Chernobyl

Chapter 22

What is wrong with a state so centralized that everything has to be decided in the capital is obvious. It suppresses initiative, it slows decision-making, it leads to waste and mismanagement and corruption. But there are advantages too. Nothing happens until some high-up authority decides it shall; but then it happens with blinding speed. That's how it is with the evacuation of the entire zone within the thirty-kilometer perimeter centered on the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. Moscow says, "Evacuate!" and a hundred towns, villages, and collective farms outside the perimeter make room for the occupants of the towns, villages, and farms within. Buses appear for the people. Trucks arrive for the farm machinery and livestock. Of course, everything is checked for radioactivity before it moves a meter away from its origins, but most of what fails the first test needs only to be hosed down. Then the specks of sooty fallout are rinsed away and it is safe. When the caravans arrive at their destinations, farmers go to farms, townspeople to towns, children to schools that are ready to receive them.

The place Sheranchuk found himself in was the collective farm of Kopelovo, a hundred kilometers outside the evacuated zone but by no means peaceful. Eighty evacuated families from Pripyat and smaller communities had been setded there, forty others, like Sheranchuk and his wife, were sent there on holiday. Holiday! It was no holiday for Sheranchuk, it was thirty — six hours of enforced exile. "I should be at the plant," he fretted as soon as they arrived.

Tamara said, "It is exactly because you were too much at the plant already that you are here, dear Leonid. Content yourself. Rest. Go to bed, but, first, let me take your temperature again."

They had arrived together in the early morning of May Day, taken at once to a soft feather bed in the home of the Party Secretary of the kolkhoz. In spite of everything, the Kopelovo farm had gone ahead with its May Day festivities, for the enjoyment of their unexpected guests and for their own morale. The celebration was wasted on Sheranchuk. He slept through the whole day, leaden, unmoving, and neither the blare of the band nor the amplified speeches penetrated his stupor. He woke up at dusk, long enough to go to the bathroom (flush toilets! Some collective farms did very well for the kolkhozists!) and eat with the Party Secretary's family, and then back to bed with Tamara.

By this time he had recovered enough to take advantage of the opportunity. They made love with the speed and success of practice, and they lay awake whispering to each other for hours until he dropped off again and slept through the night.

On the morning after May Day there was farm work to be done, legal holiday or not, and it started at sunrise. Tamara Sheranchuk got up quietly as soon as it was light. The village was already astir with farmers going out to their fields. The two sons of the Party Secretary, ousted from their room so that the Sheranchuks could have it, came back from their neighbor's, where they had spent the night, in order to have breakfast at home. Tamara joined them, talking quietly. In twenty minutes they had eaten and were gone with their father, and the woman of the house was glad enough to accept Tamara's offer to tidy up the kitchen so that she could get on with her own work.

It took very little time, even in an unfamiliar kitchen. Then Tamara made herself another cup of tea and peeped in on her sleeping husband.

Sheranchuk was curled on his side, snoring gently. Very good, that was exactly what he was supposed to be doing. She wished she had taken his temperature one more time before they'd gone to sleep but, of course, they had not been thinking like doctor and patient, only like wife and husband. (It did not occur to her to take her own, although the reason they had been sent away was that both were near collapse from exhaustion, and already close to perilous levels of exposure to radiation as well.)

Tamara left her husband asleep and investigated the shower cubicle. Yes, there was hot water; yes, there was soap and quite nice towels, probably from abroad. She bathed and dressed, feeling quite luxurious.

The inferno at the Chernobyl Power Plant was far from her mind.

It was not that she was not aware of its terrifying meaning. Partly it was that she had been so close to it for what seemed so long that her senses were numbed in that area; she had closed her mind to it for the thirty-six hours of their enforced leisure. However, there was something else on her mind. They had taken no precautions in the feather bed of the Party Secretary. As a doctor, Tamara knew well that she was at the most fertile point in her cycle. It was by no means unlikely that she was in the process of becoming pregnant.

She wondered what Leonid would think of having a new baby in the family.

