Page 57 of The Half Life of Valery K

He’d half-thought they must be missing something obvious, but what followed was studious silence. Gradually, it broke into murmurs and theories between small groups. Valery stayed by himself, holding a pen above a sheet of graph paper. Just to give his hand something to do, he sketched out what they’d found again. The caesium, another seam of something else below it – something more inert, thank Christ – and then more layers still.

The phone rang. Resovskaya picked it up, but the line was so good that Valery could hear Shenkov through it.

‘When were you going to report that explosion, comrade?’

‘When we knew what it was,’ Resovskaya said. ‘It’s odd. We’re working out what it could have been now. It wasn’t anything nefarious, comrade, it’s … well. Something in the soil. Nobody has a bomb.’

Valery could nearly see him looking sceptical in front of the cautionary poster in his office that showed the KGB seal and their unofficial slogan. trust but verify. ‘Send the students who saw it to see me, please.’

Everyone else had heard too. The two students who Valery had wrenched out of the way of the explosion looked worried. Resovskaya nodded at them to do as they were told. There was an unwilling scraping of chairs.

After Valery had finished the sketch, the pen dropped in his hand and pooled an ink splodge on the corner of the page. He watched it seep into the grain of the paper, trying to let his mind go blank. The ink splodge expanded and feathered at its edges.

He sat back slowly. After a frozen few seconds, he shoved the paper pad away. The students had started a Theories column on the blackboard, mainly insane, so he added his, and underlined it. They all looked. Resovskaya frowned at it, then got up far faster than she usually did and started gathering glass retorts.

‘I think this is what’s happened.’ Valery tapped the chalk stick against the word. ‘Help us design an experiment to test it, all of you.’

As the scramble started, the two students who had been to see Shenkov came back in, looking how people usually did after they had been to see Shenkov.

‘He says he’s sending people out to see what it—’

Valery snatched up the phone. ‘Shenkov, stop being a dick, we’re not lying to you. There’s something in the ground. If you really have to send anyone out there, make sure it’s someone you don’t like, because they might explode. We’ve got an idea. I’ll come and see you when we know.’ He put the phone down before Shenkov could argue.

‘Well,’ Resovskaya said in the worried silence that followed, ‘if anyone would like to say their final goodbyes to Comrade Kolkhanov before his untimely death?’

But Shenkov didn’t come to arrest anyone. From the security office came only quiet, patient as a spider.

By mid-afternoon, they’d confirmed it, and Valery ran to Shenkov’s office with a pen and some old receipts.

‘Do you know what chromatography is?’ Valery asked as he shoved Shenkov’s door open, hoping a lot that Shenkov would not now this instant turn out to be the sort of person who had fantastically risqué office affairs. Valery had had some suspicions for a good while now, even in the face of no evidence whatsoever. It was a truth universally acknowledged that beautiful women tended despite their natural disadvantages to be virtuous, while beautiful men were invariably bastards. Shenkov might have been doing excellent work of pretending not to, but he could not have failed to notice the wake of flushed people he left behind en route between the canteen and the office every morning.

Shenkov shook his head and sat back with forced poise as Valery rearranged the desk to make a clear space, and requisition a glass of water. Fortunately he did not have to rearrange around a flushed person.

‘No. What?’

‘Right, so, this is ordinary paper. Blob of ink near the top here. Wind it around the pen to make it hold, balance the pen over this glass, which has just enough water in it to touch the end of the paper. We’re going to leave that there and in a minute it will – well, you’ll see.’

‘Why is this happening?’ Shenkov asked, sounding strained.

‘I’m telling you. What we found in the soil, what caused that explosion, it’s caesium; and other things. Things that couldn’t be there naturally in the quantities we found them. They’re all stacked on top of each other in layers.’

‘If they aren’t naturally occurring then how did they get there?’

‘Exactly. Do you know how the nuclear reactors dispose of their waste? And where?’

‘I don’t, but underground. Why is it important? Oh, your thing’s doing something.’

Valery looked. The ink from the blob at the top of the paper strip was bleeding down, sucked in by the damp part of the paper. It was black, and it fanned out in a good few dull colours, grey and blue, and an unattractive brown. ‘Yes. So that’s chromatography; the separation of a mixture on a new medium. In this case the mixture is black ink, which is made up of several colours. Because they have different densities, they separate out at different levels, you see?’

‘Like your … layers in the soil.’

‘Yes. This is what happened in the ground. The soil is the paper. The ink is nuclear waste. The layers in the soil, they’re all the elements present in nuclear waste, and the soil has separated them out according to density. Lightest at the top, heaviest below. All the elements will be more or less radioactive, but the main problem is that a lot of them – I mean caesium right down to plutonium – explode in water.’

Shenkov was shaking his head. ‘Sorry, why would there be plutonium in nuclear waste? I thought the whole point of a military reactor was to filter it out, for fuel for bombs.’

‘It is, but our reactors only get about eighty per cent of it. It isn’t a very efficient process. The other twenty per cent gets mixed in with the waste products. So I think the plant has been burying its waste in trenches. We need to know where those are now.’ He hesitated, because a tight feeling was growing low in his chest, but he couldn’t track why. Traces of plutonium wouldn’t hurt anyone. Its radioactivity could be blocked with a sheet of paper, never mind three metres of soil. A tiny bit of it exploding in some water wasn’t going to do much either unless it aerosolised and someone breathed it in. ‘I think if we’re not careful, someone’s going to dig somewhere they shouldn’t and we’ll have more randomly exploding patches of marshland.’

‘Yes,’ Shenkov said heavily. ‘Yes, okay.’ He picked up the telephone and dialled an interior line. ‘Anna. Sorry to bother you, but I’m coming across with Valery Kolkhanov from the research centre. He needs to talk to you about nuclear waste. Can you call down to the gate and let us in? Thanks.’