Frederik Pohl - Chernobyl

"Get on it to where?" Konov demanded, recoiling a step.

"To wherever it goes," said the sergeant, reaching to pluck the dosimeter from Konov's blouse pocket. "But first give me that; we will need it for the patrols that remain on duty here."

"But, Sergeant!" Konov yelped. "I don't know what it says! If it turns out I have already been exposed to too much radiation, how will we know?"

"Of course we will know," said the sergeant, jerking a thumb toward the bus, "because we will get a report from wherever you are going to tell us that you are dead."

The mood in the bus was cheerful enough at first; someone had an accordion, and a few people in the front were singing as though they were teenagers off to their Komsomol camp for the summer. Then the bus rolled out onto the highway. It had to squeeze past a long line of Army vehicles, ambulances and heavy machines rolling toward the plant.

Everyone in the bus craned to look at the convoy. The holiday mood evaporated at once.

The bus was filled with people and their belongings. There was no seat for Konov, only the stairwell by the bus door; but at least he was on what seemed to be an intercity bus, not one of those urban ones where even the stairwell was so cramped no one could sleep in it. Konov did sleep, leaning back, his head almost under the driver's seat.

So, after a while, did most of those on the bus, even Kalychenko. He and his fiancee, too, had been lucky. They had managed to get two seats together. They had even managed to get into the very back of the bus, where there was a little more room on the floor to set down Raia's straw suitcase, her cooking pots, her sack of flour, and already-melting half kilo of lard; a J every ten minutes for the first fifty kilometers she would jerk up straight in her seat with something else she had forgotten; "The wine, Bohdan! The champagne for our wedding, it's still in the kitchen cabinet, they gave me no time to think!"

And Kalychenko would hush her, his arm twitching with pins-and-needles as it rested around her shoulder where she had been leaning against him: "Shush, Raia, it's all right. We're not leaving forever, you know?"

But was that true? Kalychenko knew quite well that "three days" might indeed stretch to forever. The fact that the town had been evacuated so hurriedly and utterly was certain proof that the radiation level had been not only above warning levels but definitely very dangerous indeed. (And how much radiation had each of them received already? Not as much for Kalychenko himself as he would have if he had remained at his post of duty, of course-but that line of thought led him to worries almost worse than future leukemia.)

He performed calculations in his mind, trying to remember the half-lives of all the deadly radionuclides that were likely to be in the smoke from the explosion and fire. Suppose (he thought) the firefighters and the engineers managed (somehow) to put out the flames and control the fission reactions. Suppose they sealed it all off. Very well. There would still remain all the tiny radioactive particles that had already fallen from the sky. The soot from the fire, the morning dew, the air itself had already left invisible films of radioactive cesium, iodine, strontium, and a dozen others. And all of them were still there in Pripyat, emitting radiation. Well, but some of them had short half-lives, he reminded himself. In just a few days half of the iodine would have radiated itself into some other element, a harmless one; in a few months the same would be true of the cesium, the strontium. In just a year or less the radiation would be only a fraction of its current levels…

A year or less! He did not even think of the long-lived transuranics, like plutonium, with a half-life of a quarter of a million years. A year was already an eternity.

And anyway, it all depended on how much there was to begin with. A quarter of a little bit was perhaps no more than the normal background, while a quarter of very much might still be enough to kill. And, worst of all, when could they start the patient clock that would tell them when they might return? For as the bus pulled out of Pripyat, Kalychenko had craned his neck to stare back. He could still see, in the waning light of that April day, the distant, uneven column of smoke. There seemed to be helicopters fluttering around it-sight-seers? Foolish ones, if they were, because if they flew through that plume, they would learn caution very thoroughly, if too late to do them any good.

The plume had been not one whit smaller or less frightening than it had been the day before.

So it could easily be a year before any of them saw Pripyat again. Kalychenko told himself. It could be much longer. It could be never. And what then of his precious stereo from East Germany, his magnetizdat tapes of Okudjava and the Beatles, his hopes for a car, his career? What of Raia's ten thousand forgotten treasures? What of their wedding? When she started up again-"My raincoat from Czechoslovakia! What if it rains where we're going?"-he patted her silently. It would rain, all right. It would rain many, many times before she saw that smart, new, black trench coat again.

When he woke from an uneasy sleep an hour later, it was because Raia was leaning across him. She was trying to help the woman in the seat ahead of them with her wailing baby. The infant had soiled itself, and the mother was trying to make a flat space on the clutter of bundles, bags, and personal possessions of all kinds that were piled in the aisle so she could change it. Under the circumstances, it was a major undertaking. The mother had not failed to bring everything she needed with her, especially including the rolls of gauze bandages that were used for diapers. Unfortunately, the child was in her lap and the bandages were in a bag buried somewhere along the aisle of the bus.

Kalychenko suffered his fiancee to climb over him, changing seats so that she could be more use to the woman ahead. Raia held the crying infant's shoulders securely while the mother dabbed him clean, then grumpily wound a head scarf around the baby boy's bottom.

Kalychenko averted his eyes. He could not avert his nose, and when the woman carefully rolled up the soiled diaper-bandages and deposited them at her feet, he complained to his fiancee, "She should throw them out the window! It's not fair, making us stand all that stink!"

Then it was Raia's turn to shush him. "And then what would she use when we got where we are going? It's all right, Bohdan. Here, let me make it smell better-" From her pock-etbook she pulled out a little flask of cologne and patted it on

Bohdan's cheek. "You don't mind about the scarf, do you?" she added shyly.

"The scarf? You mean you gave that woman my sling?" Kalychenko was suddenly outraged.

"But you don't seem to need it anymore, Bohdan dear. You lifted the bags with both hands. And, think, in just a few months, when we have our own little one-"

"I suppose it is all right," he grumbled. "Let us go back to sleep." Obediently Raia put her head on his shoulder again and presendy closed her eyes.

But for Kalychenko it was not so easy. Raia's last remark had reminded him of another problem of radiation. What about the baby she was carrying? Just how much radiation had Raia absorbed? He didn't know but had an uneasy feeling that pregnant women, or their babies anyway, were especially subject to radiation damage. In any case, he told himself, there was nothing he could do about it right now. But he remained wide awake, trying not to think.

He squirmed carefully in his seat, not wanting to disturb Raia. The woman ahead had politely opened her window a crack to try to dissipate the odor pervading her immediate area, but as a result a blast of damp, cold night air was striking Kalychenko just on the side of his head. His bladder was full. His future was murky. His mood was dour.