Page 18 of The Half Life of Valery K

Resovskaya looked rueful. ‘Comrade, come and have a cup of tea with me.’

Valery set the samples aside. As far as he knew, you could still be arrested for association with proven enemies of the state. Guilt was more infectious than typhus. He wanted to point out that it was hardly unreasonable of any of the students not to want to be seen with him, but he didn’t want to argue with Resovskaya.

‘It’s all right, I’m not marching you somewhere terrible,’ Resovskaya said. Like before, her tone was the over-gentle one which she might have taken with an incredibly old person.

Valery managed to smile. He didn’t think she meant to be patronising.

She led him out into the bare corridor, where his heart began to tap at his sternum more urgently than usual. He tried to order it to quiet down. Even if she was going to tell him off for how he’d handled the students, he wasn’t going to end up stuffed in a bio-waste bin just yet, but the memory of the police van was still so sharp he kept catching himself on it. He could smell the bleach. On cue, the cattle-prod burn on his ribs started to hurt again.

‘Are you all right?’ Resovskaya asked, sounding alarmed.

Valery realised that he was inclining his head while he listened to his own internal monologue, just as openly as he would have if Inner Valery had been another person standing beside him and talking aloud. He must have looked demented. ‘Yes, sorry.’

She pursed her lips a little. ‘Because, you know, you can say when you aren’t. I don’t run one of the labs where people are expected to carry on minus a recently amputated leg. If it’s getting too much for you, I need you to say. There aren’t many people trained to do what you do, Valery, certainly not to the standard you do it; I can’t afford to run you into the ground.’ She sounded finished, but then she seemed to hear what she had just said, and because decades of shouty men had made her hard, she looked embarrassed. He felt desperately sorry. ‘You’ll end up with inaccurate results.’

He forced himself to look at her properly. He had never liked looking anyone full in the face. It felt as invasive as poking them in the chest, and the instinct not to do it was powerful, even if he was surrounded by people who insisted it was the polite thing. It wasn’t helped any by a lingering suspicion that everyone was lying. When he was a teenager, everyone had insisted loudly that Stalin was wonderful and obviously your husband must be guilty if he’d been taken away in the night. It had seemed to follow that the validity of eye contact, handshaking, and shouting at people to get things done were also lies of obscure state purpose.

‘Comrade, I’m going to be strange for a while, if not permanently. But I’m not unhappy or damaged, or I don’t think I am. I’ve just been growing in different soil. I’m okay.’

She shifted her weight onto one side, plainly uncomfortable. He heard the heel of her shoe creak. ‘Only you do occasionally seem to hear things that aren’t there,’ she said.

‘I know. Don’t you think, though, that all the best people sometimes indulge in a little bit of auditory hallucination?’

She only nearly laughed. ‘Oh, dear. Well, I suppose as long as you know you do it.’

‘I know,’ he promised. ‘Where are we going?’

She brightened, and opened the door they had paused beside. ‘The mouse room,’ she said, and stood aside to let him go first.

The room smelled of new sawdust. It was a large square space, lined with glass boxes, all bolted together in a great framework that went right the way up to the high ceiling. On each wall was a ladder that would slide along metal rails. Inside each glass box was sawdust, water dispensers, a soft yellow lamp, and white laboratory mice. The whole room was alive with the warm sound of scuffling and claw-clicks. There must have been thousands. Valery smiled. After the bleak corridors and the dead silence of his apartment, being surrounded by so many living things felt like coming out into the sun.

‘They’re wonderful. What are they for?’

‘They’re our radiation mice,’ Resovskaya explained. ‘The wild population study will show us snapshots of how mice in the wider ecosystem are responding to the radiation, but this is the controlled side of that. We expose these mice to regular doses of gamma radiation – gamma because it goes through glass so we don’t have to take them out of the boxes – and we monitor mutations and changes in their young. Mice are perfect for intergenerational studies, of course, because you’ll get two generations per year.’

‘I see,’ he said, charmed. He went to the nearest box. A mouse came to peer at him too. ‘It must be a low dose? They seem okay.’

‘It is. The aim is to irradiate them enough to disrupt forming DNA, but not enough to hurt them. I have to say, the results have been very interesting so far. So if you come over here, this wall is the section that’s had the most frequent doses.’

Valery followed her and looked into the eye-level boxes. Even at a glance, the mice inside had all kinds of birth defects. Missing paws, missing eyes, very short tails, very long tails. They all seemed to be getting along happily enough.

‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’

‘No,’ Resovskaya agreed. ‘And that’s because what we’ve found is that a single high dose of radiation won’t do much to cause mutations; either it kills the subject, or it causes some cancers and then that’s that. That, we think, is why there’s no noticeable human mutation around Hiroshima and Nagasaki among the children of the survivors. But what will cause mutation is a steady lowish dose. The more frequent the dose and the longer the period over which that dose is given, the higher the rate of offspring mutation.’

Valery looked round. ‘This is an experiment to predict the effect of the radiation here on humans,’ he said.

She sighed. ‘Comrade, I’ve told you already, the dose people receive here is completely negligible—’

‘Come on, Elena, the students aren’t here,’ he said. ‘I was arrested at the weekend because I told some kids to get out of the irradiated river. The forest is dying. Obviously people here are getting frequent significant doses.’

She looked hunted, and he watched her teeter over denying it. But then she seemed to see that there would be no earthly point in doing that. ‘Well, it will certainly help Moscow understand how much they will need to spend on healthcare here,’ she said, stiff, and her eyes went to the main light switch by the door. ‘Especially for people who do stray into – the more rusty parts of the forest.’

He gazed at the mice. ‘So these are what generation, now?’

‘These are our fifteenth and sixteenth generations.’

‘And what’s the infant death rate?’