Page 22 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, genetic diseases … they can’t look at everything all at once, can they, from syphilis to cystic fibrosis? Surely they should be looking more closely at one particular thing?’

She gave him a look of such strangeness he remembered it always after. It was sympathy, but it was impatience and disgust as well, and he saw her try to hide the latter, but it crossed her face anyway, only enhanced because of her smoky eyeshadow that enunciated every tiny line. ‘Valery. Genetically diseased doesn’t mean syphilitic. It means Jews and gypsies and homosexuals. And before you say anything; you can’t go around blurting out that they’re innocent. Of course they bloody are. You might as well say the sky is blue and, if you do, everyone will think you’re an idiot and you’ll never be promoted above a lab technician.’

Valery looked up. ‘But they are innocent—’

‘You can’t wave that flag,’ she said again, exasperated. ‘These tests have to be done. On someone. It will be horrendous, whatever happens. But in the end you’ll either have done the science, or you won’t. If you don’t, someone else will, because it’s necessary. We need to know how radiation works and what it does. At least here, you can do it on subjects who can’t speak to you in your own language, and who you can’t be related to. That’s as good as it’s going to get, I’m afraid. Are you Jewish? Queer?’

‘Does it matter?’ he said sharply.

‘No. Exactly. It doesn’t.’ She sighed. ‘If you don’t want this job … you’re not cut out to specialise in radiation, and I’ll transfer you to another department. Microbiology, maybe. Radiobiology is a field where you must always understand that the needs of the many must come before the few. It’s a lot to cope with, and not everyone can. Human trials can be very tough indeed. You need a thick skin.’

‘Microbiology – they’re all pedantic lunatics who—’

‘Well, then the question is: do you want to stick with radiobiology?’

He nodded helplessly. This degree was his whole life.

‘Good, because it would be a bloody shame if I had to hand you off. You’re good at this.’

It was the best thing she’d ever said to him. He smiled awkwardly, not knowing where to look, and thinking about the eyes and whose they had been.

‘I’ll send Dr Fischer our papers.’ Dr Resovskaya gazed down at him for a long time as though she was making sure it was all going in. ‘Now: come along,’ she said, unexpectedly gentle. She fluffed up his hair, which had turned from an unpleasant squirrelly red to bright gold in the last few weeks, as if the sun had come out somewhere in him. ‘I’m buying you a drink. Whatever we think, this is only for a few months. Hitler will declare war and then we’ll be sent home.’

In fact it was exactly two months. After that, Valery was called for military service. He didn’t know a soul in his unit, but he was too relieved to care.

8

The Body in the Pool

City 40, 1963

Valery let the wild mice go in the morning, each one in the same place he’d found it, and then sat down on a fallen tree to shade in a diagram he’d made of the test areas. Four sections, like there would have been in a controlled experiment; but out here, in a naturally contaminated environment, they weren’t neat quarters but a mosaic of different contamination readings. Once it was done, he sighed at it. The data would be useful, but even if he took out the place it was gathered, the time, everything, it was still obviously not a controlled, artificial test space. He couldn’t see how that could get past the censorship board. There was only so much use data could be if nobody published it. He looked away through the trees, wondering what the point of the whole facility was, if nobody was ever going to see the results.

No, that was dramatic. Someone would see them. The censorship people would file the data, and then provide it, carefully curated, to heavyweight scientists in whichever fields required it. No one would know where it came from or who collected it, but it would be there. Doing a bit of good.

He became aware that he was sitting opposite a dead man.

Man; boy. He must have been about twenty, the same age as the students at the lab, and he was floating face up in a marshy pool that lapped at the exposed roots of some silver birch trees. He had been there all along, in full view, very full; he was dressed only in a hospital gown, but there weren’t any obvious marks on him. Valery turned around twice. There wasn’t a single sign of a path, a track, nothing to say that people ever came this way.

He went back to the Land Rover and picked up the radio. They all had radios. He’d never used one. He pushed the button.

‘Er … hello?’ he said.

The line crackled. ‘Hello? Lighthouse security?’

‘Y … es. I’m one of the biologists at the research base. I’m out in car –’ he leaned to see the label in the windscreen ‘– car 27. I’ve found a dead man in the woods. He’s in a pond.’

‘Sorry, a dead body in the – where are you?’

He pulled out the map from the glovebox. ‘Have you got a pencil? I’m going to have to give you coordinates. I’m about five kilometres from you.’

‘Okay. It’s a pretty rusty area, so wait in the car, not outside.’

Valery lifted his eyebrow at the map, which claimed there were only a few millicuries here. ‘I will, thank you.’

‘Is that Valery Kolkhanov?’ a voice in the background asked, with a familiar icy accent. Shenkov pronounced it Valerie, like they did in English. For a mad intrigued moment, Valery wondered if he was a super-secret Englishman. That would certainly have landed him in the Lubyanka long enough to learn the knock code. ‘If he’s been arrested again …’