Page 62 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘Because this whole facility could explode—’

Resovskaya interrupted gently, like she had when he was getting het up as a student. ‘You’re looking at a match head, and reasoning out a thousand tonnes of TNT.’

‘Do you realise what you’re asking?’ the director demanded, and Valery felt trapped between them. Anna was looking out the window as if she wasn’t listening. Shenkov was still holding his hand, though, and if it hadn’t been for that, Valery could feel that he would have descended into that foul panic again. ‘If we call the Minister, he’s going to ask whose fault this is. And it’s going to be all of us, believe you me. Never mind that we were told to come up with a way to cut costs in fifty-six.’

‘And,’ Resovskaya said, much quieter, ‘everything here would have to be stopped while the building work is carried out. The reactors would have to stop while a new disposal system was built, the biology fieldwork would be disrupted because draining and covering the entire marsh with concrete will have a massive impact on the ecosystem and on the water table. That would be catastrophic. If our baseline conditions change, we won’t be able to tell what has caused any changes in our specimens from now on. That will render all the biological studies here useless. The data would be full of holes. We might as well throw the last year’s work in the bin.’

‘If it has to stop, it has to stop,’ Valery said, but he could see now that he was going to lose this. Like always when she disagreed with him, a terrible instinctive shame drilled its way through Valery’s skull. It was like emotional trepanning, even though he knew he was right, would even have bet his life on it, because Anna agreed with him and Anna was in a league beyond either of them.

‘No. We know that one trench has leaked.’ Resovskaya sighed, looking as though she wished she was still his teacher and allowed to shake him. ‘I know you’re convinced you’re right, Valery, and you have an amazing numbers brain, but real life isn’t as neat as a mathematical proof. You can’t logic out a vast truth from a tiny scrap of data. It could be an anomaly. It could be something we haven’t thought of, in the fifteen seconds since we’ve noticed it.’

Beside him, Anna was still studying the marsh. She must have said everything she wanted to.

‘Elena – you don’t like me,’ Valery said, frustrated. ‘You don’t like the way I think, you think I’m an idiot. Why did you bother going to the almighty administrative effort of getting me out of Kolyma if you don’t think anything I say is worthwhile?’

For the first time since he’d known her, Resovskaya looked honestly shocked. ‘Valery. Jesus. Academically disagreeing with someone doesn’t mean you don’t rescue him from certain fucking death when you realise he needs rescuing.’

He didn’t know whether to feel better or worse.

The director leaned forward and clasped his hands on the table. ‘Comrade Kolkhanov. Say we talk to the Ministry, with just this one piece of evidence. Say that, against the odds, they take it seriously. I don’t think you understand what the Ministry is like. If anything goes wrong, all hell breaks loose. If we spend a kopek more than in the previous quarter, all hell breaks loose. If we don’t hit our plutonium production quotas, we’ll all be sacked, and none of us will work in anything more complicated than cab driving ever again. I don’t want to risk anyone’s safety, of course I bloody don’t, but we have one sample from one trench, as Dr Resovskaya says.’ He had taken on the crooning tone of somebody talking to a child who was having a tantrum. ‘And Comrade Kolkhanov, I’m sorry, but what’s more likely: that this is unexpectedly dense residue from the contamination in the Techa, or a whole new phenomenon nobody but your illustrious self has ever noticed before in the history of science? There’s no evidence this is not an isolated incident.’

‘There is no evidence that it is,’ Valery said. ‘Lack of evidence doesn’t prove a lack.’

‘Comrade, I believe you’re sticking so hard to this very shaky hypothesis because you morally object to radiation studies on living subjects,’ Dr Resovskaya said in her arid way. ‘You’re leaping on this for a chance to put a stop to it.’

‘What?’ Valery said, his voice misting. ‘No. Elena—’

‘Aha,’ the director said, looking satisfied.

‘I think we can all agree that the situation bears monitoring,’ Dr Resovskaya said. ‘I think we can also agree that what has been said in this room remains here. It’s no use sparking panic over nothing. We’ll declare the marsh off-limits for the students, to be on the safe side.’

Valery looked at Shenkov, not in any hope that Shenkov could do anything, but just to check that another human being thought that this was absurd and terrible. Shenkov, though, was watching Anna, who was still gazing out the window.

‘Let’s get on with our days, then,’ the director growled.

There was a scuffing of chairs on the carpet as the others started to get up and collect pens and papers.

Outside, one of the mud geysers popped, only about fifteen metres from the window. It made everyone jump except Valery, who was too sunken into his own head now to really perceive it until the mud was pattering on to the ground again, and except Anna. She only made a tiny satisfied sound and clapped once. She had been waiting for it, for the whole conversation.

‘You know what that is, don’t you,’ she said cheerfully.

‘Volcanic rubbish, isn’t it?’ the director muttered, clearly embarrassed to have flinched.

‘No volcanic activity out here, comrade. That’s the marsh water hitting the caesium strata.’

Resovskaya looked at Valery and Anna as if she would have liked to stuff them both with polonium. The director, who had gone a milky colour, was already on the phone, asking the operator for Moscow.

21

MinMac

On the day Valery’s cast came off, close to Christmas, someone from the government rang and told them to come to the Kremlin: Valery, Shenkov, Resovskaya, and the director and the senior engineer of the nuclear plant.

They went by military convoy, and then on a military plane, with three soldiers. None of them spoke until they were in the air, everyone too wary of everyone else. Valery stuck close to Shenkov and wished they could talk. He had no idea whether whoever they were meeting in Moscow actually believed them about the plutonium, or if this was meant to be a loud dressing-down, or if they were all going to be arrested and shot. He found himself holding his fist against the scar on his face. Shenkov eased it away. Valery hadn’t realised it was enough of a habit for anyone else to notice.

‘Why isn’t Anna here?’ he asked at last, once they were in the air. He had kept expecting her to turn up, separately for whatever reason, but she never had.

‘Because it would be unfair to orphan her kids,’ the director said palely.