Chernobyl

by Frederik Pohl

  "And you could try it again," Pembroke grinned. "Especially in your restaurants. Is it my turn to bring up a small thing? Then let it be this: why do the doormen in every halfway decent restaurant in Moscow work so hard to keep customers out?"

  "A good question," Stark applauded. "I have my own answer, but first let's defer to Mr. Mishko." He rapidly translated the question and relayed Mishko's answer. "Mr. Mishko suggests it is mostly because these jobs are given to old people, and old people of any country are likely to be crotchety. I have a different theory. I think it is because of the rule of 'eternal vigilance.' Every Soviet child is educated to be on guard at every moment against enemies of the state — shirkers, black marketeers, drunkards. Oh, and worse than that, of course, but your average ten-year-old child does not encounter many traitors or CIA agents in his playground. To be sure, many of these children themselves grow up to be drunkards and black marketeers. But they never forget 'eternal vigilance.' Then they achieve a position of some authority — doorman in a restaurant, ticket taker at a theater, conductor on a trolleybus. They guard their portals! And they do it ever vigilantly. No trespassers! When in doubt, say no, because to be too vigilant is only an excess of zeal, but not to be vigilant enough threatens the state — so each one is as consecrated as an agent of the KGB itself!"

  He was grinning as he elaborated his thesis, and Pembroke and Emmaline returned his smile. But as Stark translated for Mishko's benefit, his own smile faltered before the expression on the face of the man from the Central Committee. There was a rapid interchange which Emmaline could not follow. Then Stark said, with just a touch of strain in his voice, "Our honored guest has rebuked me. He says that I speak of the KGB as Americans do in their spy novels, whereas in fact the organs of the state are, in a sense, the elements which lead us to a more complete democracy."

  "Oh, reallycried Emmaline, unable to help herself.

  "Yes, really," Stark said firmly. "Mr. Mishko is quite correct. You have the opinion, I am sure, that the Soviet Union has become more 'liberal,' as you would say, in the past ten years or so. And who brought this about? First Andropov, himself a former head of the KGB. Now Gorbachev, Andropov's proteg6. You are quite mistaken if you think the KGB are all cold warriors, like your own spies and operatives. They—"

  He hesitated, then shrugged, smiling again. He took the botde out of the freezer again, with four new icy glasses. As he poured, he said, "And so we see how quickly we move from small things to big ones!"

  The big things got quickly bigger. Emmaline knew what was coming, and yet was surprised when old Mr. Mishko moved at once to Star Wars. "Since it is my turn, I ask why America is more interested in building new weapons in space than in nuclear disarmament?"

  Pembroke turned his empty glass around in his hand. "Does Mr. Mishko think Star Wars will work?" he asked.

  The answer came back quickly: "As a 'nuclear umbrella' to protect that pretty little girl we see on American television, no. Of course not. Our scientists say such a total defensive shield is quite impossible, and our scientists are quite intelligent. For that matter, most of your own scientists say the same."

  "Then why do you oppose it?"

  "Because, first, if it worked even partially, it would be an excellent adjunct to a first strike, made without warning — and your country has always refused to abjure any first use of nuclear weapons. Second, in the course of working on it, you will come up with some very troubling new weapons. These

  X-ray lasers with which you propose to destroy our missiles in flight, for example. If they can shoot down a thousand missiles in five minutes, then surely they could, for example, set fire to all of our cities. Is that an effective way to wage a war? Ask the people of Dresden or Tokyo! But," Stark went on, raising a hand as Pembroke was about to speak, "Mr. Mishko asks me to point out that he has answered your questions, but you have not answered his. Why?"

  This time Pembroke didn't hesitate. "Americans are afraid of you," he said. "They're afraid that if there's a treaty you'll cheat."

  Emmaline's nerves jumped. She had not expected so explicit a word as "cheat." But when Stark translated, Mishko only said, "Yes, we have been accused of cheating. But is it not your rule that even one who is accused is considered innocent until he has been proven guilty?"

  Pembroke said stubbornly, "That works only when you have a judge and a jury — and a sentence passed on a person found guilty. There is no international criminal code."

