Page 51 of The Half Life of Valery K

Polonium went, as far as Valery knew, mainly to the space programme. It had a good long half-life, but it wasn’t so radioactive as to fry circuitry, so the heat that came off a chunk of it was enough to power satellites for years. Probably the cosmonaut on his stolen blue stamp knew all about polonium.

That happy middle ground – radioactive but not devastatingly – made it good for other things too.

‘We use polonium on human radiation trials,’ Valery explained. ‘The effects of injecting it into a human bloodstream are slow. Plenty of time for study. That would explain the hospital gown we found him in.’

Shenkov was taut with unease again. Valery thought he must have had a difficult time as a young officer, given that his feelings etched themselves across his eyes even now. ‘If I were injected with polonium – how long would I still be walking about for before it laid me out?’

Valery shook his head a little. ‘You’d feel sick and headachey, but you would still be able to walk for a couple of days.’

‘So if he was quick about it, he could have run away from whoever injected him.’

Valery nodded.

Shenkov studied him. It was a familiar study; he ran his eyes up and down Valery twice, scanning him for any sign that he was about to break into pieces. ‘Hadn’t you better get into a shower?’

‘I … suppose,’ Valery said, mainly to his cast. Getting into a shower was an incredible ordeal, not so much because the cast was awkward, but because the bone twanged dangerously if he twisted or moved too much. Twice in one day sounded much worse than whatever mild radiation sickness he may or may not get from faffing about with polonium-contaminated organs.

‘There’s one out here,’ Shenkov prompted him. ‘Come on.’

Beneath the shower-cubicle door, Valery could see Shenkov’s shadow pacing while he spoke.

‘What do you actually mean by a human trial, what’s it involve?’ he started the moment Valery turned on the water. The noise would be more than enough to confuse any bugs in the room, although Valery could honestly not imagine why any thinking human would ever want to bug the men’s changing room at the morgue. Surely there were things even KGB agents didn’t want to hear.

Valery took a deep slow breath, hindered by the steam. He wouldn’t have thought even a month ago that he would ever whine about hot water, but the humidity made his lungs feel spongy, and trying to think about Berlin gave him the rubbed-over-with-sandpaper feeling again. It was, of course, just the tail end of the tiny spell of radiation sickness; it buggered your ability to fight colds for ages, and it caused this sandpaper variety of depression. Knowing why didn’t help.

He had to concentrate hard on the way the water droplets ran down his good arm. ‘Well, here, the experimental goal is to investigate radiation resistance. You would identify test subjects who already exhibit a high resistance; so, anyone who seems to be functioning well in a radioactive environment, without the normal cellular problems. You would want the people who continue to stay well even after a long exposure. Then, you would take those subjects into a laboratory environment, and you’d expose them to higher and higher doses, incrementally, and record what makes them sick and what they can recover from, in comparison to an average subject.’

‘Why? What’s the point?’

‘If you could isolate how someone has radiation resistance, the next step would be to reproduce it. Give it to soldiers, emergency workers in radioactive places. It would have medical benefits too. You can shrink cancers with radiation therapy, but the therapy is sometimes more savage than the cancer. It gives you low-level radiation sickness, it’s terrible. So the … yes. The ability to make humans even a small percentage more radiation resistant would save a lot of people.’

Shenkov was quiet for a while. ‘Is there such a thing as radiation resistance? I mean, is anyone immune?’

‘I don’t know,’ Valery said. He sighed. ‘No one knows. This is brand-new science. We do know it’s not biologically impossible. Ants are immune. Perhaps it’s possible for humans to adapt over generations. It would take a long time – decades – but I don’t know, maybe that’s the plan here. This place will be irradiated for centuries. Maybe they’re hoping to find children who … are different. Or even breed them.’

‘That’s insane. That sounds like something out of a bloody comic.’

Valery’s shoulder blades twitched. He was beginning to notice that he did that when someone said something he really hated: it was slight, but anyone watching him could have been forgiven for thinking he’d been rescued from the woods as a teenager after having been brought up by small, quick birds.

‘All new science sounds insane,’ he said, and concentrated hard not to lapse into what would sound to Shenkov like hysterical urgency. ‘Thirty years ago it would have sounded insane to power cities with a few grams of burning metal. It is dangerous to assume anything like this is ridiculous. It is the very fact that so many people believe some things are unthinkably ridiculous that makes them so vulnerable to those who are willing not only to think but to do the ridiculous thing. That’s how Stalin arrested tens of millions of innocent people without provoking a revolution; it’s so absurd that people didn’t believe it was happening. Human radiation studies sound odd, but I guarantee that every nation in the world with nuclear capacity is conducting them in one form or other. Germany was running human studies in the thirties and I know because I worked on them.’ He had to screw his eyes shut. ‘I worked on them. If I were German, I’d have been condemned in the Nuremberg trials for what happened in those studies. I’d be in prison now for war crimes. It isn’t ridiculous.’

He thought he’d controlled his voice well, but beyond the cubicle door, Shenkov stopped pacing, and there was a long silence.

‘How old were you?’ Shenkov said.

‘What?’

‘In Germany.’

‘Nineteen, I was an undergrad. I worked in the same lab as …’ Valery pressed one hand over his eyes, because he wanted to cry even though he hadn’t cried for years, and dug his fingernails hard into his orbital bone ‘ … Josef fucking Mengele.’

‘It wasn’t your fault. You were doing as you were told.’

‘I could have walked out, I didn’t.’

‘You were a child,’ Shenkov said, half over him. He was just on the other side of the door now. Valery touched it, wanting to open it, and not. ‘Anyway, human trials. Tell me how it would work here.’

‘Yes. I think Resovskaya is taking data from the village generally, and taking the people who are healthiest to find out how they’re healthy. And to see how much radiation they can take before they aren’t. I even asked her if she had Pyotr, and then I believed her when she said no.’