Chernobyl

by Frederik Pohl

  "We all learned that, for the same reasons."

  "And yet," she said, smiling, "I suppose I need not fear thirty years in the camps now, isn't that so? Fedor Vassilievitch, we are not strangers. Your father asked me to marry him in 1944, and if he had not been arrested, I would have looked on you as my own son."

  "I wish that had happened," Mishko said sincerely.

  "Then why don't you speak frankly to me? Is there something you want me to do?"

  Milaktiev said uncomfortably, "Perhaps this is not the place to discuss such matters—"

  "Oh, spit it out, man," she said crossly. "Didn't you call me an Old Bolshevik? Well, I am. I'm not a delicate flower who can think of nothing but sorrow at her only son's funeral; my son would not want that of me. Why should you?"

  "Well," said Mishko, glancing at his partner, "the fact is, a few of us have certain proposals to make…"

  Sheranchuk watched idly as the old woman talked to the men from the Central Committee, impatient for the ceremony to begin. A woman in a smart beige suit walked up to him. "I am Dr. Akhsmentova," she announced. "Blood pathologist for Hospital Number Six. I was in charge of typing blood for you and all of the other patients."

  "Thank you for a good job," Sheranchuk said politely. "I didn't recognize you out of your whites."

  "But I recognized you. Comrade Sheranchuk. I made it my business to know who you were so that I might speak to you before you were discharged. Tomorrow, isn't it?"

  "I hope so," said Sheranchuk, startled. "Speak to me about what?"

  The woman pursed her lips. "I had hoped your wife would inform you of this matter, but I believe she has gone."

  "She was sent back to her regular duty, yes. What matter are you talking about?"

  "You see," the doctor said reflectively, "I take a large view of my work. It is not enough to be technically correct, although I am most careful about that. As I view my duties, they oblige me to call any unusual facts I learn to the attention of the parties concerned."

  Sheranchuk was getting annoyed at the prissy woman. "And what facts have you learned about me?" he asked, his tone more ironic than he intended; but she regarded that.

  "Not just about you, Comrade Sheranchuk. About your wife and the boy, Boris Sheranchuk."

  "Yes?" he prompted, definitely irritated.

  "You are blood type O, Comrade Sheranchuk. Your wife is type A. The boy is type AB." She folded her hands at her waist as she finished, regarding him in silence.

  "Really, Dr. Akhsmentova," he protested, "I know nothing about such matters. If it is dangerous to my son—"

  But she was shaking her head. "Not dangerous to his health, no, but that is not the point. I have had experience testifying in such matters. In paternity suits, for example, where the blood types can shed light on the father of an illegitimate child. And I assure you, Comrade Sheranchuk, if your wife had brought a paternity suit against you when the boy was born, you would not have lost."

  The funeral oration was long enough to be decent, short enough so that the Second Secretary would not find he had made some embarrassingly overenthusiastic remark at a later date: ten minutes. Then the casket was lowered into the ground. The mourners took turns, one by one, in tossing clods of earth in after it. Then, of course, it was time for them all to go away and leave the professional gravediggers, leaning impatiendy on their shovels just out of earshot, to get on with their work.

  But no one wanted to leave until the two men from the Central Committee made a move to go, and they seemed in no hurry. They moved around the small group, shaking each hand, kissing every member of the family, exchanging polite words with all. Did these high Party officials have nothing better to do with their time? Sheranchuk wondered, sick with shame and rage. Of course it was not those two men that he was shouting at silently inside his head, and when they took his hand, he managed to respond to their questions about his health, and to be surprised that they actually seemed to know his name. "But of course, Comrade Sheranchuk," smiled Mishko, the older and more dapper of the two. "We have read your statement, and those of others concerning the accident. There is nothing but praise for your work and your courage!"

  "It is too early to speak of decorations," Milaktiev added warmly, "but if any has earned one, you surely have."

