"I see," Varazin said faintly. The duty officer waited him out, drumming his fingers on the desktop.
"Well," Varazin said at last, "it was quite a serious fire, to be sure. Certainly we can use guidance from the Ministry."
"Certainly you are going to get it," snapped the duty officer, "because the first echelons will be helicoptered to your plant in the next hour or so."
"Thank you," said Varazin softly, and hung up.
His voice sounded unhappy to the duty officer, which gave the officer some satisfaction. Actually he was feeling much better. His worst fears were allayed, responsibility for the twenty-four man commission was off his back, and now he lifted the phone again and called off the search for his chief. It would be time enough to disturb the highest authorities, he decided, when the full report was in. And with any luck, he'd be off by then, anyway.
In Novosibirsk, at the headquarters of the All-Union Ministry of Power Plant Structures, they took the call more seriously — until they found that the Yemeni visitors had left before it happened. At least, they reassured one another, there had not been the embarrassment of seeing one of their plants wreck itself in the presence of three potential foreign customers.
In Kiev it was another matter. The load dispatcher was shocked. "Yes, all right, two of your units are damaged. Naturally they can't generate power — but, really, why must you shut the other two down as well? A precaution? Precautions are very good, but do you have any idea what sort of trouble that makes for me?" And when he hung up he was swearing; Chernobyl was the plant he could always count on, and where on a Saturday morning was he going to find three or four thousand megawatts of electrical power to replace it?
When the phone rang in the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Authority in Vienna it might have caused more action, except that this particular call was not to give information but to ask for some.
The engineer on duty put down his cup of tea to answer the telephone. His caller had an accent, quickly explained when he said he was calling from the Soviet Ukraine. "Do you have information on controlling graphite fires in reactors?" he asked politely.
The duty engineer that morning happened to be an Englishman; he had no difficulty in understanding the question. "Do you mean the Windscale sort of thing? Yes, I think so. That was a Wigner-effect event." He paused to see if he would be required to explain the Wigner effect. The Wigner effect is a change that takes place in the molecular structure of graphite after long exposure to ionizing radiation. The molecular structure stores energy from the radiation. This has potential dangers, and so once a year graphite moderators of that sort must be "annealed" — which is to say, heated up suffi-ciendy that the molecular bonds slacken and relax when cooled. In England's Windscale in 1957 that heating got away from its operators, causing the graphite to burn and destroy the reactor.
"One moment," the Ukrainian said. There was a sound of muffled voices, and then the man came back on the line. "No, not in regard to the Wigner effect," he said. "I ask of control measures. Of ways for dealing with such an event if it should occur."
"You mean to ask how they put it out?" the Englishman said. "They simply kept drenching the thing with water. Diverted most of a river onto it, if I remember aright. Wait just a moment, I think we do have some documents in the file — shall I mail you a set?"
The voice on the phone disappeared again. When it returned it said politely, "No, thank you, we do not think that will be necessary."
The Englishman hung up, finished his tea, and examined the pot to see if there might be another blackened cup left. That, he thought, had been a curious call. He looked through his files to see what he could find about graphite-moderated reactors in the USSR. There were plenty of them, but nothing that seemed relevant to the call.
Still, he wanted to tell someone about it and so, after a moment's consideration, he picked up the telephone again and dialed a colleague in the United Kingdom. "What do you reckon they're up to?" he asked, after recounting the call.
The colleague yawned; he had been sleeping in on a rainy English weekend morning. "Russkies," he said, explaining everything. "You know what they like those graphite reactors for. The things are useful to make a little plutonium on the side. They don't want to know about controlling anything, in my opinion. They're simply hoping to find some better ways of increasing the yield."
"It could be that, I suppose," said the man in Vienna. "They've got a mass of those RBMKs going. I found a note from one of our masters, warning that the beasts were not entirely safe."
"That would be Marshall, I expert," said the one in London. That was Lord Walter Marshall, head of the United Kingdom's General Electricity Generating Board. "That was donkey's years ago, wasn't it?"
The engineer in Vienna said doubtfully, "You don't think I should report it to someone?"
"Report it to whom? And what is there to report? No," said the voice from England, "I'd forget it if I were you. It's what I'm going to do myself."
Chapter 9
If Vassili Smin lived in Moscow, he might easily be one of the westernized, pampered, English-speaking, Playboy-reading "Golden Youth" whose Wrangler jeans and Gucci loafers make the disco scene in the Blue Bird nightclub. Vassili has as much going for him as any of the spoiled Moscow darlings. His father is high in the Party, as well as being the Deputy Director of an immense industrial complex. Vassili himself had been a leader in the kids' patriotism-Communism-scouting organization, the Pioneers, had moved up to join the Komsomol as soon as he reached the tenth grade in school. He has spending money almost equal to the wages of the peasant girl who lovingly makes his bed every morning and unfailingly shines his shoes. Vassili, however, does not live in Moscow. He lives in a small town a hundred and thirty kilometers from Kiev, and even in the city of Kiev the most pampered youth are less spoiled than in the capital. The other thing that makes Vassili unlike Moscow's Golden Youth is that he has a lot of his father in him. He certainly wishes to succeed. But he knows that the way to do that is, first, to make sure of getting into a first-rate college, and, second, to join the Party as soon as he can. The Party meetings will surely be boring, but there is no other way to a high position. And, although his father has the influence to get him into almost any college in the USSR, he is far from
powerful enough to plant his boy in a leadership post for life. Vassili knows that what happens after college will depend on his grades.
It would also, Vassili knew, be helped along a good deal by commendations from his Komsomol leaders, but that was not the only reason why, that Saturday morning, he left his grandmother's apartment and took a bus to the outskirts of Kiev. Then he stood on the edge of the Pripyat road, holding a five-ruble note in the air for passing vehicle drivers to see. He was not merely reluctant to miss a day's school, or the Saturday-afternoon meeting of the league for young Communists, the Komsomol, which would put the finishing touches on their May Day plans. He was also worried.
A five-ruble note was statistically certain to get a ride from at least half of any random selection of truck, ambulance, or private-car drivers, but this morning it wasn't working. There was traffic in plenty, but most of it was official and all of it in a hurry. Vassili saw a dozen fire trucks, military vehicles, and militia cars go by before, at last, a lumbering farm truck pulled up beside him. "What's going on?" the driver demanded, leaning out of the window without opening the door.
"I don't know," said Vassili, waving the bill at him. "But I have to get to Pripyat."