"Of course," he said with pride. The Bolshoi was a Russian company, not Ukrainian, but Didchuk considered himself a truly internationalist Soviet man. In his view, the Bolshoi troupe was Soviet—and one day, just possibly, their own daughter, Lia, already getting solo parts in the dance academy where she attended school for two days of each week, might well be the Plisetskaya of the year 2000. Lia was nine, and already sound asleep in her "room" — actually, just an extension of the flat's central hall. Oksana's parents were rustling around the living-dining area which was also their bedroom, and it was, after all, time to go to sleep.
Didchuk paused to glance at the news broadcast when his wife said, "Yora? Did I tell you? That Bornets boy came in today with a temperature of thirty-eight, can you imagine?"
"No, you didn't mention it," he said.
"And when I made him go to the clinic, he came back with a note saying that the doctor was not in today. Called away on some emergency."
"I suppose," said Didchuk amiably, "that she is getting ready for May Day, like everyone else. What did you do?"
"What could I do? I couldn't send him home. His parents would both be at work. So I made him lie down in the teachers' lounge but, really, Yora, that isn't fair to the other teachers. And suppose I brought home some virus to our own family?"
"You look healthy enough to me," he said. "Well, let's go to bed." And he was reaching out for the knob on the television set when the announcer put down one sheet of paper, picked up another, and read, without change of expression: "There has been an accident at the Chernobyl power plant in the Ukraine. People have been injured, and steps are being taken to restore the situation to normal."
There is a conversion table that Soviet people apply to government announcements of bad news. If the news is never broadcast but only a subject of rumor, then it is bad but bearable. If the event is publicly described as "minor," then it is serious. And if there is no measure assigned to it at all, then it calls for resorting to "the voices."
The only radio the Didchuks owned was not in the kitchen with the television set; it was in the other room, where the grandparents were preparing for bed. Didchuk knocked on the door and excused himself. "The radio," he said. "I think we should listen for a moment."
"At this hour?" his mother-in-law demanded, but when she heard about the news announcement, she said, "Yes, I understand now. That Mrs. Smin Saturday morning, it was clear that she was concealing something. But please, not too loud for the voices."
Didchuk didn't need to be told that. He turned on their Rekord 314 radio, the size of a baby's coffin, and waited patiently for the tubes to warm up. The volume he set only to a whisper. It is not exactly illegal to listen to the Voice of America and the other foreign broadcasts beamed into the USSR, but it is not something most citizens want to advertise.
There did not seem to be anything coming in from abroad in Russian, and most of the other foreign stations, of course, were jammed. All they could find was the broadcast from France. That, for reasons no one had ever explained, was almost never jammed; but it was also in French, and none of the Didchuks spoke that language.
But even they were able to pick a few phrases out of the rapid-fire announcements, and those included "deux milles de morts" and "«« catastrophe totale."
"But the Chernobyl power plant is more than a hundred kilometers away," Oksana protested, her face pale.
"Yes, that's true," her husband agreed somberly. "We are very fortunate to be so far. They say that radiation can be very dangerous, not only at once but over a period of many years. Cancers. Birth defects. In children, leukemia…"
And they looked at each other, and then into the hall, where Lia lay peacefully asleep, with her head on her fist and her lips gently smiling.
Chapter 20
The control point for fighting the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station is no longer at the collective farm. There are far too many people now to be held in a farm village, and so it has been moved to the town of Chernobyl itself, thirty kilometers away. The evacuation of the town of Pripyat has been expanded to include every community within that thirty-kilometer ring. Where more than a hundred thousand people lived seventy-two hours earlier, there is now no living person except firefighters, emergency workers, and medics. Two squadrons of heavy-lift Soviet Air Force helicopters have joined the damage-control forces, and day and night they load up sandbags and nets filled with bars of metal, take them on the five-minute flight to the reactor, dump them into the white-hot glow, and return for another load. The helicopter cabins have been lined with sheets of lead, which seriously cuts down the loads they can carry, and their pilots are working twelve-hour days. The crews battling the accident on tne ground are allowed only three two-hour shifts out of the twenty-four. Even so, each man is stuck twice a day to yield a blood sample so his white corpuscles can be counted, and when the count is down, he is out of business entirely.
Sheranchuk understood the reason for the two-hour shifts
perfectly, but no one told him what to do in the six-hour
stretches when he was forbidden entry to the zone. What he did, mosdy, was try to sleep. When that failed, he ate, and smoked feverishly, and made a nuisance of himself.
He knew that he was being a nuisance, because he had been told so when he visited the Chernobyl town hospital to see how his wife was getting along ("Well enough, my dear," she told him, "but really, we're very busy here."), and when he tried to call the hospital in far-off Moscow to check on Deputy Director Smin. ("His condition is being carefully monitored; he is conscious; and, please, don't tie up our telephone lines at this time!") He couldn't help it. He missed Smin. All these new experts and volunteers from all over the USSR were well enough, but after all, the graphite core was still burning, was it not?
He was pacing back and forth, scowling at the distant smoke on the horizon, when the armored personnel carrier pulled up outside the Chernobyl town bus station. He jumped in to join the fourteen others ready to take their turns.
It was a half-hour ride to the plant, and none of them spoke much. On the way they all pulled on their radiation coveralls, checked one another's dosimeters, made sure the hoods were fastened. As soon as the personnel carrier came to a stop, Sheranchuk trotted right to the closed-circuit water system to check the Bourdon-gauge pressure readings.
Overhead he heard the choppers flutter in and swoop away. One came in just overhead. It looked like an airborne whale, with a rotor on top and the revolving flukes of the tail assembly. He could see someone kicking a bag of something— sand, no doubt — out of the door.
Then he was at the pipes, and he didn't look up at the helicopters again, not even when he felt a rusdy patter of dust on his helmet and knew that one of the bags had come apart as it was dropped. It was only loose sand, after all. If he had been hit by one of the bags, or by one of the falling sacks of lead shot, he would not need to look up. He would be dead — as had happened already to at least one of the firemen whose work kept them closer to the drop point.
That was the good part of Sheranchuk's immediate task, which was to free the great water valves to the steam system. They were in a sheltered location that kept him out of the direct range of the helicopter dumps. The bad part of the job was that the valves didn't want to be freed. The electric motors that were meant to drive them had shorted and burned themselves out when applied, because something inside the valves was jammed. The control wheels outside failed to move the giant leaves within. When Sheranchuk reached the scene, he saw that his relief crews had tried a different tack. They had drained the system of cooling water from the pond in order to attack the valves with crowbars; but that hadn't worked, either, because the steam system had run so hot that there was little liquid water in the pipes. It was now nearly steam all the way through; no one could work in that heat, and so they had to open the dikes and let the cooling water in again. By the time Sheranchuk got back with the new crew, the action had shifted to the external valve wheels again.