"Pripyat! I'm not going to Pripyat. But I can take you fifty kilometers."
"For one ruble, not five," Vassili bargained, and settled finally for two. Thrown into the bargain was nearly half an hour's conversation from the collective farmer, divided almost equally between complaints about the stinginess of customers at the free market in Kiev and invective against the other drivers on the road, who raced past him at a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour. Nor were they the normal assortment of trucks and buses. The bulk of the traffic still seemed to be emergency vehicles, all in a hurry, and Vassili was beginning to get seriously worried.
When at last the kolkhozist turned off onto a side road, Vassili was picked up almost at once by a soldier who was driving, of all things, a water cannon. "What, is there a riot in Pripyat?" Vassili begged, aghast at the notion, but the driver only shook his head. His orders were to go to a checkpoint thirty kilometers south of the town. He had no other information; it was all in a day's work to him, and he resented losing his Saturday to it.
Then they came to the checkpoint.
Vassili hopped down from the truck, frowning. There was a barricade across the road. Civilian vehicles had been turned back, and had already worn muddy ruts through the margins of a field of sunflowers as they turned around. There were soldiers there manning the barricades, and with them a rabble of young people — young people? — why, Vassili saw with shock, they were Komsomols! From his own troop! One of them his friend Boris Sheranchuk; and as soon as Boris saw him he waved him over. "Here, we've been called out to help the militiamen, so you're on duty too."
"Duty for what?"
"To make sure no one gets past, of course. There's been an awful accident at the power plant."
"An accident!" Vassili cried. "Have you — do you know where my father is?"
"I don't even know where my own father is. It's bad. People have been killed."
For all that long day Boris, Vassili, and the other young Communists were kept on duty. It was not their job to turn vehicles back, that was work for the militiamen. For the Komsomols the task was to make sure that none of the diverted vehicles got hopelessly stuck in the sunflower field, to try to keep them from doing more damage to the crop than was absolutely necessary, and, when trucks turned up with water and food for the guards, to help serve it. It was not glamorous work. And it was not enjoyable, for no one seemed to have any hard facts about what was happening at Chernobyl. The traffic was almost all one-way going in. The vehicles that came back were generally ambulances, and none of them stopped.
To be sure, the best source of news was the sky to the north, for there an occasional wavering dark pillar of smoke on the horizon told its own story. Vassili would not have believed there could be so much to burn. When a truck at last came from the city and stopped, Vassili was the first to reach its side. "Is the city burning?" one Komsomol demanded, but the people in the truck were only young Pioneers, twelve and thirteen years old, and they knew very little. No, certainly Pripyat itself was not on fire; what an idea! But yes, of course, the fire in the power plant was very severe, no one could say when it might be under control; and none of them had any knowledge at all of Vassili Smin's father. Or of Boris Sheranchuk's; or, indeed, of anything at all except that when their Pioneer troop had been called out to put up these signs, they had been frightened. The signs were placards with the ominous three-cornered radiation symbol in bright red, and a warning to keep out; the Pioneers toddled off in groups of three and four to hammer them into place in a perimeter that would completely surround Chernobyl.
Surround Chernobyl? In a perimeter thirty kilometers away? Vassili could not swallow the thought.
The sun was dropping toward the horizon, but inside his protective smock Vassili was sweating. When it got dark and another truck came up, with bread, tea and vegetable soup, he hung back until the militiamen had gotten theirs. Then he took his tin tray away to a corner under an old tree, and while he ate, he wept, staring at the ugly red glow that hung over the northern horizon.
He stayed at his post until after midnight, when a Soviet Army truck took the exhausted Komsomols back to Pripyat.
After the manner of boys and puppies, Vassili was ready to drop, but even so he had enough energy to be astonished at how peaceful the town was. Could it be possible that they didn't know? Of course, at midnight one did not expect much activity in the streets of Pripyat — but nothing? When he got out of the elevator and entered the sixteenth-floor apartment he shared with his parents, he thought of eating and dismissed it, thought of bathing and put that aside, too, but stood for a moment at the window that looked out toward the plant.
He could not see the smoke in the darkness, but there were still lights there.
He threw himself onto his bed, thoroughly shaken. His father's power station could not have blown up! It was the very latest triumph of Soviet technology, with all the safety features his father had been proud to display to him as they toured the giant plant. It was too big and too magnificent to explode! And, besides, it was his father's.
Chapter 10
At nine o'clock on this Saturday morning the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station is no longer a part of the Ukrainian electrical grid. No energy flows out along the high-tension lines. Reactors 1, 2, and 3 have been tripped to zero output, and the terrible fires — the fires in the buildings, at least — have been declared out long since. It is only the hundreds of tons of graphite in the exposed core of Reactor No. 4 that continue to burn. So far only one edge of the graphite is ablaze, with a blue-white heat as painful to the eyes as looking at the sun itself, and the firemen can do nothing about it. Their hoses still play on the roofs of the nearby buildings, on the smoldering heaps of rubble, on the walls around the wreck of No. 4, but they have not been able to extinguish the graphite. It is simply too hot; the water flashes into instant steam. There is another problem with using the fire hoses. The water that does trickle away from the core and from each bit of radioactive matter, small or large, dissolves radioactive material as it flows; and then it carries that radioactivity with it wherever it happens to go.
On that morning Vassili Smin's father was sitting in a militia car ten meters outside the gate of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, feverishly making notes. They had the windows rolled up tight in the car, and the militia colonel at the wheel was smoking a Bulgarian-tobacco cigarette, the kind that laborers bought for forty kopecks a pack. The car was filled with the heavy smoke. Smin didn't notice. He didn't even hear when, now and then, the militiaman picked up the microphone and issued commands on his radio, or when messages crackled in. Smin had pushed back the white hood of his garment because it made his face and neck itch — he was sweating, and the scar tissue could not sweat — and trying to get everything down while it was all fresh. It was a list of the things that had gone wrong because of deficiencies in training, equipment, and supplies. It was becoming quite a long list:
Drs. not trained radiat. sickness
Fire brigs, not trained radiat. proceds.
No radiat. protect, garments for station
No respirators.
Need equip, for station + near towns, etc.
Need reptd. drills emgcy proceds.
Smin paused, scratching the itchy scars just below his ear and gazing blankly out at the emergency vehicles that were standing around, engines running, while the few active firemen continued to play their cooling hoses on the endangered walls. None of the things he had written, he realized, attacked the real question: what in the name of God had gone wrong? He wondered if he would ever find out. The stories he had pieced together — that one by one the operators had systematically dismanded all the safety systems, just when the reactor was at its touchiest condition — were simply too fantastic. Smin refused to believe that anyone in the Chernobyl plant could have been that arrogantly stupid. It was almost easier to accept the possibility of that word that had not been much heard in the Soviet Union in recent decades: sabotage.