Frederik Pohl - Chernobyl

"No," said Nikolai loyally. "So it is not your fault. Still-"

Smin waited. "What, then, Kolya?" he asked.

"I should be going for my test, not worrying you with silly things when you aren't feeling very well."

Smin actually laughed-not "feeling very well!" But it hurt him to laugh, and all he said, with great patience, was: "Tell me what you were about to say, Kolya. Fathers and sons should speak honestly to one another."

"Well- Only- The thing is," Nikolai went on, picking up speed, "there are such terrible stories! Concrete that crumbles into sand, walls that fall down!"

"Those are true stories, Kolya. I accepted many substandard products."

"But why, Father?"

Smin sighed. "Do they teach you nothing in the Air Force of what the world is like? Let us pretend, Kolya, that you are the director of a cement factory. Each month you have a plan to fulfill. Perhaps your plan calls for the production of ten thousand tons of cement and, look, it is the twenty-fifth of the month and you have only produced four thousand. But if you don't fulfill your plan, there are no bonuses for the workers, no commendations for you; you may even be reprimanded. Or worse than reprimanded. So what do you do, Kolya? You do what every other factory manager does. You put all your workers on overtime, with orders to storm six thousand tons of cement in five days. Can they do it? Certainly-if they slop the work through any old way; and on the last day of the month you have fulfilled your plan… Of course, those six thousand tons are useless."

"But then you don't have to accept them, Father!"

"Yes, exactly," his father agreed. "One should reject them at once. But then what? Chernobyl did need cement. The cement maker needed not only to complete his plan, but to sell the production. So he says to me, 'You want some good cement, very well, I will give you all you need. But you must also take this other batch.' And I have no choice, Kolya. I take the bad, because if I don't, someone else will, and then he will get the good cement I need desperately. And with steel: the plan for the steel mill calls for another ten thousand tons, let us say; that is easy enough to make, if you make only mild, low-grade steel. But I need better! So to get the steel I need for my reactors I must persuade the steel man to make it, and to do that I must also buy a few thousand tons that are useless. Or I must bribe someone with money or even a car. Or I must send out expediters-expediters! They are gangsters, really. Flatterers. Toadies. Even pimps. And I send these slimy individuals out to wine and dine the suppliers and coax them to send me the things I really need instead of the trash they want to get rid of… and, even so, usually they will send me both."

"That is shameful," his son said harshly. Then he added quickly, "Excuse me, I don't mean you, I mean-"

"Mean me, Kolya," Smin said gently. "I could have done things properly, after all. It is only that I do not think Chernobyl would have been producing four thousand megawatts of electricity for the network if I had."

Nikolai muttered something under his breath. "What was that?" Smin asked sharply.

"Nothing, Father. I must go now for my appointment. I will come back later." And this time he did, carefully but firmly, rest his hand on his father's for a moment before he left; but Smin did not respond. He was too busy wondering if he had been right in what he thought he heard.

To have a few minutes to himself when his head was clear-that was a precious thing for Simyon Smin. He did not waste it. He pulled out the pad on which he had been writing the letter to Mishko and Milaktiev, but after only a line or two his arms wearied and his vision blurred. There was the question, too, of how he was going to get it to the people who had asked for it. Would they come back? Probably yes, he told himself, but would it be while he was still in a position to hand it over? And he would not consider giving it to either his wife or his younger son to pass on; what if they were caught with it?

Kolya, yes. Perhaps. It was at least a possibility; Kolya was a grown man and by now, after eleven months of shooting Moslem tribesmen in Afghanistan, a reasonably tough and resourceful one. But there was the worrisome thing Kolya had said. Would he, after all, be the right one to trust with such a letter?

Which left only Smin's mother.

Smin lay back, slipping the pad under his pillow, thinking about his mother. At this very moment, he knew, she was somewhere in the hospital, doing what Kolya was doing, namely having her breastbone pierced with a great sharp knife to take a sample of marrow. For him. Always for him. Since the first days he could remember, for him. He remembered his mother in the village, when he was in school, when he was a Young Pioneer, when he went off at twenty to do his military duty (an annoyance at most, really; who would dare attack the Soviet Union in 1940, when the only other powerful state in Europe had sworn an unbreakable treaty of non-aggression?)-and had the good sense, or good fortune, to choose to serve in tanks. So when Adolf Hitler broke the unbreakable treaty and shoved his irresistible armies across the border a year later, young Junior Lieutenant Simyon Smin was not poured with two million other green recruits into the first terrible meatgrinder, because he was studying advanced armored tactics four thousand kilometers away.

He shook himself awake, sweating and almost ready to scream aloud; he had been dreaming; flames had been licking over him and his T-34 had been hit.

He took a deep breath to calm himself. Perhaps he was dying now, but at least he had not died then. As so many others had. He had been given forty extra years of life, and so he was owed nothing at all.

He hadn't wasted those years. Out of them he had married two good women, and had two good sons to show for it. It was a pity that it should end badly, but it was still more than he could have hoped for as he tried to claw his way out of the burning tank.

It was then, in the hospital, that his mother had asked him if he would really mind if she were to marry again.

Such a possibility had never occurred to young Simyon Smin. He was aware that his mother was quite a good-looking woman still, though a bit over forty. But to marry ? And to marry so high a Party official? For Vassilievitch Mishko was second only to Nikita Khrushchev in the Party organization of the Ukraine, now just being won back from the Fascists.

He had given his approval at once, however. He hadn't been selfish. He had even been pleased to think of his mother having a life of her own again, without him to raise or a war or a purge to make everyone's life a misery; and it would have happened if F. V. Mishko had not happened to displease J. V. Stalin and wound up shoveling gold ore in Siberia. It did not surprise Smin that his mother had elected to live very quietly for the rest of her life. She had seen what happened when a person became too public.

"Are you awake, then?" a voice called softly from the gap in the curtains.

Smin shook himself. "Of course, Comrade Plumber," he said, working to create another smile. "What's the news outside?"

He was really glad to see Sheranchuk. He tried to listen while Sheranchuk told him his stories-the good news, his wife appearing unexpectedly at the hospital; the bad news, one of the Four Seasons dying, and another in delirium and pain. "I'm surprised you didn't hear him," Sheranchuk said. "He was shouting quite loudly a little while ago, but now he is quieter."

"Yes, yes," Smin said absently.

"And your older son came to see you. That's good news, of course."

"I suppose it is," said Smin, and his tone made Sheranchuk look more closely at him.

"Is something wrong?" he asked worriedly.