Alexander Korol had spent much of the morning sitting in Leonid Toptunov’s apartment, waiting for his old friend to come home and explain what had happened inside Unit Four. He’d heard that there had been a maximum design-basis accident at the plant. But he refused to believe it. Eventually Toptunov’s girlfriend, the nurse, arrived and explained that everybody from the midnight shift was in Hospital Number 126. Some of them were being flown to a special clinic in Moscow that evening.
