Page 56 of The Half Life of Valery K

City 40, 1963

The first snow whirled down into City 40 in the middle of November, and the great flat marshland around the black lake turned grey. Then, crackling with long needles of ice, the deep pools froze, and the grey turned to white. At night, Valery kept a window propped open, because the whole space between the Lighthouse complex and the forest was loud with the bangs and splits of dead branches falling as the cold snapped the last few fibres that had held them to their trees. They sounded like gunshots, but some background noise was better than silence.

He had stayed late at the lab on the first Monday after the tattoos disaster, but Shenkov had not come to fetch him. Valery could only interpret that as having had his standing invitation to the apartment on the ninth floor revoked.

In his own room, he kept jolting awake in the night, certain that he was back at the camp and that the Lighthouse had been a dream. After a week of doing that, what should have been an ordinary sense of aloneness was starting to feel like an entity all of its own, hunched rasping in the corner.

Once or twice, he nearly went down to the KGB office to tell Shenkov to just call the administrator at Kolyma if he wanted, because the administrator would explain about the bomb, but he, Valery, couldn’t, in the same way he couldn’t breathe carbon dioxide.

It was amazing how debilitating the effect of not sleeping was. He could only think in straight lines in the privacy of his own head; trying to explain anything to the students became fantastically difficult, harder than it had been when he was hungry all the time at the camp. He pushed through, but he started to feel the edges of his mind misting again. Whenever he saw Shenkov at a distance in the cafeteria, his heart lurched, full of reproach to whatever stupid part of his brain had decided that letting him see the bloody tattoos had been a good idea.

Excruciating now was the morning trip down to the KGB offices to get the prisoner book signed. He did all right at first, going to the front desk, but then Shenkov was there on the third day.

‘Polonium,’ was all he said. ‘Yes or no?’

Valery had to look down at the row of stamps in the prisoner book. Things blurred at the edges of his glasses where the thickness of the lenses changed. On his kitchen table, the report about the polonium in Sasha’s blood sat untouched. He stood over it for minutes every morning, and every morning he decided to pick it up and take it to Shenkov. Every morning, as he put his hand on it, his mind conjured something so strong it didn’t feel like imagination but premonition. There was a grey corridor, lined with doors, and smelling of disinfectant and badly washed people. There were little paper cups that rattled with Thorazine pills, designed to do nothing but clinically lobotomise you. There was the feeling of the very last of his mind fizzing away to nothing.

If he handed the report over, Shenkov would have a choice. He could save a child and smash a radiation trial to save other children. Or he could do nothing, and save a tattooed murderer.

‘It wasn’t,’ Valery said. ‘I made a mistake, comrade. Just a natural toxin in the water that caused the same kind of effect.’

Shenkov had put a diamond-tipped drill into his stare. ‘What did Resovskaya say to you? Did she threaten you?’

‘It was just an accident. I’ve never seen anything like it before, it …’ He couldn’t keep making things up. ‘I can’t give you anything. I’m sorry.’

Valery would have liked to be taken outside and shot then. Horribly, Shenkov was looking at him like he had when Valery’s arm snapped.

The snow had settled, but the ground had not frozen yet when the incinerator broke. It was something complicated, and within a couple of days, dead field specimens mounted up in the lab. Everyone knew what they were going to have to do, but everyone was too cold already to want to go out and dig in the snow. In the end, Valery reasoned that he was definitely the one who knew most about hard labour and was therefore least put off by it, so he took a shovel out to the lake edge and started to dig in a place with relatively firm, unmarshy ground, close to a pair of nesting cranes, who seemed not to mind.

He was surprised when the students came out in rounds of two or three to help, huddled in down coats and fluffy hats. They all seemed disproportionately impressed that he hadn’t ordered any of them to do it for him. It was nice to listen to them talk – they were excited about being allowed to move on to birds from fish soon, and still anxious about the possibly baldness-inducing snow.

‘Um, comrade,’ one of the students said, sounding puzzled. ‘What are these stripy bits in the soil?’

Valery slipped past other people digging to see. The boy was at the lakeside end of the trench, leaning against his shovel now. When he saw Valery, he tapped it against two very clear stripes, right at the base of their trench. One was rusty, and one was nearly silver, slim. Valery knelt down slowly. The silver had a dull gleam, but even as they watched, it was turning black.

‘Oop, sorry,’ someone said as they walked too close to the edge and displaced some snow on them.

It slid down the strange stripes in the soil, which fizzed just long enough for Valery to catch the nearest two students and drag them bodily behind him. Then it exploded.

Fifteen minutes later, the students were all safely inside. Valery had brushed the stray hunks of soil and soft, strange, discoloured metal from his clothes, and a few grains of it from a graze on his cheek. He went back out with Dr Resovskaya to stand at the edge of the trench, holding the original blueprints of the nuclear plant between them. Nowhere anywhere along the lake shore was anything to indicate any digging work, buildings, nothing.

‘And we’re sure that’s caesium?’ Dr Resovskaya said at last. ‘The explosion wasn’t trapped marsh gas, or …’

Valery, who had brought out a cup of coffee, slung the coffee at the silver-black strip at the base of the trench. Where the liquid hit it, it went off with a bang. Dr Resovskaya held up the plans like an umbrella to shield them from the ensuing rain of soil and caesium bits.

‘We’re sure it’s caesium,’ she murmured, and touched the back of her own head. ‘What the hell is caesium doing just floating about in the bloody topsoil?’

Valery was at a loss too. He’d never seen anything like it. Very tentatively, he picked up a spade and eased more soil away to see further down. There were more layers in it, distinct bands. There must have been at least six. Part of him wanted to dig to see how far it went and what was at the bottom, and another pointed out how stupid that would be.

‘What is that?’ he said. ‘Caesium and – what?’

‘I have … absolutely no idea,’ Resovskaya said, and for the first time since he had arrived, Valery believed her without reservation.

The students were still buzzing when they came back in. Given that seven minds were better than one extremely dodgy and recently starved one, Valery put the problem to them, and drew it out on the blackboard at the end of the lab so they could all check and draw on it too if they liked.

‘We know this doesn’t occur naturally. Caesium has to be extracted from pollucite ore, of which there are no geological strata for a thousand kilometres around us. Anyone who can tell me how we got a perfect seam of raw caesium just lying around in marshland gets a bottle of Stolichnaya.’

‘Two,’ Resovskaya said.