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Nikolai was waiting in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette. “We work until five o'clock,”
Dennis said. “So we'll have lunch at half past four. Then at ten to five is football. It is the
most important game.” He was talking about the World Cup. Ukraine's soccer team had
qualified for the first time, and tonight was the critical elimination match against Tunisia.
Fanciful images of a raucous Chernobyl sports bar danced through my mind. I told Dennis
it sounded like a great plan.
He rode shotgun, while I sat in back. A few hundred yards beyond the firemen's me-
morial, Nikolai pulled into a small gravel parking lot and jumped out of the car to buy a
bottle of beer and an ice cream bar. There was a convenience store in the zone.
Within a few minutes we reached the checkpoint for the ten-kilometer limit, which en-
compasses the most-contaminated areas. The car barely stopped as Dennis handed a sheet
of paperwork through the window to the waiting guard. He folded the rest of our permis-
sion slips and tucked them into the car's sun visor for later.
The air that streamed through the car's open windows was warm and sweet, a valentine
from the verdant countryside that surrounded us. It felt as though we were just three guys
out for a pleasant drive in the country—which was more or less the truth. Dennis and
Nikolai traded jokes and gossip in Russkrainian. “We're talking about the other guide,” said
Dennis. “He's on vacation.” It seemed there were no more than a handful of Chernobylin-
terinform guides. It only added to the sense that I had found a traveler's dream: an entire
region that—although badly contaminated—was beautiful, interesting, and as yet unmoles-
ted by hordes of other visitors.
My thoughts were interrupted by a loud electronic beep. My radiation detector had
turned itself on—funny, that—and now that there was actually some radiation to detect (a
still-modest 30 micros), it had begun to speak out with an annoying, electric bleat that in no
way matched the PADEKC's smooth iPod-from-Moscow look. There was a reason, I now
realized, that this detector looked like something you might take to the gym instead of to
a nuclear accident site: It was designed for the anxious pockets of people who thought 30
micros were worth worrying about.
In the front seat, Dennis had produced his own detector, a brick-size box of tan plastic
fronted by a metal faceplate. Little black switches and cryptic symbols in Cyrillic and
Greek adorned its surface. I was jealous. It seemed there was no kind of radiation it couldn't
detect, and it probably got shortwave radio, too. Its design was the height of gamma chic:
slightly clunky, industrially built, understatedly cryptic, and pleasingly retro. What really
sold me was its beep. Unlike the fretful blurts of the PADEKC, the beeps of this pro model
were restrained, almost musical. It sounded like a cricket, vigilantly noting for the record
that you were currently under the bombardment of this many beta particles, or that many
gamma rays. It was a detector made for someone who accepts some radiation as a fact of
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