny pieces, the German marks, and the Swedish kroner he had been given in change for his American five-dollar bill, Emmaline happily scanned the headlines. Their little story had taken over the front pages; Chernobyl was in every paper. And what headlines! The New York Post had the craziest — mass grave 15,000 reported buried in nuke disposal site — but the UPI stories claimed at least 2,000 dead, and nearly every paper discounted the Soviet numbers.

  "So what's the truth?" Pembroke asked. "Who's lying?"

  "Maybe everybody," said Emmaline, wistfully trying to get a quick look at Doonesbury and Andy Capp. "The Russians still say that there are two dead; they were killed in the explosion, and that's all. Of course, they admit there are a couple of hundred in the hospital here in Moscow, and God knows how many others in other places."

  "Do you believe that?"

  She said primly, "I work for the State Department. Mr. Schultz said he'd bet ten dollars the Soviets are lying."

  "How about one pound ten in sterling and about another two dollars in odds and ends?" Pembroke grinned.

  "That's what the Secretary of State wants to bet. I don't bet, personally. Pembroke? You know what it's like here; we don't get much hard information, and what we do get is mostly classified. I was hoping you could tell me what happened."

  The novelist leaned back, looking at her seriously. "Don't we have to get to the publishing company?" His book on Lincoln had just been published in the USSR, and the editors at the Mir Publishing Company wanted to make a ceremony of handing over to him a royalty check in good, spenda
ble U.S. dollars.

  "The car will pick us up downstairs in half an hour. Mir's only ten minutes away."

  He said, "Want some coffee?"

  And when he came back with two cups he tasted it, made a face, and said: "Do you remember what happened in Florida on January twenty-eighth?"

  "I guess you mean the shuttle blowing up?"

  "That's right. The space shuttle Challenger. It seems there's a defect in the rings that hold the external solid-fuel rocket together; NASA knew about the defect for some time, but didn't do anything until seven people got killed."

  Emmaline looked at him in perplexity. "What's that got to do with Chernobyl?"

  "I think it's the same thing, Emmaline. On the way here I

  stopped off in London to interview an Englishman named Grahame Leman. He describes things like Chernobyl and the Challenger as the results of what he calls 'TBP'—means the Technical-Bureaucratic-Political system of decision-making. You see, what Leman's saying is that technological decisions aren't made just on the basis of the technological considerations. The technical experts didn't want the Challenger to go off that day. The forces in favor of it were bureaucratic and political. The bureaucrats are the bosses, so they can overrule the technicians' decisions, just because the guy higher up can always overrule the guy lower down. The political pressures are something else. NASA wanted to brighten up its image; it didn't want another delay."

  "You're not saying they sent that ship up knowing it was dangerous?"

  "Not a bit of it, Emmaline. I'm only saying they didn't let themselves know it was dangerous. There isn't any flag that goes up to say Danger There's just a probabilistic assessment of risk. Same thing happened in England, God, I don't know, sixty or seventy years ago, when the R-101 airship smashed up. The engineers knew the R-101 wasn't ready, just as the Morton Thiokol engineers knew the Challenger wasn't ready — but they're only one leg of the triad, and the bureaucrats and the politicians outvote them. See," he said, glancing at his watch, "I don't want you to get the wrong idea. It's not exactly individual bureaucrats and politicians I'm talking about. It's the bureaucratic and political pressures that make the TBP syndrome dangerous. The worst railroad accident the English ever had was when an engineer on the Great Western Railroad wanted to make up time — that's the bureaucratic and political part— and overrode the automatic braking systems that would have stopped him after he went through a red light. They didn't. He smashed into another train. I'd say Three Mile Island was the same kind of thing too. And so was Chernobyl. The technology's not so bad on all these things, you know. It's the people who make the decisions, and the reasons they have for making them. . Oh, hell," he said, grinning. "I didn't mean to get wound up like this." Then, in a different tone, "Listen, there was something I wanted to talk to you about. Do we have time for another cup of coffee?"