She didn't wonder at all about herself. Although Tamara Sheranchuk was nearly forty, she knew that she was in as good physical shape as she ever had been. Yes, older mothers had sometimes more difficult pregnancies and deliveries than the twenty-year olds (but sometimes not). Yes, older mothers were at slightly greater risk of having a child with a birth defect (but by far the greatest number were perfecdy normal!)… yes, she told herself soberly, there was one other factor to be considered. Although the radiation she had received was very unlikely to affect her own health significantly, the damage to an embryo might be much greater.

But what did that mean, after all? Should women stop having children?

And besides, her husband deserved a new baby. Even though he didn't know how much he deserved it. She put down her empty cup, turned from the window on the now-quiet street, and went back to look in on her sleeping husband.

Who was not, after all, asleep. He opened his eyes and gazed at her. "Have you heard anything from the plant?" he asked at once.

"There is nothing to hear," she said. "You are supposed to put it out of your mind while we're here."

He snorted angrily, but then smiled. "Is it possible to have some breakfast?" he asked, glancing at his watch. "After all, the bus will pick us up at ten o'clock, and now it is nearly eight."

By the time the bus came with its load of new "holiday" people from the emergency workers, Sheranchuk was pacing back and forth on the farm village street. As soon as they were inside he was questioning the driver. Facts? The driver had very few facts. Rumors? Oh, yes, there were rumors. It was said that of the first three hundred firemen to report, at least a hundred and eighty were already dead or dying. Another three hundred militiamen, put on close perimeter guard for a six-hour shift, had been forgotten and left there for twelve — half of them were in the hospital too. And the town of Chernobyl itself was to be evacuated.

"But that is impossible," Sheranchuk protested. "The town is thirty kilometers from the plant, well out of the danger zone!"

The driver shrugged. "I am telling you what I have heard," he said. "It is all I know. Perhaps it is only temporary, because the wind has shifted."

Sheranchuk returned to his place next to Tamara, holding on to the backs of the seats as the bus bounced along the narrow road. They were in the middle of farm country, flax and wheat and orchards of cherry and apple trees. He took out a cigarette.

"You shouldn't smoke," Tamara said automatically.

He shrugged, lighting it.

"You are being very foolish," his wife said. "You've already received nobody knows how much radiation. Do you want to die of cancer before you are fifty?"

"If I die of the radiation, I won't have time to die of lung cancer, my dear," he said. He looked at her curiously, struck by her tone. After eighteen years he knew all her tones. When she advised him to give up smoking, it was with the doctor voice; in most of the communications of their daily lives it was the voice of a team worker dealing with their joint problems. This time she sounded younger, less sure of herself, more vulnerable — no, the right word was the first one he had thought of. Younger. She sounded like the girl he had met in the forest and married. "Tamara? Are you worried about me?"

"I want you around for the next twenty years," she told him seriously.

"Only for twenty years? After that I may be excused to die if I like?" he joked.

She ignored the joke. "Did you like the farm?" she asked.

"It was quite pleasant, I suppose," he conceded. "That house was really quite up-to-date."

"It was peaceful," she said, "and the air was clean. A person could live happily there, I think, without worrying about nuclear reactors blowing up." She looked directly at him. "And, in your case," she added, "without worrying about adding to the already considerable load of radiation you have been exposed to. It may be, Leonid, that you are never going to work in a nuclear power plant again."

He scowled at the thought. "And what would I do on a kolkhoz?"

"We could live there quite well. We would be safe. It is worthwhile, just to live, and to raise a family in clean air."

"Really, Tamara," he said, surprised at her tone. "I'm a trained hydrologist-engineer. Do you think they need me to turn the valves on the irrigation pipes, or fix the flush toilets that they seem to have so many of?" She didn't answer. "No," he said, "if I can't work at Chernobyl, I'll work at some other power plant — there are big new coal plants going up, and gas and oil. Perhaps a water power plant; that would be perhaps out in the open air, if it is getting away from cities that you want. But— "

"But you haven't given up on Chernobyl," she finished for

him.

