But if they had been robots, there would not now be the steady stream of casualties coming from the plant.
Almost all of the wounded now were firemen. Many suffered severe burns, but most of them also had worse than burns. Already a few of the victims had suppurating cold-sore blisters on their faces and mouths, and those were not just burns; those were the first signs of radiation sickness, and the fact that the black herpes blisters had popped up so rapidly was certain indication that the exposure had been very great.
But Rasputin, the specialist in the biological effects of radiation, had instituted tight procedures for dealing with them. Each man was carefully undressed by white-robed, white-gloved, white-hooded orderlies as he lay on his stretcher in the open air. His clothing, every scrap, went into a bin to be buried in the open field, where a bulldozer was excavating a deep trench. Then the doctors took over, first carefully washing every inch of exposed skin, checking with radiation monitors; then they redressed him in a hospital gown and poulticed the burns. A separate set of ambulances waited at the control point; when they were full, they roared away. Some ferried the patients with the worst radiation damage to the airstrip in Chernobyl town, for the plane that would take them to the special hospital in Moscow. The others were put into other ambulances to start the two-hour trip to Hospital No. 18 in Kiev.
The highway crossed a little stream at the collective farm village — it was why that spot had been chosen for the checkpoint. One fire truck was permanently posted there, its pumps constandy going to suck water from the stream. With that water each ambulance was hosed down before it went back to the plant for more of the endless supply of wounded. The ambulances from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station never passed beyond the checkpoint to the outside world. They never would.
Returning to the command post for another installment of the endless meetings, Simyon Smin saw a little two-man helicopter sitting on the ground just off the roadway. Its rotor was turning slowly, and the pilot was leaning back in his seat, gazing at the distant smoke plume from the power station. Smin ducked under the rotor and banged on the door. "Pilot! Who are you?"
The pilot blinked at him. "Lieutenant of Militia Kutsenko, at your service. Pilot to Major General Varansky."
"Of course," barked Smin, just as though he had known who General Varansky had been all along. "I have the general's orders. Take me up. I want to survey the site." And, as Lieutenant Kutsenko opened his mouth for a question, Smin snapped: "At once! Do you not understand that this accident endangers the entire country?"
Smin had never been in such a small helicopter. It bounced and swooped staggeringly, far worse than the one he had borrowed the day before, but his mind wasn't on the ride. It wasn't even on his fatigue, or the facts that his scars itched, his eyes ached, and the corners of his mouth were sore. What he was thinking about was what he had come to see.
When they were only five or six kilometers away, the plant began to come into view. The great drift of black smoke snaking into the sky seemed far thicker than the day before, even though most of the fires were long since out; it was, Smin knew, the smoldering embers that produced the pall. As they approached over the towers of Pripyat, Smin could see that the streets were full of people. Their white faces stood out sharply as they gazed up at the helicopter. "Fools," muttered Smin.
TTie pilot craned toward him. "What?" he yelled. "Did you speak?"
Smin shook his head; the people of Pripyat had to be gotten out of that area, there was no question about that, but there was nothing the pilot could do. "Up higher, if you can," he urged. "But stay out of the plume!"
The pilot nodded, and kicked and turned his controls. The machine spun and lifted, first away from the reactor, then swinging back to approach it from the windward side. They were no more than three hundred meters above the inferno. Smin could look almost directly down into it. As the pilot hovered, Smin opened his door and leaned out, staring down at the end of so many hopes and the death sentence passed on so many friends.
Even so high, the heat beat at his face. It was true that all the lesser fires were out, but he could see clearly that all the efforts of the firefighters had done nothing at all to stop, or even to slow, the terrible combustion that was going on in the graphite core of the destroyed reactor. If only ten percent of the graphite had been burning yesterday, now it was nearly a third that was aflame. The still-unburning surface of the graphite was a rubble of lumps and cracks and hillocks. The burning part was as bright and hot as the sun. Great rainbow-shaped streams of water came up from the hoses and down onto the furnace, but to no avail. Where the streams of water hit the fire, there were clouds of steam, but when the jet wavered away the fire was still burning as fiercely as ever.
On the ground Smin could see bulldozers grinding away as they heaped up berms of earth. Beside the bulldozers a pair of water cannon were blasting away at the lower reaches of the reactor shell; whether any of their water was getting through, or what good it was doing if it did, he could not tell.
The smoke billowed toward them. "Get away!" Smin shouted, pulling himself back inside and slamming the door. The pilot was already slanting away, but the vagrant gust of air was faster than he; for a moment there was smoke all around them, and a stink of burning chemicals that tore at Smin's throat. Then they were clear. Both men were coughing, and the helicopter lurched as the pilot spun it away. "Better get down," Smin managed to rasp out, and the pilot didn't even nod. He was already heading back to the perimeter post.
By the time they were on the ground the coughing fits were over. "Thank you," said Smin gravely, and got out to confront the man in the green coverall who was watching them impassively from the door of the headquarters building. Even without the insignia on his shoulderbars, Smin knew who he was. He said, "Thank you, also, General Varansky, for allowing me to borrow your aircraft."
The general didn't even smile. He only murmured, "Why should I refuse one helicopter, when you people have already borrowed half the moveable equipment in the Ukraine? But should we not go inside for the meeting?"
The general's remark was not much of an exaggeration at that. From the air Smin had seen literally scores of trucks, bulldozers, ambulances, fire vehicles, and examples of almost everything else that moved on the roads around the stricken plant.
Smin followed Major General Varansky into the meeting room. The only conference actively going on was with the special doctors from Moscow. At least these specialists knew exactly what they had to do and could get on with it. Their home base, Hospital No. 6, had been designated the center point for radiation injuries, and the first job of the task force that had flown in the night before was to screen every victim for radiation — more than a thousand so far, with nearly two hundred of them already on their way to Moscow for whatever treatment there was to give them. They were explaining this to some Party and town officials for Pripyat, who were looking glum.
Smin paused a moment at the door, where there was a rack of the pen-shaped dosimeters. He glanced around while the general went on ahead. No one was looking. Smin undipped his old one and threw it into a basket and fixed a new one to his jacket before he went in.
"I do hope," the Pripyat Party secretary was saying cheerlessly, "that you are not proposing to test everyone in Pripyat."
"Of course they will test everyone in Pripyat," Smin snapped, aware that his tone was offending the man, aware that the secretary would be writing a report on what was happening— aware, most of all, that none of that mattered. Smin wrinkled his nose at the faint smell of animal manure that permeated the meeting hall; the cow barns were only a dozen meters away. "It is not all that has to be done," he said, "in the town of Pripyat. "Those people's lives are all at risk. They must be evacuated."