Chernobyl

Chapter 4

Leonid Sheranchuk knows very little of nuclear energy. In this he is like most of the engineers and managers in the Chernobyl Power Station. Sheranchuk's specialty covers piping, pumps, water, and steam, and his work experience has been confined to that outdated peat powered plant north of Moscow. For most of the others their experience has been in coal and oil plants, and what they know is turbines, transformers, and electricity. The mushrooming growth of nuclear power in the Soviet Union has gone faster than the supply of engineers trained in nucleonics can keep up withh — though, of course, the problems of a nuclear power plant are known to be very like the problems of any power plant anywhere — you heat your water into steam, and you turn your steam into electricity— and the specifically nuclear questions, they are taught, have been solved at higher levels long ago. All the same, Sheranchuk wishes he knew more. He has even enrolled in an evening course in nucleonics at the local polytechnic, though it will not begin for another month. Meanwhile he reads texts when he can find time.

When Sheranchuk got home he thought of tackling the books again, but he was really tired. Maybe later, he thought. He ate something instead, with the nine o'clock news broadcast going on unheeded on the television set. His wife had, of course, eaten with their son, Boris, long since, but she sat companion-ably with him over a glass of wine. "Did anything interesting happen at work today?" she asked dutifully.

"No," said Sheranchuk; there was no use telling her about the annoyances with the proposed experiment on Reactor No. 4; she was already too likely to worry about the unknown dangers of nuclear power. "Some problems with one of the pumps, but it's all right now." He thought for a moment, and then said, "The Deputy Director said, in general, I was doing a good job."

"In general!"

"It's just his way. He calls me his plumber."

"Plumber!" But she knew how her husband felt about Deputy Director Smin. "Then you won't have to go in tomorrow morning?" she asked. "Because of your dentist's appointment, I mean?"

"I had forgotten all about my appointment with the dentist," Sheranchuk confessed. Then, grinning, "Do you know what she told me last time? She said, 'It's a shame you keep those stainless-steel teeth. Now we can make you much better ones, porcelain, even better than your own, so that the girls will turn and look at you.' "

"There's no need to have the girls look at you," Tamara said sharply.

"Not even just to look? If I don't look back?"

"They look at you enough already," his wife said. She began to clear dishes from the table in silence for a moment, then remembered to tell him about the young girl who had come to her clinic that morning for an abortion. "Imagine, Leony! She was only sixteen years old. No older than Boris!"

"At least our son can't get pregnant." Sheranchuk smiled.

"It is not a joke! She is destroying a life inside her, and so young."

Sheranchuk said reasonably, "But, Tamara, what else would you have her do? At sixteen she is certainly too young to marry, especially to have the care of a baby when she is only a child herself."

"I could never do such a thing," Tamara insisted.

"You have never had to," Sheranchuk said mildly. There was no reason she should; she worked in the clinic and had ample access to such things as diaphragms and sponges. But the look she gave him as she turned to get on with her household chores kept him from saying so. It was not an angry look, but it was definitely an exclusionary one, as if to say, You are a man, what do you know? If not something worse.

Sheranchuk turned off the television set and rummaged through their literary library for the works on nuclear energy he had set himself to go through. He found himself yawning as he opened his books. To help concentrate he put a magnitizdat tape on the player, and the soft sounds of a Vladimir Vyshinsky satirical song made a background while he tried to study.

Tamara Sheranchuk paused to listen. She knew the song. It was nothing out of the ordinary for them to play the tapes of Vyshinsky, or of Aleksandr Galich or Boulat Okudzhava — the balladeers who lived in, but not of, the Soviet system. Their records were never pressed by Melodiya. Their songs had no official recognition, but were known by heart by nearly every Soviet citizen, passed from hand to hand in the furtively recorded tape cassettes called "magnitizdat." "A little quieter, please, if you will," she asked. The tapes were not illegal, but all the same they were not what you would go out of your way to have your neighbors hear you playing. Still-

She had met Sheranchuk at an Okudzhava concert. It was not in a hall or a stadium, or even in a nightclub. The concert had been out in the birch and pine woods, on a spring night not quite warm enough to be comfortable, and not even dry— little sprinkles of rain came now and then. Still, there had been more than two hundred people out there in the woods, listening to the Georgian balladeer play his old guitar and sing of trolleybuses and the road to Smolensk. All young. And among them had been this red-haired young man who had come by himself, and when he looked at her he did not smile. But as the listeners moved around under the trees, trying to stay dry if not warm, she had wound up next to him. She had left the little group she came with, and Sheranchuk had taken her home.

Tamara had gotten a cold from attending that concert, but she had also gotten a husband.

In order to be fresh for the morning, when he was determined to get in bright and early, despite the dentist, Sheranchuk gave up his yawning struggle with his studies and went to bed at ten o'clock. But now sleep did not come. He lay listening to the sounds of his wife, ironing Boris's white school shirt for the morning, with the sound of pop music from the television set faint in the background; and he heard Boris come in from his Komsomol meeting, specially called to plan for their May Day celebration, and head immediately for the refrigerator.

Just as he was dozing off he remembered that he had not checked to see if the automatic pumps had been turned back on after the afternoon's aborted experiment.

