Page 39 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘A lot of women must.’

‘Women, why?’

‘Well, who’ve miscarried. Especially physicists in the main labs if they test weapons-grade plu—’

‘Oh, don’t, don’t,’ Shenkov said, and put his hand to the wall beside him. He looked ill.

‘What?’ Valery asked, confused now. He hadn’t known there was any such thing as a squeamish KGB officer, and even above that, it was an odd thing to be squeamish about. Weird as irradiated foetuses were, they were fascinating. He used to have one on his desk. It had been called Buttons.

‘My wife has had three miscarriages. All late.’

Whenever he thought he was learning to be warmer, and more human, something like this reminded him again that he was only a reptile in disguise.

‘She didn’t say,’ Shenkov said. ‘That that’s what they look like.’

Valery wanted to say something; that he was sure Anna had only been trying to keep Shenkov clean of the whole idea, or that it had been such a rancid feeling she hadn’t been able to talk about it at all, even if she’d wanted to. But he couldn’t imagine it would do Shenkov any good to go any further into it.

‘We need to find out where that foetus came from,’ Valery said instead. ‘If the editor bought it on the quiet from someone in the exclusion zone, or someone from a lab, or … from inside the city.’

‘He said someone from down the road found it in her garden.’

Valery started to nod, but then really heard it. ‘People have gardens?’

‘Gardens, yes? They’re shared allotments attached to the … towers, you look like you might kill someone.’

‘Was the soil all replaced, after the accident?’

‘I don’t think so. Ours wasn’t.’

They both gazed along the street. Everything was smart shopfronts here, but behind the theatre there were apartment blocks and allotments, some of them beautifully tended, some lined up with rows of bamboo canes where people were growing runner beans.

‘Did you do the film test?’

‘Yes. I’ll get it developed when I get back,’ Valery said. ‘Then we’ll know.’

‘I don’t understand how we don’t already know. Secrecy is one thing, the forest is one thing, but children being born here like – like that …’

‘Doctors must know,’ Valery said, just as confused.

Shenkov pulled his hand over his face. ‘Anyway, I’ll go and get the address of the woman who sold them their alien. It can’t be from here, someone must have found it in the forest and just buried it here. We can’t be surrounded by women who go through this all the time and never tell anyone.’

Valery nodded, though he disagreed. He had a needling, frost-forming feeling that that was exactly what was going on.

‘And then I suppose I’d better talk to some doctors, not that any of them will tell me anything.’

Valery wished him luck, not sure how much it would take.

Valery visited the facility darkroom, where a technician developed his radiation badges inside an hour and didn’t ask what they were for; people must have done odd experiments with film all the time. Even so, Valery didn’t dare to take them out of the packet until he was back at the lab. Carefully, he laid them out on the desk.

One to eight, like he’d hoped, showed a spectrum scale. One roentgen was a haze on the film; eight was dark.

Under them, he set out the badges he’d taken to different parts of town. He matched each one to the closest shade on his control scale.

Immediately by the lake, he’d got four roentgen in an hour. Down the main road, there was nothing showing up – that was a relief – but the relief went off the second he saw the one from the edge of the school field. Eight roentgen in an hour. And then the badge he’d left pinned to the oak tree he’d slept against; darker than anything on the control scale.

Seeing it on film felt different to reasoning it out.

He pushed the photographs back into their packet and put the packet in his breast pocket, and then nearly fell over when he tried to stand up. He waited for the dizziness to pass, but it didn’t and, feeling defeated, he trailed off to see the doctor.