Chernobyl

Chapter 28

Giving bone marrow is not an enjoyable process. A sort of hypodermic the length of a pencil is stabbed into one of the donor's largest bones — the hipbone is usually the easiest to reach. Marrow, which looks like blood, is sucked out, a teaspoonful at a time, until a pint or so has been accumulated. This is actually about a tenth of all the bone marrow an adult human has, but if he is reasonably healthy, he will regenerate it in a few weeks. The process of extraction takes an hour or more. Then the extracted marrow is centrifuged — whirled at high speed — to separate the lighter cells from the larger, older, useless ones. The light ones are then transfused into the patient from a bag hanging beside his bed, through a needle taped into the veins of his arm.

This procedure is not new. The first researches into curing radiation disease through bone-marrow transplants began in the United States in 1945, when the American nuclear bombs dropped on Japan caused some researchers to wonder what would happen if someone dropped similar bombs on America.

Thirteen years later the procedure was tried for the first time on human beings, when five Yugoslavs, exposed to radiation in a nuclear accident, were given marrow from the bones of relatives. Four of them survived, in spite of the fact that the odds against a successful transplant of unmatched marrow are around ten thousand to one, and at that time no one knew how to perform the special typing (it is called "HLA matching") necessary. There are really only two possibilities to account for the survival of the four Yugoslavs. Either they were not really all that sick to begin with and would have recovered anyway. Or they were miraculously, unbelievably lucky.

Whether Leonid Sheranchuk was going to have to test his luck or not was a very open question. Although his blood count was low, it was not critical. His estimated radiation intake was only marginal, so it was not certain that he was going to need a bone-marrow transplant. It was a lot less certain, even, that he would be able to get one if he did. His only near blood relative was his son and Boris's cells did not match.

The fact of the matter was that Sheranchuk did not think much about his own survival. If it happened, it happened. There were others a lot closer to death than he. Some had died already. A second Ponomorenko, the fireman Vassili, the one known as Summer — they had had to take off that leg after all, and he had been too weak to survive the operation. The third of the Four Seasons, his own pipefitter, Arkady Ponomorenko, seemed to be sinking fast. The doctors hadn't been able to find any bone marrow that was good for him, not even his cousin's, and so they had given him a fetal liver transplant. Whether that would save Spring's life was very doubtful. What was certain was that it had put him into a state of half-waking delirium, so that he raged at his cousin, Autumn, for ten minutes at a time with Sheranchuk sitting wordless beside them; and then, collecting himself, cracked jokes and chided poor Autumn for looking so depressed.

What worried Sheranchuk most was that he had been the one who had ordered — at least, permitted — Arkady Ponomorenko to expose himself to the radiation that was killing him. Sheranchuk could not forgive himself for that. It would have been just as effective for him to have sent the pipefitter safely to explore the ruptured pipes under the turbine room while he himself took on the more dangerous task of shutting off the hydrogen flare. He was older. He was more experienced. He could have done the job faster, he had no doubt of that, and got away with only a little radiation…

Or he, too, could have been dying now.

But, Sheranchuk asked himself, what did that matter? If you did your job, you took the risks involved. If the dice fell against you, you had no right to complain.

What mattered most of all to Sheranchuk was Deputy Director Simyon Smin, and it seemed very clear to him that Smin was dying.

For Sheranchuk this was an acute and always present pain, far worse than the bruises where the bitch Akhsmentova insisted on stabbing him for more blood six times a day. He did not want the old man to die. Sheranchuk didn't think of Simyon Smin as a father — he was not so presumptuous as that — but no filial feeling could have been stronger. He owed Smin for giving him the chance at the Chernobyl plant. He admired Smin for the way in which he got his job done, no matter what obstacles were put in his way. His throat closed up with pity and respect as he saw how courageously Smin accepted his own responsibility and the nastiness of his physical state. It did not occur to Sheranchuk to add all these feelings together, but if he had, he would have been forced to give them a name: what he felt for the old man was simply love.

And every day Smin grew weaker.

When Sheranchuk ate his lunch that day he barely noticed what it was — borscht, the good Ukrainian kind, with garlic, specially made because so many of the patients were Ukrainian, with lamb to follow. He ate quickly, talking to no one. There were in truth not very many fellow patients left to talk to, since a few had been released and a good many were now too sick to come to the dining room. Then he skipped the fruit compote that was meant to be their dessert and hurried back to the room he shared with Smin, hoping to tempt the old man to eat, spoonful by spoonful.

