"You may be luckier than that," he said. "Look, they are putting one soldier on each bus; maybe you'll spend the night on the Black Sea!"
If that was where the buses were going, some of the people waiting to be evacuated had made bad guesses. Many wore sheepskin coats, even boots; one man even had a pair of skis. Another had a tennis racket; well, since they had been told the evacuation would be for only three days, no doubt they planned to have a little vacation to make up for the pains. (But where did the man with the skis think they were going?) And the things they carried! A live chicken, even; Konov saw it with his own eyes, under one old woman's arm. There were bird cages and rolled-up blankets, there were suitcases and duffel bags, paper sacks, cardboard cartons, table lamps with rosy pink shades, television sets, a stereo or two — there was nothing in any Soviet home small enough to carry, Konov thought, that he did not see on the backs or in the arms of some of the thousands. What possessions could there be that had been left behind? And yet, Konov knew, the answer was everything. Even the poorest owned much more than he alone could carry away, and the officers had been adamant: what a person could not lift aboard a bus in one trip stayed on the ground when the bus pulled away. There was already a mound of discarded, wept-over belongings stacked helter-skelter just inside the building door — to add to everything left in the flats, or at people's places of work — and the washing on the lines; and the food on the tables—
It must, Konov thought, have been like this nearly half a century ago, when the Germans finished their sweep around the Pripyat Marshes and overran all this land. But this was not Germans. This was not the work of any external enemy; it was, Konov thought uneasily, simply the result of what they had done to themselves.
He did not like that thought.
Konov pulled the unfamiliar dosimeter instrument off his cape and held it up to the light. When he peered through it he could see cryptic numbers and symbols, black on a white background; but what the symbols meant no one had told Konov.
At the end of the block the sergeant was in an altercation with a man who was shouting and pointing to a car, while the sergeant uninterestedly shook his head. "Look," said Miklas, "the poor man only wants to evacuate himself in his Zhiguli. Why won't the sergeant let him?"
"Because they don't want traffic jams, of course," said Konov, but there was something he wanted to ask the sergeant for himself. He was beginning to be very hungry. He got up and walked toward the sergeant, almost bumping into the pale man with an arm in a sling who had helped him evacuate one of the buildings — the one with the Ukrainian name, Kaly-something-or-other — but Konov had more important things on his mind. He barely returned the man's greeting, though he noticed the young woman beside him in the line was good-looking. Konov approached the sergeant, who was standing by himself and sipping something that came out of a Fanta orange-drink bottle but looked and smelled like beer. "Sergeant," Konov said politely, "it is past time for us to eat, I think."
"You will eat when you are told to. There will be food at the bivouac area, probably."
"Yes, sergeant," said Konov, "but that, too, is a question: if our trucks are being used to take these people out of danger, how will we get to the bivouac area? It is at least ten kilometers from here."
The sergeant said thoughtfully, "It is nearer twenty." He looked at Konov, and then added cheerfully, "But you won't have to walk. I was about to select a man to board that bus to keep the refugees in order. You'll do. Get on it."
"Get on it to where?" Konov demanded, recoiling a step.
"To wherever it goes," said the sergeant, reaching to pluck the dosimeter from Konov's blouse pocket. "But first give me that; we will need it for the patrols that remain on duty here."
"But, Sergeant!" Konov yelped. "I don't know what it says! If it turns out I have already been exposed to too much radiation, how will we know?"
"Of course we will know," said the sergeant, jerking a thumb toward the bus, "because we will get a report from wherever you are going to tell us that you are dead."
The mood in the bus was cheerful enough at first; someone had an accordion, and a few people in the front were singing as though they were teenagers off to their Komsomol camp for the summer. Then the bus rolled out onto the highway. It had to squeeze past a long line of Army vehicles, ambulances and heavy machines rolling toward the plant.
Everyone in the bus craned to look at the convoy. The holiday mood evaporated at once.
The bus was filled with people and their belongings. There was no seat for Konov, only the stairwell by the bus door; but at least he was on what seemed to be an intercity bus, not one of those urban ones where even the stairwell was so cramped no one could sleep in it. Konov did sleep, leaning back, his head almost under the driver's seat.
So, after a while, did most of those on the bus, even Kalychenko. He and his fiancee, too, had been lucky. They had managed to get two seats together. They had even managed to get into the very back of the bus, where there was a little more room on the floor to set down Raia's straw suitcase, her cooking pots, her sack of flour, and already-melting half kilo of lard; a J every ten minutes for the first fifty kilometers she would jerk up straight in her seat with something else she had forgotten; "The wine, Bohdan! The champagne for our wedding, it's still in the kitchen cabinet, they gave me no time to think!"
And Kalychenko would hush her, his arm twitching with pins-and-needles as it rested around her shoulder where she had been leaning against him: "Shush, Raia, it's all right. We're not leaving forever, you know?"
But was that true? Kalychenko knew quite well that "three days" might indeed stretch to forever. The fact that the town had been evacuated so hurriedly and utterly was certain proof that the radiation level had been not only above warning levels but definitely very dangerous indeed. (And how much radiation had each of them received already? Not as much for Kalychenko himself as he would have if he had remained at his post of duty, of course — but that line of thought led him to worries almost worse than future leukemia.)
He performed calculations in his mind, trying to remember the half-lives of all the deadly radionuclides that were likely to be in the smoke from the explosion and fire. Suppose (he thought) the firefighters and the engineers managed (somehow) to put out the flames and control the fission reactions. Suppose they sealed it all off. Very well. There would still remain all the tiny radioactive particles that had already fallen from the sky. The soot from the fire, the morning dew, the air itself had already left invisible films of radioactive cesium, iodine, strontium, and a dozen others. And all of them were still there in Pripyat, emitting radiation. Well, but some of them had short half-lives, he reminded himself. In just a few days half of the iodine would have radiated itself into some other element, a harmless one; in a few months the same would be true of the cesium, the strontium. In just a year or less the radiation would be only a fraction of its current levels.. .
A year or less! He did not even think of the long-lived transuranics, like plutonium, with a half-life of a quarter of a million years. A year was already an eternity.
And anyway, it all depended on how much there was to begin with. A quarter of a little bit was perhaps no more than the normal background, while a quarter of very much might still be enough to kill. And, worst of all, when could they start the patient clock that would tell them when they might return? For as the bus pulled out of Pripyat, Kalychenko had craned his neck to stare back. He could still see, in the waning light of that April day, the distant, uneven column of smoke. There seemed to be helicopters fluttering around it — sight-seers? Foolish ones, if they were, because if they flew through that plume, they would learn caution very thoroughly, if too late to do them any good.