Chernobyl

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