Frederik Pohl - Chernobyl

"I should be sent away from here," he told them. "I'm taking up space others need more."

"We have plenty of space, Leonid," the head doctor smiled. "We also have plenty of doctors-even some new ones coming from America, soon."

But actually Sheranchuk thought they already had all too many doctors, especially the radiation hematologist, Dr. Akhsmentova. He did not care for the woman, and was not pleased when she stayed on after the other doctors had left. "Just a few more drops of your blood, if you please, Comrade Sheranchuk," she requested. She didn't wait for permission. She had already pushed him back on the bed and seized his arm.

"The nurses are gentler than you," Sheranchuk complained as she stabbed once more into the heart of the bruises left from other needles.

"The nurses have more time. Stop wriggling, please." He glared silently at her. Glancing at his bright steel teeth as she withdrew the needle, she said, "And one other thing. When the American doctors see you, try not to smile. We do not want them to think so poorly of Soviet dentistry."

When she had gone, Smin said from behind the curtains, "I hope the Americans don't see Dr. Akhsmentova at all, because we don't want them to have a poor opinion of Soviet hematologists."

His words were cheerful enough, but his tone so faint that it alarmed Sheranchuk. "Please, Simyon. Don't tire yourself talking."

"I am not tired," Smin protested. "Weak, a little, yes." He stirred fretfully; through the gap in the curtains Sheranchuk could see him trying to adjust the sheet more comfortably over his body. "Although perhaps you are right and I should rest again. I am told that I am to have distinguished visitors today, and I should try to be alert and witty for them."

The GehBehs again! Couldn't they leave the poor man alone? Sheranchuk begged, "Then do it, please. And try to eat your lunch when they bring it." But he heard the anger in his voice, and to account for the bitterness in his tone he added, "But it is true that I should not be here."

"Leonid," Smin said patiently, "you are here because you are a hero. Do you think everyone has forgotten what you did under the reactor? You are a precious person, and everyone wants to make sure you don't die on us because you foolishly did one heroic thing too many. Now go and eat your lunch."

The patients' dining room was half the floor away, and as he walked down the hall toward it, Sheranchuk peered into each room he passed. To have the Deputy Director call him a hero! But everyone in this place was a hero-the firemen, the operators who had stayed steadfast, the doctor who had come back and back to help the victims until he became a victim himself-not least among the heroes was Deputy Director Simyon Smin himself, if it came to that! And almost all of them were far worse off than Leonid Sheranchuk, who had merely been weak enough to faint from exhaustion.

The patients' dining room proved that. There were hardly more than a dozen patients at the tables that could have seated dozens more. It was not that there was any shortage 'of patients to fill the room. It was simply because so many of them were too sick or too weak, or merely too encumbered with pipettes and catheters and tubes of trickling medicines to get up and walk to their meals.

Sheranchuk paused in the doorway to sniff at what was offered. Fish soup at least, he thought approvingly; say what you will, the food was better here than in any other hospital he had ever heard of. He looked toward one of the tables by a window and was surprised to hear his name called.

The man who got up was hard to recognize at first, in the hospital whites, and then Sheranchuk saw that it was Vladimir Ponomorenko, one of the Four Seasons of the football team. "Autumn!" Sheranchuk cried in shock. "Not you, too!"

"Oh, no, Comrade Sheranchuk," the football player said apologetically, and Sheranchuk recognized that he was in the whites of a visitor, not the red-striped pajamas of the patients. "The nurses said it was all right for me to eat here, but I'm only here to see my cousins, in case they.can use my bone marrow."

"Your cousins? Both of them?" Sheranchuk repeated blankly. "But, Autumn, I had no idea. Both Spring and Summer, here in this hospital? Here, let me sit down with you, tell me what's happened to them."

But none of the news was good. The two who were

Vladimir's cousins, the fireman, Vassili, who was called "Summer," and the pipefitter, Arkady, who was called "Spring," had both taken serious amounts of radiation. The prognosis for both of them was not good. The fireman did not merely have radiation sickness. He had been badly burned; one foot, at least, was so destroyed that he was almost sure to lose it, and he was so full of morphine that he had not even recognized Autumn beside his bed. And the pipefitter Arkady-when he went back to turn off the hydrogen flare he paid for it. "But he's in my own section," Sheranchuk said, stricken. "I let him go there! And I didn't even know he was here!"

"He was on another floor," Autumn explained. "They only moved him up here yesterday, when a room became vacant." Sheranchuk winced. He knew how rooms became vacant in this wing of Hospital No. 6. Although he ate all of the good meal-the fish soup, and the shashlik and the cucumber salad and the heavy, dark bread-he hardly tasted any of it. "Volya," he said, "are you finished? Then let's go see Arkady, please. I want to apologize for not coming to him before."

But when they entered the pipefitter's room, Spring would have none of it. "Apologize for not visiting me? But, Comrade Sheranchuk, I at least knew you were here, so it is I who am at fault for not coming to you." And he grinned, because the plastic pouch of blood that was trickling into his arm was evidence for all that he was not in a position to pay social calls.

"When you're feeling better we will visit back and forth like grandmothers," Sheranchuk promised.

But he knew it was not a promise they would be able to keep. The pipefitter was not likely to walk very far. Radiation sickness took different people in different ways, and what it had done to Spring was stop his digestive system. Big, tough, muscular Spring had suddenly become gaunt. He was no longer the flame that licked down the football field. He wasn't the shy, hesitant, preoccupied pipefitter Sheranchuk had worked with all these months, either. As his body grew weak, his spirit had become almost boisterous. He joked and laughed, and winked at the nurses.

"So you like it here," Sheranchuk offered, feeling like a visitor instead of a fellow patient.

"Why not? The food is good, the nurses are pretty, and photographers come every day to take my picture. Next they will want me to autograph the photos for them. I may stay right here in Moscow. The Dynamo team can use a few good players!"

But the nurses would not let them stay very long, and when Sheranchuk walked out with Autumn, the other member of the Ponomorenko family was solicitous. Of Sheranchuk! He said seriously, "You should not be tiring yourself, should you? Let me walk you back to your room."

"I would like to see your other cousin," Sheranchuk said obstinately.

"But he is on the first floor. The stairs-"

"I can manage a flight of stairs," Sheranchuk growled. "In any case, my roommate is having important visitors. It is probably better if I stay away for a while."

Autumn shrugged. "Imagine," Sheranchuk went on, thinking about the disaster. "Both your cousins in the hospital at once. What a terrible thing! But at least your brother Vyacheslav is not here-" He broke off as he saw the way the football player was looking at him. "What is it? Has Winter been injured too?"

Autumn said apologetically, "I thought you knew. My brother was in the Number Four reactor room itself. They say he was the first to die, but they haven't been able to find his body. It's still there, they think."