Page 24 of The Half Life of Valery K

Shenkov pulled it off and lobbed it straight into the pool, where it sank. In the Land Rover, the driver looked terrified. ‘The pool isn’t radioactive enough to kill anyone straight away, you said?’

‘No, no, or it would’ve killed all the algae. Make you sick, though.’

‘Good.’

Shenkov went to the driver’s side of the car, dragged the man out, and dumped him in a puddle. Valery had to turn away so the poor man wouldn’t see him laughing, then helped him up and offered him a lift back, because the others had already driven off.

While the unfortunate man dripped and complained, Valery drove only half-listening, wondering why Shenkov cared one way or another if a troublesome biologist was crushed under a tree. The way Shenkov had reacted, they could have been blood relatives. Perhaps Valery reminded him of someone else. Or perhaps Shenkov was just a kind person.

The latter thought made Valery nervous. He was in no state to cope with kindness. With no family and no people of your own to build up your resistance to it, kindness was like a triple shot of vodka after being teetotal for years. It went straight to the head.

He was going to have to avoid Shenkov as much as he could, at least until the triple shot wore off.

He spent the rest of the day in the lab, looking down a microscope at the bone samples from the mice. The microscope was better than any he had used before, and it illuminated in needle-sharp detail every strange, frothy malformation in the bones. Half of the samples showed at least the early stages of leukaemia; barely any of the mice were producing white blood cells properly. All of them would be prone to whatever the mouse equivalent of a cold was. He felt horrible when he saw that, because most of them would die now from infection contracted through their wounded tails.

It was a lot of damage for what was marked on the map as a less contaminated area. A lot. Worse than most of the mice in the mouse room, who were irradiated a hundred times more than the figure on the map claimed these mice should have been.

Still, it wasn’t as though that was a surprise.

When Valery made his eight o’clock report to the security office in the evening to have the prisoner book stamped, he went out of his way to steer clear of Shenkov, whose office was before the main one, and asked the woman at the desk instead. It was hard not to look to the side as he went back past Shenkov’s office door, which was open now.

It was in vain, because after midnight, Shenkov came to the lab. He didn’t bang the door, but the clack of the latch was huge in the silence.

‘Hi,’ he said, and didn’t add anything, but he was clearly checking that Valery hadn’t gone mad and told everyone about the body with a megaphone.

Valery crushed down a stupid surge of happiness at the sight of him. He couldn’t think of anything more off-putting than fawning over a man who had done nothing more than pull a fellow human away from a falling tree. He had to concentrate to keep his own tone brisk.

‘Was there a leak?’ he asked. Yes, good; businesslike.

‘No,’ Shenkov said. ‘No, the physicists at the plant were as puzzled as we were. And, we aren’t missing anyone.’

Valery stood back. ‘Then where did he come from? He can’t have just wandered in, in a hospital gown. Can he?’

Shenkov shook his head. He had come to the workbench. His eyes went interestedly over the microscope and the cell-sample slides. Valery, who had expected him to just go away once he had decided everyone was behaving themselves, felt as though something Arctic had come to look at him.

‘Sometimes people come back into the exclusion zone from outside.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s the people who used to live here, who we moved after the contamination. Things aren’t good in the countryside at the moment. A lot of crop failures, and the land’s bad anyway. Here it’s good, or it looks good. A lot of people didn’t understand why they had to move, they didn’t know what radiation was. I couldn’t explain it.’ Shenkov looked straight at him. ‘Do you even know?’

Valery nodded, wishing he could say that it was actually hurting him now, for Shenkov to be showing this much interest in speaking to him. He could feel his hastily built levee creaking with the force of the hunger behind it, only this hunger was worse than hunger for food. This was desperate, grasping.

‘It’s shrapnel, from the broken cores of atoms. That’s what a radioactive substance is, something made of atoms whose cores are always in upheaval. The shards get shot out at great speed. If there are only a few shards every so often, it’s fine for humans; they go through you, but they don’t hit much. At an atomic level we’re mainly empty space. If there’s a lot all in one go, they shred your DNA and that causes problems like leukaemia later; or if there’s even more, you fall apart.’

‘That’s … straightforward.’

‘It is,’ Valery agreed. ‘I don’t know why people think it’s so mysterious, to be honest.’

Shenkov looked like he might be thinking of smiling. ‘What are you doing so late?’

‘Test results on the wild mice.’ Valery hesitated for a long time. It was beyond stupid to voice anything like concern, especially to the man who had shot Ilenko for doing exactly that, but common sense was losing the battle with the part of him that needed Shenkov to stay and talk more. ‘I’m a bit worried.’

‘Worried why?’ Shenkov said.

Oh, don’t encourage us, Normal Valery mumbled.

‘They … well.’ Valery showed him the microscope. Shenkov glanced at him, then bent his neck to see. ‘There is significant bone deterioration in all of these samples. Lots of birth defects. Not a single perfect specimen. I know we’ve got more contamination here than what’s shown on our maps, but this is ridiculous.’