Uranus
The control point is the smallest possible space that can contain the ultimate goal—or just the temporary goal—of this leg of the race, the searching and finding, the blazing of a trail in this thick impenetrable forest. So what’s the function of the meadow, then? A place to rest and to play or a ruse, a trap set by strange forces? Clever bait to draw you out of the forest and into the open, so that the eyes of spy satellites can see you from invisible heights? Or so the radioactive rain can fall on you?
We had no way of knowing, it wasn’t marked on the map and no dosimetric lines were drawn on the orienteering stencil—a few days earlier, a thousand kilometers to the north and east, Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl had exploded, under the watch of the Fifth Shift.
The pioneer camp commander later summed it up with his favorite saying: “Shit happens.”
Letter to an Unknown Comrade
I know, my dear, little, unknown Soviet and Ukrainian comrade, I know, but please—don’t finish yet, tell me again. Tell me how it happened once more, tell me, even if it means repeating yourself and wasting yet another whole page of graph paper. For me it’s important, it’s so important, you can’t even begin to imagine.
I want to hear about the banks of the Pripyat River—I can see its water boiling, I understand. But more about that later, it’s still too early, April hasn’t arrived yet, nor the beginning of May, the water is calm. Longer ago and further back, before spring and before winter. Tell me about the summer, the past, as if there never was and never will be one like it again, as if it were the last. As if we are running for the last time with pounding carefree steps toward the banks, toward the water, and it flows smoothly from the tributaries and empties out into the Dnieper. Show me around the flat terrain, across those 106,000 square kilometers, geographically, like a straight-A student. There, where the water-drainage basin stretches past the nuclear power plant. Scribble on the map, all along the river’s 748 kilometers with a black marker. Give me a little more time. I’m playing here in the grass, it’s raining, my dear little unknown comrade from the Pale between Ukraine and Belarus—I’m not even exactly sure where you are, on the map in my textbook that little corner is too small, between two holes of the spiral binding that hold the pages together. So tell me about it now, give me time to stand here a little longer, in the rain.
In return, let me admit that you are now extending this moment in Paradise—she is blonde, my little Soviet comrade from Ukraine, from Belarus, she is a blue T-shirt and blonde hair in braids and shoes with a strange design on the heels. Tell me whatever you want, don’t make me ask, my lips are busy, my words are busy. I put a lot of effort into my Russian, see how beautifully I write to you with loops and hooks, correctly using the instrumental case and the backward “e,” right?
While here with her, we can’t utter a single word, so we just move, we move and breathe.
Don’t ask me why or what for, just close your eyes and tell me, like you used to write me. Tell me again about the Pripyat River, about its waters. I know they’re brown because those waters flow from Geography, from peat-bogs. And if you want to swim, you’d better be strong because the current will sweep you away. After swimming, a coating like chocolate covers your skin, it tightens, dries out, and bakes in the air—if you pick at it with your fingers it squeaks. Like a festive Misha the Olympian, one of those marzipan bears sold as an Olympic souvenir. Of course, you know that it’s because of the swamp acids, which must be good for you—even fish swim in and breathe them. But after the disaster they will turn into coagulating agents, as the nuclear physicists call them, since they are excellent conveyors of radioactive particles, the leftovers from the breakdown of the spilled nuclear fuel, God damn it, as the nuclear physicists, or “nukies,” swore through their teeth. You are probably the child of a nukie, my dear little unknown comrade—otherwise what would you be doing in that city built in the middle of nowhere? In the middle of the Pale, there and where else in that emptiness would you be born, at that unremarkable age, the same age as the fourth reactor, the pride of the golden five-year-plans for energy construction.
You are probably a nukie’s child, because you know, your daddy told you—when he didn’t prefer to stay silent, when he said that he was just coming home for a bit and then would have to go back—that the whole power plant was leaking. It was leaking like crazy, God damn it, the nukies cursed, it was leaking, the whole thing was just one leak after another, somewhere in the ballpark of fifty cubic meters an hour through the faltering reinforcement, through the drains. Fifty cubic meters of radioactive water an hour, my boy, my dear little Soviet boy—even I know that’s a lot. The vaporizers can hardly process it. Radioactive oversaturation, as they say, and they very often send your dad on radioactive business trips, all the way to the great country’s capital, to that special Sixth Moscow Clinic. God damn it—but there’s no cure for this exhaustion, he’s always falling asleep at the table, head on the tablecloth, facedown amid the cherry jam and slices of bread. That’s a gift from our native fields—so I’m there in the picture, too. You don’t know it, my dear little comrade, but I was on the work brigade at the jam factory. That very jar, cherry jam, with a pit.
It’s very easy for them to blame him, to call him an idiot, a drunk or an ideological freak, depending on the audience and the depth of the argument required. But, my dear little comrade, I know—daddies never do anything without thinking about their children. Or even without asking them. The disguised Father Christmas makes every child’s dreams come true.
So let them write, let them compile lists that pedantically point out oversights, let them count off at length the failures to conform to labor standards and operating procedures, to the Energy Code, to the material and moral principles for acting in zones of elevated radioactive risk—oversights, mistakes, and unimplemented security measures of primary importance. And in brief, including only the gravest errors, for example, the following: that the workers on the fifth shift shut down the emergency system, they stopped and started the machine however they saw fit, doing the same with the automatic regulation system. And what’s this talk of cooling turbines, given that for the purposes of this strange experiment all the backup energy sources were cut off and even sealed off in advance—let’s see what’ll happen, those sharp minds said, let’s just see.
And what happened? The temperature rose highly strangely and strangely high, somehow quite perceptibly. The reactor, of course, was itself a Party member, it didn’t want to explode and humiliate the great country, its scientists and academics, who shouted all the livelong day that the Soviet atom was the safest atom on the planet—the reactor resisted, wringing its hands, trying desperately to keep itself together. But here the masters of that deadly sport had already put it in a headlock that no one could escape from—not even Reactor Four of the world’s third-largest atomic power plant (both in terms of size and capacity), which is even described in the Apocalypse.
And the control system, the control system designed precisely for such cases, was frozen up in any case—on top of everything the leaders of the experiment themselves, engineers, scientists, physicists, had turned it off earlier so that it wouldn’t get in the way of their plans. And so, with its back against the wall, with access to all emergency generators cut off—the two diesel generators as well as the two electrical transformers—the block, the reactor was stranded above the abyss without any energy except atomic energy. Without energy to stop, that is.
And finally—sometime around 1:20 in the morning—finally when their hair began to stand on end because they realized that they were pulling the levers of a fuse measuring fourteen meters in diameter and seven meters tall, filled with toasty, warm uranium—funny, hadn’t they realized it before?—no, apparently not, alas—then they just threw up their hands and cried “Mommy!” But Mommy was nowhere to be found, so they pulled the fatal lever labeled ES: “Emergency Shield.”
Which
