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.
Chapter 7
Simyon Smin's wife, Selena, could not be said to be a bad woman. No one would deny, however, that she is a collector. A humbler Soviet woman would be the kind who never left home without her little string bag, the
pianist and the orders of a trainer, Selena joins the workers and leads their calisthenics. Her position technically puts her in the First Department of the plant, under the direction of Gorodot Khrenov, but Khrenov never interferes with the wife of the Deputy Director. He only makes sure that the Deputy Director knows that.
There was not much sleep on that Saturday morning for Selena Smin. At six she got up and dressed slowly, wondering what the urgent summons from the plant had meant. At seven, while she was having a cup of tea with her mother-in-law, there was another knock on the door, and this time it was a telegram:
remaining here. request you and vassili stay in kiev for weekend. smin.
'But I can't do that,' complained Selena. 'I have things to do, and the boy should not miss his school.'
'He has missed it already,' said old Aftasia Smin practically. That was true enough; Vassili was still curled on the couch, blond head buried under the blankets as the women talked softly. But still! Remain in Kiev to do what? Without a car, without even a telephone? 'I can't even call him to find out what this is all about,' she complained.
'You can do as I do,' Aftasia said. 'The Didchuks have a telephone.'
'The Didchuks have one! And we do not! I will certainly speak to Simyon about this again.' Selena thought for a moment. 'And which apartment are they in, then?' she asked.
It was only one floor below. Two minutes later Selena had descended the dark stairs and knocked politely at their door. The Didchuks were at home — all of them, for it seemed that there was a child and a couple of grandparents in the flat as well as the teachers themselves. They were all awake. They were not fully dressed — the woman had her hair in curlers, the man was wearing a robe over his trousers — but they were, of course, quite polite, even welcoming, and certainly she could use their telephone.
But then it seemed she could not, really, because all of the lines to the plant were engaged. They remained engaged, were engaged on the first time she tried them and on the fifth. The
Didchuks politely went about their morning business, stepping around her when they had to come into the little living room with its small TV set and worn, brocaded couch and window that had thin, bright drapes. The old father greeted her in a mannerly way on his way to the bathroom. The old mother came out of the kitchen and offered her breakfast, which she declined graciously, but accepted a cup of tea, brought to her by the ten-year-old daughter of the teachers. Even the telephone in her own flat in the town of Pripyat did not answer; it was not engaged, but it rang uselessly until she put it down. So Smin, wherever he was, was at least not at home. 'Well, what a nuisance,' she declared, smiling at the young woman. 'But what pretty drapes! You have done so much with this room!'
The woman said modestly, 'It is difficult when we both work.'
'For me too,' Selena agreed, and chatted amiably with the young woman and her tiny, blonde mother-in-law while, in her mind, she tried fretfully to decide what to do with this day. A day in Kiev with the car, yes, that was always quite useful. In fact, it was a treat. There were places to go and stores to visit, and then one could count on
