Chernobyl

But Tamara only pouted instead of railing back at him. 'I saw that Serena Smin was here,' she said.

'She has been very good with her husband,' Sheranchuk said. 'I admire her a great deal.'

'Yes, and I saw that she admires you as well,' his wife said flatly.

'Oh,' said Sheranchuk, understanding at last. He grinned at his wife. 'You saw her kiss me. Yes, of course; she and I have been doing all sorts of things here, with her husband asleep in the next bed and her son standing guard in the corridor.'

'I do not like to joke about these matters,' Tamara said.

Sheranchuk groaned faintly. Was it possible that she was being seriously jealous again? He opened his mouth to reassure her, and then he caught a flicker of motion.

He turned to the door. A sunburned young man in Air Force blue was standing there. 'I am Senior Lieutenant Nikolai Smin,' he announced. 'Is my father here?'

'Yes,' Tamara Sheranchuk began, 'but you must wear a robe if you want to—' And she was interrupted by a voice from behind the screens.

'Is that my son? Put the nightshirt on him, please, and let him come in!'

Nikolai Smin took the visitor's chair from beside Sheranchuk's bed, now politely empty as Sheranchuk let his wife escort him out of the way of the reunion, and put it next to his father's. He started to pull the screens away, but his father stopped him. 'Leave them,' he ordered. 'You don't want to see me too well.'

That statement was distressingly validated. Nikolai could not helping the freezing of the expression on his face as he got a good look at his father. Suddenly Smin was an old man, and one apparently close to a repulsive death. What were those awful pus-filled black blobs on his face? What were the red sores on his neck and shoulders that wept colorless fluid? And that unpleasant smell?

'Don't touch me, Kolya,' Smin said. 'Kiss the air for me and I will kiss it back.'

Nikolai did as he was ordered, but protested, 'I'm not afraid of catching something from you.'

'But I am afraid for you. Also, it hurts if you touch me.'

'At least you are, well—' Nikolai fumbled, looking for something positive to say.

'Conscious? Lucid? Yes, Kolya, for sometimes half an hour at a time, so please let's not waste it with pretending. I am wonderfully pleased to see you, my son. Was it bad where you were?'

Nikolai hesitated, choosing his words. 'It is not that dangerous to be flying an MI-24 gunship in Afghanistan, Father. But it is dirty and boring, and no one but a lunatic loves shooting at civilians from the air. It is true that some of those civilians shoot back, but none have come close to me.'

'And when you are done here you will go back to Afghanistan?'

Nikolai looked rebellious. 'Of course,' he said.

'I see. Still, your mother said something about volunteering to fly in the helicopters that are dropping things over the reactor—'

'It was an idle thought. They have no further need for pilots to drop dirt on your reactor, Father, so they have discontinued the drops.'

'Oh?' said Smin, interested. 'Then the core is completely safe now?'

'I think,' Nikolai said, 'that it is at least safer to continue to deal with it by other means than to have pilots dodging that stack. I have seen the photos, Father; it is not what a helicopter pilot likes to find in his path. Anyway, they've stopped. Then I asked if there were any other flying jobs in the area. They said not. Or almost none; the only flying missions related to what happened to your plant are now Yaks dropping iodine crystals into the clouds before they get to Chernobyl, so they won't rain on the plant. But unfortunately they don't need me for that.'

'Unfortunately,' Smin repeated. 'Why unfortunately?'

Nikolai shrugged morosely. 'No, really,' his father insisted. 'I would like to understand what you feel. Are you determined to retrieve the family honor? Do you think the accident was my fault and you must do something heroic to make up for it?'

Nikolai pondered for a moment. 'I don't know what I think about that,' he said at last. 'Does it matter? At least I am here now.'

'And I am grateful,' said his father, willing to let the subject be changed. 'I appreciate that you are here to try to save my life.'

'If I can. I am to be tested this afternoon.' The young man swallowed involuntarily, and Smin noticed.

'It isn't pleasant, what they want you to do,' he said gently. 'I am sorry to have to ask you to do it. And even sorrier that it is necessary. Kolya? Are you ashamed of your father?'

'Ashamed? But, Father! You did your best!'

'I thought that was what I was doing, yes,' Smin agreed.

'No, really! My mother and Vassili have told me all about it. In the past three years you have made everything work so much better—'

'In three years, yes. And in another five years, perhaps, I would have finished the task and Chernobyl would have been fully up to standards in every respect. It is a pity, but I didn't have those five years.'

'No,' said Nikolai loyally. 'So it is not your fault. Still—'

Smin waited. 'What, then, Kolya?' he asked.

'I should be going for my test, not worrying you with silly things when you aren't feeling very well.'

Smin actually laughed — not 'feeling very well!' But it hurt him to laugh, and all he said, with great patience, was: 'Tell me what you were about to say, Kolya. Fathers and sons should speak honestly to one another.'

'Well— Only— The thing is,' Nikolai went on, picking up speed, 'there are such terrible stories! Concrete that crumbles into sand, walls that fall down!'

'Those are true stories, Kolya. I accepted many substandard products.'

'But why, Father?'

Smin sighed. 'Do they teach you nothing in the Air Force of what the world is like? Let us pretend, Kolya, that you are the director of a cement factory. Each month you have a plan to fulfill. Perhaps your plan calls for the production of ten thousand tons of cement and, look, it is the twenty-fifth of the month and you have only produced four thousand. But if you don't fulfill your plan, there are no bonuses for the workers, no commendations for you; you may even be reprimanded. Or worse than reprimanded. So what do you do, Kolya? You do what every other factory manager does. You put all your workers on overtime, with orders to storm six thousand tons of cement in five days. Can they do it? Certainly — if they slop the work through any old way; and on the last day of the month you have fulfilled your plan… Of course, those six thousand tons are useless.'

'But then you don't have to accept them, Father!'

'Yes, exactly,' his father agreed. 'One should reject them at once. But then what? Chernobyl did need cement. The cement maker needed not only to complete his plan, but to sell the production. So he says to me, 'You want some good cement, very well, I will give you all you need. But you must also take this other batch.' And I have no choice, Kolya. I take the bad, because if I don't, someone else will, and then he will get the good cement I need desperately. And with steel: the plan for the steel mill calls for another ten thousand tons, let us say; that is easy enough to make, if you make only mild, low-grade steel. But I need better! So to get the steel I need for my reactors I must persuade the steel man to make it, and to do that I must also buy a few thousand tons that are useless. Or I must bribe someone with money or even a car. Or I must send out expediters — expediters! They are gangsters, really. Flatterers. Toadies. Even pimps. And I send these slimy individuals out to wine and dine the suppliers and coax them to send me the things I really need instead of the trash they want to get rid of.. and, even so, usually they will send me both.'

'That is shameful,' his son said harshly. Then he added quickly, 'Excuse me, I don't mean you, I mean—'

'Mean me, Kolya,' Smin said gently. 'I could have done things properly, after all. It is only that I do not think Chernobyl would have been producing four thousand megawatts of electricity for the network if I had.'

Nikolai muttered something under his breath. 'What was that?' Smin asked sharply.

'Nothing, Father. I must go now for my appointment. I will come back later.' And this time he did, carefully but firmly, rest his hand on his father's for a moment before he left; but Smin did not respond. He was too busy wondering if he had been right in what he thought he heard.

To have a few minutes to himself when his head was clear — that was a precious thing for Simyon Smin. He did not waste it. He pulled out the pad on which he had been writing the letter to Mishko and Milaktiev, but after only a line or two his arms wearied and his vision blurred. There was the question, too, of how he was going to get