Frederik Pohl - Chernobyl

But Emmaline was shaking her head. "Another time, okay? I've got to get to work."

By eleven o'clock Emmaline had her desk clean, her telegrams dispatched, her day's program confirmed, and a car and driver ordered for the Rossiya Hotel at one. Warner Borden looked in. "Stonewall," he reported. "They thanked us for our kind interest but did not care to accept any offers of aid. What do they need the Embassy for, anyway, when they've got Armand Hammer's Occidental Oil?"

"Have you talked to the doctors they sent over?"

"Nobody has. They've been kept busy-I'd really love to get a word with one of them, just to find out how the Russians are doing with their radiation medicine. But even the Occidental Oil office hasn't seen them; it was all handled directly between Armand Hammer and, I guess, Gorbachev himself. The thing is," he said, sliding into the chair next to her desk, "I was wondering if you had any information on this man Smin."

"Who's Smin?"

"He's one of the patients in the radiation hospital, in bad shape; they say he was one of the biggies at the Chernobyl plant. Only I can't get a handle on him. Take a look at these."

He dropped a couple of photographs on Emmaline's desk. Three had been copied from newspapers and were very poor; the fourth showed several men at the Moscow airport, welcoming the IAEA man from Vienna, Blix. "We think Smin's one of these," he said.

"So? How would I know?"

"Maybe the same way you tipped us off on Chernobyl," said Borden. "Your credit's sky-high right now, you know. You were the first one to point out that the station in the Ukraine might be where the stuff came from, when we were all looking toward the Baltic. If your sources could help out here-"

"I'll see what I can do," Emmaline said. The truth, however, was that she didn't know what she could do, and didn't know if she wanted to ask her "sources"-there was really only one source, sitting concentratedly over her copy of Trud at her desk-to involve herself further. Had there been any risk to getting that copy of Literaturna Ukraina for her? For that matter, was it really Rima who had put it there? Rima had never said… the other side of that coin, though, was that Emmaline had never come right out and asked her.

Emmaline sighed and got ready to leave for her one o'clock appointment. She went as far as she was willing to go. That is, as she left she stopped at the translator's desk. "I'm off to meet Pembroke Williamson," she said. And, "Oh, by the way, there are some pictures on my desk you might want to look at."

Emmaline walked over to the Metro and took the train to Marksiya, one of the complex of underground stations at the heart of Moscow. Why did Borden want to know about Smin?" If the man was in the hospital he ought to be left alone. As she listened to the train conductor announce their arrival at her destination, she wished that not only Smin could be left alone, but maybe everyone in the Soviet Union could be left alone with this terrible and strictly internal disaster. They deserved a chance to try to heal themselves, didn't they?

But it was not merely an internal disaster anymore. Not with the cloud of radioactive gases wandering over half of Europe.

The quickest way to her meeting with the novelist at the Rossiya Hotel was to take the bus that circled around Red Square, but her watch told her she was early. On impulse, she walked through the crowded GUM department store and out onto Red Square, her heels catching in the cobblestones, eavesdropping on the Soviet tourists strolling by.

It was as normal as any May morning in Moscow ever had been. If Chernobyl was on anyone's mind, they were not discussing it where Emmaline could hear. A father with two young girls at his side was pointing at the spot over the Lenin Mausoleum where the great ones of the Party leadership had stood, just one week earlier, to watch the May Day parade roll through.

A family from one of the Eastern republics was gawking at the Spassky gate as a long, black Zil sedan came roaring out of the walled Kremlin, its curtains drawn and who could know who inside? Three separate queues of schoolchildren waited their turn to enter the candy-topped St. Basil's Cathedral, and two newly married couples were having their pictures taken at the mausoleum. The brides, elegant in white gauze and braided flowers in their hair, were placing their cellophane-wrapped bridal bouquets on the low wall before the tomb, under the expressionless eyes of the uniformed KGB guard. Emmaline tarried to study the bridal couples. In her experience, all brides looked rapturous and all grooms shared the same three-martini unfocused beam of tentative happiness. These two looked a little different. Both the grooms had identical slyly eager looks.

Emmaline understood at once. It was spring for them too. Whatever private encounters that particular he and that particular she had managed for the past six months, they had been severely circumscribed by shared flats, by parents who were always present and, most of all, by snow. There were no romantic trysts in the woods around Moscow in January. Or in April, for that matter.

So there were floods of pent-up hormones begging to be released, and what each of those men was dreaming of was the night ahead, with the parents for once bundled off to stay with relatives or even-oh, what luxury!-perhaps a round-trip ticket on the Red Arrow night train to Leningrad. That meant a whole day to see the great art gallery, the antireligion museum in what used to be St. Isaac's Cathedral, and the cruiser Aurora in front of the Winter Palace, but most of all it meant two whole nights in a private compartment with a lock on the door and no one to knock!

Emmaline was astonished at the quick rush of feeling in her own belly; it had, indeed, been a long winter.

The Rossiya Hotel is advertised as the second largest in the world (the first largest is also in the Soviet Union), but Emmaline had learned her way around it by now. She flashed her card, unnecessarily, to the factotum at the door and headed for the elevators.

The novelist's name was Pembroke Williamson, and he wasn't in his hotel room. Tipped off by the ever-vigilant concierge, Emmaline walked down to the end of the long corridor and, peering over the stair rail, saw him nursing a cup of tea and curiously counting over his change in the hotel's corner buffet.

"You've got American newspapers," she said at once, catching sight of the pages sticking out of his shoulder bag. "May I?"

While Pembroke tried to total up the English ten-penny pieces, the German marks, and the Swedish kroner he had been given in change for his American five-dollar bill, Emmaline happily scanned the headlines. Their little story had taken over the front pages; Chernobyl was in every paper. And what headlines! The New York Post had the craziest-

mass grave15,000 reported buried in nuke disposal site-but the UPI stories claimed at least 2,000 dead, and nearly every paper discounted the Soviet numbers.

"So what's the truth?" Pembroke asked. "Who's lying?"

"Maybe everybody," said Emmaline, wistfully trying to get a quick look at Doonesbury and Andy Capp. "The Russians still say that there are two dead; they were killed in the explosion, and that's all. Of course, they admit there are a couple of hundred in the hospital here in Moscow, and God knows how many others in other places."

"Do you believe that?"

She said primly, "I work for the State Department. Mr. Schultz said he'd bet ten dollars the Soviets are lying."

"How about one pound ten in sterling and about another two dollars in odds and ends?" Pembroke grinned.

"That's what the Secretary of State wants to bet. I don't bet, personally. Pembroke? You know what it's like here; we don't get much hard information, and what we do get is mostly classified. I was hoping you could tell me what happened."