Page 19 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘High,’ she said. ‘Only about forty per cent of the young survive to adulthood.’

‘Christ,’ he said softly. ‘What’s the human infant death rate here?’

She looked exasperated. ‘Humans aren’t mice, Valery; we’re rather bigger, and we can absorb a lot more radiation quite happily. Radiation hype is scarier than actual radiation. No one in Kyshtym is going to have horribly mutated children, we’re not in an insane science fiction novel.’

He blinked slowly, not quite able to believe that she had just said that to him when he knew bloody well what radiation was and what it did. He almost pointed east, to the forest and the dying trees, which were in turn much bigger than human beings. He didn’t.

‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘I thought this could be your project. You like animals. When you’re not running fieldwork, you can keep up with this. We use lead screens to filter out the radiation for our wall of non-irradiated mice and so forth, and – well, it’s all in the binder. What do you think?’

He nodded. ‘Yes. Thank you.’

‘Gets you away from the students too,’ she said. She made it sound as though it was the students who were at fault, but he would have bet anything that at least a couple of them had already asked her if it was really necessary to share a lab with the gulag madman who listened to imaginary voices and knock code.

‘I’m … happy to go to a different lab if you’d rather not leave me with this,’ he said.

‘There isn’t another biology lab,’ she said. ‘Everything else is for the physics people.’

‘Oh right,’ he said, and tried to think why he had been so sure there were other labs. He couldn’t. ‘How do we administer the radiation?’ he asked instead.

She pointed at the table, where there was a perfect cube of what looked like lead. ‘There’s a chunk of uranium in there. Just take the lid off for ten minutes and go for a coffee. Are you quite sure you’re all right?’

Valery pretended not to hear. Very lightly, he touched the top of the lead box. It was warm. If he were to open the box, the uranium inside would be unspectacular. Uranium was just an inoffensive grey metal. But if you could see further up the electromagnetic spectrum, past visible light, past ultraviolet, to the blasting intensity of gamma rays; it would look like a star. It made him smile, despite all of Resovskaya’s lying. It wasn’t often that anyone gave you a star in a box.

‘Oh,’ he said, because he’d remembered. ‘If there are no other labs – where’s Comrade Ilenko? You know, from the Biophysics Institute?’

Resovskaya withdrew, without moving at all. ‘Oh, Ilenko. She had to go back to Moscow unexpectedly. Shenkov told me.’

‘Shenkov?’ Valery said, puzzled. ‘What’s he got to do with—’

‘For God’s sake, Valery,’ Resovskaya whisper-snapped. ‘You need to learn to talk in code. Yes, Shenkov, because Ilenko tried to call a journalist friend who works for Truth in Moscow and explain about how everyone is lying about radiation levels and isn’t it shocking, and Shenkov had to shoot her.’

No wonder Shenkov looked like he wasn’t sleeping.

7

The Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene

Germany, 1937

It was not the first time she’d had to tell him to learn the code.

Although his memory of Before wasn’t good any more, he could remember this one, vividly.

He had been nineteen, and he’d arrived in Berlin with Dr Resovskaya and four other undergraduates from Moscow University six months prior, just as part of a traditional yearly exchange. It was the sort of placement people said was a good idea because it was Culturally Expanding, but mainly he’d found that the only thing expanding was him, German food being wonderful and German cafes being everywhere. Dr Resovskaya said he and the other students were actually beginning to look like real people and not ambulatory gardening tools. When he tried to tell the German researchers how you couldn’t get proper cheese in Moscow, they had thought he was joking, but then been mortified when they realised he wasn’t, and he and the other Soviets were still getting through the apology cheese hamper. Seeing it in the fridge made him giggle every morning. He had never met a set of people so easily worried about offending their colleagues. It was the most extraordinary change from Moscow, where you were having a marvellous time if nobody was locking you in the supply cupboard for getting your units wrong.

The lab was small and basic, but working there was fun, and he liked German people a lot. They were direct, and he had been delighted to find that the researchers would correct his pronunciation. It was remarkable how, in other languages, people were loath to do that. He had English language partners too, because so many science journals were in English and he was determined to learn, but English people were useless. If they could hazard the faintest guess at what you might mean, paralysing embarrassment kept them from mentioning that ee and i were very different sounds, or that you were going to seem peculiar if you chose the wrong one when you tried to say you were going home by ship.

That morning, everyone had been late, because there was a street protest. Valery wasn’t very good with German when people were screaming it rather than telling it to him quietly, so he assumed it was something to do with the new government and got on with his paperwork.

‘Phew,’ one of the German researchers said, reeling in as if he’d had to take a run-up at the door. That in itself was telling. He was about two and a half metres tall. ‘Getting hairy out there. There are soldiers and everything.’

‘Our windows are pretty high, I’m sure we’ll be fine,’ Valery said.

‘Windows?’

‘If they open fire.’

‘You’re insane. Russians are all insane.’