Trying to make the Deputy Director eat was really the only service he could still offer to Smin. Even that was seldom successful. The old man would swallow a few mouthfuls as a courtesy, then he would shake his head. "But I have always been too fat, Leonid," he would say seriously. "To lose a few kilos is no bad thing." And then he would ask Sheranchuk, very considerately and politely, to draw the curtains again, please.

Smin spent most of his time now behind the curtains. Sometimes he was being sick, and then the nurses would come to help. Sometimes he was sleeping — Sheranchuk was glad for those times, though always with the fear that the sleep was, finally, something worse than mere sleeping. Often Sheranchuk could see through the gaps in the curtain that Smin was writing, writing, writing — writing something on a lined schoolboy's pad that he never showed to Sheranchuk, and shoved under the pillow when someone came near. His memoirs? A confession for the GehBehs? A letter to someone? But when Sheranchuk ventured to ask, Smin said only, "It's nothing, simply some things I want to put on paper — my memory may not be so good anymore."

But it was not simply his memory that Smin was in the process of losing.

This time there had been no need for Sheranchuk to cut his meal short to help Smin eat, for when he got to the door of their room, he saw that Smin's wife and younger son were there. The boy was standing by his father's bed, a plate in one hand and a spoon in the other, looking unsure of himself. "It's all right, Vassili," Serena Smin whispered to her son. "He did eat quite a bit, and now he needs to sleep." Then she saw Sheranchuk hovering in the doorway and smiled a welcome.

To Leonid Sheranchuk, Smin's wife had always been above criticism, simply because she was Smin's wife. To himself, at least, he might have admitted that he found her rather self-centered and perhaps just a bit proud. He did not think that now. She was quite an exceptionally handsome woman — hadn't she been a dancer once? And so much younger than her husband — but what he saw as he looked at her now was a wife and mother whose love for her family was written achingly all over her face.

He stepped courteously aside as she and her son came out of the room, but she paused to talk to him. "Vassili got him to eat nearly all of his lamb." She reported the small triumph with unreasoning hope shining through the desperation in her eyes. "I minced it up for him first. I tasted it myself; it was really quite good."

"They feed us well here," Sheranchuk agreed. Then he said, "Mrs. Smin? I've been wondering if having me here in the room isn't really a bit too much for him."

"No, no, Leonid! He is grateful for your company. Don't think he hasn't told us how much you do for him."

"I wish I could do more!"

"You do everything anyone ever could," Selena Smin said firmly. "I think he will sleep now, and so we will leave him for a bit in your good hands."

"Thank you," Sheranchuk said, awkward as he wondered whether to shake her hand or not, but she setded the matter by leaning forward and kissing him on the cheek. He gazed after her admiringly and hardly noticed when a doctor came up to him, hooded, booted, and robed in white. When the physician addressed him by name, Sheranchuk was astonished to find that she was his wife.

Tamara Sheranchuk reached up to kiss her husband, a feathery, distant kiss on his cheekbone — as much as was advisable, he knew, since even the tiny salt flakes from his sweat might also be radioactive, not to mention his saliva if they had kissed on the lips. "Isn't this great luck?" she cried in delight. "How am I here? Well, partly because my own count is a bit low, and partly because I am to learn how they test blood to determine the extent of radioactivity — just for forty-eight hours, I'm afraid. But most of all, I am here because you are here, my dear, and I asked for permission."

Sheranchuk looked at her in distress. "Your count is low?"

"Oh, quite marginal," she assured him. "No, my dear, it is you who are the patient here, not I. I have had a look at your charts with the other doctors. They're a bit puzzling."

"So they have told me. I am not as sick as I ought to be."

"Did they explain to you about Dr. Guskova's system? Since we don't know how much radiation you received, she has worked out a method of deducing it from the way your blood count falls off— "

"I have heard everything there is to hear about Dr. Guskova's system. But she did not tell me how much of a dose that was, and neither did anyone else."

Tamara hesitated. "Perhaps one hundred rads," she said reluctantly. "It is possible that it is more."

"And that means?" he demanded.

"In your case, my dear," she said, "it is difficult to say."

