The next morning it was snowing again.
Pat viewed it with mixed emotions. Maybe they wouldn’t go into the evacuated zone after all?
But Dannerman was firm. The car was hired, the snow was only a light dusting, he was definitely going, she could stay in the hotel if she was that frightened of a little residual radiation, but that would make her whole presence here pointless, wouldn’t it?
All through breakfast she considered that option, but who was Dannerman to tell her she was frightened?
Then, when they arrived in the lobby, complete with parkas and boots, the concierge was apologetic. Yes, he had arranged their picnic baskets, which the doorman would put in their car-there were no restaurant facilities in the evacuated zone-but it would be a different car. The German-speaking Stefan had had an unfortunate accident. He would not be able to take them after all. However, the concierge had arranged for another man, Vassili, very good, spoke little German but his English was excellent and he knew the zone very well. Besides, he was already committed to go to Chernobyl that morning, in order to drive an engineer who worked with the monitoring crew back from leave; he would drop the woman off at Far Rainbow, the town where the workers lived, and then simply take them on to the reactor itself. She would not be in the way. She would have her own food, as would the driver. Also, she knew the zone well, and perhaps could tell them things even Vassili didn’t know.
At least the car was bigger than Pat had feared-the woman engineer sat in front with Vassili, and Dannerman and Pat had the fairly spacious backseat to themselves-and it had a good heater. Pat dozed on Dannerman’s shoulder for the hour it took to get to the zone proper, and only woke when she heard the driver talking to him. They were passing a structure like a toll plaza on an American superhighway that sat on the other side of the road. The road wasn’t any superhighway. It was paved, but it had a hard and potholed life. There were two or three cars going through the structure on the other side, and the driver explained: “Check wheels, cars, people for radioactivity, do you see? Us also when we come out.” The woman rattled something, and the driver grinned and translated: “She says easy to get in, not so easy to get out. You step in wrong place, you pick up radioactive mud, then you have to take shower and wash clothes before you leave. No hot water, either. So please be careful where you step.”
What Is Being Concealed?
Are there indeed intelligent creatures living on other stars in our universe? Yes, we are told there are, and some representatives of them are currently being held incommunicado in the chambers of the American spy agency. Do they possess priceless information which is being withheld from the great mass of peoples of the world? There can be no question of that, either. What must be done to rectify this wrong? There can be only one response. The General Assembly of the United Nations must convene its emergency session and seek, yea, demand, answers to all these questions.
ElAhram, Cairo
Behind them was a little village of small houses; it was one of the purpose-built places where the people of the town of Pripyat had been rehoused, after the great explosion. Ahead was nothing. The dead zone didn’t look particularly dead in its coating of snow, and when Pat said something the driver spoke briefly to the engineer and reported, “No, is not dead. She say you come back in two months in spring and you see everything wonderful green. Trees, meadows. Even crops still coming up in places, only nobody eat them. Too much cesium-137, you know what that is? You eat them, your children have two heads, unless you die first.”
It seemed that the engineer did have a little English after all, because she wasn’t letting Vassili get away with any of that. For the next twenty minutes, all the way to Far Rainbow, she spouted facts and statistics to the driver, who dutifully translated the flow of Ukrainian to Dannerman, who, in his incarnation as visiting research scientist, dutifully made notes. When they had dropped her in the company town the driver turned and made a face at Dannerman and Pat. “How she talks! Amazing!” he said, and said nothing more until they were well clear of the town.
Then he stopped the car. He peered up and down the deserted road, then turned to his passengers. “You get out now. I must search you for weapons. Then we will meet a friend, and he will take us to Dr. Artzybachova.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Rosaleen Artzybachova stood as much as she could of the solicitous yammering from the three of them. Then she retired to the bathroom. She did not actually have to move her bowels, and when she did have to she managed the feat expeditiously enough. Still there she was, perched morosely on the pot for half an hour and more, because where else in her little dacha could she be alone?
Even so, she could hear them muttering to each other outside the bathroom door. They were getting impatient. They wanted decisions made and actions taken. Soon enough Marisa would be knocking in polite inquiry, or Yuri would, to ask if she were quite all right in there. Soon enough she would have to come out. Then she would have to face their tender, bossy concern again.
She didn’t want to.
What Rosaleen Artzybachova wanted was to be left in the sort of peaceful solitude that had seemed so boring to her just a few, months before all this began, and now seemed like heaven. She sighed, gloomily yearning for the tedium of those endless games of chess-by-fax. She stood up and flushed the toilet-not that there was anything there to flush apart from the sparkling (if faintly radioactive) water from the Dnieper River two kilometers away. She ran some more of that water in the sink and looked at herself in the mirror.
In just a few years she would be-God’s sake!-a hundred. She observed herself critically. She was definitely more hunched over than she had been a few months before. That was osteoporosis, one of the side effects of those months in the captivity of the Beloved Leaders without her medications, and it would be with her for the rest of her life. Once the calcium was gone it didn’t come back. But at least she had stopped losing it, and, taken all in all she looked no more than, well, perhaps seventy-five, eighty at the most.
But ninety-and-some was how old she truly was, and wasn’t that enough of an age to content any reasonable human being? Was it worth the trouble to try to prolong it?
The zek children wanted her to prolong it. They wanted to save her from all the threats that were building up around her, and it would be impolite to refuse their kind, if unwanted, solicitude. When she opened the door Marisa was standing there. The girl had a couple of towels in her hand, not because she was carrying them anywhere but to provide an excuse for being in that place at that moment. “All right,” Rosaleen Artzybachova said, roughly but fondly, “you see for yourself that I did not die in there. So please put those silly towels down and sit somewhere.”
The dacha of Doktor-nauk Rosaleen Artzybachova had only four rooms, but that was because she only wanted four. It wasn’t her father’s dacha, though it was built on the same tenth of a hectare, on the same hillside fifty-two kilometers from Kiev, with the same pretty-if distant-view of the Dnieper River. Her father’s dacha had also been four rooms, but those rooms were slapped together of rough-sawn boards from the trees at the top of the hill. It had not been anything like a luxurious country home. It was hardly heated at all, apart from one fireplace and the jawboned-together tangle of copper water pipes that was meant to, but seldom did, conduct some of the fireplace heat to the bedroom. Of course it was lacking electricity and running water. And, of course, it had been taken away from the family when the GehBehs carried her grandfather off to the camps.
When Rosaleen began to be distinguished in her field it had given her some satisfaction to buy the dacha back-cheaply enough, after that whole area had been contaminated by the explosion in the Chernobyl power plant-and then to tear it down and have the new one built in its place. Which had been not at all cheap, since the workmen demanded, and got, triple pay for the risks of working in the Zone of Alienation.
In the dacha’s spacious living room Tamara and Yuri were somberly watching a news channel; the pictures on the wall screen were of Dopey and the two Docs, caught as they were being escorted from one place to another somewhere in America, but Rosaleen could not tell where because the sound was off. “Where’s Bogdan?” she asked.