  "We have a World Court, which has found America guilty of, for example, mining the harbors of Nicaragua."

  Pembroke hesitated. "I'm not in favor of the Contras, and I'm not too crazy about underhanded acts of war. I don't like the CIA much better than the KGB. But that World Court is a joke. It may be biased, as my President claims. It is certainly toothless. It can condemn, but it has no way to punish."

  "Because it has no power. Would you give it the power to punish a country such as your own?"

  "Would you?"

  Mishko took his own turn to think for a moment. "It is not up to me," he said through Stark, "but if it were, I don't think I would. You see, we don't trust Americans, either. You had a treaty that obligated you never to invade the territory of any other American state, but you broke it when you attacked Grenada. You bombed Libya without any declaration of war. Was that any different from Pearl Harbor? You condemn hijacking, but your own Air Force hijacked the civilian plane of a friendly nation over international waters in order to capture the people you blamed for the Achille Lauro—that is defined as piracy—"

  "Now, wait!"

  "A moment, please," said Stark, in the middle of translation. "There was one more thing. Your CIA overthrew the government of Chile, and didn't even have the decency to do it in the open. Now," he said pleasantly, "what was it you wanted to say, Pembroke?"

  Pembroke was scowling. "I was going to say that the Achille Lauro people were terrorists, but I've got a better idea. Let me run through a little list of my own. Your country has not lived up to the Helsinki declaration on human rights. You built a radar at Krasnoyarsk that violates the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Your jolly, sweet KGB operates a gulag archipelago that—"

  But Stark was holding up his hand. "Can I translate that much before you go on, please? I don't want to get it wrong." And when he had finished, and Pembroke was ready to continue with his list, Mishko grinned broadly and leaned forward to gently slap Pembroke's knee.

  Emmaline was astonished to hear Mishko say directly to Pembroke, in slow, thick English: "I speak to you 'Vietnam' and you speak 'Afghanistan.' I speak 'El Salvador,' you speak 'Poland.' I speak 'Bay of Pigs,' you speak 'Hungary.' So for that cause — for cause—" He shrugged and abandoned the attempt at English. He finished in Russian, and Stark translated.

  "Therefore, Mr. Mishko says, we might as well stop hurling epithets at each other and talk seriously of problems. He thought the discussion of Star Wars was quite valuable. Have you a question you would like to put to Mr. Mishko?" And before Pembroke could speak, he went on, caressing his gold medallion as he spoke. The tone of his voice didn't change, but there was something in his expression — a tightening of the jaw, a narrowing of the eyes? — that made Emmaline sit up as Stark spoke. "I remember the other day you were asking about some rumors about a secret document. Miss Branford, too, I think, has asked some questions. Would you like to ask Mr. Mishko to comment on it?"

  Mishko's demeanor changed too. He didn't scowl. He simply listened very attentively, nodding encouragement to continue each time Stark translated a sentence or two of what Pembroke was saying. "What I heard was a rumor, secondhand at that. Of course, I'd rather not say where I heard it." He went on to describe what he had heard, with particular emphasis on the most revolutionary aspects — the ending of censorship, the free elections with even separate political parties.

  When he was finished, he waited while Stark and the man from the Central Committee talked back and forth for a while. Then Stark turned to the Americans. "He
asked what I had answered you when you first brought the subject up," he reported. "I told him that I said, as you remember, that I had no personal knowledge of such a thing and wondered if it might be a fake originating with anti-Party emigre elements in the West."

  "That's what you said to me, all right," Pembroke agreed. "What does Mr. Mishko say?"

  "I'll ask him," said Stark, and reported the result sentence by sentence. "First, Mr. Mishko says that free elections can happen without any change in Soviet laws, and in fact they do. He mentioned what we discussed earlier, Miss Branford, the results of the elections in the filmmakers' union today, where the membership simply rejected the proposed list of officers entirely and elected a whole new opposition slate. So such things do happen in the USSR, though of course they are rare—"

  "I'll say," Pembroke grunted.

