With Kalychenko out of the room Raia took out a Stewardess cigarette and inhaled the menthol smoke deeply. And at once she began to worry. Should she be smoking at all? Would it be bad for the baby? Her husband-to-be had informed her quite definitely that it was, but at the clinic they had only shrugged and talked about moderation.
She wished she had thought to ask at the clinic about radiation. But who could have imagined such questions were necessary? She touched her stomach hopefully, and worried. Until now the only questions seriously troubling had been whether her fiance would actually go through with the ceremony, and whether the child would have his blue eyes.
Now — would it have any eyes at all?
By the time Kalychenko came out of the bathroom, Raia had frightened herself into stubbornness. "You must come to the Party headquarters," she said firmly.
"And leave the telephone? What if I'm needed at the plant?"
She said reasonably, "How would they find you here? As far as the plant knows, you're still at the hostel for single men, isn't that so?"
"I think I informed the plant that I would be staying here," he said, although it was a lie. Actually, he had not thought it anyone's business if he temporarily borrowed this apartment from the friend who had followed his wife to Odessa, hoping to talk her out of a divorce. In any case, judging from some of the remarks Khrenov had made, even this telephone number was almost certainly somewhere in the Personnel and Security files.
"And in all this confusion will anyone remember that? No, really, Bohdan, if you're worried that the plant needs you, call them. But first come to the Party headquarters. There's nothing else to do, is there?"
Perhaps there wasn't. Kalychenko could think of no way out. He could not simply go on hiding in his friend's apartment as he had done all the previous day. In the long run he sighed, threw up his hands at his fiancee's gentle nagging and went reluctantly out to tell the man from the milk store that after careful consideration, he had decided that he would go along to talk to the people at the Party committee building. It was not that he thought it was a good idea. He simply didn't have a better one.
There were a hundred people in the crowd that marched doggedly through the streets to the Party headquarters. The white foam had caked solid and was soiled, and there was an unpleasant smoky, chemical, almost ammonia-like smell in the air. It was true enough that there were no buses on the streets this day. There was little traffic of any kind, with nothing coming in from outside the town. They strode along the center of the roadway itself, with no militia around to fine them for jaywalking. Zakharin was in the lead, with Kalychenko looking stern enough and determined enough as he strode along just behind him.
It was still early morning, not as much as ten o'clock, but it was a sullen, coppery-colored sort of day. There weren't many clouds. The sun was bright enough, even hot. But overhead, covering half the sky, was a thin pall of smoke from Chernobyl. Citizens who would normally be sitting in their bathrobes, drinking tea in comfortable relaxation on their day off, were peering out the windows or standing on the sidewalks; they called back and forth to the clot of men moving down the center of the street, and some joined the march. Most merely looked worried.
Outside the Party headquarters the flag was stirring listlessly in the breeze. A couple of older, exhausted militiamen stood in front' of the door. "What is the matter with you people?" one of them demanded. "Why are you making a disturbance at this critical time?"
"We want to speak to the Party secretary," Zakharin said boldly.
"On a Sunday morning? Are you out of your mind?"
"It is an emergency," Zakharin insisted.
The other militiaman said, "Of course it is an emergency, and the Party secretary is at his post of duty. Go back to your homes at once."
"No," said Zakharin. "We demand that something be done. The town must be evacuated! The danger is very great to all of us. Comrade Kalychenko here is an expert on such matters. He will explain it to you."
But Comrade Kalychenko did not, because when Zakharin looked around for backing from his technical expert, Bohdan Kalychenko was nowhere to be seen.
Chapter 14
There is no "core meltdown" at the Chernobyl Power Station. At least that particular disaster was impossible, for uranium dioxide does not melt until it reaches a temperature of 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Even burning graphite never gets much hotter than half that. When the graphite burned, it was, after all, only a simple chemical matter of carbon combusting in the presence of oxygen, not basically different from the blazing logs in the fireplace of a split-level ranch house. Although it was a real nuclear explosion that started the disaster, the nuclear reaction blew itself out in the first fraction of a second after the initial blast. So there is no longer any real danger of that famous nuclear nightmare, a core meltdown, but another danger is most ominously present. In a way it has become even worse.
As the carbon in the graphite reacts with the oxygen in the air in that fire, the smoke rises. It has no chimney, as the fireplace logs would, but it doesn't need one. At such temperatures the fire creates its own chimney, as the column of hot smoke and gases thrusts upward through the atmosphere. The column carries other gases and tiny bits of solid matter along with it. That is where the real, and most terrible danger lies. That smoke contains deadly poisons. It is not just the uranium in the core that is radioactively poisonous now. The reactor has created its
own new poisons, some of which are far more worrisome than uranium. It is inevitable that it should. Even if a nuclear reactor could start with pure, and nearly harmless materials, its purity would not last. Its own radiation corrupts it. Some atoms are broken into fragments, and each fragment is a new chemical element. Nuclei gain particles or lose them. Elements which do not exist in nature — the "transuranic" ones — are created. Many of the new elements are fiercely radioactive. This is the unique danger of nuclear accidents.
Without exception, all radioactive elements are harmful to living things — every living thing, from fungi to human beings. High doses of radiation kill quickly. Lower doses take more time. At the lowest possible concentration — a single particle striking a single cell — there may be no detectable damage at all, because the rest of the body may be able to repair or replace the cell. Or it may not; in which case the damage may not show up for decades, appearing only late in life as cancer.
Say what you would about the men from the Ministry of Nuclear Energy, Smin thought wearily, you at least had to admit they got things done. He had lost count of the number of experts — specialist doctors, engineers, construction people— who had poured into Chernobyl in the last dozen hours. Of course Chief Engineer Varazin's dacha was far too small to hold all the meetings and individuals concerned in the effort to control the damage to Reactor No. 4. Perhaps, Smin thought, it was also a bit too close to the naked core for the comfort of the experts; at any rate, a new command post had been established thirty kilometers away, in the regional Party headquarters of a collective farm village.
It was not just men the people from the Ministry had conjured up, it was materiel. A steady flow of heavy machines lumbered through the checkpoint on their way to the plant. Trucks had arrived all through the night, bearing all sorts of things that the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station had never had before. Everyone now carried a little aluminum pen-shaped dosimeter. Everyone, even at the checkpoint, wore coveralls, caps that came down over the neck and ears, even cloth masks to put over the mouth and nose, though at the checkpoint all of those hung loose around the wearers' throats. You could not tell a general from a laborer. In white or green, they were all covered from head to toe. It made them look like robots.