ruled out, not by logic but only because she could never do such a thing.
There remained a fourth possibility.
There was Volya Kokoulin, her fellow bus conductor, who had let her know very clearly that nothing would give him more delight than to steal off into the woods with her and make love.
If Kalychenko were taken away before they married, it would not be hard, Raia thought, to discover where Kokoulin had been evacuated to. She could find him. Having found him, it would be quite easy to sleep with him, to inform him a few weeks later that he had made her pregnant, and to marry him. There might be some unpleasantness about dates when the child was born, but by then what would it matter? And if Kokoulin were as hungry for her flesh as he indicated, he should be easy enough to convince that premature babies ran in her family.
She was smiling to herself, perched on the edge of the table, when Kalychenko came unevenly in the door. She threw her arms around him in real pleasure. There was nothing feigned about it; this was the man she intended to marry — if at all possible — because really, when you came right down to it, all of Kokoulin's virtues did not outweigh the fact that Kalychenko was tall, blue-eyed, and graceful, and Kokoulin was
When Kalychenko stumbled back to his cottage to find Raia entering just before him, he was glowing all over with his news. 'Really, my dear,' he said at once, 'this Yuzhevin is not such a bad place after all.'
His fiancee was flushed and sweaty, with two filled string bags still on the table. Kalychenko peered into them even as he greeted her with a cheerful kiss. 'Ah, my darling,' he said fondly. 'You've had a long walk, I'm afraid. But I have good news! I've been offered a job driving a tractor here! No, no, don't look so disapproving. Wait till you hear what they pay tractor drivers! Why, this head driver, Kolka Yakovlev, he has that big house just outside the village, you know? With fruit trees all around it? And the Volga parked in the backyard? Sixteen thousand rubles he paid for that car, that's what kind of money a tractor driver earns in Yuzhevin, because everyone with skills runs off to the city!'
'That's very nice,' Raia said, gazing out the cottage door with sudden intensity.
'And if you're not too tired tonight, he has invited us to come to his house to watch some American films! He has television tapes of all sorts of things—
'I did not come on the bus; I missed it. I came in a car, Bohdan. Two men gave me a ride almost to Yuzhevin.'
'Well, that was lucky,' he beamed.
'No, Bohdan,' she sighed. 'It wasn't really lucky, I think. The men didn't say much to me, but I didn't think they were coming quite to the village. Only there is their car, just across the square. Do you know what I think, Bohdan? I think those men came here to interview evacuees like us. I think they are from the organs.'
Chapter 25
Within large continents, air generally moves across the surface of the Earth from west to east, with a slight curve toward the poles. For that reason, the weather in Chicago usually comes from somewhere in California, and Moscow gets a large part of its weather from Spain or France. At any particular place or time, however, the winds can be quite fickle. If the Soviet air masses had been moving in the prevailing direction in April and May of 1986, the gases from the Chernobyl explosion would have been carried out over Siberia and the Pacific. They weren't. First they moved north. Then east. Then everywhere.
The first stops for the wandering witches' brew from Chernobyl were Poland and eastern Scandinavia. The invisible cloud was greeted with confusion and panic. In Poland, the official press was reassuring. The underground press, which was what the Polish people read to find out what is going on, was not. So Polish pharmacies were sold out of potassium iodide overnight, for the scariest ingredient in the cloud was its radioactive iodine-131. The trouble with the radioactive iodine was that every human being has a thyroid gland, and every thyroid gland has an insatiable appetite for iodine. If the iodine happens to be the radioactive isotope, the gland swallows it anyway. There the iodine stays, ceaselessly bombarding the victim from within with its radiation. Cancer of the thyroid is one of the commonest consequences of exposure to radioactive leaks.
Before long the winds took Chernobyl's gases south and east, to blanket most of the European continent, but by then iodine-131 was no longer the greatest fear. Radio-iodine has at least one virtue. It is short-lived. In only eight days half of it decays into something else. Two other isotopes were by then more worrisome, and they were xenon-133, a gas, and cesium-137, normally a solid. (But, like the iodine, volatile enough so that large amounts went up with Chernobyl's smoke and remained in its cloud as finely divided particles.) The xenon, being a gas, is particularly troublesome. Rain won't wash it out of the air; it is there to be breathed until it, too, decays. The cesium is even worse. It takes thirty years for half of it to decay. When it finally falls to the ground, it remains in the soil and water for a long, long time.
Of course, even after the thirty years of xenon's half-life have passed, not all of it will be gone. Half will still be there; that's what 'half-life' means. If one were to follow the history of one small patch of someone's backyard onto which one million atoms of radioactive cesium from Chernobyl had fallen, by the year 2016 five hundred thousand atoms would still be there. There would still be over sixty thousand radioactive atoms of the stuff by the beginning of the twenty-second century. Sooner or later, of course, it would all be gone from that little patch, and the last of those million atoms would have turned into something else. That should happen somewhere around six centuries from now.
When the little particles of radioactive cesium finally settle out from the sky, they cling to whatever they land on. Some of them have landed on farms of lettuce and spinach (which people eat), or on grassy pastures (which cows eat, and turn into cesium-bearing milk for people).
So all over Europe governments ordered, or people simply decided on their own, that fresh milk and leafy vegetables should be removed from the daily diet. That was nasty for parents of small children. It was even worse for farmers. Exports of any of those things from Eastern Europe were refused at the borders. When the cloud reached as far south as Italy, the authorities banned the sale of even locally grown leafy vegetables and Italian farmers, broken-hearted, saw their crops dumped into fields to rot.
Chapter 26
Moscow's Hospital No. 6 takes up most of a large city block. The hospital is not entirely devoted to patients who suffer from radiation sickness. If that were so it would be nearly empty nearly all the time; Chernobyls are rare. But when a Chernobyl happens, Hospital No. 6 is ready, for it is there that the USSR has concentrated the best doctors specializing in that ailment. It is a very good hospital. The wing devoted to radiation disease is built to an old-fashioned plan, with high ceilings and large rooms, and in this warm May the sun floods in. The wing has a total of 299 patients flown in from the Chernobyl explosion. These are the worst cases, the ones who have taken the most radiation. They are getting the best care possible, but for many of them it is not enough.
When Leonid Sheranchuk got there, however, he was protesting that it was more care than he needed, and more than he really wanted by far. The admitting doctors paid his arguments no attention. Since he was there, he would stay until released; but they did allow him one boon. Most of the patients were in private rooms, but they granted his plea to share the room of Deputy Director Leonid Smin, and that kindness made him stop protesting.
Sheranchuk was not at all sure, however, that it was a kindness to Smin. The Deputy Director had certainly wel-corned his company. But the Deputy Director had been fading rapidly ever since then. On the first day Smin had been alert, if very sick; he had even greeted his Comrade Plumber and joked about his own internal plumbing. But
