infected with a deadly disease? Would you still have let any criminal walk in here and leave anything he chose on my desk while I am absent and you are charged with protecting it?'
He had her weeping in the next minute, not so much from the violence of his attack but because it was such a terrible contrast with his usual gentle demeanor. Well, he thought, he could make it up to her another time. But it was important that she should be aware that he was wholly astonished, even indignant, that this revolutionary document should have appeared from nowhere… for when people began trying to find out who had sent it, the last place they would look was among those who had received a copy from a stranger.
Chapter 34
Around the ruin of Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, concrete shields are being poured. The demon still rages inside, but the worst of the radiation from the core itself is contained. Cranes with lead- shielded cabs lift slabs of contaminated debris into trucks with lead-lined drivers' seats to be hauled away. In the other buildings, on the grounds, in the town of Pripyat, the surfaces that have not been paved over or covered with fresh earth have at least been washed down, sprayed, or painted with a latex compound. Even the farms within the thirty-kilometer radius of the evacuation zone have been attended to. The farmers are begging to be let back in to tend their crops, for that area north of Kiev is the breadbasket of the USSR. Its winters are milder than Moscow's, and the soil is black or gray, the richest in the world. Moscow grows cabbages and rye. Around Chernobyl they grow wheat and corn, and Private Sergei Konov knows that the Soviet Union needs that food.
So when he was ordered to accompany one of the white-suited technicians through the grain fields, Konov followed without complaint. The sun was hot. The red-and-white stripes of the Chernobyl exhaust tower were visible on the horizon — at least there was no smoke coming from the plant anymore.
The assignment in the grain fields was hard work. Harder,
almost, than plugging drainage sewers with quick-drying cement or shoveling rubble, for Konov carried two oil tanks on his back so he wouldn't have to waste time going back for more, and they were heavy. When the technician's detectors sniffed a patch of radioactivity among the tall stalks, Konov would step up and spray it thoroughly, destroying that square meter of ripening crop so that the rest might grow unharmed— though who was going to eat that grain when it ripened Konov could not guess.
'At noon the technician insisted on taking a break — his decision, not Konov's — and Konov asked him what would happen to the wheat. The man pulled the gauze mask away from his mouth to answer. 'It's all a matter of radiation levels,' he said. 'After the harvest they'll measure it. If it's above the danger level, they'll just put it in storage until it cools down.' He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Konov, but Konov shook his head. It was all very well for the technician to remove his mask if he chose to, but Konov had not forgotten the standing orders.
And that night, back in the barracks, when he took off the gauze mask over his mouth and nose and handed it to the barracks orderly for testing, he heard faint but ominous
Dinner was the usual — thin soup, salt fish, potatoes — but to go along with it there was a rumor: after thirty days the troops were to be relieved, for then the summer intake would provide new Army recruits in plenty.
'Good,' said his friend Miklas, dipping his bread in his tea. 'Let the rookies fry their balls.'
Konov ate silendy for a moment. Then he said offhandedly, 'I think I would like to stay on here.'
Miklas could not conceal his astonishment. 'What are you saying? What is it, Seryozha?' he demanded. 'There are no girls here to make you want to stay!'
'There are no girls back in Mtintsin, either, just pigs,' said Konov, calmly folding his second slice of black bread in half to bite into it.
'The pigs in Mtintsin at least speak Russian. There's not even anything to drink here!'
'And if you go on drinking what they sell you in Mtintsin you will be blind.'
'It is better to be blind than to have your balls fried,' Miklas said seriously. 'How do you know you won't be the next one to find a hero's grave?'
To that Konov had no good answer. As a matter of fact, he had given that prospect a lot of thought. His conclusion was that, for once, the Army orders made a good deal of sense. Therefore Konov meticulously followed the instructions about what he touched and breathed and did. He had never been cleaner. He showered at least six times a day. When off duty he stayed in the old stable with the windows nailed down that was their barracks.
He washed his clothes — his own uniform, not the coveralls that were issued every time he went outside — every time he wore it. Outside, he never removed cap, mask, or gloves, no matter how sweaty. And every other day he would line up at the medic-point at the end of the barracks to let them draw blood, and every time when the report came back it said that his blood still contained plenty of those little white things that the radiation killed first.
In three and a half weeks Konov had worked at a dozen different tasks in the cleanup of the Chernobyl explosion. Scariest was to run out onto the roof of the dead power plant itself for lumps of graphite, where you could feel the heat from the sun on one side of you and that other heat still smoldering out of the great graphite and uranium core warming the other. He had done that three times now, but that particular job was over.
The work was not all scary. Some was simple drudgery, sandbagging the dikes around the plant's cooling pond, diverting the flow of the little streams that led to the Pripyat River, standing guard in the lonely nights at the thirty-kilometer perimeter of the zone, between the hastily erected watchtow-ers, to keep the foolish ones from trying to return to their lost homes.
What Konov liked best was to be assigned some kind of work in the deserted town of Pripyat. Any kind of work, from spraying liquid rubber on the abandoned cars to shoveling debris into trucks to be hauled away. He had come to think of Pripyat as his town. He knew it as well as he knew the Leninskaya Prospekt by his home in Moscow, from the little children's amusement park (where were those children now? And would anyone ever get into the litde red and white cars of that Ferris wheel again?) to the churned-up earth along the main boulevard, where rosebeds and greensward alike had been bulldozed up and carried away.
He even liked the long nights of guard duty in the town, carrying his rifle over his shoulder against looters, with the sorrowful baying of abandoned dogs coming from nowhere under the full moon. But whatever the job was, Konov did it all, and never complained, and arose bright and eager the next morning to do more.
His lieutenant hardly recognized the new Private Sergei Konov anymore.
The next morning was piss-in-a-bottle day. Before breakfast every soldier in the barracks was lined up to urinate into a specimen jar, one by one. The radiation technician would gingerly sniff at that with his radiation detector; but, so far, none of those wheeping little poison bullets seemed to have got into Konov's body. So, Konov thought, there really was no reason not to stay on if he chose. And he did choose, though he didn't like the idea of sharing the zone with a thousand raw recruits who would not understand what it had been like in the first frightening days after the explosion.
He wondered soberly what would happen with new officers on the scene. The present crew had become quite easygoing; Senior Lieutenant Osipev had even stopped ordering him to get his hair cut. But new ones from outside might change all that around, and it could be as bad as the training base again.
Still, he knew he wanted to spend the remaining — what was it, just thirty days? Less than a thousand hours? — of his enlistment right where he was: in the evacuated zone, helping to clean up Chernobyl's deadly mess.
When Konov had picked up his breakfast that morning and taken it to a corner of the barracks, the lieutenant came over and sat down next to him, lighting a cigarette. 'Go on eating, Konov,' he ordered. 'This is not official. Just a little chat, if you don't mind.'
Konov said, 'As you wish, Senior Lieutenant Osipev.'
'I would like to ask you 'a question, Konov. Why did you volunteer to stay on here?'
'To serve the Soviet Union, Senior Lieutenant Osipev.'
'Yes, of course,' grunted the lieutenant, 'but you have not always been so eager. You have puzzled me for a
