Chernobyl

Emmaline was astonished at the quick rush of feeling in her own belly; it had, indeed, been a long winter.

The Rossiya Hotel is advertised as the second largest in the world (the first largest is also in the Soviet Union), but Emmaline had learned her way around it by now. She flashed her card, unnecessarily, to the factotum at the door and headed for the elevators.

The novelist's name was Pembroke Williamson, and he wasn't in his hotel room. Tipped off by the ever- vigilant concierge, Emmaline walked down to the end of the long corridor and, peering over the stair rail, saw him nursing a cup of tea and curiously counting over his change in the hotel's corner buffet.

'You've got American newspapers,' she said at once, catching sight of the pages sticking out of his shoulder bag. 'May I?'

While Pembroke tried to total up the English ten-penny pieces, the German marks, and the Swedish kroner he had been given in change for his American five-dollar bill, Emmaline happily scanned the headlines. Their little story had taken over the front pages; Chernobyl was in every paper. And what headlines! The New York Post had the craziest — mass grave 15,000 reported buried in nuke disposal site — but the UPI stories claimed at least 2,000 dead, and nearly every paper discounted the Soviet numbers.

'So what's the truth?' Pembroke asked. 'Who's lying?'

'Maybe everybody,' said Emmaline, wistfully trying to get a quick look at Doonesbury and Andy Capp. 'The Russians still say that there are two dead; they were killed in the explosion, and that's all. Of course, they admit there are a couple of hundred in the hospital here in Moscow, and God knows how many others in other places.'

'Do you believe that?'

She said primly, 'I work for the State Department. Mr. Schultz said he'd bet ten dollars the Soviets are lying.'

'How about one pound ten in sterling and about another two dollars in odds and ends?' Pembroke grinned.

'That's what the Secretary of State wants to bet. I don't bet, personally. Pembroke? You know what it's like here; we don't get much hard information, and what we do get is mostly classified. I was hoping you could tell me what happened.'

The novelist leaned back, looking at her seriously. 'Don't we have to get to the publishing company?' His book on Lincoln had just been published in the USSR, and the editors at the Mir Publishing Company wanted to make a ceremony of handing over to him a royalty check in good, spendable U.S. dollars.

'The car will pick us up downstairs in half an hour. Mir's only ten minutes away.'

He said, 'Want some coffee?'

And when he came back with two cups he tasted it, made a face, and said: 'Do you remember what happened in Florida on January twenty-eighth?'

'I guess you mean the shuttle blowing up?'

'That's right. The space shuttle Challenger. It seems there's a defect in the rings that hold the external solid-fuel rocket together; NASA knew about the defect for some time, but didn't do anything until seven people got killed.'

Emmaline looked at him in perplexity. 'What's that got to do with Chernobyl?'

'I think it's the same thing, Emmaline. On the way here I

stopped off in London to interview an Englishman named Grahame Leman. He describes things like Chernobyl and the Challenger as the results of what he calls 'TBP'—means the Technical- Bureaucratic-Political system of decision-making. You see, what Leman's saying is that technological decisions aren't made just on the basis of the technological considerations. The technical experts didn't want the Challenger to go off that day. The forces in favor of it were bureaucratic and political. The bureaucrats are the bosses, so they can overrule the technicians' decisions, just because the guy higher up can always overrule the guy lower down. The political pressures are something else. NASA wanted to brighten up its image; it didn't want another delay.'

'You're not saying they sent that ship up knowing it was dangerous?'

'Not a bit of it, Emmaline. I'm only saying they didn't let themselves know it was dangerous. There isn't any flag that goes up to say Danger There's just a probabilistic assessment of risk. Same thing happened in England, God, I don't know, sixty or seventy years ago, when the R-101 airship smashed up. The engineers knew the R-101 wasn't ready, just as the Morton Thiokol engineers knew the Challenger wasn't ready — but they're only one leg of the triad, and the bureaucrats and the politicians outvote them. See,' he said, glancing at his watch, 'I don't want you to get the wrong idea. It's not exactly individual bureaucrats and politicians I'm talking about. It's the bureaucratic and political pressures that make the TBP syndrome dangerous. The worst railroad accident the English ever had was when an engineer on the Great Western Railroad wanted to make up time — that's the bureaucratic and political part— and overrode the automatic braking systems that would have stopped him after he went through a red light. They didn't. He smashed into another train. I'd say Three Mile Island was the same kind of thing too. And so was Chernobyl. The technology's not so bad on all these things, you know. It's the people who make the decisions, and the reasons they have for making them. . Oh, hell,' he said, grinning. 'I didn't mean to get wound up like this.' Then, in a different tone, 'Listen, there was something I wanted to talk to you about. Do we have time for another cup of coffee?'

'If we drink it fast enough, we do,' Emmaline said, puzzled.

'Well, the hell with the coffee. The thing is, I got a call from Johnny Stark.'

Emmaline almost choked on her last sip of coffee. 'You got a call from Johnny Stark}' she repeated.

'I see you know who he is,' Pembroke said, pleased at the impression he had made.

She glanced around quickly. There were plenty of other people rattling cups and dishes in the buffet, but the only ones near them were three businessmen carrying on a loud conversation in German. 'He's the mystery man,' she said softly.

'That one. The one with the American wife. The one that commutes to Paris and New York and drives the only Cadillac convertible in Moscow. What do you know about him?'

Emmaline thought for a second. 'His real name is supposed to be Ivan something. He just uses 'Johnny Stark' for those guidebooks he writes, like The Story of the Kremlin and English Speaker's, Guide to Moscow.'

'I've seen the books.'

'Well, he gets a lot of hard currency somewhere, and I don't think it's all from the books. He's connected, you know what I'm saying? He's way out of my league, Pembroke.'

Pembroke studied her face. 'Are you telling me to stay away from him?'

Emmaline thought for a moment. 'No, not really,' she said reluctantly. 'He talks pretty openly when he wants to. The thing is, Stark has got to be very high up but nobody knows his official position, if any. So everyone is very careful around him. They say he invented glasnost before Gorbachev — what? Oh, glasnost. That's what they call the official policy now. It means something like 'frankness' or 'candor.' The funny thing is, lately they seem to actually be opening up — on occasion, at least.'

'Like about Chernobyl?'

'Aw, no. Not even Johnny Stark's going to go that far.' She hesitated, then decided to indulge her curiosity. 'Mind if I ask what he called you about?'

Now Pembroke looked a little hesitant himself. 'Well, that's the whole thing, Emmaline. I've got some friends, and they mentioned some kind of a manifesto that's going around.'

Emmaline frowned. 'What kind of manifesto do you mean?'

'They say it's all about what the USSR has to do to straighten itself out. Clean up the economy, get out of Afghanistan, have free elections with more than one candidate for each job—'

'Pembroke!' Emmaline said earnestly. 'If you get yourself mixed up with dissidents—'

'No, no! They're not dissidents. I mean, I think they aren't. I mean, maybe some of them are, because the first person to mention it was—' He stopped in the middle of a sentence when he saw Emmaline's face.