now, as Sheranchuk could hear, Smin's internal plumbing was giving him trouble again. After the bone marrow, the next targets that radiation destroyed were the soft tissues of the mouth and the intestinal tract, and one of the most unpleasant effects of an overdose was the terrible bloody diarrhea that resulted.
When the nurse came out, carrying the covered bedpan with respect because what came out of Smin's body was not only unpleasant but contaminated with radioactivity, Sheranchuk asked, 'How is he?'
She said, 'I think he will sleep for a while. How about yourself? How are you feeling?'
'I am feeling quite well,' said Sheranchuk automatically. It was almost true, not counting the aches and twinges where needles had been stuck into him. He was even thinking of getting up for a visit to some of the other patients, although he felt, as always, a bit fatigued.
She nodded, not even listening — after all, she knew his condition better than he did. 'Do you need anything?'
'Only to get out of here.' He grinned. 'Preferably alive.'
'You have a very good chance,' she said strongly. 'And in any case, you have a new doctor. Four or five of them, if you count the Americans, but one doctor in particular I am sure you will be glad to see.'
'And who is that?' asked Sheranchuk, but she only smiled and left him.
Sheranchuk picked up a magazine, shifting uncomfortably in his bed. A voice from behind the curtain said softly, 'She did not tell you the truth, you know.'
'Deputy Director Smin?' Sheranchuk cried. 'But I thought you were asleep.'
'Exactly, yes. You thought that because that nurse told you I would be, but, as you see, I am not.'
'Let me pull the curtain back,' said Sheranchuk eagerly, swinging his legs over the side of the bed.
'No, please! Don't exert yourself. I am not at my most handsome just now, as you may suppose, and I prefer not to exhibit my wretchedness. We can talk perfecdy well this way.'
'Of course,' said Sheranchuk.
There was a silence for a moment. Then Smin's Voice said gravely, 'I am told you behaved with great courage, Comrade Plumber.'
Sheranchuk flushed. 'They needed to get concrete under the reactor. Someone had to do it. I hope only that they have succeeded.'
'At least it is well begun,' Smin said, and paused to cough for a moment. Then he said, 'I spoke to the plant on the telephone last night. It is going well. They decided they needed to drill a tunnel under the core to get the concrete in, but the mud was too soft. Then they found an engineer from the Leningrad Metro to show them how. They froze the mud with liquid nitrogen, and now the concrete is in place.'
'So everything is safe now.'
There was a long silence from Smin. 'I hope so, Comrade Plumber,' he said at last. 'Isn't it almost time for the doctors' morning rounds? I think I will sleep a little until then, after all.'
When the doctors came through, they kept Smin's curtains closed, and Sheranchuk sat on the edge of his bed, kicking his heels irritably against the metal legs, listening. There was not much to hear. All the resources of Hospital No. 6 were not making Smin better. He was weaker today than he had been when Sheranchuk was admitted. As the doctors moved about and the curtains parted a bit, Sheranchuk could see how bad the old man was. His skin looked like — like — like a leper's, Sheranchuk decided, though he had never seen a leper. It was blotchy. Under the dressings were sores that ran. The part of his chest that was not covered with the great old burn scar now was dotted with the little pink blossoms of burst blood vessels the doctors called 'petechiae.' Reminded, Sheranchuk examined his own chest and arms, but there were none of the things there.
He really was not, he told himself again, sick enough to be in this place.
When it was Sheranchuk's own turn, the doctors were more relaxed. It was only, 'Open your mouth, please' and 'Please, if you will just remove your pajama bottoms' — so they could poke around his balls — and then they peered at his charts for just a moment.
'I should be sent away from here,' he told them. 'I'm taking up space others need more.'
'We have plenty of space, Leonid,' the head doctor smiled. 'We also have plenty of doctors — even some new ones coming from America, soon.'
