Page 70 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘It’s cost-effective.’

‘It is not cost-effective if six nuclear reactors explode.’

‘I’ll just open the window and point you both towards Moscow, shall I?’ Shenkov said, and unlike Anna, the wreckage of whatever argument they’d just had was still raw in his voice. He pushed the door shut.

Anna ignored him. ‘We need to call the Kremlin and tell them to send cement like they agreed in the first place,’ she said to Valery. ‘I wanted to wait for you; they’ve spoken to you already, they’re not going to take a random call from me.’

Valery put the kettle on, half to have an excuse to stay over the other end of the room from them. Even disagreeing, they were too united a front, too much an us against a you. Tribunal and criminal. ‘If Moscow have decided they don’t care if they lose six reactors and a hundred thousand people, then they don’t care. We’ve spoken to Slavsky; there are no more facts to hand over.’

Shenkov was much too restrained to wave at Valery and yell, yes, that; he was standing very still, his hands by his sides, but he took a breath as though he wanted to speak, and inclined towards Valery, just a few centimetres, before he caught himself.

‘No,’ said Anna, ‘they assuredly care if they lose six reactors. Some idiot in cost analysis or whatever has down-played it, though, and now Slavsky has got it into his thick skull that this isn’t urgent.’

Valery measured out coffee. It felt strange to do it for three people. ‘I don’t think it was some idiot. It could have been Elena Resovskaya.’

Anna looked confused. It was the first time he had seen her do that. ‘I don’t understand why she’s so against it. All her studies are in the forest. Unless she’s doing a study on the effect of exploding mud on the local heron population, I don’t see how fixing this will affect anything she does.’

‘It’s the water table,’ Valery explained. ‘The water from these lakes feeds everything round here for a hundred kilometres, but if they start damming off parts to keep the marsh drained, then the conditions will change.’

‘So we should all explode quietly and without fuss?’

‘She doesn’t think we will. It came from me and I’ve a history of disapproving of the studies she works on. I think she thinks I’m … doing some moral peacocking.’

‘The wonderful thing about telephones,’ she said drily, ‘is that we can bypass all that if we just call Slavsky.’

‘Okay. I’ll call him with you.’

‘Kolkhanov!’ Shenkov said. He went quieter with urgency, not louder; he was so quiet now that Valery had to come nearer to hear him. ‘None of us can do that. If we start calling Moscow sounding angry, someone’s going to accuse us of criticising the Ministry. It’s treason. We’ll all be shot.’

‘A hundred thousand people live here,’ Anna said, incredulous. ‘It would be worth getting shot.’

‘No, it wouldn’t, because you’d be dead and they would still be sending sand,’ Shenkov said. He shook his head once, like someone had flicked boiling water at him. ‘Losing six reactors and a hundred thousand people isn’t what bothers the Ministry. What bothers them is that the West might find out. Any weakness, anything, that gets out and towards the CIA, that’s worse. They’re not wrong either. They know that our only strength is in how strong we seem. If it preserves that illusion, then the loss of six reactors is worth it. Reactors can be rebuilt. The illusion can’t be. An explosion happens, the CIA notice, fine: it’s weapons testing, look what we can do. Great. Word gets out that the Ministry is acting to make safe something the reactor staff have screwed up so terribly that it could cause a massive accident on a scale never seen before: that’s a problem. That’s evidence of weakness in a way the blast itself isn’t. No?’

Anna glanced at Valery. ‘We have to try.’

‘Anna – we have four children, please swear to me you’re not going to call Moscow—’

‘Don’t be so bloody American,’ she said sharply, and it was the first time she had really sounded angry. Valery wished he could be somewhere else. ‘The children would survive without me, they’re not idiots. They would not, however, survive a thermonuclear blast encompassing six reactors built less than a kilometre away from where they live.’

‘Anna, you can’t call anyone, you can’t,’ Shenkov said. His voice was shattering now. ‘What if you’re wrong? What if it’s all fine, what if it’s just what Dr Resovskaya thinks? You’ll have died for nothing—’

‘We’re not wrong. Labour before family, Kostya, it’s who we are,’ she said, this time with real ire. She turned to him like a sniper. ‘Or do you want it to be God in heaven and father in the house?’

Shenkov looked utterly helpless. If she had shot him in the chest, it would have been better. Valery didn’t know very much about Shenkov’s father but even with the tiny snippet he did know, he could see that the idea of becoming that man was Shenkov’s own private hell vision.

‘What are you doing?’ Shenkov said to Valery, who had picked up the phone.

‘Calling the Ministry,’ Valery said. He looked between them. He couldn’t stand hearing them argue any more, and it was giving him the ghost pain of the cattle prod, but he didn’t know any magic tricks for this one. ‘What? You’re both right. Someone needs to call, and whoever calls might get shot. And I’m sorry to contradict noble social ideals with biochemistry, but saying you should forget about your kids is like trying to argue that you shouldn’t have arms.’

They both looked ashamed.

‘Get out, both of you. Go and talk to someone who’ll remember talking to you. And if anyone asks, I snuck in here and used your phone without permission.’ They still weren’t moving. ‘You’d have both saved a lot of time, by the way, if you’d rung me up and said, Valery, you don’t have kids, make this call for us.’

‘We’re not nominating you to risk your life just because you happen not to have children,’ Anna said, her voice rising. ‘That’s foul, Kolkhanov, worth isn’t conferred on a person according to whether or not they have children. You—’

‘It is conferred that way. Don’t,’ he added to Shenkov, who had taken a step towards him. ‘Go on, both of you, out. I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.’

It was, after all that, a straightforward phone call. He waited on hold for a minute or so for Slavsky, who, when he did answer, was pleasant. He did question whether the concrete really was necessary, and then whether they could make their own concrete with the sand supplies at City 40, but hummed in agreement when Valery pointed out that silica was only one of seven key ingredients in concrete, and that without the sulphur and magnesium, the tensile strength would be damn all, the whole lot would crack and the water problem would be the same as ever. Asphalt or tarmac would be fine too. The equivalent of a large car park. And engineers to drain the marsh. They couldn’t pour concrete on soaking ground. Slavsky agreed.