Khrenov said thoughtfully, "Chief Engineer Varazin felt that he had the obligation to make sure our guests were safe. I believe he is in Pripyat with them now. Well. Let us get on with controlling this — accident. And remember, at all costs, we must avoid panic."
Avoid panic? Yes, of course, Sheranchuk kept telling himself. That was absolutely essential.
But it was also impossible. A dozen times there flashed through Sheranchuk's mind a schooldays parody of an English poem — was it by Rudyard Kipling? — that went:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs,
Then you probably simply haven't understood what has been happening.
The difficulty for Sheranchuk was that he understood what was happening all too well. It terrified him in ways he had never expected to feel. It was not simply that he himself might have been in danger, it was the ending of an age. Helping once more with the endless task of aiding the casualties to the never-caught-up shifts of ambulances, he could hardly remember that peaceful time, not yet six hours ago, when he had in calm and leisurely fashion left his flat to look in on the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station.
There was no calm at the Chernobyl station now, nor leisure either. Sheranchuk was astonished, as he passed by a cluster of fire-brigade commanders, to learn that they had declared the fire officially out an hour before. True, little blazes were springing up now and then, where hot bits from the core continued to try to ignite whatever they touched. Certainly the core itself was not out, looked as though it never would be out as its blue-white glare starkly illuminated the charred walls around it. And certainly nothing seemed to halt the steady trickle of wounded and sick men. There were still burns, still sprains and worse as the firemen slipped and fell on the sticky, slippery roofs, but more and more of the men were simply exhausted, pale, sweating, sometimes vomiting uncontrollably.
One of them was the man from his own department, the pipefitter called Spring. "Sorry," he apologized as Sheranchuk spoke to him. "I just feel sick — but I got the hydrogen flare out for them, Leonid."
"I was certain you would," said Sheranchuk, and gazed thoughtfully after him as he climbed by himself into an ambulance and was taken away. But there were others to claim his attention. A tall, slender man was moaning as he sat clutching at his burned feet; for a moment Sheranchuk thought it was the operator, Kalychenko, but it turned out to be a fireman named Vissgerdis. As Sheranchuk turned away, someone grabbed him and shook him roughly. He did not recognize the woman at first. "Fool," she was screaming at him. "Where is your protective clothing? Do you want to die for nothing?"
He had forgotten about radiation.
And it was not until he was pulling the hood over his head that he realized that the woman had been his wife.
Really, there was not much left for someone like Leonid Sheranchuk to do — the professionals had taken over — but he could not help trying to do something anyway. When there were enough trained medical personnel on the scene to do a better job helping the injured than he could, he went back inside the buildings, once more looking for any possible wounded or simply dazed people who might have crawled away into one of the storage areas or workshops. There weren't any, as far as he could tell. He was alone. It was hard and hot work, and not without danger — he searched the entire building of Reactor No. 3. Inside it was dark, and even with the flashlight he had managed to cling to all this time he was constantly stumbling over debris. Only a wall was between him and the fulminating ruin of No. 4, and No. 4 sounded at every moment as though it were trying to come to him right through the wall. Even the cracked walls radiated heat, soaked up on one side from the 4000-degree graphite and sent on to him from the other. He peered out at the roof, where there were no visible fires anymore, but still plenty of firemen, almost ankle deep in the syrupy bitumen, still playing hoses on the smoldering embers.
Sighing, he made his way back down to ground level. He wondered if anyone had told those firemen that it was not only heat and smoke and burns they faced, byt the invisible, lethal storm of radiation that billowed up at them with the smoke.
In the four months Sheranchuk had been at Chernobyl he had diligently studied all the literature on nuclear power plants. He had understood the special dangers of a core meltdown, and the particular risk of a graphite fire in an RBMK — after all, there had been experience of it abroad. The British had had one of their own, at a place called Windscale, decades before. But nothing in his reading or imagination had prepared him for this. It occurred to him almost to wish that Smin had never telephoned him with the unexpected job offer; certainly nothing in the burning of peat could have produced this particular nightmare.
But he had no time for such thoughts. No one had time for anything in this endless night in which every second was filled with a new alarm or a new task. Yet Sheranchuk never forgot that he was Simyon Smin's Comrade Plumber. He kept an eye on his own special charges whenever he could spare a thought from the urgencies of his rescue work. His pumps and pipes and valves were still doing as much as possible of their job. Cooling water still flowed out of the pond; in the two working reactors, the circuits were still pumping through the cores.
Firefighting was, after all, a matter of plumbing. When he saw the huge hoses that were sucking water from the pond for the firemen, swearing men holding the intake ends of the hoses underwater, he almost wondered if they would pump the pond dry. But that was only a fantasy fear. The locks to the river were wide open, and they would not pump the Pripyat empty in a thousand years. There were firemen there now from, it seemed, scores of communities; even Kiev was not the farthest. There were militiamen to reinforce the plant's security forces from as many; ambulances from he could not guess where were screaming in with doctors and medical assistants, and roaring away again with the injured. Tank trucks of gasoline were refueling the firemen's pumpers as they worked. And the noise was endless and indescribable.
At some point someone thrust two tin cups into Sheranchuk's hands. One cup was of hot, concentrated tea, the other pure vodka. Sheranchuk slumped to the ground for a moment as he swallowed them both, turn and turn, gazing upward. He had not paused to see what the pyre looked like before. What it looked like was terrifying. A red-bellied smoke cloud was shooting straight up from the burning reactor, only bending away toward the north and east when it was so high that it was almost out of sight. The stars were gone; the smoke obscured them.
But Sheranchuk had no time to gaze; already someone was shouting for him, waving him toward the perimeter fence, where the latest batch of injured firemen were groaning on the ground. These, he saw, had been fighting the fire from the top of the turbine building next to the shattered reactor, and they, too, had been grievously harmed by its smoldering tar surface. He helped carry two men with severe foot burns away, and as he deposited the second one at the foot of a thick, short man in enveloping hood and coveralls, the man said softly, "Well, Comrade Plumber Sheranchuk! We've made a mess of it this time, haven't we?" And he saw the man was Simyon Smin.
Chapter 7
Simyon Smin's wife, Selena, could not be said to be a bad woman. No one would deny, however, that she is a collector. A humbler Soviet woman would be the kind who never left home without her little string bag, the avoska, "just on the chance" that she might happen somewhere to find something worth the trouble of buying. Selena, as the wife of the Deputy Director of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, does not have to do that. She gets what she wants, or nearly. More nearly than most. She has special stores to shop in, though she must go to Kiev or Moscow for the best of them. She even has the "distribution," that special perk of the high in rank that allows her to order food over the telephone — and not just what the local gastronom might carry, but high-quality food from the listed stores — and have it delivered to her flat or dacha. This is a source of great pleasure to Selena, who was a not quite successful dancer when she married Simyon Smin. There were no such luxuries in Selena's early life. She has eaten well since then, and if she no longer has a dancer's figure, Smin does not seem to mind. Selena has a job of her own, of course; she is in charge of cultural and physical fitness matters at the Chernobyl plant, and often, at eleven in the morning and one in the afternoon, when the handsome young couple in leotards do their daily exercises on the television to the accompaniment of a 78 FREDERIK POHL