'Not really,' she said. 'No one is very lucky today. They simply have not yet found it out. Are we through here? Then let's go back to Chernobyl.'
As the ambulance driver, who had had no more sleep than Tamara, wearily started to turn the vehicle around, a man came running out begging for a lift. He explained that he was a doctor trained in radiation sickness, called in from his weekend for the emergency. Tamara made herself stay awake; here was a chance to learn something useful! She asked him about the numbers. 'Yes, exactly,' he said, 'above 500 rads the only hope is to somehow give them living bone marrow.'
'And how is that done?'
'Fetal liver transplants,' he said. 'In some places they actually transplant bone marrow — this is done in America sometimes — but there are great problems. First of all, the patient's own bone marrow must be destroyed, otherwise the transplant will be rejected. Then there must be an exact typing match, and it is not easy to type bone marrow — and if that is wrong, the transplant will still be rejected. Of course, that itself is serious; a patient who might otherwise recover could be killed by the rejection process.'
'And what is the fetal liver procedure?'
'In the embryo,' he said, 'it is the liver cells that perform the functions of the adult bone marrow in manufacturing blood cells. So from aborted fetuses we extract the liver, purify the cells, and inject them into the patient.' He hesitated. 'That, too, has a poor success rate,' he admitted, 'but for patients with more than 500 rads there is, after all, no choice.'
'Ah, yes,' said Tamara, 'but how do you know what the exposure has been, since not all the victims are thoughtful enough to carry dosimeters?'
The young specialist said enthusiastically, 'That is the key, of course. The doctor in Hospital Number Six in Moscow, where I trained, has developed a procedure. We take blood counts at two-hour intervals and compare them with a standard profile. We can see how rapidly the cells deteriorate, and from that we can determine what the exposure has been. ..'
But by then Tamara was asleep beside him.
Tamara had almost allowed herself to hope that by the time she got back the fire would be under control, the emergency over. But it seemed it was worse than ever. Pripyat had been evacuated. (And where had her son, Boris, gone?) The ambulance was sent on to Chernobyl town, thirty kilometers away from the reactor. It was, it seemed, as near as was really safe, and so now there was talk that everyone,
It was not just the people now. Half the farms in the area raised livestock, cattle mostly, but any number of sheep, pigs, goats, even a few horses. Many of the animals came from the kolkhozists' private ventures, which made their owners doubly desperate to save them.
As they circled around the town of Pripyat and the stricken plant, Tamara looked longingly out of the back of the ambulance. Sheranchuk was there. Doing, Tamara was sure, something doggedly heroic and certainly dangerous. If only she could take him and Boris and run away!
It did not occur to her that this was almost the first time she had been separated from her husband when her principal worry had not been that he might be with another woman.
When they reached the town of Chernobyl they were directed to the bus station.
There Tamara Sheranchuk set up shop, but she had no more than entered the room set aside for the medics than her boss, the chief of surgery from the Pripyat clinic, wrinkled her nose and scowled. 'When did you change your clothes last?' she barked. 'Go at once. Shower. Eat something. Get cleaned up. Don't come back for one hour.'
'But there are so many patients—'
'There are plenty of doctors now, too,' said the elder — woman. 'Go now.'
And indeed when Tamara came back in a clean white gown, her hair still damp but pulled neatly to the back of her head, there were four strange doctors taking their turns with the influx. Two were from Kursk, one from Kiev, the dark, small, Oriental-looking woman all the way from Volgograd.
'But they must have emptied out every hospital in the Soviet Union,' said Tamara.
The woman from Volgograd said, 'No, the hospitals are all fully staffed. It is people like us who were off duty, now we give up our Sunday to come here to help.'
'And are the people in Volgograd so concerned about an explosion in the Ukraine?'
'The people in Volgograd know nothing about an explosion in the Ukraine. Neither did I. I was simply told to report to the airport at nine this morning, Sunday or no, and here I am. What is holding up the line? Send in the next patient!'
Even the patients were easier to deal with here. Triage had already been done — again, by teams of fresh doctors brought in from everywhere, taking their turns at the medicpoint in the Chernobyl town bus station. The seriously injured ones had already been sorted out and sent off to hospitals elsewhere. The ones that were coming through were lightly injured, or not injured at all. For most of them all Tamara had to do was a quick physical check — the eyes, the pulse, the blood pressure, the inside of the mouth; a quick questioning about symptoms and a few cc's of blood drawn for a lab somewhere to make a count. Then she passed them on. Most of them went directly onto buses or trains, for those who were able to travel were counted at once as evacuees.
'Mother,' said a voice from the next queue, and when she looked up from her patient she saw that it was a young boy. His face was filthy and he wore an outsized Army blouse, not his own; it took a moment for her to realize that it was her son.
'Boris! Are you all right?'
'I think so. Only they are sending all the Komsomols away now.'
'And quite time for it, too! But where are you going?' she demanded.
'Oh, to a summer camp, Mother! A good one! Maybe Artek, down on the Black Sea — and, oh, Mother,' he said joyfully, 'it isn't going to cost us a kopeck!'
Chapter 17
Smoke does not last very long in the air. What makes a column of smoke visible are the tiny particles of soot and other things that it contains, and they are transitory. The larger particles fall fairly quickly to the ground; the others fall more slowly, or are washed out of the air by rain, and in any case, diluted by the air they float in, quite soon, they can no longer be seen. The gases that go with the smoke, however, remain. In the gases from the nuclear accident are many which are invisible but not undetectable. Chemical analysis will spot them readily, but if it took a laboratory to detect them, they would not cause much concern. Unfortunately they announce themselves in a different, and much more alarming, way. That is by the radiation they give off.
The first person to observe anything amiss in the air about him was a Finnish soldier. There was no smoke left by the time the Chernobyl cloud reached the Finnish border, so he saw nothing. His instruments told the story. The soldier's duty was to supervise a radiation-detection station on the border between Finland and the USSR, and what his instruments noticed was a small but unexplained increase in the normal background radiation. The soldier reported it at once to his superiors, of course.
They puzzled worriedly over the information, but, for the
time being, they decided to keep it to themselves. There was a political problem they had to take into account. Finland is not part of the Warsaw Pact, but all the same, Finnish leaders have iearned a good deal of discretion. It was possible, they thought, that the radiation came from an unannounced Soviet nuclear bomb test. Disturbing reports about nuclear events in their Soviet neighbor are not broadcast indiscriminately in Finland.
Finland, however, was not the only foreign country to discover that there was something wrong with the air on that otherwise peaceful Sunday in April. It was only the first of them. At two o'clock that afternoon, in the Swedish nuclear power plant at Forsmark, a worker coming off shift went through a radiation scan. The test was pure routine, but the results were not.
