Frederik Pohl - Chernobyl

As they circled around the town of Pripyat and the stricken plant, Tamara looked longingly out of the back of the ambulance. Sheranchuk was there. Doing, Tamara was sure, something doggedly heroic and certainly dangerous. If only she could take him and Boris and run away!

It did not occur to her that this was almost the first time she had been separated from her husband when her principal worry had not been that he might be with another woman.

When they reached the town of Chernobyl they were directed to the bus station.

There Tamara Sheranchuk set up shop, but she had no more than entered the room set aside for the medics than her boss, the chief of surgery from the Pripyat clinic, wrinkled her nose and scowled. "When did you change your clothes last?" she barked. "Go at once. Shower. Eat something. Get cleaned up. Don't come back for one hour."

"But there are so many patients-"

"There are plenty of doctors now, too," said the elder -woman. "Go now."

And indeed when Tamara came back in a clean white gown, her hair still damp but pulled neatly to the back of her head, there were four strange doctors taking their turns with the influx. Two were from Kursk, one from Kiev, the dark, small, Oriental-looking woman all the way from Volgograd.

"But they must have emptied out every hospital in the Soviet Union," said Tamara.

The woman from Volgograd said, "No, the hospitals are all fully staffed. It is people like us who were off duty, now we give up our Sunday to come here to help."

"And are the people in Volgograd so concerned about an explosion in the Ukraine?"

"The people in Volgograd know nothing about an explosion in the Ukraine. Neither did I. I was simply told to report to the airport at nine this morning, Sunday or no, and here I am. What is holding up the line? Send in the next patient!"

Even the patients were easier to deal with here. Triage had already been done-again, by teams of fresh doctors brought in from everywhere, taking their turns at the medicpoint in the Chernobyl town bus station. The seriously injured ones had already been sorted out and sent off to hospitals elsewhere. The ones that were coming through were lightly injured, or not injured at all. For most of them all Tamara had to do was a quick physical check-the eyes, the pulse, the blood pressure, the inside of the mouth; a quick questioning about symptoms and a few cc's of blood drawn for a lab somewhere to make a count. Then she passed them on. Most of them went directly onto buses or trains, for those who were able to travel were counted at once as evacuees.

"Mother," said a voice from the next queue, and when she looked up from her patient she saw that it was a young boy. His face was filthy and he wore an outsized Army blouse, not his own; it took a moment for her to realize that it was her son.

"Boris! Are you all right?"

"I think so. Only they are sending all the Komsomols away now."

"And quite time for it, too! But where are you going?" she demanded.

"Oh, to a summer camp, Mother! A good one! Maybe Artek, down on the Black Sea-and, oh, Mother," he said joyfully, "it isn't going to cost us a kopeck!"

Sunday, April 27

Smoke does not last very long in the air. What makes a column of smoke visible are the tiny particles of soot and other things that it contains, and they are transitory. The larger particles fall fairly quickly to the ground; the others fall more slowly, or are washed out of the air by rain, and in any case, diluted by the air they float in, quite soon, they can no longer be seen. The gases that go with the smoke, however, remain. In the gases from the nuclear accident are many which are invisible but not undetectable. Chemical analysis will spot them readily, but if it took a laboratory to detect them, they would not cause much concern. Unfortunately they announce themselves in a different, and much more alarming, way. That is by the radiation they give off.

The first person to observe anything amiss in the air about him was a Finnish soldier. There was no smoke left by the time the Chernobyl cloud reached the Finnish border, so he saw nothing. His instruments told the story. The soldier's duty was to supervise a radiation-detection station on the border between Finland and the USSR, and what his instruments noticed was a small but unexplained increase in the normal background radiation. The soldier reported it at once to his superiors, of course.

They puzzled worriedly over the information, but, for the time being, they decided to keep it to themselves. There was a political problem they had to take into account. Finland is not part of the Warsaw Pact, but all the same, Finnish leaders have iearned a good deal of discretion. It was possible, they thought, that the radiation came from an unannounced Soviet nuclear bomb test. Disturbing reports about nuclear events in their Soviet neighbor are not broadcast indiscriminately in Finland.

Finland, however, was not the only foreign country to discover that there was something wrong with the air on that otherwise peaceful Sunday in April. It was only the first of them. At two o'clock that afternoon, in the Swedish nuclear power plant at Forsmark, a worker coming off shift went through a radiation scan. The test was pure routine, but the results were not.

The man's shoes were radioactive.

Sweden does not take the discovery of unexplained radioactivity lightly. There is a powerful antinuclear movement among the Swedish people. Everything that happens at an atomic power plant is scrutinized at every step with great care. So this information was reported on the nationwide alert network at once. It caused immediate concern, multiplied when other stations reported that their air, too, was unexpectedly as radioactive as after a nearby bomb test. Or even after a real bomb.

The first thought (after they decided that the Swedish plants themselves were innocent) was a terrifying one. Most of Scandinavia's air comes from the west and south. (It is for that reason that the smoke from England's factories kills Swedish lakes; the British got rid of their pea-soup fogs with huge stacks that export the pollution to Scandinavia.) So their first thought was that the source of the radiation was in the United Kingdom. Was it possible that England had suffered a nuclear attack? But the English radio stations were still prattling away. Alternatively, could the English, the Germans, or the Dutch have-totally unexpectedly-set off a nuclear bomb test? Then meteorologists traced the recent movements of the air masses over Sweden, and informed the nuclear authorities that the patterns were a bit unusual. It was not from the west that the radioactive cloud came; untypically, the most recent incoming air had originated to the south and east.

It had come from the Soviet Union.

The Swedes are as conscious of their Soviet neighbor as the Finns, but less careful about Soviet sensibilities. They saw no reason to keep the matter secret. The news services were informed. The report made instant headlines. In an hour most of the world knew that something big and nuclear had happened in the USSR… almost all of the world, in fact, except for the USSR itself.

Monday, April 28

The Embassy of the United States of America in Moscow is on the ring boulevard, in the section of the boulevard named after the composer Tchaikovsky. The Embassy isn't a single building. It is a collection of several structures, linked together in a ramshackle red-brick compound. At every entrance to the compound a couple of uniformed KGB guards loiter, smoking cigarettes and chatting to each other, until someone approaches: then they interpose themselves in front of the door and request U.S. passports or hotel cards. When the documents are found to be in order, the KGB guards then say, or the more polite ones say, "puzhalsta," which means "please," and perhaps they even touch the visors of their caps as they step out of the way. (There have been times when they have been less polite and a very great deal more energetic, especially when, as has now and then happened, some desperate Soviet citizen has tried to hurl himself past them to sanctuary.)