Page 5 of The Half Life of Valery K

No; but you didn’t give radiation-test subjects their own taxi from the airport.

Did you?

He didn’t know how the world worked any more. He’d been out of it for too long. He felt like he might come apart at the seams. People were glued together with logic a lot more than they were glued with the strong nuclear force, and not one atom of any of this made sense.

The taxi was running slowly by the lake shore. The lake itself was black and still. In the middle, some kind of chimney or flue stretched up from the water like a monstrous submarine periscope. There was something wrong about the lake, something odd and dead, and he had to examine it for a clear minute before he could place what it was. A whole section of the nearer half was a lighter colour. It wasn’t clouds reflecting on the water; it was that the water was only about a metre deep. Under it was a swathe of solid concrete.

‘We’re here,’ the driver said triumphantly. ‘See you round.’

Valery got out, nearly too weak to stand as the car drove away.

At first, he only saw the closest building. It was long and rectangular, and at one end there was a high tower where he could make out washing lines in some of the windows. The whole lot was painted yellow, which couldn’t have suited the gloom less. He couldn’t tell if it was a prison or not. Beyond it, on a great stretch of land full of diggers and construction supplies, the ground nothing but bare earth and sand, there was another set of buildings, with more fences and gates. Five of them, square, with cooling towers and outbuildings that thrummed, even from here, pipes plunging underground and heavy wheel-locks exposed to the weather. Without meaning to, he glanced at the lake. Wide, cold, unpopulated; he was damned if those buildings didn’t house nuclear reactors.

Even as he watched, a crane swung a concrete block into place on a new building. It looked like it was going to be just like the other five. Christ, six reactors; he’d never seen so many. Six nuclear reactors and a whole forest close by that was plainly suffering radiation damage – there must have been some kind of accident.

But he couldn’t see any zeks on the building site. Just people in proper work clothes and fluorescent jackets, and hard-hats. Whatever this place was, it wasn’t in the middle of a clean-up operation, and they weren’t using prison labour. You didn’t get a jacket and a hard-hat if you were on prison labour.

It began to rain, properly. The sound of it on the concrete ground was like stars glittering. Rain, real rain; all the way above zero degrees. Yes, of course it was. It was only October. He had managed to forget that winter wasn’t six months long everywhere.

Beyond the construction site was the vast shining stretch of marsh. It was so flat that the horizon seemed much further away than it should have, the sky a grey vault. Somewhere over the wetlands, a blast of mud spurted up about ten metres into the air; there must have been geysers out here.

He should run away.

Only, there was nowhere to run to. They had just come in through the hefty fence around the facility. He had never been here before. He had no idea where to go. Serious people, with the right kind of mind, didn’t let that kind of thing bother them. He had seen men escape the gulag before. They were straightforward. They just walked off the second the opportunity presented itself, some of them hadn’t been shot, and he’d never seen them again. Maybe they’d lived.

‘Dr Kolkhanov?’ A woman in a white cap was standing at the doors. ‘Come inside, it’s cold.’

Doctor; that was the second time someone today had called him doctor. Nobody called zeks anything but a number. He had the exact opposite of foreboding; a sort of creeping hope, seeping through his chest. The KGB agent had just left him, the driver had just left him. No one was behaving like he was a security risk.

‘Today,’ the woman in the cap prompted him.

He followed her through the glass doors. They were heavy and they banged shut right behind him. Inside was a broad, pale hallway lined with framed portraits (Lenin, Stalin, Marx) and cork noticeboards with little adverts pinned on them – the nearest had one for a set of political lectures, and someone’s lost hat. So definitely not a prison. They wouldn’t have glass or drawing pins at a prison. He couldn’t convince himself, though. Maybe this was just an administration block.

The woman was looking at him as if she disapproved. ‘Wait here, and Comrade Shenkov will come for you shortly.’

Valery wanted to say, I’ve got no idea what’s going on and I’d be obliged if you’d tell me before I have a nervous attack and collapse, but it seemed like too much immediately after hello.

He sat down on a plastic chair to wait. Everything was silent. After a few minutes, he had to pull open his collar and yank off his tie, and tell himself firmly that everything was fine.

What was important to notice, the indefatigable over-bright voice in his head said, was that this wasn’t like the Lubyanka at all. The Lubyanka was actually rather a nice building, with parquet floors in the main hall and carpets in all the corridors. You couldn’t go around linking two places just because they both happened to be sepulchrally quiet. He seriously doubted that this place was silent by law. Nobody was going to lean in and tell you to shut up if you whispered.

As clear as though it were happening right now, with no echo whatever despite the long passageway of the years, he heard someone knocking on the other side of the wall just next to him. Tap tap, tap-tap-tap.

He snapped his fingers so he could show his brain the difference between remembered sound and real sound. It helped. The lady in the white cap looked at him like he was insane. He nearly admitted that he probably was. He still dreamed in the Lubyanka knock code.

He’d hoped Shenkov would be a scientist, but the man who came out from a door down the hall to fetch him wore a tailored dark suit and good shoes. KGB, he had to be; nobody else was ever so polished.

‘Are you Dr Kolkhanov?’ Shenkov said, entirely polite, but looking a lot like he’d hoped for someone different. Valery could see why. Shenkov was tall and powerful, probably about Valery’s age, but with the grace of somebody who considered failure to keep fit a betrayal of the Soviet duty of labour. Being little and ill was, Valery suspected, hardly better than mooning the Kremlin.

‘Um – yes.’

Shenkov didn’t actually say outstanding, but he managed to clang it on to the floor like an anvil anyway.

‘I’m Konstantin Shenkov, I’m the head of security.’ He had an ice-shard of an accent that Valery couldn’t place, and he brought with him a clear impression of flint; but it might only have been because of his hair, which was just that colour.

Valery remembered what you were supposed to do next, and stood up to shake his hand. Shenkov was warm.

‘Welcome to City 40. This place is called the Lighthouse. It is a radioecological research facility, and over the road is the refinery which supplies most of the plutonium in the Soviet Union.’