Two of the Moscow doctors nodded, but the men from Pripyat looked thunderstruck. "Impossible!" cried the Party secretary. "What are you saying? We do not want panic!"
"It is better that they be frightened than dead," Smin said flatly.
"I refuse," the man said. "This very morning some panic-mongers in Pripyat came to the Party headquarters with the same ultimatum. It was almost a demonstration! We taught the ringleaders a lesson, I assure you."
"If you put them in jail in Pripyat," said Smin, "you will teach them a final lesson, because they will die there. Everyone in the city will die if they remain there long enough. They must be taken away at once."
"Taken to where?"
"To sleep in the fields if they must," Smin cried, "because that is better than dying in their flats! If you won't do it on your own authority, then call Moscow. I will talk to them myself. I insist — oh, what is it now?"
The biological-effects man, Rasputin, was standing in the doorway, next to a doctor who was holding a glass vial of water. Hydrologist-engineer Sheranchuk was beside her, looking as weary as Smin himself, but he spoke first. "It's the stream," he said. "The one where they get the water they are using for the wounded, and to wash the vehicles. It is showing radioactivity now."
Leonid Sheranchuk did not just look weary. He was sodden with fatigue. He had not slept at all — for, what? He had lost count. More than forty-eight hours, at least.
He could have gone home when the militia and fire brigades and emergency workers of all kinds began to show up in strength, because they no longer needed amateur rubble-shifters and stretcher-toters. But then he remembered that he was a highly trained expert in hydraulic flow, and hydraulic flows were the only things that were keeping all the rest of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station from joining the stricken reactor in flames. It was Sheranchuk who managed to get some of the station's primary pumps working to provide pressure for the hosemen and give a little relief to the straining fire trucks, Sheranchuk who directed the pumper intakes to the deepest and least sedimented parts of the cooling pond…
And Sheranchuk who, watching the streams of water running down the sides of the building and spreading across the sodden ground, thought to wonder where that water was going.
When he found Rasputin and expressed his fears, the man from the Ministry responded at once. He commandeered one of the doctors and set out. The radiation detectors gave the answers. The clear, purling waters of the brook by the command post were registering radioactivity.
It wasn't an immediate problem. The brook water was still good enough to wash down the trucks. That was not important, anyway. In any case there were the wells of the collective farm ready to supply the need for drinking water and to clean the wounds of the injured.
The problem was that the brook did not stop flowing at the highway.
That brook came from near the Chernobyl Power Station. It wasn't just picking up radiation from the fallout of soot from the fire. It was the conduit — one of the conduits — for the wastewater from the firefighting. Millions of gallons of water were being pumped out of the Pripyat River and the plant's cooling pond to pour onto the fire. What did not turn into steam ran away into the ground and across it, into that brook and every other nearby — into the Pripyat River itself, sooner or later.
"And," said Sheranchuk grimly, "the Pripyat River flows into the reservoirs that supply the city of Kiev."
He looked directly at the Party secretary, who frowned back. After a moment he said, "Yes?" And then, raising a hand to keep Sheranchuk from answering, "I see what you are implying, but surely that is not important — the hose water from a few fire engines, against a reservoir?"
"That hose water," said Smin wearily, "is full of radioactive material. What do we do, Comrade Plumber?"
"We must dam up the overflow," Sheranchuk said at once. "We must dike every stream, every little river that flows near Chernobyl. The cooling pond, it must be diked off from the Pripyat. Sewers, drains — they must be diverted or simply stopped up."
The Party secretary stared at him. "Stop up the sewers?"
"Exactly," said Rasputin. "Just as Sheranchuk here says. We don't have a choice."
"Or else we will poison the people of Kiev," said Sheranchuk.
Smin sighed, and stood up and said, "Let's go, Comrade Plumber. Show me where you want to build these dikes."
But in the long run, of course, it wasn't Sheranchuk who decided where the dikes should go. It wasn't Smin, either. It was the men from Moscow. By the time Smin and Sheranchuk got back to the command post, someone had produced a hydrological map of the area — Sheranchuk's eyes were bulging;
he had not even known that such a map existed — and the dikes and trenches and diversions were already being marked.
Smin knew that it was all out of his hands now. Higher authority had taken over. Higher authority listened, spoke, looked at some plans, then picked up a phone and issued instructions. Higher authority did not have to bribe or wheedle to get what it wanted. It simply gave an order, and somewhere in the Ukraine or Moscow or Byelorussia someone began calling workers in to load a truck with whatever was required and send it speeding to Chernobyl.
They did not send Smin away, though he was reeling with fatigue. They did not object when he appeared at one of the endless meetings to plan for the implacable future while, simultaneously, dealing with the catastrophic present. They even listened courteously when he spoke. But that was not often, for higher authority knew its resources better than he did. He listened and marveled.
To Rasputin, explaining to the head of the Pripyat hospital that the reason his clinic had been evacuated was not only that it was better for the patients to be farther away, but that his staff was simply not adequate to the problems. "Your doctors are diagnosing burns, shock, heat exhaustion, even heart attacks — but where is one diagnosis of radiation sickness?"
To Lestilyan, patiently reasoning with the general commanding the fire brigades. "We must use other methods." The fire in the core was not out. It had not even slowed down; the supply of burnable graphite was endless, and every atom of it hungered to unite with the oxygen in the air. The terribly hot core was a massive reserve of heat. Even if they cooled the surface a bit, the vast interior store reheated it and kept the temperature of the graphite blocks well above the ignition temperature.
"Exactly. So water is no good," the fire chief complained. "It boils right off."
"Of course. So we must smother it. Cover it with sand, maybe. Something that will keep the air out."
"Sand through hoses?" said the fire commander. "What nonsense! I have never heard of such a thing."
"Not through hoses," Lestilyan said patiently. "In some other way, and quickly. What is it now, six hundred micro-roentgens an hour in Pripyat? And more all the time!"
"I know nothing of micro what-you-said," the fire commander said stubbornly. "I know only what to do with fires." He meditated for a moment. Then he said, "Well, then. Can we get helicopters to drop it in? Or do you want my men to carry the sand there in their helmets?"
"Of course," said Lestilyan, nodding. "Helicopters." And picked up the phone to call the Air Force.
To everyone. Smin listened carefully to all of them, and spoke little. And that was the day, one emergency falling on top of another, no time to solve one problem before the next arose. At least the Air Force promised helicopters would be on the scene by nightfall. At least a crane was brought from Pripyat to the burning reactor and an operator found brave enough to try dumping dirt, broken rocks, slabs of cement onto the blazing reactor even before the heavy helicopters got there. At least the medical problems were now being dealt with by experts. At least—