Frederik Pohl - Chernobyl

Before long the winds took Chernobyl's gases south and east, to blanket most of the European continent, but by then iodine-131 was no longer the greatest fear. Radio-iodine has at least one virtue. It is short-lived. In only eight days half of it decays into something else. Two other isotopes were by then more worrisome, and they were xenon-133, a gas, and cesium-137, normally a solid. (But, like the iodine, volatile enough so that large amounts went up with Chernobyl's smoke and remained in its cloud as finely divided particles.) The xenon, being a gas, is particularly troublesome. Rain won't wash it out of the air; it is there to be breathed until it, too, decays. The cesium is even worse. It takes thirty years for half of it to decay. When it finally falls to the ground, it remains in the soil and water for a long, long time.

Of course, even after the thirty years of xenon's half-life have passed, not all of it will be gone. Half will still be there; that's what "half-life" means. If one were to follow the history of one small patch of someone's backyard onto which one million atoms of radioactive cesium from Chernobyl had fallen, by the year 2016 five hundred thousand atoms would still be there. There would still be over sixty thousand radioactive atoms of the stuff by the beginning of the twenty-second century. Sooner or later, of course, it would all be gone from that little patch, and the last of those million atoms would have turned into something else. That should happen somewhere around six centuries from now.

When the little particles of radioactive cesium finally settle out from the sky, they cling to whatever they land on. Some of them have landed on farms of lettuce and spinach (which people eat), or on grassy pastures (which cows eat, and turn into cesium-bearing milk for people).

So all over Europe governments ordered, or people simply decided on their own, that fresh milk and leafy vegetables should be removed from the daily diet. That was nasty for parents of small children. It was even worse for farmers. Exports of any of those things from Eastern Europe were refused at the borders. When the cloud reached as far south as Italy, the authorities banned the sale of even locally grown leafy vegetables and Italian farmers, broken-hearted, saw their crops dumped into fields to rot.

Tuesday, May 6

Moscow's Hospital No. 6 takes up most of a large city block. The hospital is not entirely devoted to patients who suffer from radiation sickness. If that were so it would be nearly empty nearly all the time; Chernobyls are rare. But when a Chernobyl happens, Hospital No. 6 is ready, for it is there that the USSR has concentrated the best doctors specializing in that ailment. It is a very good hospital. The wing devoted to radiation disease is built to an old-fashioned plan, with high ceilings and large rooms, and in this warm May the sun floods in. The wing has a total of 299 patients flown in from the Chernobyl explosion. These are the worst cases, the ones who have taken the most radiation. They are getting the best care possible, but for many of them it is not enough.

When Leonid Sheranchuk got there, however, he was protesting that it was more care than he needed, and more than he really wanted by far. The admitting doctors paid his arguments no attention. Since he was there, he would stay until released; but they did allow him one boon. Most of the patients were in private rooms, but they granted his plea to share the room of Deputy Director Leonid Smin, and that kindness made him stop protesting.

Sheranchuk was not at all sure, however, that it was a kindness to Smin. The Deputy Director had certainly wel-corned his company. But the Deputy Director had been fading rapidly ever since then. On the first day Smin had been alert, if very sick; he had even greeted his Comrade Plumber and joked about his own internal plumbing. But now, as Sheranchuk could hear, Smin's internal plumbing was giving him trouble again. After the bone marrow, the next targets that radiation destroyed were the soft tissues of the mouth and the intestinal tract, and one of the most unpleasant effects of an overdose was the terrible bloody diarrhea that resulted.

When the nurse came out, carrying the covered bedpan with respect because what came out of Smin's body was not only unpleasant but contaminated with radioactivity, Sheranchuk asked, "How is he?"

She said, "I think he will sleep for a while. How about yourself? How are you feeling?"

"I am feeling quite well," said Sheranchuk automatically. It was almost true, not counting the aches and twinges where needles had been stuck into him. He was even thinking of getting up for a visit to some of the other patients, although he felt, as always, a bit fatigued.

She nodded, not even listening-after all, she knew his condition better than he did. "Do you need anything?"

"Only to get out of here." He grinned. "Preferably alive."

"You have a very good chance," she said strongly. "And in any case, you have a new doctor. Four or five of them, if you count the Americans, but one doctor in particular I am sure you will be glad to see."

"And who is that?" asked Sheranchuk, but she only smiled and left him.

Sheranchuk picked up a magazine, shifting uncomfortably in his bed. A voice from behind the curtain said softly, "She did not tell you the truth, you know."

"Deputy Director Smin?" Sheranchuk cried. "But I thought you were asleep."

"Exactly, yes. You thought that because that nurse told you I would be, but, as you see, I am not."

"Let me pull the curtain back," said Sheranchuk eagerly, swinging his legs over the side of the bed.

"No, please! Don't exert yourself. I am not at my most handsome just now, as you may suppose, and I prefer not to exhibit my wretchedness. We can talk perfecdy well this way."

"Of course," said Sheranchuk.

There was a silence for a moment. Then Smin's Voice said gravely, "I am told you behaved with great courage, Comrade Plumber."

Sheranchuk flushed. "They needed to get concrete under the reactor. Someone had to do it. I hope only that they have succeeded."

"At least it is well begun," Smin said, and paused to cough for a moment. Then he said, "I spoke to the plant on the telephone last night. It is going well. They decided they needed to drill a tunnel under the core to get the concrete in, but the mud was too soft. Then they found an engineer from the Leningrad Metro to show them how. They froze the mud with liquid nitrogen, and now the concrete is in place."

"So everything is safe now."

There was a long silence from Smin. "I hope so, Comrade Plumber," he said at last. "Isn't it almost time for the doctors' morning rounds? I think I will sleep a little until then, after all."

When the doctors came through, they kept Smin's curtains closed, and Sheranchuk sat on the edge of his bed, kicking his heels irritably against the metal legs, listening. There was not much to hear. All the resources of Hospital No. 6 were not making Smin better. He was weaker today than he had been when Sheranchuk was admitted. As the doctors moved about and the curtains parted a bit, Sheranchuk could see how bad the old man was. His skin looked like-like-like a leper's, Sheranchuk decided, though he had never seen a leper. It was blotchy. Under the dressings were sores that ran. The part of his chest that was not covered with the great old burn scar now was dotted with the little pink blossoms of burst blood vessels the doctors called "petechiae." Reminded, Sheranchuk examined his own chest and arms, but there were none of the things there.

He really was not, he told himself again, sick enough to be in this place.

When it was Sheranchuk's own turn, the doctors were more relaxed. It was only, "Open your mouth, please" and "Please, if you will just remove your pajama bottoms"-so they could poke around his balls-and then they peered at his charts for just a moment.