He said rebelliously, "The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station is a valuable asset to the country, Tamara. It isn't going to be thrown away just because one reactor caught fire. It will be back in operation in a year, I'm sure of it."

"Let's see," said his wife. "You want to stay at Chernobyl because you admire Smin; very well, I admire him too, but do you really believe he will keep his job after this?"

"He is not the one at fault!"

"He may not even live, Leonid. And as to yourself, your white corpuscle count is down; you've taken at least twenty rads already — it could be a hundred, because you weren't wearing a dosimeter at first. You certainly can't afford to be exposed to more."

He shrugged, looking out the window. They were entering the town of Chernobyl. If the town was about to be evacuated, it displayed no signs of it. The streets were full, the townspeople themselves trying to go about their normal lives while thousands of emergency workers milled about, most of them waiting their turns to be ferried to the turmoil at the plant.

"Are you listening?" his wife asked. "You've done your part, Leonid. You can let others take over from you now."

"I suppose I'll have to," he said somberly.

But in that he was quite wrong, because when he reported to the control plant, the news was bad. Radiation had surged up again, to almost seventy-five percent of the level of its first day. The attempt to get to the plenum from No. 3's pool had failed; too much steel and concrete.

An hour later he was back at the station.

A forward control point had been established in an underground bunker, once the dormitory for the plant's fire brigade, now the command post for the disaster-control operation. It was thick with stale cigarette smoke and not much ventilation; the same air was recirculated over and over because, however it might stink, it was better than what was outside.

It was hardly forty-eight hours that Sheranchuk had been gone, but so much had changed! The helicopter drops were nearing their objective. Almost five thousand tons of boron, lead, sand, and marble chips had already been dumped on the still-burning graphite of the reactor core, but the burning graphite was no longer the immediate problem.

The immediate problem was the plenum under the ruined reactor. It contained water, and it was therefore in Leonid Sheranchuk's department.

Of course, the purpose of the plenum was to act as a safety feature, to quench the steam if one or two pipes burst.

But that safety feature was now the greatest danger the core of Reactor No. 4 still faced.

Hanging over it was a mass of one hundred and eighty tons of uranium dioxide, whatever was left of eighteen hundred tons of graphite, the fragments of the 200-ton refueling machine and associated materials, the rubble of the collapsed walls — and the five thousand tons that had been dumped over it all to stop the deadly emissions. The structure had never been designed to support such a load. Worse, the structure itself had been shocked and damaged by the violence of the explosion. It was weakened in unpredictable ways. The whole thing might come down at any moment.. and if it collapsed those two thousand tons of uranium and graphite would plunge into the plenum. And… and then that water would flash into steam, and the explosion that followed would be perhaps even worse than the first.

With the whole thing to do over again — not to mention killing a good many of the people frantically working to contain the accident.

It was a major general of engineers who was now in command of the operation, and he had a plan of the underground reservoir spread before him. Sheranchuk hunched over the drawing as the general explained: "Our miners from Donetsk pushed this tunnel through, here. Then we had a team of eight volunteers — nine originally, but one of them just fell apart— and they've worked steadily for a day and a half to break through—"

"You've broken through to the plenum?" Sheranchuk demanded. "Then what is the problem? Simply drain it and pour in your concrete."

"It won't drain," the general said.

"Won't drain? Why not? Ah, of course," Sheranchuk said, placing his finger on the plans. "Those valves need to be opened first."

"But those valves," the general said gloomily, "are now under water. All those passages are filled with runoff. Someone must go down in a diving suit and open the valves. We have two volunteers… but neither of them knows where the valves are."

"I do," Sheranchuk cried.

The general studied him for a moment. "Yes," he said, "that is what I thought."

What Sheranchuk expected from the words "diving suit" was the kind of thing you saw in films, the big man-from-Mars helmets and trailing air hoses. It wasn't like that. What the volunteers got to breathe with were simply scuba masks, with tanks on their backs for air. What they wore on their bodies were wet suits, rubbery things that were stiff and cold and nasty to put on and chokingly tight where they were not chafingly loose to wear — of course, they had not had time to be very scrupulous about sizes. They did not have portable underwater lights. What they had was a floodlamp on a long cable— the electrician swore he had done his very best to make it watertight — and one of the two volunteers to carry it. They didn't have phones, either. Once they were in the water, there was no one to talk to, and nothing to hear.

