Page 44 of The Half Life of Valery K

Dr Resovskaya reappeared late, after dinner, after the students had gone for the night. He didn’t see her come in; she just materialised in her office, the anglepoise lamp on and pointing interestedly at a stack of files. That was quite a magic act. There was no other way into her office except the little back door, which just led straight outside behind the bins, and if she knew about the radiation then she hadn’t been wandering around out there. He tapped on the door. She smiled.

‘Valery. The doctor said you were sick.’

‘Yes, radiation sickness,’ he said, because he couldn’t think of any other way to do this than frankness. ‘Only mild.’

Her expression twisted from sympathy into indignation. ‘How did you get it?’

‘I was outside, near the perimeter fence,’ he said. ‘I’ve almost no immune system at the moment, so it got me sooner than it should have.’

‘What were you doing near the … ?’

‘Could I sit down?’

She nodded at the chair.

He sat. ‘I stumbled over your village.’

Immediately she looked sharper. ‘What do you mean, my village?’

It needled that her instinct was to pretend not to know even when he’d caught her. ‘The village of people who moved back into the exclusion zone, the one the KGB doesn’t know about. You’ve been taking bone samples.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous—’

‘No – no, no.’ She was scared, that was all. Not calling him stupid. ‘Obviously there’s a human study here. I thought it was odd that there wasn’t, when I arrived.’ He smiled a little. ‘It’s just that they’ve lost a child. Pyotr. They’re out in the woods looking for him, they’re going to get sick if they stray too near here. You haven’t got him for tests or anything like that, have you?’

‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘No. That’s disturbing. That’s the second, recently, is it? They had another man missing, Sasha, and he’s turned up dead. I heard you found him.’

‘I did.’

‘You’re rather good at finding things,’ she murmured.

‘Accidentally.’

‘I’d believe that once, but twice is a bit much. Valery … you do understand, don’t you, why the radiation levels are secret? They’re much higher than we can say, but if people in town knew that, there’d be chaos. Even if people didn’t try to leave, the restitution funds alone would be astronomical.’

‘Of course I understand.’

Her eyes went right down him and right up twice. He had no idea how she could hold a gaze for that long. ‘Why are you so worried about this boy Pyotr?’ she asked.

‘Because someone from the village came to fetch me, to see if I’d help. And he’s ten. One night on the soil where I was, he’ll be too sick to move, I – why aren’t you worried?’

‘Because when your village is in an irradiated territory, children who wander off into a more contaminated band are likely to succumb. This won’t have been the first time, Valery.’

‘No, I can see that,’ he said, because he was starting to feel tired of being spoken down to. ‘But they haven’t chosen to be here. There’s famine beyond the exclusion zone, and when they were cleared out in the first place they weren’t given any money or anywhere to stay. Irradiated territory was better than famine, that wasn’t a choice, and now their kids are going missing – we should be helping them.’

‘I do, as much as I can. I can’t do anything about famine or lack of restitution funds. We have a human population living in an irradiated environment … it would be silly not to monitor them,’ she said gently. ‘Moscow has okayed the project. We need human results, more than any others.’

‘They’re dying.’

‘Yes. And we need to know how, and how quickly, because one day, probably soon, the Americans will find a way to do that to a whole city full of people, not just a village. We have to know what will be needed. You know that – and God, Valery, you know that most of this science … doesn’t exist yet. We’re clawing information from studies like this one.’

Valery had to dig his fingernails into the arm of the chair. ‘I didn’t mean that, I mean their kids are dying in the woods that we irradiated and which we now lie about to try and convince everyone there is not an area that gives off over eight roentgen per hour—’

‘Eight roentgen per – how are you arriving at these figures, there are no dosimeters available to—’

‘Please. We could tell Shenkov that they’re there, but to leave them alone. The best way to find Pyotr will be to ask the KGB to help. They’ve got the manpower, cars …’

Resovskaya was shaking her head. ‘Unless you can think of a way to guarantee that Shenkov will not decide that his orders are more important than our orders, no. He’s been told from day one to clear anyone he finds out of the exclusion zone. If he decides to throw them out, that’s all our human data wrecked. And before you say anything about prioritising our data over this boy’s life – this data will save the lives of many, many children in years to come, so think extremely carefully.’