he had borrowed the day before, but his mind wasn't on the ride. It wasn't even on his fatigue, or the facts that his scars itched, his eyes ached, and the corners of his mouth were sore. What he was thinking about was what he had come to see.
When they were only five or six kilometers away, the plant began to come into view. The great drift of black smoke snaking into the sky seemed far thicker than the day before, even though most of the fires were long since out; it was, Smin knew, the smoldering embers that produced the pall. As they approached over the towers of Pripyat, Smin could see that the streets were full of people. Their white faces stood out sharply as they gazed up at the helicopter. 'Fools,' muttered Smin.
TTie pilot craned toward him. 'What?' he yelled. 'Did you speak?'
Smin shook his head; the people of Pripyat had to be gotten out of that area, there was no question about that, but there was nothing the pilot could do. 'Up higher, if you can,' he urged. 'But stay out of the plume!'
The pilot nodded, and kicked and turned his controls. The machine spun and lifted, first away from the reactor, then swinging back to approach it from the windward side. They were no more than three hundred meters above the inferno. Smin could look almost directly down into it. As the pilot hovered, Smin opened his door and leaned out, staring down at the end of so many hopes and the death sentence passed on so many friends.
Even so high, the heat beat at his face. It was true that all the lesser fires were out, but he could see clearly that all the efforts of the firefighters had done nothing at all to stop, or even to slow, the terrible combustion that was going on in the graphite core of the destroyed reactor. If only ten percent of the graphite had been burning yesterday, now it was nearly a third that was aflame. The still-unburning surface of the graphite was a rubble of lumps and cracks and hillocks. The burning part was as bright and hot as the sun. Great rainbow-shaped streams of water came up from the hoses and down onto the furnace, but to no avail. Where the streams of water hit the fire, there were clouds of steam, but when the jet wavered away the fire was still burning as fiercely as ever.
On the ground Smin could see bulldozers grinding away as they heaped up berms of earth. Beside the bulldozers a pair of water cannon were blasting away at the lower reaches of the reactor shell; whether any of their water was getting through, or what good it was doing if it did, he could not tell.
The smoke billowed toward them. 'Get away!' Smin shouted, pulling himself back inside and slamming the door. The pilot was already slanting away, but the vagrant gust of air was faster than he; for a moment there was smoke all around them, and a stink of burning chemicals that tore at Smin's throat. Then they were clear. Both men were coughing, and the helicopter lurched as the pilot spun it away. 'Better get down,' Smin managed to rasp out, and the pilot didn't even nod. He was already heading back to the perimeter post.
By the time they were on the ground the coughing fits were over. 'Thank you,' said Smin gravely, and got out to confront the man in the green coverall who was watching them impassively from the door of the headquarters building. Even without the insignia on his shoulderbars, Smin knew who he was. He said, 'Thank you, also, General Varansky, for allowing me to borrow your aircraft.'
The general didn't even smile. He only murmured, 'Why should I refuse one helicopter, when you people have already borrowed half the moveable equipment in the Ukraine? But should we not go inside for the meeting?'
The general's remark was not much of an exaggeration at that. From the air Smin had seen literally scores of trucks, bulldozers, ambulances, fire vehicles, and examples of almost everything else that moved on the roads around the stricken plant.
Smin followed Major General Varansky into the meeting room. The only conference actively going on was with the special doctors from Moscow. At least these specialists knew exactly what they had to do and could get on with it. Their home base, Hospital No. 6, had been designated the center point for radiation injuries, and the first job of the task force that had flown in the night before was to screen every victim for radiation — more than a thousand so far, with nearly two hundred of them already on their way to Moscow for whatever treatment there was to give them. They were explaining this to some Party and town officials for Pripyat, who were looking glum.
Smin paused a moment at the door, where there was a rack of the pen-shaped dosimeters. He glanced around while the general went on ahead. No one was looking. Smin undipped his old one and threw it into a basket and fixed a new one to his jacket before he went in.