"I see," he said, thinking. Then, remembering how she had appeared from nowhere and made him put on coveralls, "It would have been more if it hadn't been for you."

"So I am good for something as a wife," she said. It was a light remark, but her tone was not light. He opened his mouth to ask if anything was wrong, but she was going right on: "Deputy Director Smin may not have had much more, but as you see, he is very ill and you are — not?"

"I feel all right," he said, stretching the truth. In fact, he felt tired much of the time and sometimes a bit feverish. But nothing like Smin, of course.

His wife sat down next to him on the bed, prepared to lecture. "The etiology of radiation sickness," she said, "is quite well known. Simyon Mikhailovitch doesn't fit the curve. He is getting worse faster than he should. He—"

Suddenly remembering, she glanced apprehensively at the closed curtains. "He's asleep," Sheranchuk assured her. "I heard him snoring a minute ago."

"Well," she said, lowering her voice, "your blood count is not dropping off as fast as his, or many of the others."

"Doctor talk again," he complained. "Which means what?"

"Which means we don't know what," she said. "Perhaps it means that all of your exposure was from external sources— dust and smoke on your skin, that was washed off. Smin, on the other hand, may actually have swallowed some, or breathed it. The radioisotopes are still in his body."

Sheranchuk was puzzled. "But I was exposed as much as he! I was in the area longer, even; he was away when the explosion occurred. We breathed the same air, ate the same food—"

"But such a little difference can make such a big effect, Leonid. You were within buildings much of the time. He may have been outside. It could be as small a thing as a stack of bread that was left too long on a table. Perhaps he had the top slice, and you only one from lower down."

Sheranchuk said, making his tone calm, "Does that mean that I will—"

He didn't finish the sentence. "It means that your chances are better," she said; and then, strongly, "Leonid! I think you will recover completely!"

Sheranchuk turned and raised himself on an elbow to study his wife. He had never been her patient before, except now and then for a headache or a sore wrist. Was this how she always talked to those under her care? It was not at all the same free and easy way they spoke in their kitchen, or their bed.

"You do go on talking like a doctor," he complained.

"But, Leonid, I am a doctor. And, oh," she went on, "I'm sure of it! Especially with those American doctors here! You would not believe how good they are! Just this morning the hospital centrifuge broke down, and in just a few hours they had packed everything up and moved it to another facility. And their own instruments! They have a machine, you put into it a sample of blood, whisk, click, and in just a few seconds you have a blood cell count printed out, with every number! While for us it is necessary to put each blood sample under a microscope and someone must count every individual cell — half an hour at least, and after a technician has counted a dozen samples his eyes are weary and his attention flags, and how likely it is to make mistakes!"

"That sounds wonderful," said Sheranchuk.

She pursed her lips, preparing to announce some surprising news. "And did you know, Leonka, that one of them is not an American at all, but from Israel?"

That was astonishing; Israel and the USSR had no diplomatic relations at all. Therefore no Israeli citizen could possibly get a visa to enter the Soviet Union — unless, of course, someone very high up ordered that the laws be forgotten for this case. "That is even more surprising than a machine," he conceded. "Still, we've given the Israelis plenty of people, they can lend us one in return."

"The American doctor even said that in his country a hospital like this would be air-conditioned!"

"The Americans," Smin grinned, "will be air-conditioning their cars next." His arm was getting tired. He sank back on his bed, curled facing his wife as she went on describing the technological wonders that had flown in from California. Her manner was, after all, a bit puzzling. He welcomed the conversation because he didn't have many visitors and it was tiring to hold a book to read, but were these the subjects a wife would normally discuss under these circumstances? Was it possible she was keeping something from him? What could it be? "What about Boris?" he asked suddenly.

She broke off. "Boris?" she said, as though trying to recall who he was talking about. "Well, yes. It is a pity, but his cells do not match yours. Still, you may not need a transfusion at all—"

"I already know that," he grumbled. "I was asking if you had heard from him since he left."

"Oh, but of course I have," she said penitently. "He has been evacuated to the Artek camp — on the Black Sea — the very best Komsomol camp in the whole country, and it's all free for him."

"I have been told that too. I asked if you had heard from the boy himself."

