Frederik Pohl - Chernobyl

Dressed and ready to go, Emmaline looked out the window of her flat in the foreign ghetto as she finished her grapefruit-the last grapefruit she was going to have, until someone from the Embassy took another courier flight to Helsinki. She was waiting for Warner Borden, the Embassy's Science Attache, to knock on her door. She had not made up her mind what to tell him-whether she would accept a ride to the Embassy in his little red Nissan hotrod or walk it on her own for the sake of the exercise. (At 124 pounds, Emmaline was convinced she'd grown hog-fat over the Russian winter.)

Then, she hadn't really made up her mind about Warner Borden at all. It was spring. It had been a long winter. It had been a lonely one for Emmaline, and along about March even Borden had begun to seem interesting; there were very few unattached American males in Moscow; and no black ones at all, unless you counted the nineteen-year-old Marine guards at the Embassy. Emmaline was not formally engaged to the guy back in Waycross, and she wasn't constitutionally opposed to a little experimenting around. She wasn't even, really, opposed to Warner Borden. But it took a lot of the fun out of fornication when you knew that the telephone headset, a microphone in the wall, and another in the bathroom were very likely to be faithfully transmitting every moan, gasp, grunt, and babble to someone with a headset and a tape recorder a block away. And the ears under the headset were not necessarily always Russian.

So (Emmaline being by nature a fair person) the decision to make about Warner was whether to encourage him or not. It was a decision that needed to be made. She thought about it as she was tidying up the remains of her breakfast, everything tightly wrapped to discourage the bugs, and was still thinking about it as she peered at herself in the bathroom mirror. As she gave her teeth a final brushing, she found three more roaches stirring feebly by the toilet. She went back for the brush and cardboard and, of course, that was just when Warner Borden knocked at her door.

She stood inside the doorway to greet him. "Thanks, anyway," she said, "but I think I'd better walk."

He did not seem disappointed. "You've got a nice day for it. Can I have a cup of coffee anyway?"

It was absolutely foolish to be embarrassed about the roaches, which were everyone's cross to carry. "Help yourself," she said, turning away. As she was capturing the last sick bug, cowering behind the toilet but unable to move fast enough to get away, Borden appeared in the bathroom door, holding his cup, to watch her flush them down.

He said with scientific interest, "You'll be lucky if you don't plug up the pipes with those buggers. What'd you knock them out with?"

"Rima's grandmother's recipe. You mix boric acid into cold mashed potatoes and roll up little balls. Rima says it makes them thirsty but it keeps them from being able to drink. So they die. Sometimes they do, anyway. I guess that's why they're always around the toilet and the sink."

Borden grinned. "Hanging around what they can't get. I do the same thing myself."

Emmaline slammed the toilet lid down to change the subject. "What do you hear from Chernobyl?"

He said sourly, "Still nothing. They've been having press conferences at the Ministry of Nuclear Energy, but only for the commie countries and Ted Turner. So much for glasnost." He glanced at his watch and swallowed the rest of his coffee. "I've got a meeting in half an hour. Maybe I'll find something out then. Anyway, the cloud's still heading east, so I guess we're okay here."

Emmaline made an effort to look at the bright side. "If it did come, it might at least kill the damn roaches."

"Oh, hon, no way. Roaches don't mind radiation. They eat it up. If you went to Chernobyl this morning you'd probably find a bunch of dead people-and about a million happy roaches sitting down to dinner."

"That many?" she asked, dampened.

"The million roaches? Oh, you mean the dead people. Well, how are you supposed to know? The Russians've only admitted to two. Everybody in Washington is saying it's a lot more, maybe hundreds-there was a story in New York that said there were fifteen thousand dead already."

"Which one do you believe, Warner?"

"Hon," he sighed, turning to rinse out his cup before leaving, "when you're in this place as long as I am you'll learn not to believe anybody."

On this pleasant May morning, the air, as Emmaline walked from the foreign compound past the walled Sovkino motion-picture studios to the Kiev railroad station, was just cool enough to be comfortable. The sun was bright. Still, she was glad she'd taken a sweater. There were traces of dirty snow at the bases of the tallest north-facing walls. Some of it had been there since October and was not yet melted away, but the trees were in leaf and green things were popping out of the ground.

Her mind was full of Warner Borden and Chernobyl. It was a little annoying that he hadn't seemed crushed when she refused his ride. Well, she told herself, the man was busy. His first appointment that day was to make another offer of American technical assistance to the Soviet authorities at the Ministry of Nuclear Energy, and his thoughts were obviously more on his appointment than her bod.

All the same, he hadn't even tried to grope her. She was piqued. It was certainly her privilege to make him leave her alone, but she hadn't counted on his giving up so easily.

And then she saw she was approaching the Metro station by the Kiev railroad terminal, and she forgot about Warner Borden, because she remembered what was happening there this day.

As she was heading toward the terminal, staring, she was stopped by a woman in slacks as well cut as her own, with a camera slung around her neck. "Excuse me," the woman said, "but you're an American, aren't you? What's going on?"

Emmaline had already seen the reason for the question. The Kiev railroad station was noisier and more crowded than ever, and the number of police, in uniform or not, at least ten times the normal quota. "They're bringing in children from Kiev," she said. "They've been evacuated."

"Oh, my Lord," breathed the woman, moving aside to get out of the way of a little procession of young evacuees. They seemed to be eight or ten years old, twenty or thirty of them in disciplined lines supervised by a pair of schoolteachery women. The children were obviously overtired, and not as clean as they might have been, but they were orderly and quiet as they walked toward a waiting bus. Each one of them clutched a bag of possessions and most were holding an apple that they had just been given by their surrogate parents. "We were just going to our hotel," the American woman said absently, her face worried. "That's the Hotel Ukraine, you know? And we took the subway to this station, and- Listen, is it safe here? We keep hearing all kinds of stories."

"As far as I know," Emmaline said carefully, "you're perfectly safe here in Moscow. The city shouldn't be affected at all. Your hotel is over that way, across the big boulevard they call Kutozovsky." She pointed, excused herself, and turned to see what was going on for herself. A Reuter's newsman, looking sweaty and harassed, hailed her. "Do you know anything I don't know?" he demanded.

"I don't know that much. Have you been talking to the children?"

"Talk to them! I can't even get near them without some KGB yobbo telling me I'm in the way of the evacuation. You're a dip, love. Walk right in there to the trains and take me along, there's a dear."

"Not a chance," Emmaline said firmly. "Tell me what's happening, though."

"Ah," the man said in disgust, "they've rounded up every little kid in Kiev and shipped them up here. They're supposed to be going to Young Pioneer summer camps outside of Moscow somewhere, but what I really want to know is what it's like in Kiev now and they won't let me talk to any of them. Listen, your Russian's better than mine. See that bunch of kids waiting to get into the W.C.? Let's see if we can just idle by and strike up a chat."