Frederik Pohl - Chernobyl

What Konov liked best was to be assigned some kind of work in the deserted town of Pripyat. Any kind of work, from spraying liquid rubber on the abandoned cars to shoveling debris into trucks to be hauled away. He had come to think of Pripyat as his town. He knew it as well as he knew the Leninskaya Prospekt by his home in Moscow, from the little children's amusement park (where were those children now? And would anyone ever get into the litde red and white cars of that Ferris wheel again?) to the churned-up earth along the main boulevard, where rosebeds and greensward alike had been bulldozed up and carried away.

He even liked the long nights of guard duty in the town, carrying his rifle over his shoulder against looters, with the sorrowful baying of abandoned dogs coming from nowhere under the full moon. But whatever the job was, Konov did it all, and never complained, and arose bright and eager the next morning to do more.

His lieutenant hardly recognized the new Private Sergei Konov anymore.

The next morning was piss-in-a-bottle day. Before breakfast every soldier in the barracks was lined up to urinate into a specimen jar, one by one. The radiation technician would gingerly sniff at that with his radiation detector; but, so far, none of those wheeping little poison bullets seemed to have got into Konov's body. So, Konov thought, there really was no reason not to stay on if he chose. And he did choose, though he didn't like the idea of sharing the zone with a thousand raw recruits who would not understand what it had been like in the first frightening days after the explosion.

He wondered soberly what would happen with new officers on the scene. The present crew had become quite easygoing; Senior Lieutenant Osipev had even stopped ordering him to get his hair cut. But new ones from outside might change all that around, and it could be as bad as the training base again.

Still, he knew he wanted to spend the remaining-what was it, just thirty days? Less than a thousand hours?-of his enlistment right where he was: in the evacuated zone, helping to clean up Chernobyl's deadly mess.

When Konov had picked up his breakfast that morning and taken it to a corner of the barracks, the lieutenant came over and sat down next to him, lighting a cigarette. "Go on eating, Konov," he ordered. "This is not official. Just a little chat, if you don't mind."

Konov said, "As you wish, Senior Lieutenant Osipev."

"I would like to ask you "a question, Konov. Why did you volunteer to stay on here?"

"To serve the Soviet Union, Senior Lieutenant Osipev."

"Yes, of course," grunted the lieutenant, "but you have not always been so eager. You have puzzled me for a long time, Konov. You're not an asshole. You have some education, after all. You could have become a lance corporal. You could even have gone to a training battalion to become a sergeant. Why were you such a fuckup?"

Konov looked at him consideringly and decided to tell the truth. "The fact is, all I wanted was to get out of the Army as fast as possible, Senior Lieutenant Osipev."

"Um," said the lieutenant, who had expected no better answer. "But actually, Konov, being in the Army is not altogether bad. As a private, of course, it is one thing. But you could consider applying for one of the service academies-even the Frunze, which is where I myself trained. As an officer the life is entirely different."

"I am grateful for the lieutenant's consideration," Konov said politely, finishing the dark bread and porridge, and saving the one slice of white to savor with his tea.

"The Soviet Union needs good officers, Konov," the lieutenant pointed out. "The Great Patriotic War was not the last that will ever happen, you know." Konov nodded courteously, and the lieutenant went on. "Our country was in great danger then. Great battles were fought in this area. Hider's Germans, in 1941, came through right here, and these marshes of the Pripyat were our best defense."

"But still they broke through?" Konov offered.

"Not through the marshes. Tanks could not do that, then. There was heavy fighting in Chernigov, a hundred kilometers east of us, and around Kiev, down to the south. It was a bad time, Konov, but where did the Fascists get to in the end? They got as far as Stalingrad, and there they learned how to retreat. Why? Because of the brave men and officers of the Soviet Army. You could be one of them. No," he said, getting up, "don't give me an answer now. I only want you to think about it."

When the lieutenant was gone Miklas came over from his own bunk. "What'd he want?" he demanded.

"To invite me to tea at the officers' club, of course," said

Konov. "What did you think? Now let's get to work. We're going back to Pripyat today."

When the armored car had let them out by the empty radio factory, Konov ordered, "Hand it over."

Miklas made a sarcastic show of reaching into his white coveralls and taking out the sack of leftover food Konov had reclaimed from the kitchen garbage. "Your dinner, your honor," he said obsequiously. "May your honor dine well."

Konov disregarded him. He took out his own sack, heavy with crusts of moldy bread and the pork bones from the officers' evening meal and looked about for a likely place to leave them for Pripyat's abandoned pets. "They're all going to die anyway, you know," Miklas offered.

"Sooner or later so are we," Konov said cheerfully. "I will put it off a litde longer for the dogs if I can."

Miklas sighed. "Are you still determined to volunteer to stay here?"

"Why not?"'

"A thousand reasons why not! If you must volunteer, why not to work on one of the new villages they are building for the farmers? At least there would be people there."

"And work fourteen hours a day to dig foundations for their houses? Not me," Konov said, though that was not the real reason he had rejected the idea.

"But at least from that you may come away without two heads," Miklas grumbled.

"For you," Konov said, "another head would be a very good thing. Pick your building."

"Oh, I think the factory needs to be guarded most closely," Miklas said at once.

"Then do it," said Konov, knowing that what Miklas most wanted to guard there was the dozen cases of canned kvass and Coca-Cola the first soldiers had found in the radio factory's canteen. Now they were more than half consumed. He debated warning Miklas against taking off his mask to drink a Coke, but he knew that would be no use. Anyway, he consoled himself, the inside of the factory was fairly clean.

Almost a quarter of Pripyat was fairly clean, in fact-well, nearly fairly clean. On the best of its blocks there were pockets of intractable radiation-soaked into the paving or trapped in the cracks of a building-that would take a demolition crew to remove. You marked those with the warning signs, and you hurried past them. But there were whole buildings where the radiation level was barely above background.

On the surface, though, the town of Pripyat had hardly changed in three weeks. It was like some lifeless geological formation. No doubt it would weather and perhaps erode away, but only over long periods of time. Nothing else would change. Doors that had been left open remained open. The skis and baby carriages and bicycles on the balconies stayed untouched. Cars that had been left behind by their owners, pulled up under a tree with their canvas coverings protecting them against the elements, were still unmoved. The winds and the rains had wrapped some of the washing around the lines so that the garments no longer danced in the breeze; some garments had danced a bit too passionately and torn themselves free, and now lay crumpled in a gutter or draped across a dead rosebush. Konov stopped at a corner, hesitated, then entered the six-story apartment building on the right.