"Certainly! Oh! I was forgetting — he even sent some photographs — look," she said, fumbling some out of her bag, "these were taken on a trip to Yalta." While Tamara was proudly telling him how Boris was actually learning to ride a horse, Sheranchuk gazed at the color prints. There was Boris on a beach, his arm on the shoulder of another teenage boy Sheranchuk had never seen before. Both were in swim trunks, grinning into the camera. Behind them was a gaggle of stout, middle-aged women in bikinis, industriously tossing a volleyball. One had a huge caesarean scar across her belly.

"Can you trust him around such bathing beauties as these?" Sheranchuk smiled.

She took the pictures back, studying them for a moment before putting them away. "In a summer camp one can be tempted," she sighed.

Sheranchuk smiled a real smile. That at least was more like the old Tamara. "Or in a hospital, perhaps? So you think I am misbehaving with Dr. Guskova? She is a bit old for me, as well as a trifle heavyset for my taste. But there is a nurse on the night duty—"

But Tamara only pouted instead of railing back at him. "I saw that Serena Smin was here," she said.

"She has been very good with her husband," Sheranchuk said. "I admire her a great deal."

"Yes, and I saw that she admires you as well," his wife said flatly.

"Oh," said Sheranchuk, understanding at last. He grinned at his wife. "You saw her kiss me. Yes, of course; she and I have been doing all sorts of things here, with her husband asleep in the next bed and her son standing guard in the corridor."

"I do not like to joke about these matters," Tamara said.

Sheranchuk groaned faintly. Was it possible that she was being seriously jealous again? He opened his mouth to reassure her, and then he caught a flicker of motion.

He turned to the door. A sunburned young man in Air Force blue was standing there. "I am Senior Lieutenant Nikolai Smin," he announced. "Is my father here?"

"Yes," Tamara Sheranchuk began, "but you must wear a robe if you want to—" And she was interrupted by a voice from behind the screens.

"Is that my son? Put the nightshirt on him, please, and let him come in!"

Nikolai Smin took the visitor's chair from beside Sheranchuk's bed, now politely empty as Sheranchuk let his wife escort him out of the way of the reunion, and put it next to his father's. He started to pull the screens away, but his father stopped him. "Leave them," he ordered. "You don't want to see me too well."

That statement was distressingly validated. Nikolai could not helping the freezing of the expression on his face as he got a good look at his father. Suddenly Smin was an old man, and one apparently close to a repulsive death. What were those awful pus-filled black blobs on his face? What were the red sores on his neck and shoulders that wept colorless fluid? And that unpleasant smell?

"Don't touch me, Kolya," Smin said. "Kiss the air for me and I will kiss it back."

Nikolai did as he was ordered, but protested, "I'm not afraid of catching something from you."

"But I am afraid for you. Also, it hurts if you touch me."

"At least you are, well—" Nikolai fumbled, looking for something positive to say.

"Conscious? Lucid? Yes, Kolya, for sometimes half an hour at a time, so please let's not waste it with pretending. I am wonderfully pleased to see you, my son. Was it bad where you were?"

Nikolai hesitated, choosing his words. "It is not that dangerous to be flying an MI-24 gunship in Afghanistan, Father. But it is dirty and boring, and no one but a lunatic loves shooting at civilians from the air. It is true that some of those civilians shoot back, but none have come close to me."

"And when you are done here you will go back to Afghanistan?"

Nikolai looked rebellious. "Of course," he said.

"I see. Still, your mother said something about volunteering to fly in the helicopters that are dropping things over the reactor—"

"It was an idle thought. They have no further need for pilots to drop dirt on your reactor, Father, so they have discontinued the drops."

"Oh?" said Smin, interested. "Then the core is completely safe now?"

"I think," Nikolai said, "that it is at least safer to continue to deal with it by other means than to have pilots dodging that stack. I have seen the photos, Father; it is not what a helicopter pilot likes to find in his path. Anyway, they've stopped. Then I asked if there were any other flying jobs in the area. They said not. Or almost none; the only flying missions related to what happened to your plant are now Yaks dropping iodine crystals into the clouds before they get to Chernobyl, so they won't rain on the plant. But unfortunately they don't need me for that."

"Unfortunately," Smin repeated. "Why unfortunately?"

Nikolai shrugged morosely. "No, really," his father insisted. "I would like to understand what you feel. Are you determined to retrieve the family honor? Do you think the accident was my fault and you must do something heroic to make up for it?"

