She wondered what Leonid would think of having a new baby in the family.
She didn't wonder at all about herself. Although Tamara Sheranchuk was nearly forty, she knew that she was in as good physical shape as she ever had been. Yes, older mothers had sometimes more difficult pregnancies and deliveries than the twenty-year olds (but sometimes not). Yes, older mothers were at slightly greater risk of having a child with a birth defect (but by far the greatest number were perfecdy normal!)… yes, she told herself soberly, there was one other factor to be considered. Although the radiation she had received was very unlikely to affect her own health significantly, the damage to an embryo might be much greater.
But what did that mean, after all? Should women stop having children?
And besides, her husband deserved a new baby. Even though he didn't know how much he deserved it. She put down her empty cup, turned from the window on the now-quiet street, and went back to look in on her sleeping husband.
Who was not, after all, asleep. He opened his eyes and gazed at her. "Have you heard anything from the plant?" he asked at once.
"There is nothing to hear," she said. "You are supposed to put it out of your mind while we're here."
He snorted angrily, but then smiled. "Is it possible to have some breakfast?" he asked, glancing at his watch. "After all, the bus will pick us up at ten o'clock, and now it is nearly eight."
By the time the bus came with its load of new "holiday" people from the emergency workers, Sheranchuk was pacing back and forth on the farm village street. As soon as they were inside he was questioning the driver. Facts? The driver had very few facts. Rumors? Oh, yes, there were rumors. It was said that of the first three hundred firemen to report, at least a hundred and eighty were already dead or dying. Another three hundred militiamen, put on close perimeter guard for a six-hour shift, had been forgotten and left there for twelve — half of them were in the hospital too. And the town of Chernobyl itself was to be evacuated.
"But that is impossible," Sheranchuk protested. "The town is thirty kilometers from the plant, well out of the danger zone!"
The driver shrugged. "I am telling you what I have heard," he said. "It is all I know. Perhaps it is only temporary, because the wind has shifted."
Sheranchuk returned to his place next to Tamara, holding on to the backs of the seats as the bus bounced along the narrow road. They were in the middle of farm country, flax and wheat and orchards of cherry and apple trees. He took out a cigarette.
"You shouldn't smoke," Tamara said automatically.
He shrugged, lighting it.
"You are being very foolish," his wife said. "You've already received nobody knows how much radiation. Do you want to die of cancer before you are fifty?"
"If I die of the radiation, I won't have time to die of lung cancer, my dear," he said. He looked at her curiously, struck by her tone. After eighteen years he knew all her tones. When she advised him to give up smoking, it was with the doctor voice; in most of the communications of their daily lives it was the voice of a team worker dealing with their joint problems. This time she sounded younger, less sure of herself, more vulnerable — no, the right word was the first one he had thought of. Younger. She sounded like the girl he had met in the forest and married. "Tamara? Are you worried about me?"
"I want you around for the next twenty years," she told him seriously.
"Only for twenty years? After that I may be excused to die if I like?" he joked.
She ignored the joke. "Did you like the farm?" she asked.
"It was quite pleasant, I suppose," he conceded. "That house was really quite up-to-date."
"It was peaceful," she said, "and the air was clean. A person could live happily there, I think, without worrying about nuclear reactors blowing up." She looked directly at him. "And, in your case," she added, "without worrying about adding to the already considerable load of radiation you have been exposed to. It may be, Leonid, that you are never going to work in a nuclear power plant again."
He scowled at the thought. "And what would I do on a kolkhoz?"
"We could live there quite well. We would be safe. It is worthwhile, just to live, and to raise a family in clean air."
"Really, Tamara," he said, surprised at her tone. "I'm a trained hydrologist-engineer. Do you think they need me to turn the valves on the irrigation pipes, or fix the flush toilets that they seem to have so many of?" She didn't answer. "No," he said, "if I can't work at Chernobyl, I'll work at some other power plant — there are big new coal plants going up, and gas and oil. Perhaps a water power plant; that would be perhaps out in the open air, if it is getting away from cities that you want. But— "
"But you haven't given up on Chernobyl," she finished for
him.
He said rebelliously, "The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station is a valuable asset to the country, Tamara. It isn't going to be thrown away just because one reactor caught fire. It will be back in operation in a year, I'm sure of it."
"Let's see," said his wife. "You want to stay at Chernobyl because you admire Smin; very well, I admire him too, but do you really believe he will keep his job after this?"
"He is not the one at fault!"
"He may not even live, Leonid. And as to yourself, your white corpuscle count is down; you've taken at least twenty rads already — it could be a hundred, because you weren't wearing a dosimeter at first. You certainly can't afford to be exposed to more."
He shrugged, looking out the window. They were entering the town of Chernobyl. If the town was about to be evacuated, it displayed no signs of it. The streets were full, the townspeople themselves trying to go about their normal lives while thousands of emergency workers milled about, most of them waiting their turns to be ferried to the turmoil at the plant.
"Are you listening?" his wife asked. "You've done your part, Leonid. You can let others take over from you now."
"I suppose I'll have to," he said somberly.
But in that he was quite wrong, because when he reported to the control plant, the news was bad. Radiation had surged up again, to almost seventy-five percent of the level of its first day. The attempt to get to the plenum from No. 3's pool had failed; too much steel and concrete.
An hour later he was back at the station.
A forward control point had been established in an underground bunker, once the dormitory for the plant's fire brigade, now the command post for the disaster-control operation. It was thick with stale cigarette smoke and not much ventilation; the same air was recirculated over and over because, however it might stink, it was better than what was outside.
It was hardly forty-eight hours that Sheranchuk had been gone, but so much had changed! The helicopter drops were nearing their objective. Almost five thousand tons of boron, lead, sand, and marble chips had already been dumped on the still-burning graphite of the reactor core, but the burning graphite was no longer the immediate problem.
The immediate problem was the plenum under the ruined reactor. It contained water, and it was therefore in Leonid Sheranchuk's department.
Of course, the purpose of the plenum was to act as a safety feature, to quench the steam if one or two pipes burst.
But that safety feature was now the greatest danger the core of Reactor No. 4 still faced.
Hanging over it was a mass of one hundred and eighty tons of uranium dioxide, whatever was left of eighteen hundred tons of graphite, the fragments of the 200-ton refueling machine and associated materials, the rubble of the collapsed walls — and the five thousand tons that had been dumped over it all to stop the deadly emissions. The structure had never been designed to support such a load. Worse, the structure itself had been shocked and damaged by the violence of the explosion. It was weakened in unpredictable ways. The whole thing might come down at any moment.. and if it collapsed those two thousand tons of uranium and graphite would plunge into the plenum. And… and then that water would flash into steam, and the explosion that followed would be perhaps even worse than the first.