diverted or simply stopped up.'
The Party secretary stared at him. 'Stop up the sewers?'
'Exactly,' said Rasputin. 'Just as Sheranchuk here says. We don't have a choice.'
'Or else we will poison the people of Kiev,' said Sheranchuk.
Smin sighed, and stood up and said, 'Let's go, Comrade Plumber. Show me where you want to build these dikes.'
But in the long run, of course, it wasn't Sheranchuk who decided where the dikes should go. It wasn't Smin, either. It was the men from Moscow. By the time Smin and Sheranchuk got back to the command post, someone had produced a hydrological map of the area — Sheranchuk's eyes were bulging;
he had not even known that such a map existed — and the dikes and trenches and diversions were already being marked.
Smin knew that it was all out of his hands now. Higher authority had taken over. Higher authority listened, spoke, looked at some plans, then picked up a phone and issued instructions. Higher authority did not have to bribe or wheedle to get what it wanted. It simply gave an order, and somewhere in the Ukraine or Moscow or Byelorussia someone began calling workers in to load a truck with whatever was required and send it speeding to Chernobyl.
They did not send Smin away, though he was reeling with fatigue. They did not object when he appeared at one of the endless meetings to plan for the implacable future while, simultaneously, dealing with the catastrophic present. They even listened courteously when he spoke. But that was not often, for higher authority knew its resources better than he did. He listened and marveled.
To Rasputin, explaining to the head of the Pripyat hospital that the reason his clinic had been evacuated was not only that it was better for the patients to be farther away, but that his staff was simply not adequate to the problems. 'Your doctors are diagnosing burns, shock, heat exhaustion, even heart attacks — but where is one diagnosis of radiation sickness?'
To Lestilyan, patiently reasoning with the general commanding the fire brigades. 'We must use other methods.' The fire in the core was not out. It had not even slowed down; the supply of burnable graphite was endless, and every atom of it hungered to unite with the oxygen in the air. The terribly hot core was a massive reserve of heat. Even if they cooled the surface a bit, the vast interior store reheated it and kept the temperature of the graphite blocks well above the ignition temperature.
'Exactly. So water is no good,' the fire chief complained. 'It boils right off.'
'Of course. So we must smother it. Cover it with sand, maybe. Something that will keep the air out.'
'Sand through hoses?' said the fire commander. 'What nonsense! I have never heard of such a thing.'
'Not through hoses,' Lestilyan said patiently. 'In some other way, and quickly. What is it now, six hundred micro-roentgens an hour in Pripyat? And more all the time!'
'I know nothing of micro what-you-said,' the fire commander said stubbornly. 'I know only what to do with fires.' He meditated for a moment. Then he said, 'Well, then. Can we get helicopters to drop it in? Or do you want my men to carry the sand there in their helmets?'
'Of course,' said Lestilyan, nodding. 'Helicopters.' And picked up the phone to call the Air Force.
To everyone. Smin listened carefully to all of them, and spoke little. And that was the day, one emergency falling on top of another, no time to solve one problem before the next arose. At least the Air Force promised helicopters would be on the scene by nightfall. At least a crane was brought from Pripyat to the burning reactor and an operator found brave enough to try dumping dirt, broken rocks, slabs of cement onto the blazing reactor even before the heavy helicopters got there. At least the medical problems were now being dealt with by experts. At least—
At least, Smin thought grimly, his wife and younger son were out of it. He had passed them through the checkpoint himself, in their own car, not twenty minutes before the order had come to let no more vehicles through.
But nearly fifty thousand other people were still in the town of Pripyat.
When someone thrust a plate of bread and Army soup in front of him, Smin realized that it was well past noon and he had eaten nothing since he arrived at the control point, well before daybreak. He wished he could put his head down, just for a minute, close his eyes—
But it would not be a minute. The aching weariness in every bone, the sullen throbbing that was beginning between his temples — no ten-minute nap would heal those. So Smin did not put his head down. Instead, he got up from his meal he had picked at and walked out the door, because he had heard the sound of a helicopter approaching.
Could it be the Air Force, arriving so quickly? It wasn't. It was a little two-man craft, like that of the major general of militia, and the man getting out of it was the Director of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, T. M. Zaglodin. He spoke deferentially to Istvili, the man from the Ministry, before he turned to Smin. 'Well, Simyon Mikhai-lovitch,' he said angrily. 'I am called away on business for a few days, and a fine mess you make!'
What the Director had to say meant nothing to Smin. In any decision-making sense, he no longer mattered. He had not been present when the first decisions had to be taken, and now that the men from Moscow were on the scene, nothing he, or Smin, decided would be final without ratification by them. Smin ignored him. 'Comrade Istvili,' he said, 'I request a decision on the question of the urgent evacuation of all unnecessary personnel from Pripyat.'
Istvili raised his hand. 'The buses are already on the way,' he said, but he didn't seem interested in the subject. He was peering curiously at Smin's face. He said soberly, 'Comrade Deputy Director, I think you will have to leave these matters to us now.'
— Smin scowled, and the sudden, sharp crack of pain at the corner of his mouth informed him what Istvili meant better than any words. He touched the spot. When he brought his finger away he was not surprised to find it damp with the fluid from a broken blister.
Istvili had already turned away to order an ambulance for Deputy Director Smin. 'Ambulance?' Smin protested. 'There is work that I must do here! Why do I need an ambulance for a blister?'
'Not for the blister,' Istvili said gently. 'For what caused it. What you will do now is what the doctors will tell you to do, in Hospital Number Six. You're relieved of your duties, Deputy Director Smin.' He turned to Zaglodin, his face hardening. Then he paused, looked back at Smin and added, 'Good luck.'
Chapter 15
Although the Soviet Army soldier Sergei Konov was born in Tashkent, he is both Russian and Muscovite by ancestry and upbringing. He does not remember anything about Tashkent. He doesn't even remember coming to Moscow with his parents when he was two years old. He remembers very well leaving it when he was ordered up for his military service in June of 1984, when he was twenty, because he did not at all want to go. Konov has not been a good soldier. He did not want to be a soldier at all, since he didn't like any of the possibilities that suggested. You could be sent to Afghanistan and die there, you could go to Poland and have the Solidarity girls shun you; you could, at the very best, have to spend all your time doing dull and arduous things for a couple of years, with no chance to put on the beautiful Wrangler jeans and join friends in the Blue Bird nightclub off Pushkin Street, or listen to Beatles and Abba tapes in someone's flat until daylight.
But what Konov wanted had not mattered. There was no way to get out of it, though he had tried. The entire jar of American coffee powder he had forced himself to brew and drink just before his examination by the military doctor had certainly made his heart pound, but the doctor had not been impressed. All he had said was,
'Less coffee, please, Konov; you will serve your country better if you sleep at night.'
Konov has a reputation in his unit as a sloppy soldier. He has deserved it. He doesn't get along very well with most of his comrades, few of whom are Slavs like himself (and none, of course, Byelorussians, since the Byelorussian Republic is where his 461st Guards Rifle Division is based.) He avoids all the details he can — pretty successfully now that he is a fourth class soldier, with his discharge not far away and thus in a position to make the juniors do his work for him.