Nikolai pondered for a moment. "I don't know what I think about that," he said at last. "Does it matter? At least I am here now."

"And I am grateful," said his father, willing to let the subject be changed. "I appreciate that you are here to try to save my life."

"If I can. I am to be tested this afternoon." The young man swallowed involuntarily, and Smin noticed.

"It isn't pleasant, what they want you to do," he said gently. "I am sorry to have to ask you to do it. And even sorrier that it is necessary. Kolya? Are you ashamed of your father?"

"Ashamed? But, Father! You did your best!"

"I thought that was what I was doing, yes," Smin agreed.

"No, really! My mother and Vassili have told me all about it. In the past three years you have made everything work so much better—"

"In three years, yes. And in another five years, perhaps, I would have finished the task and Chernobyl would have been fully up to standards in every respect. It is a pity, but I didn't have those five years."

"No," said Nikolai loyally. "So it is not your fault. Still—"

Smin waited. "What, then, Kolya?" he asked.

"I should be going for my test, not worrying you with silly things when you aren't feeling very well."

Smin actually laughed — not "feeling very well!" But it hurt him to laugh, and all he said, with great patience, was: "Tell me what you were about to say, Kolya. Fathers and sons should speak honestly to one another."

"Well— Only— The thing is," Nikolai went on, picking up speed, "there are such terrible stories! Concrete that crumbles into sand, walls that fall down!"

"Those are true stories, Kolya. I accepted many substandard products."

"But why, Father?"

Smin sighed. "Do they teach you nothing in the Air Force of what the world is like? Let us pretend, Kolya, that you are the director of a cement factory. Each month you have a plan to fulfill. Perhaps your plan calls for the production of ten thousand tons of cement and, look, it is the twenty-fifth of the month and you have only produced four thousand. But if you don't fulfill your plan, there are no bonuses for the workers, no commendations for you; you may even be reprimanded. Or worse than reprimanded. So what do you do, Kolya? You do what every other factory manager does. You put all your workers on overtime, with orders to storm six thousand tons of cement in five days. Can they do it? Certainly — if they slop the work through any old way; and on the last day of the month you have fulfilled your plan… Of course, those six thousand tons are useless."

"But then you don't have to accept them, Father!"

"Yes, exactly," his father agreed. "One should reject them at once. But then what? Chernobyl did need cement. The cement maker needed not only to complete his plan, but to sell the production. So he says to me, 'You want some good cement, very well, I will give you all you need. But you must also take this other batch.' And I have no choice, Kolya. I take the bad, because if I don't, someone else will, and then he will get the good cement I need desperately. And with steel: the plan for the steel mill calls for another ten thousand tons, let us say; that is easy enough to make, if you make only mild, low-grade steel. But I need better! So to get the steel I need for my reactors I must persuade the steel man to make it, and to do that I must also buy a few thousand tons that are useless. Or I must bribe someone with money or even a car. Or I must send out expediters — expediters! They are gangsters, really. Flatterers. Toadies. Even pimps. And I send these slimy individuals out to wine and dine the suppliers and coax them to send me the things I really need instead of the trash they want to get rid of.. and, even so, usually they will send me both."

"That is shameful," his son said harshly. Then he added quickly, "Excuse me, I don't mean you, I mean—"

"Mean me, Kolya," Smin said gently. "I could have done things properly, after all. It is only that I do not think Chernobyl would have been producing four thousand megawatts of electricity for the network if I had."

Nikolai muttered something under his breath. "What was that?" Smin asked sharply.

"Nothing, Father. I must go now for my appointment. I will come back later." And this time he did, carefully but firmly, rest his hand on his father's for a moment before he left; but Smin did not respond. He was too busy wondering if he had been right in what he thought he heard.

To have a few minutes to himself when his head was clear — that was a precious thing for Simyon Smin. He did not waste it. He pulled out the pad on which he had been writing the letter to Mishko and Milaktiev, but after only a line or two his arms wearied and his vision blurred. There was the question, too, of how he was going to get it to the people who had asked for it. Would they come back? Probably yes, he told himself, but would it be while he was still in a position to hand it over? And he would not consider giving it to either his wife or his younger son to pass on; what if they were caught with it?

