you believe it? Now he has a grandson of his own! Well, I won't keep you any longer.. and thank you for helping with my birthday surprise.'
'You're welcome,' said both the Didchuks at once. They looked at each other dismally after the old woman left. But they didn't say anything further about the birthday surprise, not then, when one of the visitors might happen to return at any moment, and indeed not ever.
In any case, their daughter's return gave them far more attractive things to think about. They engaged a taxicab for the trip to the railroad station and extravagantly commanded, and bribed, the driver to wait. The terminal was a far happier place this time than it had been three weeks before.
The Didchuks were not the only parents eagerly awaiting a returning child, and everyone was in a holiday mood… with somber undertones, to be sure. The official death toll had just been announced again — the number was now up to twenty-three, twenty-one of them men and two women. And everyone was well aware that the number would surely rise. And go on rising, not just this week or this year, but for a long time to come as the slow damage from radiation would produce cells that turned cancerous, or caused babies to abort, or, worse still, let them be born with no one knew what difficulties. The doctors had said that at least one hundred thousand Soviet citizens, perhaps twice that many, had been exposed to levels of radiation high enough to warrant a close watch for decades to come.
The train, of course, was late. After half an hour Didchuk sighed and went outside to pay the taxi driver off, but returned in a glow. 'Imagine!' he told his wife, beaming. 'He said he would wait for nothing! He, too,had a child who was evacuated, the boy will be back on Saturday, and he said he would be glad to see that our daughter got home in comfort!'
His wife's eyes were suddenly misted with happy, sentimental tears. Then she had a sudden thought. 'On Saturday?' For they, like most citizens of Kiev, had been notified that the next few Saturdays were to be devoted to voluntary extra work, helping complete the nine-kilometer aqueduct that would bring water to Kiev if the autumn floods made everything nearer undrinkable with spill from Chernobyl.
Didchuk looked concerned. 'Oh, to be sure. I had forgotten. But surely they will give him time off to meet his son,' he offered.
His wife wasn't listening. She was looking in surprise at another track, with the waiting afternoon intercity train. An old woman was reasoning with the guard, who finally shrugged and allowed her to march triumphantly onto the platform.
'But that is surely Aftasia Smin,' said his wife. 'What can she be doing? She didn't mention to us that she was going to Moscow.'
Chapter 37
The gull-winged TWA airline terminal at New York's Kennedy Airport is not only an architectural spectacle, it is huge. It has its own customs and immigration facilities for passengers arriving from abroad. That relieves crowding, and that's a good thing. The United States is not the easiest country in the world to enter. The customs searches can be very thorough. Foreign nationals must have visas and health cards, and sometimes they are subjected to considerable questioning about their politics and their possible criminal records. Sometimes they are even turned back at the airport and must reboard their plane for its return flight. For many years, even returning American citizens had to spend eternities of time in the long lines, but because so many American voters complained to so many American congressmen, it has now been made easier for Americans to get back into their country; they pass by the immigration desks completely, and even at customs if they say they have nothing to declare they are generally waved through. But not always; and those who are asked to step into another room are sometimes in for an ordeal.
When Dean and Candace Garfield were politely invited out of the line at the customs counter, the shock was nasty. 'But we've written everything down on the form,' Garfield expostulated. 'We haven't even talked to the customs officer yet.'
Then he caught sight of his network's New York publicity chief coming toward him with a young woman and a uniformed U.S. Immigration Service official, and Garfield relaxed. 'Leave the bags,' the man urged, grinning. 'Bobbi here will schlepp them through, we've got something else going for you.'
The something else turned out to be a little room where a government doctor with a finger-pricking blood sample needle waited for them. Just outside, there were half a dozen newspaper and network people eager to talk, first of all, to celebrities, and, even more, to celebrities who had been near the Chernobyl disaster; and that night the Garfields had the pleasure of seeing themselves on the six o'clock news.
'I should've had my hair done in Paris,' Candace fretted.
Her husband, switching channels, said loyally, 'You look gor-geous, gorgeous. And, Jesus, he even got us on CBS. Look!'
And there they were. Of course, they got less time than they had been given on their own network, but nevertheless Garfield saw himself once more grinning at the camera and saying, 'The doctor says we've got traces of, what do you call it, tellurium and some other 'urium' from the explosion. But so does everybody in the Ukraine. It isn't very much, and we don't have to worry about it. And, yes, the people in Kiev are all doing fine. They've got it all cleared up, far as we could see, though, of course, they're kind of worried about the future. But he— But heck, who isn't?'
'They left out that whole part where I was talking about
Her husband said, 'Hold it a minute, I want to hear this.' The 'related subject' was a story about a news conference called by the'American Association of Nuclear Engineers.
They gave the spokesman more time than they had given the Garfields, as he explained that what had happened in Chernobyl couldn't possibly happen here. Yes, there had been accidents in America in the past — little ones; really, only technical mishaps, if you looked at them impartially and if you weren't one of those antinuclear freaks. And certainly nobody had been hurt in any American nuclear accident. Well, very few people, anyway. Yes, it was true that the Chernobyl reactor did in fact turn out to have a containment shell, despite what had been said earlier, but it was rectangular rather than a dome. Yes, all right, at the time of Three Mile Island the authorities had released no information at all on the accident for several days, too, and maybe the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had expressed an irritated wish that sometimes the freedom of the press wasn't observed quite so faithfully in the United States — yes, all right, the man finished, obviously growing annoyed, there were plenty of little nitpicking arguments that could be made against American nuclear power by the Jane Fondas and the people who loved whales. That was certainly their privilege.
But nevertheless it couldn't happen here, and what happened at Chernobyl just showed that the Russians couldn't be trusted with high technology. Their management practices were abysmal. The people in charge at Chernobyl were undoubtedly in bad trouble, and they deserved to be!
'Christ,' said Garfield, switching again but getting nothing but the weather report. 'I don't like the sound of that. I hope Cousin Simyon's all right.'
'I wish I'd worn the blue dress,' said his wife.
There was one other 'related subject' that didn't get covered on the newscast, although Garfield's clipping service faithfully passed it on to him from the next day's paper. The story came from France, where at the nuclear reprocessing plant in Cap La Hague five workers had received radiation exposure — one of them five times the permitted annual dose— when radioactive liquid leaked from a pipe.
It wasn't much of a story in America. It wasn't even taken very seriously in France, except at one newspaper office, where an enterprising reporter had uncovered something considerably more worrisome. It seemed that earlier that year another French reactor had gone critical when its pumps failed because it lost electrical power on its primary circuits. That was bad enough, but things got worse when they tried to avert total meltdown by switching to the backup diesel generators. The first generator failed. The second was the last resort.
As it happened, the second generator worked. With its electrical power the meltdown was averted. The Frenchmen managed to shut down their errant reactor without catastrophe. They swore a bit, and one or two of
