Frederik Pohl - Chernobyl

Milaktiev left the door open as he moved to the desk and ripped the envelope open, struggling with the triple seals. Then he glanced at the document inside. It had no letter attached. There was no name on it, or on the envelope. There was nothing to say where it had come from, but what it said was very clear. It proposed what it was pleased to call "A Movement for Socialist Renewal" and, although it was couched in formal and impassive language, what it said was astonishing. Each phrase and sentence leaped off the paper:

Our country has reached a limit beyond which lies an insurmountable lag… The USSR is now on the path to becoming one of the underdeveloped nations…

Economic and political reforms must be combined____________________

We require different competing political organizations, with control by the people in free elections… We must comply with such fundamental constitutional principles of the socialist state as the freedom of speech, press, and assembly, of personal immunity, private correspondence and telephone calls, and the freedom to join organizations.…

It was all there, every word.

Milaktiev read it all through, all seventeen closely typed pages, with his secretary glancing curiously at him through the open door. Then he raised his voice in a roar: "Margetta Ivanovna! What is this thing? Where did it come from?"

She hurried nervously to his side. "It was delivered by hand. A soldier; he said it was urgent, and for your eyes only-"

"And did you get his name? Did you make him show identification? What if it had been a bomb, or something infected with a deadly disease? Would you still have let any criminal walk in here and leave anything he chose on my desk while I am absent and you are charged with protecting it?"

He had her weeping in the next minute, not so much from the violence of his attack but because it was such a terrible contrast with his usual gentle demeanor. Well, he thought, he could make it up to her another time. But it was important that she should be aware that he was wholly astonished, even indignant, that this revolutionary document should have appeared from nowhere… for when people began trying to find out who had sent it, the last place they would look was among those who had received a copy from a stranger.

Monday, May 19

Around the ruin of Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, concrete shields are being poured. The demon still rages inside, but the worst of the radiation from the core itself is contained. Cranes with lead-shielded cabs lift slabs of contaminated debris into trucks with lead-lined drivers' seats to be hauled away. In the other buildings, on the grounds, in the town of Pripyat, the surfaces that have not been paved over or covered with fresh earth have at least been washed down, sprayed, or painted with a latex compound. Even the farms within the thirty-kilometer radius of the evacuation zone have been attended to. The farmers are begging to be let back in to tend their crops, for that area north of Kiev is the breadbasket of the USSR. Its winters are milder than Moscow's, and the soil is black or gray, the richest in the world. Moscow grows cabbages and rye. Around Chernobyl they grow wheat and corn, and Private Sergei Konov knows that the Soviet Union needs that food.

So when he was ordered to accompany one of the white-suited technicians through the grain fields, Konov followed without complaint. The sun was hot. The red-and-white stripes of the Chernobyl exhaust tower were visible on the horizon-at least there was no smoke coming from the plant anymore.

The assignment in the grain fields was hard work. Harder, almost, than plugging drainage sewers with quick-drying cement or shoveling rubble, for Konov carried two oil tanks on his back so he wouldn't have to waste time going back for more, and they were heavy. When the technician's detectors sniffed a patch of radioactivity among the tall stalks, Konov would step up and spray it thoroughly, destroying that square meter of ripening crop so that the rest might grow unharmed- though who was going to eat that grain when it ripened Konov could not guess.

'At noon the technician insisted on taking a break-his decision, not Konov's-and Konov asked him what would happen to the wheat. The man pulled the gauze mask away from his mouth to answer. "It's all a matter of radiation levels," he said. "After the harvest they'll measure it. If it's above the danger level, they'll just put it in storage until it cools down." He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Konov, but Konov shook his head. It was all very well for the technician to remove his mask if he chose to, but Konov had not forgotten the standing orders.

And that night, back in the barracks, when he took off the gauze mask over his mouth and nose and handed it to the barracks orderly for testing, he heard faint but ominous wbeepwheepwheep sounds from the snub-nosed radiation detector. "Nothing serious," said the orderly, yawning as he turned off the wand; but there had been nastiness in the dust after all, and Konov was glad he, at least, had kept the mask on.

Dinner was the usual-thin soup, salt fish, potatoes-but to go along with it there was a rumor: after thirty days the troops were to be relieved, for then the summer intake would provide new Army recruits in plenty.

"Good," said his friend Miklas, dipping his bread in his tea. "Let the rookies fry their balls."

Konov ate silendy for a moment. Then he said offhandedly, "I think I would like to stay on here."

Miklas could not conceal his astonishment. "What are you saying? What is it, Seryozha?" he demanded. "There are no girls here to make you want to stay!"

"There are no girls back in Mtintsin, either, just pigs," said Konov, calmly folding his second slice of black bread in half to bite into it.

"The pigs in Mtintsin at least speak Russian. There's not even anything to drink here!"

"And if you go on drinking what they sell you in Mtintsin you will be blind."

"It is better to be blind than to have your balls fried," Miklas said seriously. "How do you know you won't be the next one to find a hero's grave?"

To that Konov had no good answer. As a matter of fact, he had given that prospect a lot of thought. His conclusion was that, for once, the Army orders made a good deal of sense. Therefore Konov meticulously followed the instructions about what he touched and breathed and did. He had never been cleaner. He showered at least six times a day. When off duty he stayed in the old stable with the windows nailed down that was their barracks.

He washed his clothes-his own uniform, not the coveralls that were issued every time he went outside-every time he wore it. Outside, he never removed cap, mask, or gloves, no matter how sweaty. And every other day he would line up at the medic-point at the end of the barracks to let them draw blood, and every time when the report came back it said that his blood still contained plenty of those little white things that the radiation killed first.

In three and a half weeks Konov had worked at a dozen different tasks in the cleanup of the Chernobyl explosion. Scariest was to run out onto the roof of the dead power plant itself for lumps of graphite, where you could feel the heat from the sun on one side of you and that other heat still smoldering out of the great graphite and uranium core warming the other. He had done that three times now, but that particular job was over.

The work was not all scary. Some was simple drudgery, sandbagging the dikes around the plant's cooling pond, diverting the flow of the little streams that led to the Pripyat River, standing guard in the lonely nights at the thirty-kilometer perimeter of the zone, between the hastily erected watchtow-ers, to keep the foolish ones from trying to return to their lost homes.