Some Rich Asshole’s Just Lost His Job
Petya said the explosions made the ground shake and the water surface ripple in all directions. Pieces of concrete and steel started landing in the pond around them. They could hear the hissing as the pieces cooled. For a while they watched the cloud billow out and grow above the reactor. By then the fire was above the edge of the building. Through a crack in one of the containment walls they could see a dark blue light. “Some rich asshole’s just lost his job,” he remembered remarking to his friend. I assume he meant someone other than his eldest brother.
And by then they’d both begun to feel dreadful. Their eyes streamed tears as they reeled about, so sluggish and disoriented it took them an hour to traverse the half-kilometer to the medical station. By the time they arrived, it resembled a war zone.
The Individual Citizen in the Vanguard
How much difference could an individual bureaucrat really make in our system? That was a popular topic for our drinking bouts. For the epic bouts, we seemed to require a Topic. The accepted wisdom, which tempered our cynicism enough to smooth the way for our complacency, was that with clever and persistent and assiduous work and some luck, the great creeping hulk that was our society could be nudged in this or that direction. But one had to be patient, and work within the system, and respect the system’s sheer size.
Because, you see, our schools directed all their efforts to inculcating industriousness (somewhat successfully), obedience (fairly successfully), and toadyism (very successfully). Each graduation produced a new crop of little yes-people. Our children learned criticism from their families, and from the street.
The Individual Citizen Still in the Vanguard
By four in the afternoon the day after the explosion, the members of the Government Commission began to gather, having flown in from everywhere. I’d been telephoned at five that morning by the head of the Party Congress. He was already exhausted. The station managers were assuring him that the reactor itself was largely undamaged and radioactivity levels within normal limits. There was apparently massive damage, however, and they couldn’t control the fires. When I told him, rubbing my face and holding the phone, that that made no sense, his response was, “Yes. Well.” I was to be on a military transport by 8:30. Mikhail, I knew, would be on duty, but when I phoned up Petya, there was no answer.
On the drive in from the airport, we slowed to traverse roads flooded with a white foam along the shoulders. The decontamination trucks we passed made us quiet. When we found our voices, we argued about whether the reactor had been exposed. The design people were skeptical, insisting that this variant was so well conceived that even if the idiots in charge had wanted to blow it up, they couldn’t have.
But all that talk petered out when we assembled on the roof of the Town Committee office and could see over the apartment buildings to No. 4. Its wall was open and flames were burning straight up from behind it. The air smelled the way metal tastes. We could hear the children down in the courtyard having their hour of physical training. “Which way is the wind blowing?” someone asked, and we all looked at the flags on the young people’s club.
We moved back to the Town Committee office and shut the windows and shouted and squabbled for an hour, with contradictory information arriving every moment. Where was Mikhail? a voice in my head inquired repetitively. We had no idea what to do. As my mother used to say, it’s only thunder when it bangs over your head. It wasn’t possible, we were told, to accurately gauge the radiation levels, because no one had dosimeters with the right scales. The ones here went up to 1000 microroentgens per second, which was 3.6 roentgens per hour. So all of the instruments were off the scale wherever you went. But when Moscow demanded the radiation levels, they were told 3.6 roentgens an hour. Since that’s what the machines were reading.
The station had had one dosimeter capable of reading higher levels, the assistant to the nuclear power sector reported. But it had been buried by the blast.
Everyone was hoping that the bad news would announce itself. And that the responsibility and blame would somehow be spread imperceptibly over everyone equally. This is the only way to account for our watchmaker’s pace, at a time when each minute’s delay caused the criminal exposure of all those citizens—all those children—still going about their ordinary day outside.
The deputy chief operational engineer of the No. 4 unit was managing to sustain two mutually exclusive realities in his head: first, the reactor was intact, and we needed to keep feeding water into it to prevent its overheating; and second, there was graphite and fuel all over the ground. Where could it have come from?
No one working at the station, we were told, was wearing protective clothing. The workers were drinking vodka, they said, to decontaminate. Everyone had lost track of everyone. It was the Russian story.