He helped a fireman to stumble toward the waiting ambulance; the man limped and held one hand to his face. He was not the only casualty already. The doctor who had given him a lift was loading a bundle of charred rags into his ambulance that Sheranchuk would not have thought human if it hadn't been cursing steadily in a faint, high-pitched voice. Three other firemen were coughing as they sat on the cement roadway, waiting for someone to bring them oxygen, or, better still, new lungs to replace the ones filled with smoke. (Why weren't they wearing respirators? Sheranchuk asked himself. But, for that matter, why wasn't he?) Glazouva, the tough old woman who ran the plant's night coffee stand, had managed to stay together long enough to help two of her customers to safety, but when Sheranchuk saw her, she was collapsed under the plaque of Lenin at the plant entrance, sobbing helplessly, not responding to anyone's attempts to talk to her. A militiaman lay stunned on the ground, his hair scorched where a bit of flaming debris from the sky had knocked him out and, likely enough, cracked his skull.
There was room for only two in the ambulance, but the doctor promised to send more from the Pripyat hospital as he got in to drive away. "And hurry, please!" Sheranchuk shouted after him.
The next ambulance to arrive, though, didn't come from Pripyat. It was from the town of Chernobyl, thirty kilometers away, and with it came half a dozen new fire trucks. There were more than a hundred firemen on the scene already, the stentorian throbbing of pumps adding to the shouts and the ominous thuds and snaps and crackling sounds from the fires; and in the center of it all, stark and incredible, the splintered walls of what had once been Reactor No. 4.
Burns, bruises, cuts, contusions, smoke inhalation, heat fatigue, simple exhaustion — put them all together and there were forty or fifty people lined up to be taken away in the ambulances shuttling between the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station and the hospital in Pripyat, just a few kilometers away. Sheranchuk thought it strange that when the ambulances left the plant they went without sirens or bells, and seemed to take a roundabout way that circled the town before heading directly for the hospital. Was it possible they were being considerate about waking the townspeople up? He stood amid a tangle of hose lines, his mind weary of questions, pondering that irrelevant one.
"Hi! You! Get back behind the lines, you're just in the way here!" A brigade commander was shouting at him as a new fire truck, from one of the farm villages, tried to inch its way through the congestion to take station with the others. Sheranchuk shook his head, trying to clear it. What was the thing someone had said? People still unaccounted for, somewhere inside the plant?
Well, that at least was something he could do. He retreated toward the gate, slowly, until the fire commander wasn't looking at him anymore, then hurried to the nearest entrance to the plant. Exactly why he did that Sheranchuk would have been unable to say. It was partly to see if there was anyone who needed help getting out, partly because he just couldn't stay away.
Inside the building the noise from outside dwindled, but there were new and worrisome sounds. He could hear the creaks and thuds from what was left of Reactor No. 4, and an irregular throbbing that bothered him. The building he was in was attached to the turbine hall shared by Reactors 3 and 4, and it had not been left untouched. The walls were seamed with huge cracks. In places whole sections of paneling had fallen out, and these he had to dodge around. The floor of the hall he trotted along bulged in places, and was littered with fluorescent light fixtures, fire extinguishers — fire extinguishers! — and odds and ends of unidentifiable things that had been shaken off the walls and ceilings by the blast. Most of the windows here, too, had been blown out, and broken glass crunched under his feet as he raced from door to door in the halls. A nasty, choking chemical-smoky smell was everywhere. It made him cough as he trotted along, stumbling in the gloom because only a few emergency lights were still going.
Most of the doors were tidily locked for the weekend. When he flung others open, he shouted inside to see if anyone were there, but there were no answers. He was on the fifth floor of the building when he began to think he was accomplishing nothing productive with his time.
He stopped and considered. It did not occur to him that he was being courageous, only that he might be doing something that had no purpose.
The irregular throbbing was still there. He listened, frowning, one hand against the vibrating beige wall of the corridor. It took a moment to recognize that what he heard was the sound of turbines still running in the hall that served both Reactors 3 and 4.
Its control room was only two stories away, and Sheranchuk took the stairs on a dead run, arriving breathless in the room. There were only three men there, the shift chief and two operators, and they turned to greet him with angry expressions as he burst in. He stared around the room incredulously. The immaculate control room was dirty. When he gripped the back of a chair to steady himself, sooty dust came away on his fingers. "What's going on here?" he demanded.
"The devil knows," the shift chief snarled, waving a hand at the instrument wall. The lights were flickering, but Sheranchuk could read the indicators.
Startled, he shouted an obscenity. "Be careful! You'll have this one off too!"
The supervisor rasped furiously in return, "Screw God and your mother, both\ What are we supposed to do? First that cow Number Four blows up, then we try to stabilize our own reactor, then we get the order to evacuate the whole plant at once! So we begin to shut this one down — then they countermand the order and it's keep the working units working, boys, we need the power."
"But Turbine Six—" Sheranchuk began, waving a hand at the hydraulic pressure meters.
"Turbine Six your mother's ass! They've all gone mad! Your pipes have sprung a leak, plumber!"
Instinctively Sheranchuk picked up a phone to call the pump control room, but, of course, there wasn't any sound from the instrument; its cables, too, like most of the others in that building, had been fried somewhere along the line. Sheranchuk didn't wait to argue. He went down the stairs faster than he had come up, nearly falling half a dozen times in the gloom. When he reached the pump control room, he almost expected it to be empty, but at least one of his people was there — the pipefitter they called "Spring," Arkady Pono-morenko. "You're not an operator!" Sheranchuk said accusingly.
"There's no operator here," the football player explained softly, shy and deferential even now. "I was told there was damage to the pumps, so I came to take a look. Look, Leonid, the pressure is dropping; I've tried to cut in another pump, but still it falls."
"We have to have pressure," Sheranchuk snapped. "Here, let me see." He shouldered the pipefitter roughly out of his way, glaring at the intractable pressure gauges before him. But Spring had been right; of the main pumps all were already engaged, though three of them did not seem to be operating at all, and the pressure in the system was slowly creeping downward.
Sheranchuk rubbed a fist across his eyes. Outside he heard someone shouting, but he paid no attention. "We'd better have a look," he said. "There's probably no power down below; is there a light here?"
"I've already got it out," said Spring eagerly, holding out a hand torch.
"Come on, then!" But just outside the door a fire brigade commander was hurrying toward them shouting.
"Is this the place where the plumbers are? Look, you two! We've got some kind of flame going that we can't put out, somebody said it's yours."
"Flame?" Sheranchuk repeated. Then, understanding, "Oh, the hydrogen flare! Yes, of course, it only needs to be turned off—"