Page 71 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘It was good of you to call, comrade,’ he said at last. ‘Rather brave, actually.’

The line clicked and died.

Valery supposed that was Slavsky’s way of suggesting he enjoy the next few days before he turned up dead under a hedge.

Shenkov tilted the door open. He and Anna were still just outside, exactly where Valery had left them.

‘Slavsky says we can have the concrete.’

‘Well done,’ Anna said. She seemed smaller than before.

‘Don’t say that yet. Fifty-fifty it doesn’t turn up. Right; I’d better get to the lab.’

‘Kolkhanov.’ She stopped him, only lightly, one arm out shy of his chest. They were the same height, but there was much more of her and he couldn’t have gone by if he had tried. ‘Don’t think we don’t realise that we just used our children as human shields.’

‘Don’t be so stupid,’ he said, even though an evil little voice in the back of his mind hissed that that was exactly what they’d done. He stamped on it, hard.

He smiled. ‘Anyway, I’d better go.’

Already, there was work going on at the lake bank, over near the main reactor; they were building what must have been the new waste drain, to pump the nuclear slag straight into the water. Not ideal though that was, the water would look magnificent once there was a decent amount of radioactive waste in it. It would turn the most incredible turquoise. He liked that; a lot of things went a bright colour to warn you that they were poisonous, and it was helpful of even lakes to do the same thing.

The lake surface was dancing. It was raining. Not the fine drizzle that had come down after the first snow a few weeks ago; driving, wetlands rain. It made a cosy sound on the roof, and on the plastic lids of the biowaste bins. Like always, there were diggers and building trucks out in force, at work on the new reactor building, and the workmen were hurrying to and fro with their hard-hats pulled down to shield their eyes.

Out on the marshes, the reed groves nodded, and the pools gleamed grey. Something in the forest cracked – more falling branches probably – audible even over the beep of reversing trucks and the deep, ever-present hum of the reactors.

A fountain of mud exploded just on the nearer lake shore.

‘Oop! Points for me. We’re playing more geyser bingo,’ one of the students said, and drew a little happy face on a chart.

Valery was glad they were cheerful.

‘God, already,’ Resovskaya said, doing her trick of appearing from what had been her empty office. She was looking at the digging work. ‘Our data’s going to be worthless.’

He watched for a moment and saw her afresh, properly. He had been seeing her younger film-star self all along, but she was getting old, and ill. Either this place or something else was taking its toll. Her hands looked bad, the knuckles swollen, and he was sure she was walking more awkwardly now than she had even a few weeks ago when he first arrived. She wasn’t wearing her sparkly red shoes any more, but flat ones, ugly and comfortable. She was too proud to say that she wanted her human trial done, and the results in and published, somewhere, before she died of whatever was draining her like this. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Elena, I’m sorry. But what if there really is a hundred kilograms of plutonium out there, ready to go off? They can’t add any more to it. And they certainly can’t keep digging trenches out there.’ He hesitated. ‘Whatever happens now, whatever the delays, your name is stamped on this place. You’re legendary.’

She gave him the bitterest look anyone ever had. ‘My name, and yours, will be redacted on every document that comes from here. This isn’t about my ego. This is about the work. This trial could be the difference between knowing what to do when the Americans drop a bomb on Moscow, and not. But you object to human radiation studies, so you and the sainted Anna Shenkovna, who wants desperately to get out of here and back to her cosy tenure position at the Kurchatov Institute, spun a stupid story about a bit of caesium. No?’

He took his glasses off to have something in his hands. ‘No. It isn’t a stupid story, it—’

‘—was unevidenced, and you scared the director into talking to the Ministry. Those geysers could be anything, but you pushed this caesium idea because you knew that even while Slavsky would never evacuate this place, you could at least bugger the trial enough to get it shut down. Or did that never once slither across your mind?’

‘It honestly didn’t,’ he said. ‘I didn’t work out the caesium and the geysers, Anna did, while we were at that table. We didn’t – we didn’t come up with a story and plot beforehand.’

‘Yes,’ she said drily, ‘it’s funny how I don’t believe you.’

25

The Asylum

The rain turned to snow again, and the ground froze. This time, it froze properly. The frost arrived instantly, overnight, riming everything with ice after a night that plunged down to minus eighteen degrees. It was a Sunday, and Valery was still curled up in a ball in bed, watching Albert turn his tank heater right up. On the reasoning that an octopus was the best person to know how warm or cool an octopus wanted to be, Valery had shown him how to use it and put an octopus-friendly lever on the dial, in case dripping shorted the electrics. It seemed to work, and it saved him from worrying that Albert would freeze in the night. He blinked slowly. Even his eyes were cold. Albert stayed bobbing on the surface, as near to the heater as he could safely get.

Very carefully, a lot more aware of every single exposed square centimetre of himself than he ever had been at the camp – this was the peril of relative comfort – he went to the window. Outside, everything was white. The lake was frozen. He pulled on another jumper and folded his arms tight for a moment, then gave Albert a huge portion of breakfast crab. Digestion heated you up. Albert flashed yellow and did a victory lap.

Valery wondered exactly how frozen the lake was. When he went outside to see, it was frozen perfectly; mirror-smooth, interrupted only where the bulrushes pushed up through the ice. Two of the students were out doing the same thing. One of them bounced experimentally on the edge of the ice, which didn’t even creak.

‘We found skates in the supply cupboard,’ one of them said. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think we should get those right now,’ said Valery.