Kolya, yes. Perhaps. It was at least a possibility; Kolya was a grown man and by now, after eleven months of shooting Moslem tribesmen in Afghanistan, a reasonably tough and resourceful one. But there was the worrisome thing Kolya had said. Would he, after all, be the right one to trust with such a letter?

Which left only Smin's mother.

Smin lay back, slipping the pad under his pillow, thinking about his mother. At this very moment, he knew, she was somewhere in the hospital, doing what Kolya was doing, namely having her breastbone pierced with a great sharp knife to take a sample of marrow. For him. Always for him. Since the first days he could remember, for him. He remembered his mother in the village, when he was in school, when he was a Young Pioneer, when he went off at twenty to do his military duty (an annoyance at most, really; who would dare attack the Soviet Union in 1940, when the only other powerful state in Europe had sworn an unbreakable treaty of non-aggression?) — and had the good sense, or good fortune, to choose to serve in tanks. So when Adolf Hitler broke the unbreakable treaty and shoved his irresistible armies across the border a year later, young Junior Lieutenant Simyon Smin was not poured with two million other green recruits into the first terrible meatgrinder, because he was studying advanced armored tactics four thousand kilometers away.

He shook himself awake, sweating and almost ready to scream aloud; he had been dreaming; flames had been licking over him and his T-34 had been hit.

He took a deep breath to calm himself. Perhaps he was dying now, but at least he had not died then. As so many others had. He had been given forty extra years of life, and so he was owed nothing at all.

He hadn't wasted those years. Out of them he had married two good women, and had two good sons to show for it. It was a pity that it should end badly, but it was still more than he could have hoped for as he tried to claw his way out of the burning tank.

It was then, in the hospital, that his mother had asked him if he would really mind if she were to marry again.

Such a possibility had never occurred to young Simyon Smin. He was aware that his mother was quite a good-looking woman still, though a bit over forty. But to marry? And to marry so high a Party official? For Vassilievitch Mishko was second only to Nikita Khrushchev in the Party organization of the Ukraine, now just being won back from the Fascists.

He had given his approval at once, however. He hadn't been selfish. He had even been pleased to think of his mother having a life of her own again, without him to raise or a war or a purge to make everyone's life a misery; and it would have happened if F. V. Mishko had not happened to displease J. V. Stalin and wound up shoveling gold ore in Siberia. It did not surprise Smin that his mother had elected to live very quietly for the rest of her life. She had seen what happened when a person became too public.

"Are you awake, then?" a voice called softly from the gap in the curtains.

Smin shook himself. "Of course, Comrade Plumber," he said, working to create another smile. "What's the news outside?"

He was really glad to see Sheranchuk. He tried to listen while Sheranchuk told him his stories — the good news, his wife appearing unexpectedly at the hospital; the bad news, one of the Four Seasons dying, and another in delirium and pain. "I'm surprised you didn't hear him," Sheranchuk said. "He was shouting quite loudly a little while ago, but now he is quieter."

"Yes, yes," Smin said absently.

"And your older son came to see you. That's good news, of course."

"I suppose it is," said Smin, and his tone made Sheranchuk look more closely at him.

"Is something wrong?" he asked worriedly.

"What should be wrong? — No, Leonid, it is a bit of a worry. Kolya said something. We were talking about what was wrong at the plant — I don't mean the accident, I mean the difficulties with materials and personnel. He became quite indignant. Then he said — I think he said—'It would be better to have Stalin back.' "

"I see," said Sheranchuk.

Smin looked up at him. "Do you?"

"Well, yes, I think so," Sheranchuk said uncomfortably.

"He is a military man, after all. There are many who think the leadership has wasted too much time in Afghanistan."

Smin said in sorrow, "Are you saying that you, too, think Mikhail Gorbachev is too liberal?"

"No, no! Nothing like that. What do I know of such things, after all? I am merely saying that I have heard people say that sort of remark. There is, really, a great deal of waste and corruption."

"But under Stalin we had the same kind of inefficiency, Leonid, only then it was called 'sabotage.' And also we had the purges."

"I don't remember Stalin times very well," Sheranchuk apologized.

"Unfortunately, my son Kolya doesn't either. He has never had to worry about a knock on the door at two a.m. Now they are much more considerate, the GehBehs. They come only during business hours. Leonid? Have you been questioned yet?"

