Frederik Pohl - Chernobyl

"Only in the hospital room-and, oh, yes, at the funeral, but only for a moment."

Ivanov was silent for a while. Then he smiled and poured another glass of wine. "And now," he said gaily, "before you hurry off to your good wife, who is certainly eager to see how you are after your first day back on the job, let us talk about your own future. You have taken a good deal of radiation, you know."

"The hospital released me completely," Sheranchuk said defensively.

"But you have surely exceeded the limits for a worker in a nuclear power plant. Usually anyone with twenty-five rads is sent away. You have at least eighty. You can never enter a reactor room again, I'm sorry to say."

"But that's impossible," Sheranchuk cried in alarm. "How am I supposed to do my job?"

"Simply in another place," Ivanov said kindly. "And in a different job. No, no, we're not sending you away. We need you here for some time, to advise the crews as they complete the job of controlling the damage. Then you will go away for a time, if you're willing, but only to take some courses in nuclear safety. The Ministry has ordered this for all senior administrators. And when you come back to Chernobyl, you will be in charge of training and enforcing the new safety standards on all the operating personnel. It's a very serious job, Leonid. Please accept it."

Sheranchuk stared at his glass of wine for a moment. "I could request a transfer to another power plant. Not nuclear."

"Of course you could. I would not prevent you. But we want you very much to stay."

And there really was no choice, for how could he leave Deputy Director Simyon Smin's plant? "All right," Sheranchuk said at last.

"Very good! Wonderful! Let's see, this is Thursday-no sense in your coming in tomorrow-take the long weekend to get acquainted with your good wife again, eh? Have I told you how pleased I am that she is still with you, after all?" And, as Sheranchuk stiffened, Ivanov added, "And, oh, yes, Comrade Sheranchuk, if you should happen to run into either Comrade Mishko or Comrade Milaktiev again, please be sure to let me know."

When, five minutes later, the secretary told Kalychenko he could go in, his reception was far less amiable. There was certainly no wine; there was, at first, not even an indication that Ivanov knew the shift operator was there standing on one foot before him.

Kalychenko waited patiendy enough. He had not expected anything better. The interview with the GehBehs in Yuzhevin had told him what was before him, and Ivanov no more than confirmed it. The circumstances of his running away were permanently on his record. He would be watched carefully. One more misstep would be his last.

Kalychenko stood humble and penitent throughout. He denied nothing. He excused nothing. He acknowledged cowardice, lack of discipline, desertion of his post, unauthorized absence-however many different ways Ivanov discovered to describe the same unforgivable but also undeniable lapse, Kalychenko accepted them all.

It was only at the very end of the conversation that Ivanov said anything that Kalychenko had not expected.

Even that was, when you thought about it, no surprise. It was the logically inevitable next step.

There was no friendly fireman to give him a bunk while he waited to begin his first midnight shift under the new regime, but Kalychenko found a comfortable corner of the canteen not in use. He drowsed over a can of kvass until it was time to report to the main control for the sleeping Reactor No. 3.

He was quite aware that only a few walls separated him from the exploded ruin of No. 4. All of his shift mates seemed a little edgy, as Kalychenko himself was at first. But the monotony of the work was calming… and, too, he needed to think over the things Ivanov had said to him.

There was not really much to do, with three of the reactors in stand-down mode and the other permanently out of action. The little that had to be done, however, had to be done most urgently; the temperatures of the slumbering cores needed to be monitored all the time, the pumps and rod mechanisms and circulating water systems checked every day-everything had to be perfectly normal and operational, because no one dared face the consequences if there should be another runaway reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station.

Still, the work did not take much of Kalychenko's attention. That was good, because he needed to think of what Ivanov had said at the end. Kalychenko tried to remember the exact words: "There are only two ways you can wipe your record clean, Kalychenko. One is to lead a perfectly blameless existence for the rest of your days. Unfortunately, you can't live long enough for that to work. The other is to perform a great service for the Soviet Union. There are bad elements here, Kalychenko. Not all Ukrainians are as loyal as you-as, at least, I hope you will learn to be. There are rumors of nationalist agitation. Eternal vigilance is needed to unmask them. You can help. See that you do."

Kalychenko winced. It was bad enough to face his comrades as a runaway; what would it be like if they found him to be an informer as well?

When he heard the other people on his shift cry out sharply, it took him a while to realize that a distant alarm bell was ringing loudly, and even longer to recognize that, for some time now, he had been smelling smoke.

Another fire!

It was impossible, Kalychenko thought despairingly. How could it happen that the Chernobyl plant was wrecking itself again? Once more he found himself running in panic… but this time, without any conscious decision to do so, he was not running away from the new disaster but straight toward it.

Thursday, May 22

What Park Avenue once was to New York City is what Gorky Street is to Moscow. People who live there matter. The apartments in the buildings on Gorky Street are light and airy. Walls meet each other at right angles, doors close without a body block, and no one tries to enforce the nine-square-meters-a-person rule. Cars, like Johnny Stark's baby-blue Cadillac Eldorado convertible, are not pulled up on the sidewalk and protected with tarpaulins. They are in roomy garages, and it is not only the cars that have plenty of room. The people who live on Gorky Street are ballerinas and film stars, pianists and chess champions, the brothers of members of the Central Committee and the grandsons of great generals. Of course, they all have dachas. Of course, they travel abroad. It is a paradox of Gorky Street that these people whose homes are so spacious occupy them so little of the time.

Emmaline Branford had never been at a party in a Gorky Street flat before. At first she kept very quiet, because she had not been wrong. These people were far out of her league. The skinny uniformed man with the prematurely bald head-all those stars on his shoulderboards surely meant that he was a general. The pretty woman with the plump young man at her arm was, Emmaline was nearly sure, a featured dancer from the Leningrad Kirov, and the man the dancer was talking to was a

Bolshoi opera baritone. As far as Emmaline could see, she and Pembroke Williamson were the only Americans present-not counting Johnny Stark's wife-but the elderly woman with blue hair was something in French motion pictures, and the young couple in hiking boots turned out to be Australian. Emmaline stayed close to Pembroke's shadow until the third or fourth interesting man bore down on her to practice his English or let her work on her Russian. The first had been a film director, another, oh, my God, a cosmonaut!

Then she remembered that her color made her, too, a kind of special celebrity in Moscow.

The red crepe had been, after all, not one bit too dressy, because these other women were at least as stylish as she, and none of their clothing had come from Lerner's. The dancer's pearls were certainly real. And Johnny Stark's wife, the American-well, the former American-was really quite modestly dressed, until you looked at the rock on her finger that could not be less than three carats.