Chernobyl

Chapter 6

There is a difference between the nuclear reactions in a power plant — even a plant with a "positive void coefficient" — and an atomic bomb. The difference lies mainly in the fuel. Power-plant uranium is slightly enriched with the touchy isotope, U-235. Bomb uranium is very much so. This governs the speed of the reaction in which one fissioning atom releases a neutron, which strikes another atom and causes it to fission, and so on in the familiar "chain reaction." The links of this chain happen very fast in either case. In a bomb, there can be a hundred million successive links in a single second. In a power plant, only about ten thousand. For a human operator the difference doesn't really matter much, because he can't react quickly enough to intervene in either case. But within the core it is the difference between a nuclear accident and a bomb blast. If the core of Reactor No. 4 had been of weapons-grade uranium, the nuclear reaction would have gone on to involve far more of the fissionable material before the force of the explosion had time to blow it away. Since it was not, the nuclear explosion "blew itself out." Its kinetic force scattered its own fuel elements, and in the process destroyed only part of one building instead of an entire city. The later consequences, however, were of course another story.

In that first moment the shift engineer, Bohdan Kalychenko, had saved his life by running away from the reactor. On the perimeter of the plant, the hydrologist-engineer, Leonid Sheranchuk, saved his by running toward it. When he saw the great fireworks display blossom terribly overhead, he stood transfixed. Flaming debris rained down on everything, on the ground, on the buildings, on the man with the bicycle, on the man on foot twenty meters away, even on the roof of the ambulance that was slowly turning around to return to the scene of the explosion. A huge chunk of something the size of a football fell only meters away; it blazed blue, and he could feel the heat of it. Graphite? Could it be graphite? From the core of the reactor itself? He couldn't tell; really, if that were the case, he didn't want to know. But none of the debris fell on Sheranchuk.

At first he was shielded by the guard's cabin. Then he ran for the nearest entry to the plant — not because he reasoned out that that was the right thing to do, but because the plant was in mortal peril and he could not do anything else — and it happened to be the door to the section of the building that contained the main control room for Reactor No. 4, on the far side from the blazing, spitting inferno that had been the reactor itself, with the whole turbine hall between.

Even as he entered he heard the clanging alarm that ordered evacuation. But that was wrong! Sheranchuk knew instantly that it was wrong; you didn't run away from a nuclear plant because there was an accident; you had to do whatever you could, whatever that might be, to keep the accident from becoming terribly worse.

"Stop!" he yelled, trying to bar the door with his body, but someone roughly pushed him aside and someone else stumbled past to the red-lit outside. "No, wait!" he cried. "What are you doing? Go back to your stations! You can't leave the plant untended!"

Some swore at him, some did not hear. Some he seized by the shoulders and turned around by brute force. There were too many for him — shift operators, maintenance workers, radiation monitors, two older men he thought were observers from another plant — he even caught a glimpse of two men, wrangling as they trotted away along another corridor, that looked like Khrenov and Chief Engineer Varazin.

Then the alarm bell stopped in mid-clang. From outside, almost drowned in the hideous crackle and crash of the burning reactor building, Sheranchuk could hear the lesser sirens of the plant's fire brigade racing to the disaster point. "Do you hear?" he yelled. "The firemen are coming! Help them, get back to your work, make sure the other reactors are safe!" And then, abandoning the effort, he pushed past the dazed ones and hurried through choking smoke and alarming sounds of crash and rumble to the stairs. He was hardly aware of the long climb, and when he reached the control room for Reactor No. 4, he could not believe his eyes. Below the window, the entire turbine room was in flames. The top of the reactor building was simply gone. He could not see the burning core itself— that saved his eyes, as well as his life — but there were fires everywhere, everywhere, and the world had without warning come to an end.

What went wrong at 1:23 a.m. on that Saturday morning in Chernobyl occurred in four separate stages, but they followed so closely on each other that they were only seconds from beginning to end.

First, there was the power surge in one little corner of the vast graphite and uranium core. Although the reactor had been throttled back almost to extinction, a small section went critical; that was the atomic explosion.

The second stage was steam. The nuclear blast blew the caps off the 1,661 steam tubes. All of them blew out at once, and the broken tubes of water were exposed to naked, violently hot fuel material. The water squeezed under sixty-five atmospheres of pressure was suddenly under no pressure at all. It flashed into steam, and the steam explosion shattered the containment vessel. At that point the disaster was completely out of control and everything that followed was inevitable.

The next explosion was chemical. The terrible heat and pressure caused the steam from the ruptured pipes to break down into its gaseous elements, hydrogen and oxygen; the zirconium in which the steel pipes were clad helped the process along as a catalyst. That produced a hydrogen-oxygen explosion, the powerful reaction that drives spacecraft into orbit. The wreckage of the immense steel and concrete containment box was hurled into the air. The refueling floor, just above the reactor, was tossed aside, along with the forty-ton crane that transported the fuel rods. Fiercely radioactive material was thrown in all directions. Anything nearby that could burn was ignited. Major fires began on the tarred roofs of the building complex, and that was the third stage.