  He got a scowl from Stark for that, but then Stark continued. "Mr. Mishko points out that the possibility that an anonymous document is a fake cannot be excluded. Also, persons in high positions have quite adequate means of arguing cases without resort to samizdat. However, the leadership of the Party and the nation does not wear blinders. It is constantly examining all possible alternatives. All of them can be proposed and discussed. Those that have merit are adopted. But the leadership is not a string of paper soldiers. All sides of a question may be argued, and some people propose projects that are rejected. So, even if the document is a forgery, it is possible that some parts of it do in fact represent the views of certain high officials — but, Mr. Mishko says, not a majority" — Stark smiled—"or else it would have been printed in Pravda instead of in samizdat."

  As Pembroke waited with Emmaline for her bus, she said thoughtfully, "Johnny Stark knew I'd been asking questions about that manifesto."

  "Does that prove he's KGB?"

  Emmaline shrugged. What she thought was that it proved two people were KGB — both Stark and Rima, the person she had hinted to about it — but she didn't say that. She only said, "You know, at first I thought it was very indiscreet of him to invite us to talk to this Mr. Mishko — I've absolutely got to look him up, first thing in the morning, and find out who we were talking to! But I don't think Stark's ever indiscreet."

  "So what do you think was happening up there?"

  "God knows! It looked like somebody was trying to score some points off somebody else. About what?" Emmaline shrugged. "Stark was the one who brought up that mysterious seventeen-page document, right?"

  "But he didn't say much about it himself."

  "Maybe he wanted to see what Mishko would say. Maybe they think Mishko's involved in it. They're both pretty big wheels, you know. The KGB can't just haul Mishko in and interrogate him, so maybe Stark was trying to get a rise out of him." She sighed. "Whatever it was, I don't think you and I will ever find out the score."

  "Not even with glasnosO"

  "There will never," Emmaline told him seriously, "be that much glasnost."

  Chapter 40

  Friday, May 23

  Meteorologists who wish to explain the circulation of the Earth's atmosphere sometimes employ an illustration called "Caesar's Last Breath." By an arithmetical coincidence, the average number of molecules of air in a human lung is quite close to the total number of "lungful-equivalents" in the Earth's atmosphere. In the two thousand years since Julius Caesar died of his stab wounds in the Roman forum, there has been plenty of time for mixing, so the molecules of air he exhaled as he perished are now everywhere. Even in your lungs. On average, each time you take a breath, you take in one molecule that Caesar gasped out. This does you no harm. Caesar's last breath contained nothing that can hurt you; but the last huge "breath" from the dying Chernobyl Reactor No. 4 is another matter. It is not as well distributed as Caesar's exhalation. There has not been as much time. Especially in the southern hemisphere, which exchanges air with the north only weakly, through what are called "Hadley cells," only tiny fractions of the Chernobyl gases have yet been circulated. But there was so vastly much more of the gases from Chernobyl that every one of us now has in our lungs a certain number of Chernobyl molecules, and this is not only true for all Americans and Russians and Chinese and French and Italians, but for every African, Australian, and Cambodian, and even for all the elephants in Kenya and

  the Antarctic penguins. We breathe in some of Chernobyl's last breath every day, and will go on doing so all our lives.

  By eight o'clock in the morning of May 23 the new fire at the Chernobyl power plant had been puffing additional poisons into the air for half a dozen hours. Leonid Sheranchuk knew nothing about it. He was thirty kilometers away,'in the little apartment he and his wife had been given in the town of Chernobyl (only two rooms, and where was Boris to sleep? But what luck to get an apartment immediately anyway!) What Sheranchuk was doing was to discuss with his wife whether they wanted to ask Smin's widow if she intended to sell the plot of land where the Smin's dacha was certainly not now going to be built, and if so whether they should hire a car to go out into the countryside to look at it first.

  Then there was the knock on the door and Vladimir Ponomorenko, last living man of the Four Seasons, was standing there, apologetic, worried, insistent.

  Was Comrade Sheranchuk going out to the plant in this emergency? If so could he get a ride with him? What emergency? Oh, hadn't Sheranchuk heard? A fire, a big one, a bad one — started only God knew how, spontaneous combustion or something in Section 24 of the plant, now almost out of control because that was the section nearest the deadly core and flooded with radiation so the firemen couldn't get close to it to put it out. "And, please, Comrade Sheranchuk! I have to get out there right away to help!"