But actually Sheranchuk thought they already had all too many doctors, especially the radiation hematologist, Dr. Akhsmentova. He did not care for the woman, and was not pleased when she stayed on after the other doctors had left. 'Just a few more drops of your blood, if you please, Comrade Sheranchuk,' she requested. She didn't wait for permission. She had already pushed him back on the bed and seized his arm.
'The nurses are gentler than you,' Sheranchuk complained as she stabbed once more into the heart of the bruises left from other needles.
'The nurses have more time. Stop wriggling, please.' He glared silently at her. Glancing at his bright steel teeth as she withdrew the needle, she said, 'And one other thing. When the American doctors see you, try not to smile. We do not want them to think so poorly of Soviet dentistry.'
When she had gone, Smin said from behind the curtains, 'I hope the Americans don't see Dr. Akhsmentova at all, because we don't want them to have a poor opinion of Soviet hematologists.'
His words were cheerful enough, but his tone so faint that it alarmed Sheranchuk. 'Please, Simyon. Don't tire yourself talking.'
'I am not tired,' Smin protested. 'Weak, a little, yes.' He stirred fretfully; through the gap in the curtains Sheranchuk could see him trying to adjust the sheet more comfortably over his body. 'Although perhaps you are right and I should rest again. I am told that I am to have distinguished visitors today, and I should try to be alert and witty for them.'
The GehBehs again! Couldn't they leave the poor man alone? Sheranchuk begged, 'Then do it, please. And try to eat your lunch when they bring it.' But he heard the anger in his voice, and to account for the bitterness in his tone he added, 'But it is true that I should not be here.'
'Leonid,' Smin said patiently, 'you are here because you are a hero. Do you think everyone has forgotten what you did under the reactor? You are a precious person, and everyone wants to make sure you don't die on us because you foolishly did one heroic thing too many. Now go and eat your lunch.'
The patients' dining room was half the floor away, and as he walked down the hall toward it, Sheranchuk peered into each room he passed. To have the Deputy Director call him a hero! But everyone in this place was a hero — the firemen, the operators who had stayed steadfast, the doctor who had come back and back to help the victims until he became a victim himself — not least among the heroes was Deputy Director Simyon Smin himself, if it came to that! And almost all of them were far worse off than Leonid Sheranchuk, who had merely been weak enough to faint from exhaustion.
The patients' dining room proved that. There were hardly more than a dozen patients at the tables that could have seated dozens more. It was not that there was any shortage 'of patients to fill the room. It was simply because so many of them were too sick or too weak, or merely too encumbered with pipettes and catheters and tubes of trickling medicines to get up and walk to their meals.
Sheranchuk paused in the doorway to sniff at what was offered. Fish soup at least, he thought approvingly; say what you will, the food was better here than in any other hospital he had ever heard of. He looked toward one of the tables by a window and was surprised to hear his name called.
The man who got up was hard to recognize at first, in the hospital whites, and then Sheranchuk saw that it was Vladimir Ponomorenko, one of the Four Seasons of the football team. 'Autumn!' Sheranchuk cried in shock. 'Not you, too!'
'Oh, no, Comrade Sheranchuk,' the football player said apologetically, and Sheranchuk recognized that he was in the whites of a visitor, not the red-striped pajamas of the patients. 'The nurses said it was all right for me to eat here, but I'm only here to see my cousins, in case they.can use my bone marrow.'
'Your cousins? Both of them?' Sheranchuk repeated blankly. 'But, Autumn, I had no idea. Both Spring and Summer, here in this hospital? Here, let me sit down with you, tell me what's happened to them.'
But none of the news was good. The two who were
Vladimir's cousins, the fireman, Vassili, who was called 'Summer,' and the pipefitter, Arkady, who was called 'Spring,' had both taken serious amounts of radiation. The prognosis for both of them was not good. The fireman did not merely have radiation sickness. He had been badly burned; one foot, at least, was so destroyed that he was almost sure to lose it, and he was so full of morphine that he had not even recognized Autumn beside his bed. And the pipefitter Arkady — when he went back to turn off the hydrogen flare he paid for it. 'But he's in my own section,'