"Well, yes, a little. I simply told them that I was not on duty at the time of the explosion and that, as far as I know, it was Chief Engineer Varazin who insisted on pushing the experiment through without safeguards. With the encouragement of Gorodot Khrenov, of course." Sheranchuk paused, looking at Smin's face. "What's the matter?"

"Leonid! What did you say about Khrenov?"

"Only that. I simply told the truth."

"You told what you think is the truth. You told it about Khrenov," Smin said patiendy. "Khrenov is with the organs. Do you think the organs wish to report that one of their own was involved, even only to encourage?"

"They did seem quite concerned about that," Sheranchuk admitted.

"Leonid, are you insane? Are you even right? How do you know what Khrenov did?"

"I know he hung around the Chief Engineer like a shadow," Sheranchuk said doggedly.

"That is what he is paid to do, Leonid. Why do you say 'encourage'? Were you present when Khrenov 'encouraged' Varazin to go ahead?"

"No, but he did!"

"How do you know that? You were not present," Smin insisted. "Believe me, the organs know well what Khrenov did and Khrenov will answer for it to them. But not in public. So if there is a hearing, as there will be, and if you testify, as you must, you will simply speak the truth about what you saw and what you did. Not about what you think you know from some other person's reports." He hesitated, and then said sofdy, "All of these things are on the record."

"And the record will remain forever in the files of the GehBehs," Sheranchuk said bitterly, because suddenly he was afraid.

Smin paused. After a moment he said slowly, "Not necessarily. Remember Khrushchev's speech on the excesses of the Stalin regime. It is possible that everything will come out in some way." Then he shook his head and grinned, a woeful sight in that damaged face. "In any case — wait, what's that?"

Sheranchuk heard it too. He said worriedly, "I'm afraid Arkady Ponomorenko is shouting again. But what is it you were going to say?"

"Only that, in any case, perhaps we will all be lucky enough to die here in Hospital Number Six. But go to your friend; he sounds as though he needs someone."

At the door of the pipefitter's room a nurse stopped Sheranchuk. "Where are you going?" she scolded. "Can't you see he's in no shape to have visitors?"

"But I am not a visitor but a fellow patient. In any case he needs someone."

"And what good do you think you can do him now?" she asked bitterly. Behind her, "Spring" had stopped screaming at least, but was now addressing sober, thoughtful remarks to the air above his bed. "Well," she said, softening, "I suppose it can do no harm, at least until his cousin comes back."

But if Volya Ponomorenko didn't come back soon, Sheranchuk was sure, he would not see his cousin alive. The pipefitter was gasping for breath as he spoke. He was telling the air that the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station had no right to be where it was. "It is the Russians, you see," he said dreamily, gazing at the ceiling. "They're the ones who need it, not us. We have farms in the Ukraine! We grow food, the best in the world; we don't need their factories or their power plants. If we want electrical power, we have the Dnieper River!

Already there are two dozen great dams on the Dnieper, so why bring in these atomic contraptions?"

"Shhh," said Sheranchuk nervously. "You should rest, please, Arkady."

The pipefitter gave no sign of hearing him. He addressed the ceiling reasonably. "So why do we have this nuclear power station at all? Because the Russians want it, you see. It is not a thing for Ukrainians at all. It is so the Russians can turn on the lights in Moscow and sell electricity to the people in Poland and Bulgaria. Let them make their own!"

"Please rest," Sheranchuk begged, glancing toward the door. Where were the doctors when you wanted them?

"But no!" cried Ponomorenko, suddenly loud again. "The Russians insist, and what can we do? Can we say no to them? Can we ask them please to make their filthy atomic messes somewhere else? Can we live freely in our own dear Ukraine, that Bogdan Khelmnitski freed from the Poles? Can we even speak the truth when we want to? No, we cannot, and do you know why? I'll tell you why!" he shouted.

"Please!" cried Sheranchuk, and then to the door, "Nurse!"

"This is why!" Ponomorenko cried, raising himself on his elbows. "Because we are prisoners¹. The Russians have taken us captive, and now we can't get free. My only wish—"

He burst out in a fit of coughing and fell back. And what his only wish was no one would ever know, because the way his head hit the pillow, the way one eye was half open and the other shut, the way his jaw hung slack, they all told the story: the brave pipefitter and daring football player, the "Spring" of the Four Seasons, Arkady Ponomorenko, was dead.