Frederik Pohl - Chernobyl

It was hard work. Konov was sweating at once inside his coverall and hood, but he was meticulous. He sought out and poked his long-handled spray into every corner of the garden plots (dead tomato vines and grape) and floral plantings (wilted stalks with buds that would never blossom through their thick coating of oil).

Looked at in one way, what Konov was doing was destruction. Where he saw green life, he killed it with his spray. Where a missed corner of black earth showed through the greasy film, he covered it at once with deadly oil. He didn't look at it in that way. He was wielding the surgeon's knife, he reasoned. He killed here to prevent a worse death somewhere else, and so he was painstaking at poking his spray behind dead shrubs, under wooden steps, into every corner that might have been overlooked.

It took him an hour or more to finish the grounds around a single building, and there were half a hundred high-rise apartments in Pripyat, not to count the parks and school yards and open squares and offices and stores. No matter. Not one centimeter was going to get by Sergei Konov. Nor did he neglect his collateral duties. All the time he was spraying he was alert for the sounds or sights of unauthorized others in the town.

There were, of course, some who had a right to be there, for he and his partner were not alone. Two other teams were spraying in other areas, and there were the big orange trucks that rumbled through now and then to water down the roadways one more time. But when he turned a corner of a building and saw a smaller truck standing there with its motor running and its back flaps up and no one in sight, he had one sudden thought: Looters.

He had to investigate. He shrugged the tank off his shoulders and set it down, and cautiously approached the truck. It was full of things! Things taken from the empty apartments! So perhaps there really were looters at work, because Konov could see radio sets and tape machines stacked inside the truck.

Yet each one was tagged with the number of the apartment it had come from, and surely looters would not care about such a thing. And just inside the tailgate were things that a looter would hardly bother with: books, magazines, papers, also all carefully tagged: 115 Victory Drive, Flat 22; 112 Marx Prospekt, Flat 18.

Konov's curiosity made him pick some of the printed materials up. Some of the papers were bound into volumes of their own, with blue cardboard covers on which someone had typed a title and a name. They were not real books, with illustrations on the jacket and printed pages. They were mimeographed, some of them hardly legible, carefully stitched together with cotton thread. When he read a few of the titles they were quite unfamiliar-authors with names like Vladimir Voinovich (who was Vladimir Voinovich? Konov often read books, but he had never heard of this author before), and Oksana Mechko (Mechko? another puzzle) and-what was this?-oh, Boris Pasternak, Andrei Amalryk-of course! All this was samizdat! Konov had seen samizdat before, but never so much, or so carefully collected.

It was not all samizdat, however. There were separate piles of brighdy colored magazines, all foreign. These were not tagged at all but simply stacked in heaps, and when Konov got a look at the covers his eyes popped… though not as much as they did when he turned the pages and saw-women! Beautiful women! Naked women! And not merely naked, but displaying all of their most private of parts in brazenly alluring ways!

Konov had never seen such pictures. He had never dreamed they existed-and here were twelve or fourteen magazines, all filled with them! True, the writing was in English and German and what looked to Konov like Italian, and incomprehensible therefore; but who needed writing to say what these photographs represented?

A harsh voice from behind him snarled: "And what do you think you're doing, pig's scum?"

Konov turned guiltily to confront two men, gloved hands filled with more papers and books. Their insignia was hidden by the white coveralls, but he didn't need to see their flashes to know what branch of service they represented. "I am on duty here," he said doggedly. "Are you on official business?"

"We are always on official business," the other one said, his voice light and pleasant. The eyes behind the gauze mask, however, were bleak. "We were gathering evidence. What, do you want to take one of these filthy magazines? Why not?" And he took one from the top of the stack in his arms.

"Not that one," growled the other man, pointing to the magazine with the English title Hustler.

"Then this one. And this. And take them away quickly, little soldier, because we are very busy."

Konov did. It was always better to do what the organs wanted you to do. And then, for half an hour, he sat just inside the doorway of one of the tall apartment buildings, so that he could see outside, carefully turning over every page. He could feel himself harden as he turned back to gaze again at one of his favorites, this one of the little blonde in her underwear, standing with her back turned and her head cocked coyly toward him, one thumb beginning to lower the panties; or this other of the slim, almost boyish brunette, lying on her back and looking impassively at him through her spread knees.

"And what have you stolen now?" asked his partner, Miklas, coming up to the door.

Konov jumped. Then he handed one of the magazines to Miklas and watched the man's eyes pop as he leafed through the pages. "And there are more of them in the truck?" he asked.

"Dozens more. Also samizdat, all kinds."

"Konov," said Miklas sorrowfully, "do you know what those magazines are worth? We could get ten rubles each for them."

"We could get arrested as looters, you fool."

"Only if we are foolish enough to be caught. We aren't looters; the GehBehs have done that for us. Also, what do you think they are going to do with that samizdat, but make some poor man's life miserable? It is our duty," Miklas said virtuously, "to protect the interests of the people who were thrown out of their homes without notice. We should do what we can to save them from harm!"

When the GehBehs came back, their arms full of more papers and a shortwave radio, they saw Konov and Miklas at the tailgate of the truck, running the radiation detector over the stacks of papers. "Hey!" shouted one of them. "Assholes! Get away from there at once!"

Miklas turned to them apologetically, running the prod over the magazines. "With all regret, your honors," he said obsequiously, "just listen!" The detector was screaming.

"What is this?" the GehBeh demanded. "Is this material contaminated?"

"All of it, I'm afraid," said Miklas sorrowfully. "Was it near open windows? Perhaps exposed to dust? Radioactivity is so tricky, your honors, one can never tell what is safe and what may be deadly-but simply listen! The count is going right off the scale!"

Cursing, the GehBehs kicked the papers out of the back of the truck and drove away. As soon as they were out of sight, Miklas knocked the bit of radioactive mud off the end of his detector and Konov sprayed it lavishly with the oil. "Now," grinned Miklas, "our only problem is figuring out how to get the magazines back to the barracks."

They could not simply be carried. "Perhaps one or two at a time?" Konov offered. "We can hide them somewhere and just take a couple on each trip, tuck them inside our pants?"

But Miklas's expression had changed. He was idly running the now-clean detector over the magazines. "Not next to my balls, curse it," he groaned, for the instrument was squealing its warning of contamination as loud as ever.

Sunday, May 11

Afghanistan has been called the Vietnam of the USSR. This is not just because it has gone on so long and drained off so many young lives. It resembles the American experience in Vietnam in another way. The Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, for the first time in their lives, are exposed to an easy and cheap supply of narcotics. Drugs had never before been a major Soviet problem. The penalties were too harsh, the surveillance too complete. Small boats did not sneak into Soviet harbors by night or light planes steal across its borders with cargoes of heroin, cocaine, and pot. They would have been sunk, or shot out of the sky. Anyway, the Soviet people, like the Russians of the czarist times before them, took to drunkenness rather than dope as a favorite vice. But Afghanistan is changing all that.