  And, of course, since Simyon Smin's plant was once again horribly, unexpectedly, in trouble, so did Comrade Sheranchuk.

  They found a taxi willing to take them as far as the perimeter checkpoint. They wheedled their way onto an ambulance bringing out a pair of new casualties — firemen again, of course, one knocked senseless by a hose nozzle that got out of control, the other far worse off because his radiation suit had been ripped open when he was breaking through a wall to get at the fire. The medics handled him with caution as they transferred him to another car.

  It was bad, all right. The driver filled them in as they bounced along the road to the plant, sometimes circling off the road to avoid a still-contaminated patch of paving.

  Sheranchuk knew the layout of the place where the fire started. It was Section 24 of the reactor building, several stories above the imprisoned, dying core. It was a nasty place. Everything in that area had been baked hot and dry from the earlier fires; perhaps some charred rubble had worked itself up to ignition temperature. No one could be sure of that. No one had been there to see. That whole section was sealed off with steel doors welded in place, for it was drenched with radiation. "So they broke through the walls," the driver said, fighting his wheel as he jolted over a series of potholes, "but the fire was higher up. I don't know what they're doing now — look, it's still going, because there's the smoke!"

  Smoke there was, black billows of it staining the pretty blue morning sky. Sheranchuk leaned forward, squinting to see what was going on from half a kilometer away.

  "What are those people doing on the roof?" he demanded. But the driver didn't know; they hadn't been there when he left. "That's dangerous!" Sheranchuk muttered, peering at the upper stories of the plant.

  The core was at least partly shielded by walls on all four sides and the bottom — the solid layer of concrete that replaced the water Sheranchuk had helped remove. But there was nothing over the top of the core but what the helicopters and cranes had dumped there, nothing near enough to stop the flood of radiation. Even in their grotesque rubber and lead suits, those people on the roof were taking chances with their lives.

  Then he caught his breath. "The diesel fuel," he said. As the ambulance lurched toward the gateway to the plant he caught a better look at where the firemen were.

  "What?" the driver demande
d, and Ponomorenko looked at him curiously. Sheranchuk just shook his head. The place where the firemen were struggling with something on the roof was only a few meters away from the fuel stores for the standby diesel generators! And if those went up—

  Sheranchuk didn't want to think about what would happen if the fire spread to the diesel oil.

  The men on the roof were dangling long lines over the edge for some reason, and firemen on the ground were setting something up below. Sheranchuk and Ponomorenko were out of the ambulance and running toward the building, when a fire major thrust himself in their way. "Do your mother, get out of here!" he snarled. "You don't even have radiation suits!"

  "But I'm Engineer Sheranchuk. The diesel stores — they should be drained, or you'll have another explosion!"

  The fireman scowled. "Sheranchuk? Yes, all right, I know who you are, but you'll have to go in the bunker. What's this about diesel stores?"

  Sheranchuk explained hurriedly, dodging as firemen ran toward them with a limp hose, toward the lines dangling from the roof. "I know where they are," he said. "Let me go up there! You'll need a truck to drain them into; the pipes should be all right—"

  "Not you," snapped the major. "You've taken too many rads already. Don't worry, we'll find the tanks—"

  "Comrade Major," Ponomorenko said eagerly. "I know where they are."

  The fire major glared at him, then shrugged. "All right, off with you to get a suit, then you can show us. But you, Sheranchuk, it's into the bunker for you, and no arguments. It's your life, man!"

  So while a hundred firemen and volunteers were fighting the blaze in one part of the plant, Leonid Sheranchuk was fuming in a smoke-filled, stinking underground room a hundred meters away. Once the room had been the barracks for the plant's firemen. Now it was the on-site operations headquarters.

  He could not stay there. The thing was, he knew the plant. That whole building was a maze of traps. The corridors were blocked intentionally by steel doors, or simply by heaps of clean-up rubble. And all these firemen were new men, brought in to replace the decimated original crew. Did they know what they were doing? Would Ponomorenko be able to lead them to the diesel tanks? Would they know how to open the drainage valves? Would the pumps work? Had they been able to find a tank truck to drain the fuel into?