Page 61 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘Invigorated,’ Anna said, taking a chair beside Valery.

‘It’s all utterly hysterical. I’d think better of you, Elena,’ the director snapped, but he did sit down, looking as though he would have preferred it were not by Shenkov. Shenkov watched him without hostility, but his poise became even more immaculate than usual, and the contrast between them was suddenly so marked that it looked like a Western cartoon about the Soviet hope for society versus the sad fact; on the one hand, a portrait of socialist realism with a bewitching soldier, and on the other, actual realism.

The senior engineer ghosted into a chair too, looking like a walking toothache. He was a salt-and-pepper man, ugly in the way people become when they have been indefinably ill for a long time. He was too pale, his face too lined for the age that he was, and though he kept his eyes lowered as he sat down, Valery caught the way that they flickered strangely; very rapid left to right, as if he were asleep, or watching the land go by from a speeding car. As the director began to rail again, the engineer pressed both thin hands over his mouth and yawned.

‘Boring you, am I, Polotov?’ the director snarled.

Polotov stiffened, scared.

Valery sat back. It was called asthenia, that sourceless fatigue, and he had seen the eye-flicker before too, but never outside a laboratory. It was from chronic radiation sickness.

‘As Polotov will tell you if he can be bothered to stir himself,’ the director said to all of them, ‘all the waste from our plant is disposed of safely. Concrete-lined trenches, in reinforced tanks. Whatever the hell it is you’ve found in the ground, it isn’t from us. Trace amounts from the small volume dumped into the Techa during the experimental contamination, it has to be.’

Experimental contamination; not explosion of apocalyptic proportions. The man sounded like he had been lying so fluently for so long that the truth was beginning to slip his mind.

‘It could well be that,’ Resovskaya said, nodding. ‘This marsh is fed by the Techa. About two million curies’ worth of radioactive material has been pumped into it over the last seven or eight years; some of that water will have brought sediment of those radioactive elements into the soil.’

‘Two million curies is nothing,’ the director put in. ‘Three hundred million curies are released per kiloton of fission bomb, and the one dropped on Nagasaki was twenty kilotons. Six thousand million curies. And Nagasaki is not drenched in radiation sickness and hysteria, so.’

Valery had to take a deep breath. ‘That’s like saying you can’t drown in a lake because some people were once shipwrecked in the Pacific. And this is not radioactive sediment from the contamination in the Techa. There’s too much.’ He looked at Anna, willing her to explain how it could have got out if there were waste tanks. She hadn’t mentioned those before.

She was, thank God, already nodding. ‘If the comrade director remembers,’ she said, ‘the containment-tanks strategy was abandoned in nineteen fifty-six. We used to use tanks, with cooling systems. But when one of the cooling systems broke down, the cost of replacing it was estimated very high, and the physicists were asked to reassess whether it was necessary.’

‘And you reported that it was not,’ the director said, raising his voice. ‘Your signature is on that document, Shenkovna!’

‘Yes, it is, because you said we’d all be arrested if we didn’t fiddle the figures to show that it was safe,’ she said mildly.

‘How dare you!’

‘Everyone at this table must be very clear about what happened. Waste at this plant is liquid. It is treated with ammonium nitrate to lessen its radioactivity. Ammonium nitrate, however, degrades and spontaneously combusts with significant force if allowed to. It needs a cooling system. But the budget wouldn’t allow for it, so the cooling system was not replaced. The safety report that said it need not be replaced was then interpreted by the Ministry as a reason not to invest in any further containment tanks at all after the incident in fifty-seven, which destroyed all the extant ones. Liquid waste was then dumped straight into the concrete trenches, and covered over with earth. It has been for six years.’

‘Ammonium nitrate,’ Valery echoed. ‘That explains what happened in fifty-seven, doesn’t it? An ammonium nitrate explosion set off a chain reaction and …’

‘Nothing happened in fifty-seven!’ the director bellowed at him.

It was a absurd thing to do, shout like that. Valery should have been able to laugh at him. But instead all Valery could do was clench his hands in his lap as ghost electric pain shot up and down his ribs, and his whole chest wrenched tight. His heart sped again and, with a distant horror, he wondered if he was going to have yet another of those humiliating attacks right here at this table, in front of all of them. Blood shot away from his hands as fast as the sea receding before a tsunami. It left him icy, waiting for the wave.

Under the table, Shenkov caught his hand and gripped it hard. He was warm.

‘So you’ve been dumping straight into trenches,’ Resovskaya summarised, as though nothing had happened. ‘You’ve brought a map of the locations of the waste trenches?’

‘No. There is no map.’

‘What?’

The director huffed as if it was a stupid idea. ‘It’s a matter of national security. We don’t want to leave around a guide as to where to find exhausted nuclear fuel. People would steal it.’

‘We need to talk to the Ministry,’ Valery said, because he had had a lot more than enough. ‘This whole marsh needs to be drained and covered in concrete. However it got there and whatever happened in fifty-seven, we have a significant layer of plutonium in the soil now, and when water reaches it, it will explode.’

‘No – no,’ said Resovskaya, laughing a little. ‘Hold your horses, Valery. We don’t know that we have a significant layer. We know we have it in one particular place, from one trench. For all we know, the others are fine.’

Valery couldn’t believe what she’d said at first. He had to listen to the memory again before he was sure he had understood properly. ‘How could they be?’

‘It’s been six years,’ she said. ‘We’ve seen no reaction before. It’s possible that, mostly, the trenches are deep enough that the groundwater isn’t penetrating. Without any further evidence, all we have here is a tiny anomaly.’

Valery nearly choked on that. ‘Further evidence? We can’t take core samples, and we can’t dig. If we hit the plutonium layer and introduce water, we could set off a thermonuclear reaction. There’s … no safe way to prove what’s down there.’

‘If we have no proof then why are we talking?’ the director said triumphantly.