"Then come along and do it!" yelled the fireman.
"I'll do it," the pipefitter volunteered. "It's only a matter of turning a valve, after all, and then I'll come back to help
you."
He didn't wait for permission. He simply pressed the torch into Sheranchuk's hand and loped away with the brigade commander. Sheranchuk put the matter out of his mind. It was the hydraulic system that was his business, not a simple flame that only needed to be shut off like the stove in his wife's kitchen.
Five minutes later he was standing on the bottom step of the flight that led down to the basement, shining the light into a steamy gloom, appalled at what he saw.
The hydraulic shock of the explosion had gone completely through the return-water system. Every pipe on the floor had been neatly severed at the joints, the flanges that linked the units together opened like flowers. The water that should have flowed through them back into the systems of Reactors 3 and 4 was pulsing slowly out of the opened joints to add to the steaming, centimeters deep pond on the floor of the underground pipe hall.
Sheranchuk's first rational thought was that Reactor No. 3 had to be shut down. If the return-water system was breached, at some time not very far in the future, the pumps would have nothing to send through the core of No. 3 but air, and then No. 3 would join No. 4 in blowing up. His second thought was that the person with the authority to order the shutdown was Chief Engineer Varazin, wherever Varazin might be. He reached those conclusions slowly and painstakingly; but his body acted without waiting for a formal decision. Long before he had concluded that he must find Varazin he was already out of the building, running along in the dark night away from the hullabaloo at the fire, heading toward the door of Reactor No. 2.
The door was more than a hundred meters away and, even running, Sheranchuk had time to notice that there were bright stars in the sky and a scent of something green and flowery— lilacs, again? — in the air. At this end of the great joined structures the smoky smell was gone, sucked away by the strong wind. There was nothing, Sheranchuk thought detachedly, to keep him from going on running, straight ahead, over the fence if he had to, and away.
Of course, he did nothing of the kind. When he came to the door he grabbed for the knob.
The door was locked.
Sheranchuk shouted angrily, but once again his body acted without waiting for instructions from his rational mind. The door at the end of the block would be open, though with a guard to keep intruders away.
The door was indeed open, and with no guard in sight. Sheranchuk pounded up the stairs, pausing only at the fifth level to cross quickly over to the No. 1 turbine room (no, no one there, though the turbines were howling peacefully away) and to peer into the refueling chamber over the No. 1 reactor. It was empty, too, and quite normal in every way to the eye, with the great crane squatting silently in one corner. No one was in the crane's control room, either, but Sheranchuk had not really expected to find Varazin there.
He was breathing quite hard by the time he got back across the building and up to the main control room for No. 1 Reactor.
Varazin wasn't there either. The six people in the room were the normal nighttime crew. They looked pretty strained, not to say scared, but they were carrying out their duties in the business-as-usual way. "Varazin? No," said the shift supervisor. "Someone said that when last heard from he was heading for Pripyat, but I didn't see him myself."
"Could he be in Number Two?" Sheranchuk fretted. "I'd best run over there and see—"
The shift chief looked astonished. "As you wish, but wouldn't it be better simply to telephone?"
"Telephone?" Sheranchuk blinked at the strange idea, then recollected himself. And indeed, the phone in Control Room No. 2 was picked up at the first ring, though Varazin was not there either. The shift chief for No. 2 volunteered that Khrenov had stopped by a litde earlier to urge them to stay at their posts, but Khrenov was no use to Sheranchuk. On the chance, he tried to ring No. 3, but its lines were still out of order.
"I'll have to go to Number Three," he groaned, and was gone before anyone in the room responded.
At the stairs he realized there was an alternative to seven flights down and seven back up again. The alternative was to cross the roof of the building.
But that was not to be either. As soon as he opened the door to the roof a fireman shouted at him to go back. Indeed, there wasn't any choice. All across the broad expanse of roof joining the reactor buildings was a spattering of bonfires, some tiny, some huge. Firemen were limping about in the softened waterproofing of the roof, trying to get hoses on them all at once, but as soon as one fire was out another would start up. At the entrance of the stairs for No. 3 Sheranchuk saw a curious sight picked out in the searchlights of the firefighters: a sort of black fountain, half a meter high, dark droplets flung up and cascading back down to the source. Smoke was rising from it, and as he watched, it burst into flame when the chunk of white-hot graphite that had buried itself in the bitumen finally ignited the stuff.
It would have to be seven floors down and seven back up again, after all — only now, because he had made the extra climb to the roof, it was eight each way.
When at last, sobbing and coughing for breath, he got to the main control room for Reactor No. 3 he saw that the two operators had become six, as volunteers came in to replace the absent ones. But the shift chief was obstinate. No, Chief Engineer Varazin was not here, nor had he been since the explosion. Yes, granted, there was something wrong with the turbines and the water system. But no, positively no he would not shut his reactor down.
"Do your mother! You must\" Sheranchuk gasped. "Are you crazy? Do you know what will happen when the water runs out?" But the engineer, his face a frozen mask, was shaking his head.
"We have no orders!" he said.
"Orders! I order you!" Sheranchuk shouted.
"In writing, then, if you- please," said the engineer, ludicrously firm, "for I will not take the responsibility of failing to fulfill our plan, with only four days to go until the end of the month." And incredibly, comically, Sheranchuk found himself scribbling a written order for which he had no authority at all—I direct that Unit No. 3 he placed at once in standby mode—before the man would stand aside and allow the operators to get on with their work. Only two operators now, Sheranchuk noted; the others had fled. The two remaining, cursing and swearing, labored over the boards until a series of thuds, almost lost in the constant noise of fire and firefighting, told them that all the boron rods were firmly socketed.
"What are you doing, Sheranchuk?" asked a gentle, sorrowing voice from behind him.
Sheranchuk knew before he turned that it was the Director of the First Department, Gorodot Khrenov. "I am helping shut down this reactor," he said.
"Yes, yes," Khrenov said absently. The liquid brown eyes seemed clouded, and the man's expression was detached. "You appear to have given orders in matters that don't concern you," he observed, gazing around the room. The operators stood watching the encounter.
"He only told us to do what we have orders to do anyway in such a case," one of them called.
Khrenov's eyes swept over the man, whose face stiffened. Sheranchuk spoke up to draw the fire to himself. "The Ministry must be notified at once," he said.
Khrenov's eyes widened, but the operator spoke again. "That's been done. I telephoned a report to Moscow myself."
"Ah," said Khrenov, nodding. "Someone else who takes responsibility onto himself. And what did you report, then?"
"That Reactor Number Four had exploded, of course. I know," the shift man added apologetically, "that that is the duty of the Chief Engineer, but I couldn't find him."