  Sheranchuk succeeded in thanking them. He stared after them in surprise until, fully half an hour after the service was over, Minister Mishko glanced at his watch and said, quite clearly enough to be heard, "Oh, but it is nearly three o'clock, and I have an appointment at Gosplan at three-thirty."

  "And I must get back to my office," Milaktiev added. "Can we give any of you a lift? No? Then let me drop you at your office, Fedor Vassilievitch. And let us hope we see you all again, in happier times!"

  Happier times had not yet arrived when Milaktiev arrived at his office. He nodded civilly to his secretary, pushed open the door of his private room, and paused, looking at his desk.

  There was an envelope on it, a large square one, marked in a bold hand: For the personal attention of A. P. Milaktiev ONLY.

  Milaktiev left the door open as he moved to the desk and ripped the envelope open, struggling with the triple seals. Then he glanced at the document inside. It had no letter attached. There was no name on it, or on the envelope. There was nothing to say where it had come from, but what it said was very clear. It proposed what it was pleased to call "A Movement for Socialist Renewal" and, although it was couched in formal and impassive language, what it said was astonishing. Each phrase and sentence leaped off the paper:

  Our country has reached a limit beyond which lies an insurmountable lag…. The USSR is now on the path to becoming one of the underdeveloped nations.. .

  Economic and political reforms must be combined____

  We require different competing political organizations, with control by the people in free elections…. We must

  comply with such fundamental constitutional principles of the socialist state as the freedom of speech, press, and assembly, of personal immunity, private correspondence and telephone calls, and the freedom to join organizations. ..

  It was all there, every word.

  Milaktiev read it all through, all seventeen closely typed pages, with his secretary glancing curiously at him through the open door. Then he raised his voice in a roar: "Margetta Ivanovna! What is this thing? Where did it come from?"

  She hurried nervously to his side. "It was delivered by hand. A soldier; he said it was urgent, and for your eyes only—"

  "And did you get his name? Did you make him show identification? What if it had been a bomb, or something infected with a deadly disease? Would you still have let any criminal walk in here and leave anything he chose on my desk while I am absent and you are charged with protecting it?"

  He had her weeping in the next minute, not so much from the violence of his attack but because it was such a terrible contrast with his usual gentle demeanor. Well, he thought, he could make it up to her another time. But it was important that she should be aware that he was wholly astonished, even indignant, that this revolutionary document should have appeared from nowhere… for when people began trying to find out who had sent it, the last place they would look was among those who had received a copy from a stranger.

  Chapter 34

  Monday, May 19

  Around the ruin of Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, concrete shields are being poured. The demon still rages inside, but the worst of the radiation from the core itself is contained. Cranes with lead-shielded cabs lift slabs of contaminated debris into trucks with lead-lined drivers' seats to be hauled away. In the other buildings, on the grounds, in the town of Pripyat, the surfaces that have not been paved over or covered with fresh earth have at least been washed down, sprayed, or painted with a latex compound. Even the farms within the thirty-kilometer radius of the evacuation zone have been attended to. The farmers are begging to be let back in to tend their crops, for that area north of Kiev is the bre
adbasket of the USSR. Its winters are milder than Moscow's, and the soil is black or gray, the richest in the world. Moscow grows cabbages and rye. Around Chernobyl they grow wheat and corn, and Private Sergei Konov knows that the Soviet Union needs that food.

  So when he was ordered to accompany one of the white-suited technicians through the grain fields, Konov followed without complaint. The sun was hot. The red-and-white stripes of the Chernobyl exhaust tower were visible on the horizon — at least there was no smoke coming from the plant anymore.

  The assignment in the grain fields was hard work. Harder,

  almost, than plugging drainage sewers with quick-drying cement or shoveling rubble, for Konov carried two oil tanks on his back so he wouldn't have to waste time going back for more, and they were heavy. When the technician's detectors sniffed a patch of radioactivity among the tall stalks, Konov would step up and spray it thoroughly, destroying that square meter of ripening crop so that the rest might grow unharmed— though who was going to eat that grain when it ripened Konov could not guess.

