Page 8 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘Oh, hello,’ he said. And then something in the back of his mind lit up and said: the Biophysics Institute. It sounded boring, but it was one of the most secret institutions in Moscow. ‘The Institute; are you even allowed to tell me that?’

She laughed, and he laughed too, because she had a brilliant laugh, and brilliant teeth; they were crooked, a child’s teeth, but they suited her, and they took the edge off the worry of meeting a person from a secret institute. ‘They let you boast. Mind if I sit with you before the children drive me completely insane? Good, thank you,’ she said, effusive with exhaustion. He could see what she meant about children. None of the students could have been more than twenty years old.

It wouldn’t last; people in isolated labs always rushed to make friends and then calmed down and regretted it later, but all the same, Valery liked her a lot for bothering.

‘I’m Ilenko, by the way.’ She nodded at the students. ‘I’m on mum duty.’

‘I doubt that’s true,’ he offered, awkward. He never knew what to say when women pointed out that they were women and that it was, generally, awful. There was a knee-jerk human instinct to say it couldn’t be as bad as all that, like he would have to anyone who was feeling blue, but it was one of those instances where it really was awful, and trying to say it wasn’t was somewhere on the spectrum between stupid and criminal.

Dr Resovskaya clipped in, red shoes shining. Valery couldn’t make them out perfectly, but he thought they might even have sparkly straps. Ilenko nudged him and pointed indignantly at her own shoes, which were the white, flat kind that nurses wore. He grinned.

Live long enough in an unsafe place, and you got used to it. Valery had become so used to the camp that he’d lost any real awareness that it was unsafe. A fourteen-hour labour shift was normal; infection was normal; hunger was normal; the dirty-fingernail-scratching feeling on the back of his neck, the one that reminded him that there were bigger, angrier, more violent men around him all the time, was normal. And now it was gone. Safety was coming up through the floor, glowing from the students, from Ilenko, from Dr Resovskaya at the front.

‘Right, everyone,’ Dr Resovskaya called from by the projector. ‘Listen up or you’ll be seeing a lot more of the KGB than you want.’

Dr Resovskaya started with a slide that showed a map of the whole Kyshtym area. It was nearly three thousand square kilometres around the city and its lake, and the territory was divided into rough bands with radiation readings noted on. They weren’t neat, and in some of the bands where the radiation was generally less, there were patches of concentration that represented deep lakes connected by the water system to this one.

‘Welcome to the Lighthouse, everyone. My name is Elena Resovskaya, I’ll be overseeing your research here. Now: the recruitment process for this job was very secretive, yes?’

It wasn’t only Valery who laughed. The students did as well.

‘I shall explain. New researchers rotate into this institute around this time every year because, as you’ve noticed, this whole district is irradiated, and all of you will be working daily with irradiated materials. We don’t want anyone to get too high a dose. So, we move people in and out a lot. For most of you, this placement will last for nine months, and then you’ll go back to your doctoral studies.

‘You are all here,’ Dr Resovskaya continued over the fluttery sound of the projector’s fan, ‘to study the effects of radiation on an ecosystem. This is an extraordinary opportunity; nowhere else in the world is it possible. The overarching aim of this facility is to discover which species develop radiation resistance, which do not, and how that affects all the others.’

There was a dazed silence.

An irradiated ecosystem.

If Valery had been asked to fill out a form describing what heaven looked like, whatever he wrote would have been pretty damn close to this. It was the bane of any biologist working with radiation; you could only ever work in extremely controlled conditions, in a lab, or worse, a glass box in a lab. You waved some uranium at a rabbit, you waved it for longer at another rabbit, and so forth, and then you wrote down what happened, bored to extinction with the knowledge that all those results would say was how radiation affected rabbits in labs. Yes, you could make guesses about other things, but they were only guesses. You couldn’t tell how those rabbits would behave in a natural environment. You couldn’t tell how far-reaching the effects of the radiation would be.

Fifteen minutes ago he’d still been terrified.

The massive swing of feeling was already starting to give him a headache. It was coiling round his temples. He slid down in the chair to enjoy it. Ilenko offered him a mint humbug from a paper packet. He took one carefully but didn’t open it, worried about crackling the plastic wrapper, but Ilenko crackled away, looking gleeful.

‘Now,’ Dr Resovskaya was saying, ‘that necessitates working in a somewhat radioactive environment, but hold in the hysterics.’ She stepped away from the map so they could see properly. The students giggled.

‘The radiation in the soil is measured carefully. Immediately by this lake, it’s high; but you need not worry about that because, as you can see, there’s damn all here for you to work on.’ She motioned outside the big window. Part of the view was the black lake and sprawl of the marshes, but part of it was the rest of the research complex, where the ground was bare, and ploughed through with sand that bore heavy machine tracks. ‘In the areas where you’re going to be walking about, the radiation is never going to be more than five millicuries per square metre. I know not all of you are used to thinking in curies and millicuries, but essentially what that means is that even if you sat on that ground for four hours a day every day, the total radiation you absorbed from it after a year would still be less than the background radiation you get from cosmic rays. Comrade Kolkhanov there is our new resident number genius; am I correct?’

Valery nodded. He had been working it out while she spoke. He was surprised by how readily the figures swam through his head. Assume an average person weighed about a hundred kilograms (given all the cheese), assume you’d only absorb about thirty per cent of the radiation dose … ‘Ten times less,’ he said.

‘Scary, isn’t he?’ Resovskaya said to the students, who laughed. ‘I had to put up with that for a whole year once.’

Valery smiled too, but he felt puzzled. That kind of radiation wouldn’t hurt anything. It certainly didn’t murder forests.

‘You’ll all get a copy of this map,’ Resovskaya was saying, ‘so you’ll always know which zone you’re in. As you probably saw on your way here, the roads and buildings in town are washed down once weekly to get rid of any contamination, and readings inside all the accommodation blocks are wholly within a normal range.

‘I imagine you know this, but I can’t say this enough: you will not get even mild radiation sickness unless you are exposed to a hundred roentgen or more in one dose. You are safe.’

She wrote on the blackboard beside the projector image in capital chalk letters: 100 roentgen=slightly annoying. She surrounded it with little stars and sparkles, and everyone laughed again.

Someone raised a hand. ‘Will we be issued with dosimeters?’

Dr Resovskaya smiled. When she did that, you could see what she had used to look like; a smoky, sultry film star. She carried herself as if she still looked like that. Valery loved her for it. No despair here; no slouching.

‘No. Dosimeters are bloody expensive, and they won’t tell you anything that this map doesn’t already. That’s all been done for you. Relax, enjoy your fieldwork. What we do always say is to limit your outdoor time within a five-hundred-metre radius of this facility to about half an hour a day, just to be on the safe side. We’ll give you stopwatches. Putting laundry out is good fun on a timer, I tell you.’

More giggles.