Frederik Pohl: Chernobyl

It was bad, all right. The driver filled them in as they bounced along the road to the plant, sometimes circling off the road to avoid a still-contaminated patch of paving.

Sheranchuk knew the layout of the place where the fire started. It was Section 24 of the reactor building, several stories above the imprisoned, dying core. It was a nasty place. Everything in that area had been baked hot and dry from the earlier fires; perhaps some charred rubble had worked itself up to ignition temperature. No one could be sure of that. No one had been there to see. That whole section was sealed off with steel doors welded in place, for it was drenched with radiation. "So they broke through the walls," the driver said, fighting his wheel as he jolted over a series of potholes, "but the fire was higher up. I don't know what they're doing now-look, it's still going, because there's the smoke!"

Smoke there was, black billows of it staining the pretty blue morning sky. Sheranchuk leaned forward, squinting to see what was going on from half a kilometer away.

"What are those people doing on the roof?" he demanded. But the driver didn't know; they hadn't been there when he left. "That's dangerous!" Sheranchuk muttered, peering at the upper stories of the plant.

The core was at least partly shielded by walls on all four sides and the bottom-the solid layer of concrete that replaced the water Sheranchuk had helped remove. But there was nothing over the top of the core but what the helicopters and cranes had dumped there, nothing near enough to stop the flood of radiation. Even in their grotesque rubber and lead suits, those people on the roof were taking chances with their lives.

Then he caught his breath. "The diesel fuel," he said. As the ambulance lurched toward the gateway to the plant he caught a better look at where the firemen were.

"What?" the driver demanded, and Ponomorenko looked at him curiously. Sheranchuk just shook his head. The place where the firemen were struggling with something on the roof was only a few meters away from the fuel stores for the standby diesel generators! And if those went up-

Sheranchuk didn't want to think about what would happen if the fire spread to the diesel oil.

The men on the roof were dangling long lines over the edge for some reason, and firemen on the ground were setting something up below. Sheranchuk and Ponomorenko were out of the ambulance and running toward the building, when a fire major thrust himself in their way. "Do your mother, get out of here!" he snarled. "You don't even have radiation suits!"

"But I'm Engineer Sheranchuk. The diesel stores-they should be drained, or you'll have another explosion!"

The fireman scowled. "Sheranchuk? Yes, all right, I know who you are, but you'll have to go in the bunker. What's this about diesel stores?"

Sheranchuk explained hurriedly, dodging as firemen ran toward them with a limp hose, toward the lines dangling from the roof. "I know where they are," he said. "Let me go up there! You'll need a truck to drain them into; the pipes should be all right-"

"Not you," snapped the major. "You've taken too many rads already. Don't worry, we'll find the tanks-"

"Comrade Major," Ponomorenko said eagerly. "I know where they are."

The fire major glared at him, then shrugged. "All right, off with you to get a suit, then you can show us. But you, Sheranchuk, it's into the bunker for you, and no arguments. It's your life, man!"

So while a hundred firemen and volunteers were fighting the blaze in one part of the plant, Leonid Sheranchuk was fuming in a smoke-filled, stinking underground room a hundred meters away. Once the room had been the barracks for the plant's firemen. Now it was the on-site operations headquarters.

He could not stay there. The thing was, he knew the plant. That whole building was a maze of traps. The corridors were blocked intentionally by steel doors, or simply by heaps of clean-up rubble. And all these firemen were new men, brought in to replace the decimated original crew. Did they know what they were doing? Would Ponomorenko be able to lead them to the diesel tanks? Would they know how to open the drainage valves? Would the pumps work? Had they been able to find a tank truck to drain the fuel into?

Sheranchuk hunted around and found a suit-not one of the good rubber-lead ones, just the compulsory garments everyone in the plant now had to wear, designed to protect against small radiation leaks only. It was at least two sizes too big for him, but he put it on, and when a group of firemen finished a conference and dashed out to put their decisions into action, Sheranchuk ran out with them.

The good thing-the only good thing-was that this time the firefighters seemed to know what they were doing. They even had the equipment to do it with; an oil tanker was parked next to the building wall, its hoses already connected; the tanks were being drained. Everybody was much better at the job now, Sheranchuk thought sardonically, since they'd had the practice. Everybody seemed to take this new fire as a personal affront, too, because everybody had taken it for granted that such a thing could not happen twice.

A sharp explosion overhead made him duck away and stare up in sudden panic.

No, it wasn't the diesel tanks. It was something strange. Someone had dangled an explosive charge from the roof; it had blasted a jagged hole in the wall of the reactor building, and black smoke puffed out.

Sheranchuk was startled to see that already hoses were being dragged up from the ground, and a sort of scaffolding was jerkily lowering from the roof. There were men on that scaffold! Four of them, at least, looking like deep-sea divers, clinging to the ropes as the scaffold swayed-and above them two more men being lowered in harnesses.

Sheranchuk watched unbelievingly as the men reached the gaping hole. They didn't hesitate. One leaped inside, making the platform swing away, then reached out and caught it while his comrades secured the hoses and followed him. Sheranchuk heard a shout. Then the first of the hoses stiffened with pressure, and the smoke pouring out of the hole was joined with hideous yellowish clouds of steam.

He was still standing there, blinking up into the sun, when the fire major tapped his shoulder. "I told you, man, the bunker. Otherwise I'll have you arrested and taken away! The fire? Oh, you don't have to worry about the fire anymore- now we've got a fair shot at it, we'll have it out in no time."

And, actually, they did.

It was not really as easy as that.

It wasn't easy at all, in fact, and it certainly wasn't without price. There were twenty-five new casualties, almost all firemen, but the lead and rubber suits had kept the worst of the radiation out, even for the heroes who had jumped into the hole in the wall.

If they had had the same equipment a month earlier, Sheranchuk mused, how many lives might they have saved? Simyon Smin's, for one.

No one was going to die from the second fire. The highest dosimeter reading was less than a hundred rads. There were men vomiting and pale in the assembly area as they waited to be taken away, but most were cursing and joking.

And some, like Volya Ponomorenko, were even proud of the radiation they had taken. "Thirteen rads!" he boasted, waving the pen-shaped instrument. "But we got the fuel out, Comrade Sheranchuk."

"The country's proud of you, Autumn," Sheranchuk said, no more than half jesting. And then, remembering the scene at his cousin's deathbed, "I mean-all of the country. Especially the Ukraine, of course."

Ponomorenko sobered quickly. He fiddled with the dosimeter for a moment before he spoke. "What Arkady said-in a way, he was quite right. You are Ukrainian, too, Comrade Sheranchuk. You know that. But, you see, my cousin was a little bit wrong too. Only a few idiots want an independent country of the Ukraine."