The experiment was not his business. The pumps, however, were. He thought for a moment, then rolled over on his left side, with his elbow under the goosedown pillow, curled up like a fetus in the position that always meant comfort and sleep to him. The duty engineers would certainly have restored the pumps' operation, he reassured himself. There was no point in lying awake and worrying. He tried to think of pleasant things. Of Tamara in the next room, for instance. He thought of calling her to bed; perhaps they could make love, and that would make him sleepy. But there was the boy, no doubt eating an apple at the table with his books spread out all around him, studying for his Saturday examination in geometry. If he had thought of it a little earlier, Sheranchuk mused, they could have taken advantage of the boy's being out of the house and it could have been just as it was when they were first married and in an apartment of their own.. He dozed for a moment, and then was wide awake again as someone in another apartment noisily flushed the toilet. He fumbled for the alarm clock and held it in the light from the window. Already after midnight. A new day; and the pumps were still on his mind.

Sheranchuk groaned and sat up, his feet on the floor, rubbing his chin. After a moment, he sighed, reached for his robe, and went into the living room to call the plant. Tamara passed him in the hall, on her way to the bathroom. "What, still awake?" she chided. He patted her on the rump affectionately as they passed, but did not stop.

Boris was already asleep on the couch, and Sheranchuk kept his voice down as he talked to Kalychenko, one of the shift operators. "The pumps—" he began, and listened in surprise as Kalychenko told him that the free-wheeling experiment was, after all, already in progress. "Without the Director present? But then surely, Smin—" But, no, Smin wasn't there, either. And was not missed, Kalychenko said, because, apart from small power surges, the experiment was going well. Sheranchuk frowned. "What kind of small surges? From six to eleven percent? But that's not small!" He listened for a while and then hung up. He opened the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of apple juice. He gazed thoughtfully at his sleeping son as he sipped the juice.

It occurred to him that Boris was not likely to wake, and Tamara would probably not yet be asleep in their warm bed.

Sheranchuk told himself that it was wrong for him to lose sleep over matters that were someone else's responsibility. He went back to bed. Tamara was already asleep on her side of the bed, and Sheranchuk put his arm around her experimentally. She made a faint, agreeable noise, but then turned away.

Ah, well.

He turned over and tried to sleep.

Half an hour later he sighed, got up and began to dress. At one o'clock he was down on the cold street, for there was no point in being awake at home, worrying about the plant, when he could just as well be awake and worrying about it on the scene. He was almost alone at this hour, the trolleybuses long since stopped for the night, only an occasional lighted window in the apartment buildings. There was a scent of lilacs in the spring night air.

In a way, Sheranchuk was pleased to be a part of the work at the power plant at such odd hours. It reminded him of the special importance of what they did. All over the country factories had long since shut down, people were turning off their lights and TV sets; electrical demand was dropping minute by minute. Oil powered turbine plants would be ceasing operations for the night. Coal and peat steam plants would be banking their fires; the hydroelectric generators would be slowing as the sluices were closed to preserve the heads of water behind the huge dams. But Chernobyl went on. Nuclear power was baseline power. You kept it going.

It was a warm night, with a few clouds among the stars overhead as he walked through the silent streets of Pripyat. He wondered why Smin was not on hand this night. True, the Deputy Director made a policy of leaving day-to-day operations to the people in charge of them. It was nevertheless also true that Smin had a habit of turning up when and where he was needed. He was a good man. Sheranchuk thought of the conversation in the sauna. When Smin had readjusted the sheet around himself, Sheranchuk could see the wide, pale, almost glistening burn scars that went from the left side of his face clear down his back; they were from the Great Patriotic War, Sheranchuk knew, but just how Smin had received them he never said. Sheranchuk wondered what it was like to be in a war. He was an infant in the Great Patriotic War; his own Army service had been in peacetime — a general sort of peace, at least, not counting a few skirmishes along the Amur with the Chinese, but Sheranchuk had been three thousand kilometers away from any fighting.

Sheranchuk's little flat was three kilometers from the plant, but this night luck was with him. An ambulance moved slowly past, and at his hail it stopped and gave him a lift. Sheranchuk half-recognized the doctor as a colleague of Tamara's, and the man knew who Sheranchuk was as soon as he gave his name. He had just had a call to attend a little girl who had swallowed something she shouldn't have, he explained — yes, yes, the child was quite all right, only a little sick from having her stomach pumped out — and he was now on his way back to the clinic. But there was no real hurry, and he was glad to go a couple of minutes out of his way for Tamara Sheranchuk's husband.

The ambulance circled around a man on a bicycle to take the engineer to the plant fence. He thanked the doctor and got out, fumbling for his papers as he watched the ambulance slowly start away. Although on the other side of the fence the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station was almost as brightly lighted as in daytime, on this side it was a peaceful middle-of-the-night scene. The only things moving were the ambulance, the bicyclist, and some early-rising health faddist, it seemed, walking with great arm-swinging strides along the road and not even glancing at Sheranchuk or the gate guard.

The funny thing was, Sheranchuk discovered, that now that he was actually at the plant, he was beginning to feel quite drowsy at last. He could turn around and go back to bed easily enough.

He smiled to himself, his mind made up; no, he was this far, he would go in and see for himself just what they were doing with Reactor No. 4.. .

He was actually displaying his paprusbka to the gate guard when the world changed around him.

There was a sudden orange-white flare of light, a flower of flame overhead, the shattering, hurtful sound of a vast explosion. "In God's name!" Sheranchuk cried, clutching at the guard's arm as the two of them stared up in horror.

The noise did not stop. A siren screamed inside one of the buildings. There was a distant sound of men shouting. "But this is quite impossible," the guard bawled accusingly in Sheranchuk's ear.

Sheranchuk's mouth was open as he stared up. The great ball of bright flame was floating away and diminishing, but behind it was a sullen, growing red glow. To the other noises was added the patter of a shower — no, a downpour! — but it was not rain that was falling. It was bits of stone and brick and metal, pelting down all around them. "Yes," Sheranchuk said dazedly, "it is quite impossible."

But it had happened.