Page 36 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘Is the – are the spores still in the air? Will they hurt you?’

‘It’s possible they’ll be bad for a foetus,’ she said. She sighed, more like someone whose soufflé had sunk than someone whose unborn baby had just been doused in radiation. She was always that way, but it shocked him whenever he saw it. He could never say that: she had told him straight up when they got married that she wasn’t a natural mother, that she didn’t do very well with small helpless things, because she had been trained to care about electron microscopes, thanks, and obviously she would gestate him a small helpless thing to look after if he desperately wanted one, but it would be his; she would be present for emotional support et cetera, because she liked him a lot, but there would be no talk of staying at home, nesting, or maternal fussing, because frankly that was nothing but weakness of character in a woman and if he thought differently then he could fuck off.

He had been stupid enough to find it funny at the time, and to think she was underestimating the power of her own heart. She had, as usual, been pristinely accurate.

‘It’ll be all right,’ she said. She smiled, but not much. When she stopped sounding so proper, she was telling the truth. It was a kind of code. ‘We’re not being evacuated here. A few towns downwind are, just while they deal with the blight.’

‘So – you’ll be all right? The baby will be all right?’

‘Could be,’ she said to the bump, as if it might have something to say for itself. ‘Never mind if not, though. Or maybe it will be a dragon mutant; that would be variation.’

No pregnancy was a certain thing, working as she did in the lab. There were accidents every second month, as far as he could tell. She had lost three since they’d been here. She would have gone insane if she’d loved them before she knew them. She wasn’t hugely interested in the twins even now; she would garner some interest, she said, when they learned the periodic table. He was pretty sure that what she meant was that it would take her that long to feel sure they weren’t temporary. ‘Speaking of which. I think Dragon Mutant is hungry. I wonder if there are sandwiches.’

‘I’ll … let you get on,’ he said, because in his experience, distraught husbands only got in the way. He had to swallow hard. His favourite time, with the children, was sitting in the rocking chair with them while they were still tiny and surprised by everything, like the bright pop-up book about the girl who met the Winter King in the woods. He was always sad when they grew up enough not to want to sit still any more. It was an unspeakable thing to mourn, though. If he even tried to say it, he’d sound like a hysterical moron. It was one of those things you just had to fold away, like the baby clothes.

The buildings around the lake had been bulldozed already. Now, there were trailer offices and tents. Predictably, the KGB had a tent. They would all, Shenkov knew full well, have been far too embarrassed to argue hard for walls and heating. He thought wearily that he had better recruit some women. Women didn’t do stupid things just to prove they were really good at being women.

Orders had just come in from Moscow. They were to clear out everyone within forty kilometres of the plant, and maintain the exclusion zone no matter what.

‘Only forty kilometres?’ Shenkov asked. ‘People have radiation sickness in Chelyabinsk, I’ve just come from there.’

The Moscow officer looked him up and down, and then drew him to one side, behind a trailer full of construction workers in hard-hats, leaning over some plans on a table.

‘No one has radiation sickness in Chelyabinsk,’ the Moscow man said. ‘You’re mistaken.’

Shenkov let his breath out impatiently. ‘Yes, fine, no one has radiation sickness in Chelyabinsk, but the doctors have clocked it, so—’

The man punched him in the stomach. Shenkov collapsed.

‘No one has radiation sickness in Chelyabinsk. As you know, comrade, this was a scheduled contamination, in order that scientists have an irradiated district to study properly. It has been carefully controlled, and obviously Moscow would never allow anything unsafe to happen. There is a toxic blight in Chelyabinsk, that’s all; a perfectly natural difficulty. It would be irresponsible to suggest otherwise.’

12

The Alien

1963 (now)

Valery thought about it for a while after Shenkov had finished. There had been a bang, and some electrical equipment shut down ninety kilometres away. Within a few hours, people arrived at the hospital with radiation sickness. The reactor in the lake had been gutted so badly that it had not been rebuilt, but filled in with concrete. If people caught outside in Chelyabinsk had absorbed at least the hundred roentgen required for radiation sickness, then the amount of radioactive material in the air was vast. Vast, however, was not a very specific thing to say.

He pulled his hand across his jaw, frustrated. He felt as if Shenkov had given him everything he needed to know, but if any tests had been done recently to determine exactly what caused what and how, he had no idea. He’d been in prison for too long. When he was arrested, the very first nuclear detonations had happened barely a decade before, and if they were being honest, people knew bugger all about them except that there was a very big bang.

‘And the investigators didn’t have any conclusions?’ he asked at last.

‘No,’ said Shenkov. ‘I think they said a small steam explosion. It looked bad but it was nothing.’

‘But you had a radio flash.’

‘What’s that?’

‘What made the electricals short. A nuclear explosion generates an electromagnetic pulse. Fries circuitry.’ He paused. ‘It would normally have to be above the visible horizon I think, the blast, but maybe we’re uphill enough.’

‘Yes,’ Shenkov said, sounding unsure of himself. ‘I thought so anyway, but I was on morphine at the time, and when I asked Anna, she said there couldn’t have been, she didn’t see how the numbers could line up for that.’

Valery shook his head. ‘I don’t know enough about it. They must have done tests since I was arrested, I’m six years out of date, but … it can’t have been a bomb, or City 40 wouldn’t be here, a warhead just flattens everything within a kilometre.’ He tried to think around the corners of the idea, but it was polyhedral and it had an awful lot of corners. ‘But Anna is right, even if the reactor was in disgusting shape, it still couldn’t have gone up like that.’

‘Could they have done it on purpose, like they say?’ Shenkov said quietly.

‘I don’t see what would justify it. A reactor costs millions upon millions, you don’t just blow one up. It was really under the lake?’