Nothing, that was, except the ominous creaks and thuds and settling sounds from the six or seven thousand tons of material that was waiting to fall on them from overhead.

They couldn't help hearing those sounds. If their ears had been plugged, they still would have felt them as shudders and shakes in the water all around.

At least they weren't cold. At first Sheranchuk thought that was a blessing, because the wet suit had been horribly clammy to put on. Then it was not so much of a blessing, because the water was distinctly warm — hotter than blood temperature, with the furious heat of the core raging just over it. Sheranchuk found himself sweating in a suit that gave the sweat no place to go.

That was not the worst of it, either. Sheranchuk was angrily aware that the water was hot in other and even more unpleasant ways, for most of it had run down through mazes of radioactive rubble to fill the concrete passages they were swimming and pushing their way along. None of them had taken a dosimeter along. There was no point. The water was only mildly contaminated with radioactivity — as far as anyone could tell from outside — and anyway the job had to be done. It was essential.

The only question was whether or not it was also impossible.

The concrete-walled passages Sheranchuk had once walked along without a thought were now mazes. The floodlight showed the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the useless light fixtures, the inoperative instruments — but how different they, all looked when they were underwater! It took twenty minutes of struggle, more swimming than walking, to reach the passage where the plenum valves were located.

When Sheranchuk was sure of what he was looking at, he splashed around to face his companions. Squinting into the watery glow of the thousand-watt lamp, he beckoned them to come to him.

Just then, without flash or warning, the light went

out.

"God and your mother!" Sheranchuk shouted into the darkness. All he got for response was a mouthful of water as he dislodged the scuba mask, and a strangling coughing fit once he got it back in place. No one heard. No one spoke, either, or if they did, he could not tell.

Hanging, almost floating, in that total underwater blackness, Sheranchuk could not tell up from down, could not guess where the walls were, much less where his comrades had gotten to. He thrashed about in panic until he caught one wall a bruising blow with his knuckles. Then he reached out for it and felt along it until he encountered a railing, pulling himself back along the rail until something caught him a violent kick in the side. He reached out and caught the foot of one of the other men.

Which one? There was no way to tell until he felt the third man brush against him and, feeling his arms, found the useless floodlight with its cable.

Sheranchuk thought for a moment. They could go back for another light. But would it work any better? And how much longer could he spend in this place without beginning to glow in the dark?

He found the lamp bearer's shoulder and slapped it twice to get his attention, then thrust him gently back down the corridor: there was no further need for him. The other man he pulled toward the wall, found his hand, put it on the railing. Then he tugged the man forward as he himself turned and pulled himself farther down the flooded corridor.

With thanks to the God he had never believed in,

Sheranchuk felt the plenum pipe under his feet at the end of the corridor.

From there it was, if not easy, at least simple. The two of them felt their way along the pipe until they came to the first valve. Sheranchuk put the other man's hand on it and there in the dark, with the contracting sounds of the core shaking them, they put their weight on it.

It turned.

A moment later they had found the second valve. It, too, turned; and through the water that surrounded them they felt the gurgling suck of the plenum emptying itself.

In the open air Sheranchuk blinked at the light, fending off the workers who were trying to hug him as he was doing his best to strip off the wet suit. He was triumphant, but most of all he was very tired. He tripped on the duckboards at the floor of the miners' tunnel, but a half-dozen hands were quick to grab him.

By the time he was back in the bunker he was ready for a cigarette, but when he saw a doctor coming toward him with a clipboard, he knew what she was going to say. He stood up to greet her.

Funnily, he could see her mouth moving as though she were speaking to him, but he couldn't hear the words.

As he was opening his mouth to tell her this interesting fact, the world began to spin around him and the lights, Sheranchuk's personal lights, went out. He could feel himself falling heavily forward into the doctor's arms, and then he could not feel anything at all.