Frederik Pohl: Chernobyl

"Therefore, Mr. Mishko says, we might as well stop hurling epithets at each other and talk seriously of problems. He thought the discussion of Star Wars was quite valuable. Have you a question you would like to put to Mr. Mishko?" And before Pembroke could speak, he went on, caressing his gold medallion as he spoke. The tone of his voice didn't change, but there was something in his expression-a tightening of the jaw, a narrowing of the eyes?-that made Emmaline sit up as Stark spoke. "I remember the other day you were asking about some rumors about a secret document. Miss Branford, too, I think, has asked some questions. Would you like to ask Mr. Mishko to comment on it?"

Mishko's demeanor changed too. He didn't scowl. He simply listened very attentively, nodding encouragement to continue each time Stark translated a sentence or two of what Pembroke was saying. "What I heard was a rumor, secondhand at that. Of course, I'd rather not say where I heard it." He went on to describe what he had heard, with particular emphasis on the most revolutionary aspects-the ending of censorship, the free elections with even separate political parties.

When he was finished, he waited while Stark and the man from the Central Committee talked back and forth for a while. Then Stark turned to the Americans. "He asked what I had answered you when you first brought the subject up," he reported. "I told him that I said, as you remember, that I had no personal knowledge of such a thing and wondered if it might be a fake originating with anti-Party emigre elements in the West."

"That's what you said to me, all right," Pembroke agreed. "What does Mr. Mishko say?"

"I'll ask him," said Stark, and reported the result sentence by sentence. "First, Mr. Mishko says that free elections can happen without any change in Soviet laws, and in fact they do. He mentioned what we discussed earlier, Miss Branford, the results of the elections in the filmmakers' union today, where the membership simply rejected the proposed list of officers entirely and elected a whole new opposition slate. So such things do happen in the USSR, though of course they are rare-"

"I'll say," Pembroke grunted.

He got a scowl from Stark for that, but then Stark continued. "Mr. Mishko points out that the possibility that an anonymous document is a fake cannot be excluded. Also, persons in high positions have quite adequate means of arguing cases without resort to samizdat. However, the leadership of the Party and the nation does not wear blinders. It is constantly examining all possible alternatives. All of them can be proposed and discussed. Those that have merit are adopted. But the leadership is not a string of paper soldiers. All sides of a question may be argued, and some people propose projects that are rejected. So, even if the document is a forgery, it is possible that some parts of it do in fact represent the views of certain high officials-but, Mr. Mishko says, not a majority"- Stark smiled-"or else it would have been printed in Pravda instead of in samizdat."

As Pembroke waited with Emmaline for her bus, she said thoughtfully, "Johnny Stark knew I'd been asking questions about that manifesto."

"Does that prove he's KGB?"

Emmaline shrugged. What she thought was that it proved two people were KGB-both Stark and Rima, the person she had hinted to about it-but she didn't say that. She only said, "You know, at first I thought it was very indiscreet of him to invite us to talk to this Mr. Mishko-I've absolutely got to look him up, first thing in the morning, and find out who we were talking to! But I don't think Stark's ever indiscreet."

"So what do you think was happening up there?"

"God knows! It looked like somebody was trying to score some points off somebody else. About what?" Emmaline shrugged. "Stark was the one who brought up that mysterious seventeen-page document, right?"

"But he didn't say much about it himself."

"Maybe he wanted to see what Mishko would say. Maybe they think Mishko's involved in it. They're both pretty big wheels, you know. The KGB can't just haul Mishko in and interrogate him, so maybe Stark was trying to get a rise out of him." She sighed. "Whatever it was, I don't think you and I will ever find out the score."

"Not even with glasnosO"

"There will never," Emmaline told him seriously, "be that much glasnost."

Friday, May 23

Meteorologists who wish to explain the circulation of the Earth's atmosphere sometimes employ an illustration called "Caesar's Last Breath." By an arithmetical coincidence, the average number of molecules of air in a human lung is quite close to the total number of "lungful-equivalents" in the Earth's atmosphere. In the two thousand years since Julius Caesar died of his stab wounds in the Roman forum, there has been plenty of time for mixing, so the molecules of air he exhaled as he perished are now everywhere. Even in your lungs. On average, each time you take a breath, you take in one molecule that Caesar gasped out. This does you no harm. Caesar's last breath contained nothing that can hurt you; but the last huge "breath" from the dying Chernobyl Reactor No. 4 is another matter. It is not as well distributed as Caesar's exhalation. There has not been as much time. Especially in the southern hemisphere, which exchanges air with the north only weakly, through what are called "Hadley cells," only tiny fractions of the Chernobyl gases have yet been circulated. But there was so vastly much more of the gases from Chernobyl that every one of us now has in our lungs a certain number of Chernobyl molecules, and this is not only true for all Americans and Russians and Chinese and French and Italians, but for every African, Australian, and Cambodian, and even for all the elephants in Kenya and the Antarctic penguins. We breathe in some of Chernobyl's last breath every day, and will go on doing so all our lives.

By eight o'clock in the morning of May 23 the new fire at the Chernobyl power plant had been puffing additional poisons into the air for half a dozen hours. Leonid Sheranchuk knew nothing about it. He was thirty kilometers away,'in the little apartment he and his wife had been given in the town of Chernobyl (only two rooms, and where was Boris to sleep? But what luck to get an apartment immediately anyway!) What Sheranchuk was doing was to discuss with his wife whether they wanted to ask Smin's widow if she intended to sell the plot of land where the Smin's dacha was certainly not now going to be built, and if so whether they should hire a car to go out into the countryside to look at it first.

Then there was the knock on the door and Vladimir Ponomorenko, last living man of the Four Seasons, was standing there, apologetic, worried, insistent.

Was Comrade Sheranchuk going out to the plant in this emergency? If so could he get a ride with him? What emergency? Oh, hadn't Sheranchuk heard? A fire, a big one, a bad one-started only God knew how, spontaneous combustion or something in Section 24 of the plant, now almost out of control because that was the section nearest the deadly core and flooded with radiation so the firemen couldn't get close to it to put it out. "And, please, Comrade Sheranchuk! I have to get out there right away to help!"

And, of course, since Simyon Smin's plant was once again horribly, unexpectedly, in trouble, so did Comrade Sheranchuk.

They found a taxi willing to take them as far as the perimeter checkpoint. They wheedled their way onto an ambulance bringing out a pair of new casualties-firemen again, of course, one knocked senseless by a hose nozzle that got out of control, the other far worse off because his radiation suit had been ripped open when he was breaking through a wall to get at the fire. The medics handled him with caution as they transferred him to another car.