  'At noon the technician insisted on taking a break — his decision, not Konov's — and Konov asked him what would happen to the wheat. The man pulled the gauze mask away from his mouth to answer. "It's all a matter of radiation levels," he said. "After the harvest they'll measure it. If it's above the danger level, they'll just put it in storage until it cools down." He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Konov, but Konov shook his head. It was all very well for the technician to remove his mask if he chose to, but Konov had not forgotten the standing orders.

  And that night, back in the barracks, when he took off the gauze mask over his mouth and nose and handed it to the barracks orderly for testing, he heard faint but ominous wbeepwheepwheep sounds from the snub-nosed radiation detector. "Nothing serious," said the orderly, yawning as he turned off the wand; but there had been nastiness in the dust after all, and Konov was glad he, at least, had kept the mask on.

  Dinner was the usual — thin soup, salt fish, potatoes — but to go along with it there was a rumor: after thirty days the troops were to be relieved, for then the summer intake would provide new Army recruits in plenty.

  "Good," said his friend Miklas, dipping his bread in his tea. "Let the rookies fry their balls."

  Konov ate silendy for a moment. Then he said offhandedly, "I think I would like to stay on here."

  Miklas could not conceal his astonishment. "What are you saying? What is it, Seryozha?" he demanded. "There are no girls here to make you want to stay!"

  "There are no girls back in Mtintsin, either, just pigs," said Konov, calmly folding his second slice of black bread in half to bite into it.

  "The pigs in Mtintsin at least speak Russian. There's not even anything to drink here!"

  "And if you go on drinking what they sell you in Mtintsin you will be blind."

  "It is better to be blind than to have your balls fried," Miklas said seriously. "How do you know you won't be the next one to find a hero's grave?"

  To that Konov had no good answer. As a matter of fact, he had given that prospect a lot of thought. His conclusion was that, for once, the Army orders made a good deal of sense. Therefore Konov meticulously followed the instructions about what he touched and breathed and did. He had never been cleaner. He showered at least six times a day. When off duty he stayed in the old stable with the windows nailed down that was their barracks.

  He washed his clothes — his own uniform, not the coveralls that were issued every time he went outside — every time he wore it. Outside, he never removed cap, mask, or gloves, no matter how sweaty. And every other day he would line up at the medic-point at the end of the barracks to let them draw blood, and every time when the report came back it said that his blood still contained plenty of those little white things that the radiation killed first.

  In three and a half weeks Konov had worked at a dozen different tasks in the cleanup of the Chernobyl explosion. Scariest was to run out onto the roof of the dead power plant itself for lumps of graphite, where you could feel the heat from the sun on one side of you and that other heat still smoldering out of the great graphite and uranium core warming the other. He had done that three times now, but that particular job was over.

  The work was not all scary. Some was simple drudgery, sandbagging the dikes around the plant's cooling pond, diverting the flow of the little streams that led to the Pripyat River, standing guard in the lonely nights at the thirty-kilometer perimeter of the zone, between the hastily erected watchtow-ers, to keep the foolish ones from trying to return to their lost homes.

  What Konov liked best was to be assigned some kind of work in the deserted town of Pripyat. Any kind of work, from spraying liquid rubber on the abandoned cars to shoveling debris into trucks to be hauled away. He had come to think of Pripyat as his town. He knew it as well as he knew the Leninskaya Prospekt by his home in Moscow, from the little children's amusement park (where were those children now? And would anyone ever get into the litde red and white cars of that Ferris wheel again?) to the churned-up earth along the main boulevard, where rosebeds and greensward alike had been bulldozed up and carried away.

  He even liked the long nights of guard duty in the town, carrying his rifle over his shoulder against looters, with the sorrowful baying of abandoned dogs coming from nowhere under the full moon. But whatever the job was, Konov did it all, and never complained, and arose bright and eager the next morning to do more.

