Page 21 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘Hello! Hello, how are you? It’s unbearable, but I literally haven’t got a spare five minutes to find a cafe, I’m so sorry. Come inside for tea. And have a look at the lab! We’ve got all sorts today!’

It was infectious enthusiasm, and they both laughed. The man’s name was Dr Fischer, and he hurled the lab doors open again just as hard as he’d shot through them a moment before. Inside, half a dozen people were working.

Fischer shouted something across the lab, a name, maybe Joe. ‘Come and show them your twins thing while I make the tea! Sorry, you’re Dr Resovskaya and … Valery, is it?’ he said kindly.

‘Yes,’ Valery said, impressed that the man had bothered to learn his name, and then had to look at the research assistant, Possibly Joe, who was smiling and shaking hands now too. He was dark and handsome, but he seemed not to know; he wasn’t snooty, just cheerful.

‘You’re the radiation people? Excellent. Listen, the twins thing is boring, come and look at what Fischer’s working on.’

‘Why are they being nice to us?’ Valery whispered to Dr Resovskaya.

‘Because they’re going to make a job offer,’ Dr Resovskaya whispered back.

Valery smiled when she nudged his shoulder. She was right. This was much nicer than their little polytechnic.

Joe took them across the lab to a long dissection table where, incredibly, there was a whole human cadaver. Valery shot a look at Dr Resovskaya, who widened her eyes back. There was no way in hell that their lab would ever get an entire human.

A small child toddled past, followed closely by an identical one. Valery watched them go, puzzled, then remembered what Dr Fischer had said about twins. Now he was looking, there were three sets, mostly occupied with building blocks in the corner. None of them seemed to have obvious parents. They were laughing, and painfully sweet. It gave him a pang. He loved children, but he knew he would never have any.

‘So, I know we’ve got a reputation, but we are honestly not just about sterilising schizophrenics,’ Joe was saying. ‘We’re starting on some radiation studies. Our interest is in the modification of genes. We know radiation changes DNA, obviously, but what we want to start looking into is whether it might change them in a targeted way, to correct genetic errors.’

Valery looked down at the cadaver. He had never seen radiation sickness in a human before, but he had seen it in plenty of rabbits, and he could recognise it well enough to know that that was what the man had died of. Part of him did a happy pirouette. So not just human trials: unfettered human trials. Not hemmed in by miniature dose rates and results so negligible that they might have been caused by radiation, or a chest cold. Another shifted uneasily. It wasn’t a very precise or clever trial if they were killing human subjects with it.

‘I didn’t think we were anywhere near that kind of thing,’ Dr Resovskaya said. Her dark eyes were serious now.

‘Well, reach for the stars and you might get to the moon,’ Joe smiled.

Dr Fischer came over with the tea. He had a natural bounce to his step, and he was modulating it so carefully now that he looked as though he were pretending to roller-skate. ‘There we are. What do you think? How would you two like to work here with us?’

‘We’re Soviet,’ Dr Resovskaya said. ‘I suspect there will be a passport problem in the next few months.’

‘We’ll sort it out,’ Dr Fischer said. ‘Don’t worry. Joe’s from Frankfurt, for God’s sake, and we took him.’

Joe joke-shushed him.

‘Anyway, let’s have a proper tour, shall we? Dr Mengele?’ he added grandly to Joe.

‘This way,’ Joe said, still smiling. ‘You look worried?’ he asked Valery.

‘No,’ Valery said slowly. ‘No, just …’

Dr Resovskaya gave him a death stare which ordered him not to go off in hysterics about the waste of human life and useless suffering like every other pissy undergraduate who went around stating the bloody obvious.

‘I was thinking it must be much more difficult for you to get trial volunteers now that you have to declare a death?’ he said.

Joe and Fischer both laughed. It was a friendly laugh, but there was something under it that a hyena would have recognised. ‘Oh, God, no. They’re not volunteers. They’re condemned prisoners. Don’t worry. No shortage. It’s sad, but we have to do the tests on someone and, as you say, we’d not get many volunteers, and certainly not in the genetically diseased groups we’re interested in.’

Valery felt queasy.

‘What do you think?’ Resovskaya asked him as they left, aiming for the tram. ‘Fabulous CV fodder.’

She was steering him by the small of his back, something she often did with students here. At home, she would never have touched him, but in Germany, where men stayed boyish well into their thirties, Valery had endless trouble convincing the paper-checking police that he really was nineteen and that he had not forged his passport. He couldn’t place how or why, but people from the Soviet Union grew up when they were much younger. If you were being obviously herded by a professor, the effect lessened.

‘It’s a bit bad they’re using prisoners,’ he said. It bubbled out before he could stop it.

She tipped her head in a kind of diagonal nod that wasn’t whole agreement. ‘Mm. But this is a radiation study with human test subjects. It’s information that we have to know. I’m not impressed by their ethics either, but the horrible thing we all have to accept about working in science is that we have to go where the money is. And career-wise, you will be at a considerable advantage if you’ve got even a few months working on human trials. It’s very prestigious, and it’s absolutely the goal of the whole field.’

Valery could feel the weight of her approval, or disapproval, right on the back of his neck. ‘I thought it was a little untargeted too.’