Page 80 of The Half Life of Valery K

Shenkov had seemed impossibly, desperately fragile this morning. Standing, it was difficult to notice anything about him except how tall he was, solid muscle and poise, but lying down, his collarbones were clear, and he slept curled on his side with his sleeves pulled over his hands against the cold, unmoving like anyone who had been in the Lubyanka, as though he hated the idea of taking up an inch more space than he had to. Hearing Resovskaya say his name felt like a threat.

She paused. ‘Valery, I don’t know if you have the stomach for this. You didn’t much like the German trial.’

‘Well, if I go to pieces, throw me out and shoot me,’ he said.

‘I’ll have to. I can’t have you going in hysterics to all and sundry.’

‘I do understand, comrade.’

‘Not a word. Not to Shenkov, not to random people in cafes. This is serious.’

‘I know.’

‘I hope so.’

The four rooms had used to be offices. There were still marks on the carpet where the old desks had been. Now, there were beds, shelves, books, televisions, and the old wall that had once hosted all their doors had been taken out and replaced with glass. No one in the rooms could see the others, but they could see out into the corridor. Above the glass, they were all marked one to four.

‘Research quadrants,’ Resovskaya said, pointing. ‘One is the Lighthouse. Irradiated but with the most possible safety measures taken, including imported food and water, and everyone is fully aware of how to keep themselves safe; average yearly intake of about fifty roentgen.’

There was a man inside the cell, watching the television with every sign of enjoying it.

‘Quadrant Two is City 40. Irradiated with some safety measures, but the non-scientific populace are unaware of any precautions. We think they get about eighty roentgen annually, from accidental exposure and ingestion of contaminated materials; the river, say, or food grown in garden allotments. Three: the village in the exclusion zone. Irradiated, very few safety precautions taken, contaminated food and water. An average individual absorption rate of a hundred and fifty roentgen annually.’

Valery nodded. In the third cell was a boy who must have been Pyotr. He was asleep.

‘Four: control group. Moscow.’

There was a woman in the last cell, reading.

‘What we’re doing is increasing the dose gradually, to see if there is a universal threshold of radiation tolerance, or if being accustomed to a higher dose to begin with helps with resistance to even higher doses. Moscow’s orders are to see if there’s a way of increasing resistance.’

Valery looked across at her. ‘What do the results suggest so far?’

‘There’s not enough data to say yet, but it looks like neither. Some people can be pushed much further than others. Oddly we’re having most success with the City 40 group. We can’t tell why.’

Valery thought about it, rolling around all the factors he didn’t know. ‘How do you get the subjects? I mean how do you choose?’

She nodded. ‘Whenever anyone goes for a hospital check-up, we get their blood work. For those with interesting results, their names then go to the KGB, who arrest them for – you know, whatever – and bring them here. It’s not ideal, but it’s the only way to get this done.’

‘Efficient,’ he said. ‘Is there any coffee?’

‘Coffee, yes.’ She laughed. ‘You’re full of surprises, Valery.’

‘Am I?’ he said, pretending to be confused.

Part of him was indignant to find how simple it was. Resovskaya thought he was an easily upset, prematurely old man, and so long as he acted a decent caricature of himself, she would keep thinking so. He was too harmless and skittish to be doing anything nefarious. He followed her back into the kitchen, wondering, a bit put out, if he shouldn’t have gone into international espionage instead of chemistry. Everything suggested he’d have been outstanding at it.

In the lab, there was data for far more than four people. There had been about sixty test subjects in the last six years. Most, he noticed, were men. That made sense. The more body mass you had, the more diluted any particular dose of radiation was. The numbers were up on a blackboard at one end of the windowless room.

‘I have a job for you, if you’d like to get started straight away,’ Resovskaya said. ‘Chelyabinsk has sent us this week’s round of blood samples, we’ve got about two hundred to plough through. Run them through the spectrometer and find out which ones are carrying any radioactive isotopes. Boring, but it’s Item One every Monday.’

Valery nodded. She was right, it was repetitive grunt work, but it was a relief to start with something dull and easy. He didn’t know if he would have been able to do an autopsy with equilibrium. ‘Of course.’

She lifted up a plastic blue crate that clinked with glass vials slotted into a grid inside, and gave him a wry look. ‘Box one of five. Protective gear over there.’

‘Elena,’ he said.

She had set the crate down on a workbench, and now she was flexing her hands. The arthritis must have been getting very painful indeed. ‘Hm?’