Frederik Pohl - Chernobyl

"Uh-huh," said Yakovlev agreeably. "More than nine hundred rubles a month, I suppose."

Kalychenko's eyes bulged as he Was swallowing the new shot. He almost exploded, but managed to gasp, "How many rubles?"

"It is what I would be paying my son to help me drive the tractors, only the boy has decided he would rather be poor in Odessa than rich in Yuzhevin. Does that sort of salary interest you? Yes? Then, dear Bohdan, I think we've had enough of this duck piss. Come to my place and we will drink some good French brandy while I find out if you know enough to take an eighteen-year-old's place."

When Kalychenko's fiancee, Raia, trudged back to the village, she went to the hut Kalychenko shared instead of the one where the three single women had been assigned. She was not surprised that he wasn't there. She wasn't surprised, either, at the fact that none of the repairs had been done, and nothing had been cleaned, although the empty vodka bottles on the table did raise her eyebrows.

Still, she told herself, setting about trying to restore order, you could not expect a man like Bohdan Kalychenko to turn into a housewife.

Raia did not have very many illusions about the man she intended to marry. It was his pale skin and his blue eyes that had made her willing to go to bed with him, not his character. True, his job at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station was socially well above her own status-Raia worked as a conductor on the town buses-but in Pripyat there were plenty of young men with good jobs. Only they didn't look like Bohdan Kalychenko.

She knew quite well that Kalychenko was scared. She saw no reason to mention it to him. There was no way she could reassure him, because he had every reason to be afraid. There was inevitably going to be an enormous investigation of the disaster at Chernobyl, and her fiance had nominated himself for the position of major scapegoat by running away from his post of duty.

Raia didn't excuse him for that. She didn't bother blaming him, either. Certainly it must have been terrifying to be right on the scene when Reactor No. 4 blew itself up. She simply accepted as a fact of life that there was a real chance that when her child was born, its father might be five thousand kilometers away, chopping logs to lay across some Siberian permafrost. This did not make Raia reluctant to marry him. It made her want to get the ceremony performed-soon-right away, in case one night the organs appeared and the next morning he was on his way to Lefortovo Prison. As to the possibility that her son might suffer any effect from radioactivity, after her first horrid vision of a child with no eyes, Raia had simply dismissed any such idea. After all, she was healthy. It could not happen to her…

Raia paused and lighted a cigarette, frowning at the stove that would not give up its coat of grease.

It was necessary, she thought, to make alternative plans in case the worst happened.

Raia's capacity for reasoning was excellent. She perceived that she had four alternatives. First, she could marry Kalychenko and bear his child; that was the best thing, if it could be made to happen. Second, she could bear the child unmarried. A poor second choice; a single woman with a child would never marry, and Raia definitely wanted, if at all possible, to have a home and a husband. Third, she could have an abortion-but that she simply ruled out, not by logic but only because she could never do such a thing.

There remained a fourth possibility.

There was Volya Kokoulin, her fellow bus conductor, who had let her know very clearly that nothing would give him more delight than to steal off into the woods with her and make love.

If Kalychenko were taken away before they married, it would not be hard, Raia thought, to discover where Kokoulin had been evacuated to. She could find him. Having found him, it would be quite easy to sleep with him, to inform him a few weeks later that he had made her pregnant, and to marry him. There might be some unpleasantness about dates when the child was born, but by then what would it matter? And if Kokoulin were as hungry for her flesh as he indicated, he should be easy enough to convince that premature babies ran in her family.

She was smiling to herself, perched on the edge of the table, when Kalychenko came unevenly in the door. She threw her arms around him in real pleasure. There was nothing feigned about it; this was the man she intended to marry-if at all possible-because really, when you came right down to it, all of Kokoulin's virtues did not outweigh the fact that Kalychenko was tall, blue-eyed, and graceful, and Kokoulin was ugly.

When Kalychenko stumbled back to his cottage to find Raia entering just before him, he was glowing all over with his news. "Really, my dear," he said at once, "this Yuzhevin is not such a bad place after all."

His fiancee was flushed and sweaty, with two filled string bags still on the table. Kalychenko peered into them even as he greeted her with a cheerful kiss. "Ah, my darling," he said fondly. "You've had a long walk, I'm afraid. But I have good news! I've been offered a job driving a tractor here! No, no, don't look so disapproving. Wait till you hear what they pay tractor drivers! Why, this head driver, Kolka Yakovlev, he has that big house just outside the village, you know? With fruit trees all around it? And the Volga parked in the backyard? Sixteen thousand rubles he paid for that car, that's what kind of money a tractor driver earns in Yuzhevin, because everyone with skills runs off to the city!"

"That's very nice," Raia said, gazing out the cottage door with sudden intensity.

"And if you're not too tired tonight, he has invited us to come to his house to watch some American films! He has television tapes of all sorts of things- The Wizard of Oz, and motion pictures with Clark Gable and even Mickey Mouse! Oh," he said apologetically, "but, of course, you're worn out carrying those things. It's my fault. I went to meet the bus, but-"

"I did not come on the bus; I missed it. I came in a car, Bohdan. Two men gave me a ride almost to Yuzhevin."

"Well, that was lucky," he beamed.

"No, Bohdan," she sighed. "It wasn't really lucky, I think. The men didn't say much to me, but I didn't think they were coming quite to the village. Only there is their car, just across the square. Do you know what I think, Bohdan? I think those men came here to interview evacuees like us. I think they are from the organs."

Tuesday, May 6

Within large continents, air generally moves across the surface of the Earth from west to east, with a slight curve toward the poles. For that reason, the weather in Chicago usually comes from somewhere in California, and Moscow gets a large part of its weather from Spain or France. At any particular place or time, however, the winds can be quite fickle. If the Soviet air masses had been moving in the prevailing direction in April and May of 1986, the gases from the Chernobyl explosion would have been carried out over Siberia and the Pacific. They weren't. First they moved north. Then east. Then everywhere.

The first stops for the wandering witches' brew from Chernobyl were Poland and eastern Scandinavia. The invisible cloud was greeted with confusion and panic. In Poland, the official press was reassuring. The underground press, which was what the Polish people read to find out what is going on, was not. So Polish pharmacies were sold out of potassium iodide overnight, for the scariest ingredient in the cloud was its radioactive iodine-131. The trouble with the radioactive iodine was that every human being has a thyroid gland, and every thyroid gland has an insatiable appetite for iodine. If the iodine happens to be the radioactive isotope, the gland swallows it anyway. There the iodine stays, ceaselessly bombarding the victim from within with its radiation. Cancer of the thyroid is one of the commonest consequences of exposure to radioactive leaks.