All of those things happened in an instant, and then the fourth stage completed the holocaust.

The graphite that contained the core was now exposed to the open air, with its containment shattered. Graphite is carbon. Carbon burns, even (though with more difficulty) when it is in the dense, poreless form of graphite. Moreover, thick steam from ruptured water pipes now roiled over the hot graphite. This is a classical chemical reaction that is demonstrated every day in high school chemistry labs all over the world; it is called the "water gas" process. Chemistry teachers write the equation C + H₂0 = CO +H₂ on the blackboard for their students, meaning that the carbon and the water combine to produce carbon monoxide and free hydrogen. The carbon monoxide is quite combustible when exposed to air. The hydrogen is explosively so.

At that point the basic event was complete. The edge of the graphite blocks had begun to burn. All the fires together produced a vertical hurricane of hot gases that carried along with it a soup of fragmentary particles and even ions of everything nearby. . including the radionuclides of the core. Lanthanum-140, ruthenium-103, cesium-137, iodine-131, tellu-rium-132, strontium-89, yttrium-91—they laced the soot of the smoke, mingled with the plutonium and uranium of the fuel elements, spread out in a cloud that ultimately would cover half a continent. The first three explosions wrecked Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Power Station, but it was the fire that carried the calamity over a million square miles.

There was no longer anything that anyone could do in the main control room for Reactor No. 4. There was nothing left of Reactor No. 4 to control. The wall of meters showed readings that were reassuringly staid or wildly impossible, but they were no longer registering any reality. The only person left in the room was the shift chief, who said, "There's nothing to do here. Everybody else has gone; you might as well get out too."

"But then, why are you still here?" Sheranchuk asked.

The man did not look well at all; he was sweating and rubbing at his mouth.

"Because I haven't been relieved yet," he said.

Halfway down the stairs again it occurred to Sheranchuk that he could simply have said the words, I relieve you, then, and the man might have accepted the release. But, after all, he was as safe there as anywhere else, Sheranchuk reasoned. In any case, he would not go back.

At the ground level he could not resist another look outside. There were plenty of firemen present now, from the town of Pripyat as well as the plant's own brigade, and yellow militia cars were arriving with their green lights flashing. Searchlights paled the flames from burning debris and picked out the shapes of firemen on the roofs of some of the buildings. Beyond the milling firemen on the ground was the dark hulk of the plant's office block, looking curiously deserted — because, Sheranchuk saw, all of its windows had been blown out in the force of the explosion.

Somebody was shouting at him — a militiaman, face black with smoke and sweat. "Hi, you there! Are you all right? Give a hand with these people!"

Sheranchuk did not stop to think about whether that was what he should be doing, he simply obeyed. He was glad for the order, because an order to follow was better than helplessly trying to decide what to do. For what that was he simply could not guess.

He helped a fireman to stumble toward the waiting ambulance; the man limped and held one hand to his face. He was not the only casualty already. The doctor who had given him a lift was loading a bundle of charred rags into his ambulance that Sheranchuk would not have thought human if it hadn't been cursing steadily in a faint, high-pitched voice. Three other firemen were coughing as they sat on the cement roadway, waiting for someone to bring them oxygen, or, better still, new lungs to replace the ones filled with smoke. (Why weren't they wearing respirators? Sheranchuk asked himself. But, for that matter, why wasn't he?) Glazouva, the tough old woman who ran the plant's night coffee stand, had managed to stay together long enough to help two of her customers to safety, but when Sheranchuk saw her, she was collapsed under the plaque of Lenin at the plant entrance, sobbing helplessly, not responding to anyone's attempts to talk to her. A militiaman lay stunned on the ground, his hair scorched where a bit of flaming debris from the sky had knocked him out and, likely enough, cracked his skull.

There was room for only two in the ambulance, but the doctor promised to send more from the Pripyat hospital as he got in to drive away. "And hurry, please!" Sheranchuk shouted after him.

The next ambulance to arrive, though, didn't come from Pripyat. It was from the town of Chernobyl, thirty kilometers away, and with it came half a dozen new fire trucks. There were more than a hundred firemen on the scene already, the stentorian throbbing of pumps adding to the shouts and the ominous thuds and snaps and crackling sounds from the fires; and in the center of it all, stark and incredible, the splintered walls of what had once been Reactor No. 4.

Burns, bruises, cuts, contusions, smoke inhalation, heat fatigue, simple exhaustion — put them all together and there were forty or fifty people lined up to be taken away in the ambulances shuttling between the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station and the hospital in Pripyat, just a few kilometers away. Sheranchuk thought it strange that when the ambulances left the plant they went without sirens or bells, and seemed to take a roundabout way that circled the town before heading directly for the hospital. Was it possible they were being considerate about waking the townspeople up? He stood amid a tangle of hose lines, his mind weary of questions, pondering that irrelevant one.