  His lieutenant hardly recognized the new Private Sergei Konov anymore.

  The next morning was piss-in-a-bottle day. Before breakfast every soldier in the barracks was lined up to urinate into a specimen jar, one by one. The radiation technician would gingerly sniff at that with his radiation detector; but, so far, none of those wheeping little poison bullets seemed to have got into Konov's body. So, Konov thought, there really was no reason not to stay on if he chose. And he did choose, though he didn't like the idea of sharing the zone with a thousand raw recruits who would not understand what it had been like in the first frightening days after the explosion.

  He wondered soberly what would happen with new officers on the scene. The present crew had become quite easygoing; Senior Lieutenant Osipev had even stopped ordering him to get his hair cut. But new ones from outside might change all that around, and it could be as bad as the training base again.

  Still, he knew he wanted to spend the remaining — what was it, just thirty days? Less than a thousand hours? — of his enlistment right where he was: in the evacuated zone, helping to clean up Chernobyl's deadly mess.

  When Konov had picked up his breakfast that morning and taken it to a corner of the barracks, the lieutenant came over and sat down next to him, lighting a cigarette. "Go on eating, Konov," he ordered. "This is not official. Just a little chat, if you don't mind."

  Konov said, "As you wish, Senior Lieutenant Osipev."

  "I would like to ask you "a question, Konov. Why did you volunteer to stay on here?"

  "To serve the Soviet Union, Senior Lieutenant Osipev."

  "Yes, of course," grunted the lieutenant, "but you have not always been so eager. You have puzzled me for a long time, Konov. You're not an asshole. You have some education, after all. You could have become a lance corporal. You could even have gone to a training battalion to become a sergeant. Why were you such a fuckup?"

  Konov looked at him consideringly and decided to tell the truth. "The fact is, all I wanted was to get out of the Army as fast as possible, Senior Lieutenant Osipev."

  "Um," said the lieutenant, who had expected no better answer. "But actually, Konov, being in the Army is not altogether bad. As a private, of course, it is one thing. But you could consider applying for one of the service academies — even the Frunze, which is where I myself trained. As an officer the life is entirely different."

  "I am grateful for the lieutenant's consideration," Konov said politely, finishing the dark bread and porridge, and saving the one slice of white to savor
with his tea.

  "The Soviet Union needs good officers, Konov," the lieutenant pointed out. "The Great Patriotic War was not the last that will ever happen, you know." Konov nodded courteously, and the lieutenant went on. "Our country was in great danger then. Great battles were fought in this area. Hider's Germans, in 1941, came through right here, and these marshes of the Pripyat were our best defense."

  "But still they broke through?" Konov offered.

  "Not through the marshes. Tanks could not do that, then. There was heavy fighting in Chernigov, a hundred kilometers east of us, and around Kiev, down to the south. It was a bad time, Konov, but where did the Fascists get to in the end? They got as far as Stalingrad, and there they learned how to retreat. Why? Because of the brave men and officers of the Soviet Army. You could be one of them. No," he said, getting up, "don't give me an answer now. I only want you to think about it."

  When the lieutenant was gone Miklas came over from his own bunk. "What'd he want?" he demanded.

  "To invite me to tea at the officers' club, of course," said

  Konov. "What did you think? Now let's get to work. We're going back to Pripyat today."

  When the armored car had let them out by the empty radio factory, Konov ordered, "Hand it over."

  Miklas made a sarcastic show of reaching into his white coveralls and taking out the sack of leftover food Konov had reclaimed from the kitchen garbage. "Your dinner, your honor," he said obsequiously. "May your honor dine well."

  Konov disregarded him. He took out his own sack, heavy with crusts of moldy bread and the pork bones from the officers' evening meal and looked about for a likely place to leave them for Pripyat's abandoned pets. "They're all going to die anyway, you know," Miklas offered.

  "Sooner or later so are we," Konov said cheerfully. "I will put it off a litde longer for the dogs if I can."