Frederik Pohl - Chernobyl

To be sure, the best source of news was the sky to the north, for there an occasional wavering dark pillar of smoke on the horizon told its own story. Vassili would not have believed there could be so much to burn. When a truck at last came from the city and stopped, Vassili was the first to reach its side. "Is the city burning?" one Komsomol demanded, but the people in the truck were only young Pioneers, twelve and thirteen years old, and they knew very little. No, certainly Pripyat itself was not on fire; what an idea! But yes, of course, the fire in the power plant was very severe, no one could say when it might be under control; and none of them had any knowledge at all of Vassili Smin's father. Or of Boris Sheranchuk's; or, indeed, of anything at all except that when their Pioneer troop had been called out to put up these signs, they had been frightened. The signs were placards with the ominous three-cornered radiation symbol in bright red, and a warning to keep out; the Pioneers toddled off in groups of three and four to hammer them into place in a perimeter that would completely surround Chernobyl.

Surround Chernobyl? In a perimeter thirty kilometers away? Vassili could not swallow the thought.

The sun was dropping toward the horizon, but inside his protective smock Vassili was sweating. When it got dark and another truck came up, with bread, tea and vegetable soup, he hung back until the militiamen had gotten theirs. Then he took his tin tray away to a corner under an old tree, and while he ate, he wept, staring at the ugly red glow that hung over the northern horizon.

He stayed at his post until after midnight, when a Soviet Army truck took the exhausted Komsomols back to Pripyat.

After the manner of boys and puppies, Vassili was ready to drop, but even so he had enough energy to be astonished at how peaceful the town was. Could it be possible that they didn't know? Of course, at midnight one did not expect much activity in the streets of Pripyat-but nothing ? When he got out of the elevator and entered the sixteenth-floor apartment he shared with his parents, he thought of eating and dismissed it, thought of bathing and put that aside, too, but stood for a moment at the window that looked out toward the plant.

He could not see the smoke in the darkness, but there were still lights there.

He threw himself onto his bed, thoroughly shaken. His father's power station could not have blown up! It was the very latest triumph of Soviet technology, with all the safety features his father had been proud to display to him as they toured the giant plant. It was too big and too magnificent to explode! And, besides, it was his father's.

Saturday, April 26

At nine o'clock on this Saturday morning the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station is no longer a part of the Ukrainian electrical grid. No energy flows out along the high-tension lines. Reactors 1, 2, and 3 have been tripped to zero output, and the terrible fires-the fires in the buildings, at least-have been declared out long since. It is only the hundreds of tons of graphite in the exposed core of Reactor No. 4 that continue to burn. So far only one edge of the graphite is ablaze, with a blue-white heat as painful to the eyes as looking at the sun itself, and the firemen can do nothing about it. Their hoses still play on the roofs of the nearby buildings, on the smoldering heaps of rubble, on the walls around the wreck of No. 4, but they have not been able to extinguish the graphite. It is simply too hot; the water flashes into instant steam. There is another problem with using the fire hoses. The water that does trickle away from the core and from each bit of radioactive matter, small or large, dissolves radioactive material as it flows; and then it carries that radioactivity with it wherever it happens to go.

On that morning Vassili Smin's father was sitting in a militia car ten meters outside the gate of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, feverishly making notes. They had the windows rolled up tight in the car, and the militia colonel at the wheel was smoking a Bulgarian-tobacco cigarette, the kind that laborers bought for forty kopecks a pack. The car was filled with the heavy smoke. Smin didn't notice. He didn't even hear when, now and then, the militiaman picked up the microphone and issued commands on his radio, or when messages crackled in. Smin had pushed back the white hood of his garment because it made his face and neck itch-he was sweating, and the scar tissue could not sweat-and trying to get everything down while it was all fresh. It was a list of the things that had gone wrong because of deficiencies in training, equipment, and supplies. It was becoming quite a long list:

Drs. not trained radiat. sickness

Fire brigs, not trained radiat. proceds.

No radiat. protect, garments for station

No respirators.

Need equip, for station + near towns, etc.

Need reptd. drills emgcy proceds.

Smin paused, scratching the itchy scars just below his ear and gazing blankly out at the emergency vehicles that were standing around, engines running, while the few active firemen continued to play their cooling hoses on the endangered walls. None of the things he had written, he realized, attacked the real question: what in the name of God had gone wrong? He wondered if he would ever find out. The stories he had pieced together-that one by one the operators had systematically dismanded all the safety systems, just when the reactor was at its touchiest condition-were simply too fantastic. Smin refused to believe that anyone in the Chernobyl plant could have been that arrogantly stupid. It was almost easier to accept the possibility of that word that had not been much heard in the Soviet Union in recent decades: sabotage.

But that, too, was impossible to believe! Yes, certainly, the CIA or the Chinks, they were quite capable of blowing up a power plant simply to inconvenience the Soviets. But there was no way such a thing could have been possible without the concurrence of everyone in the main control room-and to believe that was as preposterous as to believe in simple, crass, spectacularly gross stupidity.

And the cost of it! Not simply the ruble cost, though that was going to be heavy. Not even the cost to the Plan; it was the cost to human beings that weighed on Simyon Smin. So many casualties! Nearly one hundred of the worst already on their way to the airstrip in the town of Chernobyl, where a special plane was going to take them right up to Moscow for treatment. And two dead already! One man never found, but dead all right because he had been last seen in the reactor hall itself, minutes before the blast. The other dying early this morning in the Pripyat hospital, with burns over eighty percent of his body and terrible radiation damage as well… and there would be more-

He bent to the pad on his knee and wrote quickly:

Anti-flash cream?

Spl. burn facil. in hosp.?

"Comrade Smin?"

"Eh?" He looked up at the militiaman, who was replacing the microphone on the dashboard again.

"I said the helicopter from Kiev will be landing one kilometer away, by the river, in five minutes. With the team from the Ministry of Nuclear Energy."

"Oh, of course," said Smin, looking at his watch-nine o'clock! They'd made good time. "Would you mind driving me out to meet them?" And as the militia officer started to say of course, Smin said sharply, '"No, wait. Can you turn on that outside speaker of yours?" He was scowling out the window at the idle firemen in their white hoods and jumpsuits, clustered in knots as they watched their comrades playing water on the walls. "You there!" Smin cried into the microphone, and heard his amplified voice bounced back to him. "Get those men behind shelter! Have you forgotten everything you've just been taught about radiation?" As they turned to gaze at him, he snarled, "Do you want your balls fried?"