"Hi! You! Get back behind the lines, you're just in the way here!" A brigade commander was shouting at him as a new fire truck, from one of the farm villages, tried to inch its way through the congestion to take station with the others. Sheranchuk shook his head, trying to clear it. What was the thing someone had said? People still unaccounted for, somewhere inside the plant?

Well, that at least was something he could do. He retreated toward the gate, slowly, until the fire commander wasn't looking at him anymore, then hurried to the nearest entrance to the plant. Exactly why he did that Sheranchuk would have been unable to say. It was partly to see if there was anyone who needed help getting out, partly because he just couldn't stay away.

Inside the building the noise from outside dwindled, but there were new and worrisome sounds. He could hear the creaks and thuds from what was left of Reactor No. 4, and an irregular throbbing that bothered him. The building he was in was attached to the turbine hall shared by Reactors 3 and 4, and it had not been left untouched. The walls were seamed with huge cracks. In places whole sections of paneling had fallen out, and these he had to dodge around. The floor of the hall he trotted along bulged in places, and was littered with fluorescent light fixtures, fire extinguishers — fire extinguishers! — and odds and ends of unidentifiable things that had been shaken off the walls and ceilings by the blast. Most of the windows here, too, had been blown out, and broken glass crunched under his feet as he raced from door to door in the halls. A nasty, choking chemical-smoky smell was everywhere. It made him cough as he trotted along, stumbling in the gloom because only a few emergency lights were still going.

Most of the doors were tidily locked for the weekend. When he flung others open, he shouted inside to see if anyone were there, but there were no answers. He was on the fifth floor of the building when he began to think he was accomplishing nothing productive with his time.

He stopped and considered. It did not occur to him that he was being courageous, only that he might be doing something that had no purpose.

The irregular throbbing was still there. He listened, frowning, one hand against the vibrating beige wall of the corridor. It took a moment to recognize that what he heard was the sound of turbines still running in the hall that served both Reactors 3 and 4.

Its control room was only two stories away, and Sheranchuk took the stairs on a dead run, arriving breathless in the room. There were only three men there, the shift chief and two operators, and they turned to greet him with angry expressions as he burst in. He stared around the room incredulously. The immaculate control room was dirty. When he gripped the back of a chair to steady himself, sooty dust came away on his fingers. "What's going on here?" he demanded.

"The devil knows," the shift chief snarled, waving a hand at the instrument wall. The lights were flickering, but Sheranchuk could read the indicators.

Startled, he shouted an obscenity. "Be careful! You'll have this one off too!"

The supervisor rasped furiously in return, "Screw God and your mother, both\ What are we supposed to do? First that cow Number Four blows up, then we try to stabilize our own reactor, then we get the order to evacuate the whole plant at once! So we begin to shut this one down — then they countermand the order and it's keep the working units working, boys, we need the power."

"But Turbine Six—" Sheranchuk began, waving a hand at the hydraulic pressure meters.

"Turbine Six your mother's ass! They've all gone mad! Your pipes have sprung a leak, plumber!"

Instinctively Sheranchuk picked up a phone to call the pump control room, but, of course, there wasn't any sound from the instrument; its cables, too, like most of the others in that building, had been fried somewhere along the line. Sheranchuk didn't wait to argue. He went down the stairs faster than he had come up, nearly falling half a dozen times in the gloom. When he reached the pump control room, he almost expected it to be empty, but at least one of his people was there — the pipefitter they called "Spring," Arkady Pono-morenko. "You're not an operator!" Sheranchuk said accusingly.

"There's no operator here," the football player explained softly, shy and deferential even now. "I was told there was damage to the pumps, so I came to take a look. Look, Leonid, the pressure is dropping; I've tried to cut in another pump, but still it falls."

"We have to have pressure," Sheranchuk snapped. "Here, let me see." He shouldered the pipefitter roughly out of his way, glaring at the intractable pressure gauges before him. But Spring had been right; of the main pumps all were already engaged, though three of them did not seem to be operating at all, and the pressure in the system was slowly creeping downward.

Sheranchuk rubbed a fist across his eyes. Outside he heard someone shouting, but he paid no attention. "We'd better have a look," he said. "There's probably no power down below; is there a light here?"

"I've already got it out," said Spring eagerly, holding out a hand torch.

"Come on, then!" But just outside the door a fire brigade commander was hurrying toward them shouting.

"Is this the place where the plumbers are? Look, you two! We've got some kind of flame going that we can't put out, somebody said it's yours."

"Flame?" Sheranchuk repeated. Then, understanding, "Oh, the hydrogen flare! Yes, of course, it only needs to be turned off—"

"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."

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.