'I do hope,' the Pripyat Party secretary was saying cheerlessly, 'that you are not proposing to test everyone in Pripyat.'
'Of course they will test everyone in Pripyat,' Smin snapped, aware that his tone was offending the man, aware that the secretary would be writing a report on what was happening— aware, most of all, that none of that mattered. Smin wrinkled his nose at the faint smell of animal manure that permeated the meeting hall; the cow barns were only a dozen meters away. 'It is not all that has to be done,' he said, 'in the town of Pripyat. 'Those people's lives are all at risk. They must be evacuated.'
Two of the Moscow doctors nodded, but the men from Pripyat looked thunderstruck. 'Impossible!' cried the Party secretary. 'What are you saying? We do not want panic!'
'It is better that they be frightened than dead,' Smin said flatly.
'I refuse,' the man said. 'This very morning some panic-mongers in Pripyat came to the Party headquarters with the same ultimatum. It was almost a demonstration! We taught the ringleaders a lesson, I assure you.'
'If you put them in jail in Pripyat,' said Smin, 'you will teach them a final lesson, because they will die there. Everyone in the city will die if they remain there long enough. They must be taken away at once.'
'Taken to where?'
'To sleep in the fields if they must,' Smin cried, 'because that is better than dying in their flats! If you won't do it on your own authority, then call Moscow. I will talk to them myself. I insist — oh, what is it now?'
The biological-effects man, Rasputin, was standing in the doorway, next to a doctor who was holding a glass vial of water. Hydrologist-engineer Sheranchuk was beside her, looking as weary as Smin himself, but he spoke first. 'It's the stream,' he said. 'The one where they get the water they are using for the wounded, and to wash the vehicles. It is showing radioactivity now.'
Leonid Sheranchuk did not just look weary. He was sodden with fatigue. He had not slept at all — for, what? He had lost count. More than forty-eight hours, at least.
He could have gone home when the militia and fire brigades and emergency workers of all kinds began to show up in strength, because they no longer needed amateur rubble-shifters and stretcher-toters. But then he remembered that he was a highly trained expert in hydraulic flow, and hydraulic flows were the only things that were keeping all the rest of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station from joining the stricken reactor in flames. It was Sheranchuk who managed to get some of the station's primary pumps working to provide pressure for the hosemen and give a little relief to the straining fire trucks, Sheranchuk who directed the pumper intakes to the deepest and least sedimented parts of the cooling pond…
And Sheranchuk who, watching the streams of water running down the sides of the building and spreading across the sodden ground, thought to wonder where that water was going.
When he found Rasputin and expressed his fears, the man from the Ministry responded at once. He commandeered one of the doctors and set out. The radiation detectors gave the answers. The clear, purling waters of the brook by the command post were registering radioactivity.
It wasn't an immediate problem. The brook water was still good enough to wash down the trucks. That was not important, anyway. In any case there were the wells of the collective farm ready to supply the need for drinking water and to clean the wounds of the injured.
The problem was that the brook did not stop flowing at the highway.
That brook came from near the Chernobyl Power Station. It wasn't just picking up radiation from the fallout of soot from the fire. It was the conduit — one of the conduits — for the wastewater from the firefighting. Millions of gallons of water were being pumped out of the Pripyat River and the plant's cooling pond to pour onto the fire. What did not turn into steam ran away into the ground and across it, into that brook and every other nearby — into the Pripyat River itself, sooner or later.
'And,' said Sheranchuk grimly, 'the Pripyat River flows into the reservoirs that supply the city of Kiev.'
He looked directly at the Party secretary, who frowned back. After a moment he said, 'Yes?' And then, raising a hand to keep Sheranchuk from answering, 'I see what you are implying, but surely that is not important — the hose water from a few fire engines, against a reservoir?'
'That hose water,' said Smin wearily, 'is full of radioactive material. What do we do, Comrade Plumber?'
'We must dam up the overflow,' Sheranchuk said at once. 'We must dike every stream, every little river that flows near Chernobyl. The cooling pond, it must be diked off from the Pripyat. Sewers, drains — they must be
