Emmaline sighed and got ready to leave for her one o'clock appointment. She went as far as she was willing to go. That is, as she left she stopped at the translator's desk. "I'm off to meet Pembroke Williamson," she said. And, "Oh, by the way, there are some pictures on my desk you might want to look at."
Emmaline walked over to the Metro and took the train to Marksiya, one of the complex of underground stations at the heart of Moscow. Why did Borden want to know about Smin?" If the man was in the hospital he ought to be left alone. As she listened to the train conductor announce their arrival at her destination, she wished that not only Smin could be left alone, but maybe everyone in the Soviet Union could be left alone with this terrible and strictly internal disaster. They deserved a chance to try to heal themselves, didn't they?
But it was not merely an internal disaster anymore. Not with the cloud of radioactive gases wandering over half of Europe.
The quickest way to her meeting with the novelist at the Rossiya Hotel was to take the bus that circled around Red Square, but her watch told her she was early. On impulse, she walked through the crowded GUM department store and out onto Red Square, her heels catching in the cobblestones, eavesdropping on the Soviet tourists strolling by.
It was as normal as any May morning in Moscow ever had been. If Chernobyl was on anyone's mind, they were not discussing it where Emmaline could hear. A father with two young girls at his side was pointing at the spot over the Lenin Mausoleum where the great ones of the Party leadership had stood, just one week earlier, to watch the May Day parade roll through.
A family from one of the Eastern republics was gawking at the Spassky gate as a long, black Zil sedan came roaring out of the walled Kremlin, its curtains drawn and who could know who inside? Three separate queues of schoolchildren waited their turn to enter the candy-topped St. Basil's Cathedral, and two newly married couples were having their pictures taken at the mausoleum. The brides, elegant in white gauze and braided flowers in their hair, were placing their cellophane-wrapped bridal bouquets on the low wall before the tomb, under the expressionless eyes of the uniformed KGB guard. Emmaline tarried to study the bridal couples. In her experience, all brides looked rapturous and all grooms shared the same three-martini unfocused beam of tentative happiness. These two looked a little different. Both the grooms had identical slyly eager looks.
Emmaline understood at once. It was spring for them too. Whatever private encounters that particular he and that particular she had managed for the past six months, they had been severely circumscribed by shared flats, by parents who were always present and, most of all, by snow. There were no romantic trysts in the woods around Moscow in January. Or in April, for that matter.
So there were floods of pent-up hormones begging to be released, and what each of those men was dreaming of was the night ahead, with the parents for once bundled off to stay with relatives or even — oh, what luxury! — perhaps a round-trip ticket on the Red Arrow night train to Leningrad. That meant a whole day to see the great art gallery, the antireligion museum in what used to be St. Isaac's Cathedral, and the cruiser Aurora in front of the Winter Palace, but most of all it meant two whole nights in a private compartment with a lock on the door and no one to knock!
Emmaline was astonished at the quick rush of feeling in her own belly; it had, indeed, been a long winter.
The Rossiya Hotel is advertised as the second largest in the world (the first largest is also in the Soviet Union), but Emmaline had learned her way around it by now. She flashed her card, unnecessarily, to the factotum at the door and headed for the elevators.
The novelist's name was Pembroke Williamson, and he wasn't in his hotel room. Tipped off by the ever-vigilant concierge, Emmaline walked down to the end of the long corridor and, peering over the stair rail, saw him nursing a cup of tea and curiously counting over his change in the hotel's corner buffet.
"You've got American newspapers," she said at once, catching sight of the pages sticking out of his shoulder bag. "May I?"
While Pembroke tried to total up the English ten-penny pieces, the German marks, and the Swedish kroner he had been given in change for his American five-dollar bill, Emmaline happily scanned the headlines. Their little story had taken over the front pages; Chernobyl was in every paper. And what headlines! The New York Post had the craziest — mass grave 15,000 reported buried in nuke disposal site — but the UPI stories claimed at least 2,000 dead, and nearly every paper discounted the Soviet numbers.
"So what's the truth?" Pembroke asked. "Who's lying?"
"Maybe everybody," said Emmaline, wistfully trying to get a quick look at Doonesbury and Andy Capp. "The Russians still say that there are two dead; they were killed in the explosion, and that's all. Of course, they admit there are a couple of hundred in the hospital here in Moscow, and God knows how many others in other places."
"Do you believe that?"
She said primly, "I work for the State Department. Mr. Schultz said he'd bet ten dollars the Soviets are lying."
"How about one pound ten in sterling and about another two dollars in odds and ends?" Pembroke grinned.
"That's what the Secretary of State wants to bet. I don't bet, personally. Pembroke? You know what it's like here; we don't get much hard information, and what we do get is mostly classified. I was hoping you could tell me what happened."
The novelist leaned back, looking at her seriously. "Don't we have to get to the publishing company?" His book on Lincoln had just been published in the USSR, and the editors at the Mir Publishing Company wanted to make a ceremony of handing over to him a royalty check in good, spendable U.S. dollars.
"The car will pick us up downstairs in half an hour. Mir's only ten minutes away."
He said, "Want some coffee?"
And when he came back with two cups he tasted it, made a face, and said: "Do you remember what happened in Florida on January twenty-eighth?"
"I guess you mean the shuttle blowing up?"
"That's right. The space shuttle Challenger. It seems there's a defect in the rings that hold the external solid-fuel rocket together; NASA knew about the defect for some time, but didn't do anything until seven people got killed."
Emmaline looked at him in perplexity. "What's that got to do with Chernobyl?"
"I think it's the same thing, Emmaline. On the way here I
stopped off in London to interview an Englishman named Grahame Leman. He describes things like Chernobyl and the Challenger as the results of what he calls 'TBP'—means the Technical-Bureaucratic-Political system of decision-making. You see, what Leman's saying is that technological decisions aren't made just on the basis of the technological considerations. The technical experts didn't want the Challenger to go off that day. The forces in favor of it were bureaucratic and political. The bureaucrats are the bosses, so they can overrule the technicians' decisions, just because the guy higher up can always overrule the guy lower down. The political pressures are something else. NASA wanted to brighten up its image; it didn't want another delay."