finding a friend or two at the club for lunch. But without the car—
The thought of the club gave her an idea. 'One more call, if you don't mind,' she begged prettily, and dialed the Great Gate Hotel. But the operator could not find any Mr. and Mrs. Dean Garfield from America on the roster.
'You must have a room number,' the operator explained. 'One cannot complete a call without a room number, of course.'
Selena exploded, 'What nonsense! I am Selena Smin and I am making this call for S. M. Smin, the Director of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station.'
The operator retreated. For quite a while, leaving Selena to hold the whispering, hissing phone while she thought wistfully how nice it would have been if she could have invited the Americans not merely to lunch at the club — pleasant though the club was — but to their own home in Pripyat, to see how a decent Soviet family lived in a decent home, not this Khrushchev tenement. (But, of course, that was only a fantasy, since one did not invite foreigners to Pripyat.) And then when the operator returned she said only, with some satisfaction, 'The Americans you speak of are no longer in the hotel.'
'But of course they are in the hotel! I saw them only last night!'
'They have departed,' the operator said triumphantly. 'Perhaps if you were to consult Intourist, they could inform you of their itinerary.'
'Ah, well,' sighed Selena to the young couple, who were beginning to glance surreptitiously at their watches — they would have to leave for their Saturday morning classes. 'Simply one more call, if I may, just to call for a taxi.'
But where was she to go in the taxi? To the club? And do what there, especially with Vassili? Who should, in any case, be on his way to school by now. And as she looked out the window, she heard distant thunder and saw that it was beginning to rain.
Chapter 8
A Saturday in the Soviet Union is not quite like a Saturday in London or New York. The Soviets do not work a five-day week. Schools are in session. The working force works. But a Saturday is still, after all, part of a weekend, even in the Soviet Union, and those who are in a position to get away for some relaxation generally do.
In Moscow this Saturday, for instance, the telephone rang from Chernobyl. The duty officer at the Ministry of Nuclear Energy heard the voice say, 'This is Vitaly Varazin, Chief Engineer at the Chernobyl Power Station,' and the officer exploded.
'At last! What has been going on? We had a call that there had been a serious accident, nothing more, and no one answers your telephones?'
'Yes,' said Varazin, 'Quite a nuisance that was. Communications have been interrupted because of a fire in a generating unit. But emergency crews responded at once.'
What the duty officer responded was not quite audible. It was definitely obscene, for he had spent a nasty hour in the middle of the night trying to track down his superior. Unfortunately his superior had left the night before for his dacha at Peredelkino, and so the duty officer had been forced to act on his own. He groaned as he thought of what those actions had been. 'The situation is under control, then?' he demanded. 'Quite under control, yes.'
'Then tell me something,' the duty officer snarled.'What are you going to do with the planeload of experts in the special commission that is even now on its way to Kiev?'
There was a pause on the line. 'A special commission?' Varazin asked.
'Twenty-four people,' the duty officer said grimly. 'All woken up in the middle of the night on the basis of the first report from Chernobyl. Their plane left Moscow at six.'
'I see,' Varazin said faintly. The duty officer waited him out, drumming his fingers on the desktop.
'Well,' Varazin said at last, 'it was quite a
'Certainly you are going to get it,' snapped the duty officer, 'because the first echelons will be helicoptered to your plant in the next hour or so.'
'Thank you,' said Varazin softly, and hung up.
His voice sounded unhappy to the duty officer, which gave the officer some satisfaction. Actually he was feeling much better. His worst fears were allayed, responsibility for the twenty-four man commission was off his back, and now he lifted the phone again and called off the search for his chief. It would be time enough to disturb the highest authorities, he decided, when the full report was in. And with any luck, he'd be off by then, anyway.
In Novosibirsk, at the headquarters of the All-Union Ministry of Power Plant Structures, they took the call more seriously — until they found that the Yemeni visitors had left before it happened. At least, they reassured one another, there had not been the embarrassment of seeing one of their plants wreck itself in the presence of three potential foreign customers.
In Kiev it was another matter. The load dispatcher was shocked. 'Yes, all right, two of your units are damaged. Naturally they can't generate power — but, really, why must you shut the other two down as well? A precaution? Precautions are very good, but do you have any idea what sort of trouble that makes for me?' And when he hung up he was swearing; Chernobyl was the plant he could always count on, and where on a Saturday morning was he going to find three or four thousand megawatts of electrical power to replace it?
When the phone rang in the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Authority in Vienna it might have caused more action, except that this particular call was not to give information but to ask for some.
The engineer on duty put down his cup of tea to answer the telephone. His caller had an accent, quickly explained when he said he was calling from the Soviet Ukraine. 'Do you have information on controlling graphite fires in reactors?' he asked politely.
The duty engineer that morning happened to be an Englishman; he had no difficulty in understanding the question. 'Do you mean the Windscale sort of thing? Yes, I think so. That was a Wigner-effect event.' He paused to see if he would be required to explain the Wigner effect. The Wigner effect is a change that takes place in the molecular structure of graphite after long exposure to ionizing radiation. The molecular structure stores energy from the radiation. This has potential dangers, and so once a year graphite moderators of that sort must be 'annealed' — which is to say, heated up suffi-ciendy that the molecular bonds slacken and relax when cooled. In England's Windscale in 1957 that heating got away from its operators, causing the graphite to burn and destroy the reactor.
'One moment,' the Ukrainian said. There was a sound of muffled voices, and then the man came back on the line. 'No, not in regard to the Wigner effect,' he said. 'I ask of control measures. Of ways for dealing with such an event if it should occur.'
'You mean to ask how they put it out?' the Englishman said. 'They simply kept drenching the thing with water. Diverted most of a river onto it, if I remember aright. Wait just a moment, I think we do have some documents in the file — shall I mail you a set?'
The voice on the phone disappeared again. When it returned it said politely, 'No, thank you, we do not think that will be necessary.'
The Englishman hung up, finished his tea, and examined the pot to see if there might be another blackened cup left. That, he thought, had been a curious call. He looked through his files to see what he could find about graphite-moderated reactors in the USSR. There were plenty of them, but nothing that seemed relevant to the call.
Still, he wanted to tell someone about it and so, after a moment's consideration, he picked up the telephone again and dialed a colleague in the United Kingdom. 'What do you reckon they're up to?' he asked, after recounting the call.
The colleague yawned; he had been sleeping in on a rainy English weekend morning. 'Russkies,' he said, explaining everything. 'You know what they like those graphite reactors for. The things are useful to make a little plutonium on the side. They don't want to know about controlling anything, in my opinion. They're simply hoping to
