"No, of course not," Tamara soothed, letting go of the chart to rescue the toppling saline stand again. "Tell me, Paraska," she ventured. "Did you by any chance see my husband today?"
But Paraska Kandyba only shook her head and continued weeping. It was obvious that her tears and her concern were all for Deputy Director Simyon Smin.
When they reached Hospital No. 18 in the city of Kiev, Tamara Sheranchuk dragged herself out of the ambulance for the transfer of the patients. She wasn't needed. She stood aside while the hospital's own orderlies took over, efficiently unloading the patients and wheeling them into the receiving room. She was looking forward to the ride back. It would be nearly two hours! Two hours in which she could stretch out in the ambulance and sleep. She leaned against the door of the ambulance, dreaming of that wonderful two-hour trip, when she realized the driver had poked her and said, "Look at them."
Tamara blinked. "Look at what?"
"Those people! Look, they are acting as if nothing had happened!"
It was true. She gazed around the streets of Kiev wonder-ingly. Here in Kiev, at least, it was, after all, a peaceful Sunday afternoon! People were strolling the wide streets, children were laughing as they played, a few early blossoms were on the chestnut trees, the bright posters were everywhere for the May Day celebration. How incredible, Tamara marveled, that all these people could be going about their normal lives, unaware of the hell that was raging less than a hundred and fifty kilometers away.
"They're lucky," grumbled the ambulance driver, and Tamara shook her head.
"Not really," she said. "No one is very lucky today. They simply have not yet found it out. Are we through here? Then let's go back to Chernobyl."
As the ambulance driver, who had had no more sleep than Tamara, wearily started to turn the vehicle around, a man came running out begging for a lift. He explained that he was a doctor trained in radiation sickness, called in from his weekend for the emergency. Tamara made herself stay awake; here was a chance to learn something useful! She asked him about the numbers. "Yes, exactly," he said, "above 500 rads the only hope is to somehow give them living bone marrow."
"And how is that done?"
"Fetal liver transplants," he said. "In some places they actually transplant bone marrow — this is done in America sometimes — but there are great problems. First of all, the patient's own bone marrow must be destroyed, otherwise the transplant will be rejected. Then there must be an exact typing match, and it is not easy to type bone marrow — and if that is wrong, the transplant will still be rejected. Of course, that itself is serious; a patient who might otherwise recover could be killed by the rejection process."
"And what is the fetal liver procedure?"
"In the embryo," he said, "it is the liver cells that perform the functions of the adult bone marrow in manufacturing blood cells. So from aborted fetuses we extract the liver, purify the cells, and inject them into the patient." He hesitated. "That, too, has a poor success rate," he admitted, "but for patients with more than 500 rads there is, after all, no choice."
"Ah, yes," said Tamara, "but how do you know what the exposure has been, since not all the victims are thoughtful enough to carry dosimeters?"
The young specialist said enthusiastically, "That is the key, of course. The doctor in Hospital Number Six in Moscow, where I trained, has developed a procedure. We take blood counts at two-hour intervals and compare them with a standard profile. We can see how rapidly the cells deteriorate, and from that we can determine what the exposure has been. .."
But by then Tamara was asleep beside him.
Tamara had almost allowed herself to hope that by the time she got back the fire would be under control, the emergency over. But it seemed it was worse than ever. Pripyat had been evacuated. (And where had her son, Boris, gone?) The ambulance was sent on to Chernobyl town, thirty kilometers away from the reactor. It was, it seemed, as near as was really safe, and so now there was talk that everyone, everyone, within that thirty kilometer radius of the plant was to be ordered away. And where would they find places for all these people to stay? There were a dozen villages and nearly thirty collective farms in the area; where would they all go?
It was not just the people now. Half the farms in the area raised livestock, cattle mostly, but any number of sheep, pigs, goats, even a few horses. Many of the animals came from the kolkhozists' private ventures, which made their owners doubly desperate to save them.
As they circled around the town of Pripyat and the stricken plant, Tamara looked longingly out of the back of the ambulance. Sheranchuk was there. Doing, Tamara was sure, something doggedly heroic and certainly dangerous. If only she could take him and Boris and run away!
It did not occur to her that this was almost the first time she had been separated from her husband when her principal worry had not been that he might be with another woman.
When they reached the town of Chernobyl they were directed to the bus station.
There Tamara Sheranchuk set up shop, but she had no more than entered the room set aside for the medics than her boss, the chief of surgery from the Pripyat clinic, wrinkled her nose and scowled. "When did you change your clothes last?" she barked. "Go at once. Shower. Eat something. Get cleaned up. Don't come back for one hour."
"But there are so many patients—"
"There are plenty of doctors now, too," said the elder — woman. "Go now."
And indeed when Tamara came back in a clean white gown, her hair still damp but pulled neatly to the back of her head, there were four strange doctors taking their turns with the influx. Two were from Kursk, one from Kiev, the dark, small, Oriental-looking woman all the way from Volgograd.
"But they must have emptied out every hospital in the Soviet Union," said Tamara.
The woman from Volgograd said, "No, the hospitals are all fully staffed. It is people like us who were off duty, now we give up our Sunday to come here to help."
"And are the people in Volgograd so concerned about an explosion in the Ukraine?"
"The people in Volgograd know nothing about an explosion in the Ukraine. Neither did I. I was simply told to report to the airport at nine this morning, Sunday or no, and here I am. What is holding up the line? Send in the next patient!"
Even the patients were easier to deal with here. Triage had already been done — again, by teams of fresh doctors brought in from everywhere, taking their turns at the medicpoint in the Chernobyl town bus station. The seriously injured ones had already been sorted out and sent off to hospitals elsewhere. The ones that were coming through were lightly injured, or not injured at all. For most of them all Tamara had to do was a quick physical check — the eyes, the pulse, the blood pressure, the inside of the mouth; a quick questioning about symptoms and a few cc's of blood drawn for a lab somewhere to make a count. Then she passed them on. Most of them went directly onto buses or trains, for those who were able to travel were counted at once as evacuees.
"Mother," said a voice from the next queue, and when she looked up from her patient she saw that it was a young boy. His face was filthy and he wore an outsized Army blouse, not his own; it took a moment for her to realize that it was her son.
"Boris! Are you all right?"
"I think so. Only they are sending all the Komsomols away now."
"And quite time for it, too! But where are you going?" she demanded.
"Oh, to a summer camp, Mother! A good one! Maybe Artek, down on the Black Sea — and, oh, Mother," he said joyfully, "it isn't going to cost us a kopeck!"
Chapter 17
Smoke does not last very long in the air. What makes a column of smoke visible are the tiny particles of soot and other things that it contains, and they are transitory. The larger particles fall fairly quickly to the ground; the others fall more slowly, or are washed out of the air by rain, and in any case, diluted by the air they float in, quite soon, they can no longer be seen. The gases that go with the smoke, however, remain. In the gases from the nuclear accident are many which are invisible but not undetectable. Chemical analysis will spot them readily, but if it took a laboratory to detect them, they would not cause much concern. Unfortunately they announce themselves in a different, and much more alarming, way. That is by the radiation they give off.