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.
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."
"I don't think much about political questions," Sheranchuk apologized.
"Arkady thought too much of them," the footballer said kindly. "He made me think too. And what I think is that perhaps the Ukraine will have more of a voice on what happens in the Ukraine before long, and that will be worth waiting for." He shook himself and smiled. "Have you spoken to our real hero yet?"
"Real hero?"
"Bohdan Kalychenko. He was here a moment ago, but they've taken him off to hospital, I suppose. They say he was the first one on the roof, even before the firemen. Imagine! He stole a suit from somewhere, they thought he was one of their own!"
When Sheranchuk finally got back to the town of Chernobyl, the litde apartment was empty. There was only a note:
I've been called to duty at the hospital. Come and tell me that you're all right!
He poured himself a glass of apple juice, thought of going out to phone the hospital (their luck in getting the apartment had not yet extended to a telephone), decided he might as well go there himself.
As he walked through Chernobyl town's crowded streets, he discovered he was feeling dejected. The adrenaline lift of the fire was gone. He had, after all, been of very little use in that emergency, he told himself. Well, yes, he had pointed out the danger of the diesel fuel, but it was Ponomorenko who had gone into the danger zone to deal with it-and who was to say the firemen wouldn't have dealt with it on their own?
Leonid Sheranchuk was not at ease with his thoughts on that sunny day. The fire was out, yes, but who was to say there would not be another? Or some other sudden emergency, not expected, not planned for-striking without warning to place Simyon Smin's plant once more in mortal danger? Was it as the man had said, that "forever" meant always, every day, remembering how badly things could go and always being vigilant?
He did not allow himself to really think of Simyon Smin. He didn't have to; that pain was always there.
Then there was Tamara. Certainly he had forgiven her in his heart-if indeed she needed forgiving; if what the bitch-doctor, Akhsmentova, had said had anything to do with reality. But would he always remember that she was forgiven? Even if something came up, something perhaps like what Ivanov had said, to remind him that his cuckoldry (if indeed it were true) was known to others than himself… Not to mention the fact that he could never again do his real job at the Chernobyl plant, or indeed at any other nuclear power station anywhere.
He sighed, crossing the street before the hospital. You can't expect to be happy all the time, he told himself.
Then he revised that. No, he thought, the important thing is to take what you've got, no matter what that is, and find a way to make a happy life out of it somehow.
When he found his wife, flushed and busy in the admitting room, he first assured her that he was all right and then, impulsively, threw his arms around her and kissed her hard.
Tamara was startled. She drew away, then, laughing, returned the kiss. "All of that, my dear," she said, "can wait until later. I'm glad you're all right! Now, please, I'm busy-why don't you go to see Bohdan Kalychenko and let him boast to you of his heroism? After all, he has earned the chance!"
Kalychenko was in hospital pajamas, but he wasn't in bed. He was standing in the hall, in everyone's way, talking reassuringly to the fireman with the broken head. When he saw Sheranchuk, he hesitated, then came to him, grinning. "Poor lad, he's off to the operating room, but they'll fix him up, you can be sure. Me? Yes, I'm fine, but I couldn't find a suit quite tall enough for me. So I took nearly fifty rads, did you know? So they want to watch me for a bit, but that's only their way."
"I see that you just can't help running away from your post of duty," Sheranchuk said, mock severe.
Kalychenko flushed. "But the reactor was down!" he protested. "There was nothing to do there, only to watch the meters-"
Sheranchuk apologized quickly. "I was only making a joke. No, Kalychenko, this time you have covered yourself with honor, up on the roof. And with radiation, too, of course." He hesitated. "It's a pity, but I suppose that means they'll want to send you away. Still, they've made an exception for me. Perhaps they will for you, too."
"No, no," Kalychenko said quickly. "I've already been told that's out of the question, but it's all right. I've had an offer of another job, quite a different kind. Where? In Yuzhevin, the village where we were evacuated." And yes, he said (but silently to himself), all right, it's an "unpromising" village. But the job is good, and Raia likes the idea, and at least there I won't have to report on my comrades.
Sheranchuk couldn't make out the man's expression. "Well," he said vaguely, "I wish you all luck there. And, of course, congratulations on your marriage-have I said that already?"
He tried to think of a way to ease the sudden wariness that seemed to have entered the conversation. Emulating the man who was never far from his thoughts-"Ah, yes," he said. "Do you like Radio Armenia jokes? Deputy Director Smin was fond of them; there's one he told me in the hospital in Moscow, just before he died. It's a twenty-first-century joke. What does the father say then to his little girl when he takes her up a certain hill? He says, 'Don't be afraid, little dove. Under this hill is buried an old atomic power plant, but it's perfectly safe.' And then, when the frightened little girl still doesn't want to climb it, what does he tell her? He says, 'But, really, it's quite all right. Here, if you're frightened, give me your hand. Now give me your other hand. Now give me your other hand.' "
When, late that night, Sheranchuk remembered to tell his wife the same joke, he complained, "Kalychenko was odd, really. He didn't think it was very funny. But it's a good joke, isn't it?"
But Tamara wasn't laughing, either.