Page 90 of The Half Life of Valery K

He hoped to God Anna had thought of something. He wasn’t sure he was in much of a state now to do any thinking at all.

‘In America,’ Anna said that evening, ‘this is called a demon core.’ She set two perfect, silvery hemispheres down on the table between them.

They were in Shenkov’s apartment again. The children, including Tatiana this time, were playing on the floor with Albert and a small army of the kind of little plasticky toys Valery had always assumed that children hated. Again, the television was on loud. Sometimes, Tatiana pinged a wind-up toy car towards them, so Valery pinged it back. She looked okay, he thought. Perhaps, just perhaps, there were treatments in France or England or America he didn’t know about.

‘A what core?’

‘I know, it sounds dramatic, but actually it’s – quite accurate.’

The metal of the hemispheres was beryllium. It was shined up so well it showed warped reflections of them, and light wasn’t all it reflected. Beryllium was a neutron reflector. Anna said it with great significance, but Valery, who had never been a physicist, didn’t understand at first.

People threw around terms like industrial-grade plutonium and weapons-grade plutonium all the time, she explained, but the difference was this: industrial-grade plutonium, the kind that ran power stations for electricity, was less refined. Weapons-grade plutonium had to go through far more refinement – that was, skimming other elements out of it until it was as pure as it could reasonably be – and this meant it was always close to criticality. Refined plutonium’s rate of radioactive decay was so fast that it didn’t just degrade and crumble, like other radioactive elements. It exploded. Criticality was the moment the rate of decay increased from normal crumbling to God’s own wrath.

But you couldn’t just ship atomic bombs around the country without knowing exactly how close to exploding they were. If the plutonium was too refined, it would go off by itself and you’d have a crater where Moscow used to be.

So it was important to test it. The demon core was that test.

Put a piece of weapons-grade plutonium into the hemispheres and tip them nearly closed, and the beryllium would reflect all of those loose neutrons back at the plutonium. They’d smash into it with almost the same force as it had slung them out – near to light speed – and in a few seconds, it would be so close to exploding that the beryllium sphere would be hot to touch. But, it was safe once you opened the core again. Let the core close completely, though, and a few seconds later you’d be vaporised.

He sat back from it, even though there was no plutonium anywhere near. ‘But that would – Jesus, that would be like the Hiroshima bomb going off. That would take out the whole city.’

‘Yes it would, but before it explodes, it does something else a lot more useful. It emits a burst of gamma radiation.’

Valery looked up slowly. ‘How much?’

‘An absolute fuck tonne,’ she said. ‘It only takes about half a second.’

‘So it just has to do … this,’ said Valery, and ducked his fingertips towards his thumb. ‘The two hemispheres touch for that half a second and then they need to come apart again.’

‘Exactly.’

He almost touched it and then couldn’t, and took his hand back. ‘I can’t believe this thing exists. It’s the stupidest test I’ve ever heard of.’

‘You ain’t heard nothing yet,’ she said.

It was the stupidest test ever devised, and of course it had been devised by American scientists. American science culture was a lot more about pizazz than peer review (it made Valery feel much better about the flaws in Soviet science) and so rather than people like Anna, it was full of showy young men who were very concerned with seeming like hot stuff for their lab assistants.

One of these showy young men had taken to doing the demon-core test with especial pizazz. He would pop the plutonium into the hemispheres, and then keep them propped open with nothing more technical than a screwdriver; and therefore, nothing but one slip of a screwdriver between him and wholesale annihilation of his entire facility. He did it at dozens of demonstrations for his bosses. Valery wanted not to imagine someone who said yee-hah, but that felt like flying in the face of likelihood.

Nobody, it seemed, had thought to suggest to him that this was idiotic, and one day, the screwdriver slipped. The core closed, surrounding the chunk of weapons-grade plutonium with the neutron-reflecting beryllium, bombarding it with neutrons like machine-gun fire. Fortunately, the young scientist had flipped the top hemisphere of beryllium off before the plutonium could actually explode, but not quickly enough. He got a thousand roentgen in the face and, over the following fortnight, disintegrated.

Valery gazed down at the beryllium hemispheres, open at the moment like coconut halves. Inside, his own reflection looked back, a haze of gold-red and the shine of his glasses. ‘It’s a horrible way to die,’ he said quietly.

‘Yes. It is. But they’ll be doubled up being sick in buckets within twenty minutes, and I can’t think of anything else fast enough. If we had time – polonium in a sugar cube would make someone very ill within three days, but that’s too slow. An acute dose by injection, great, but you said there are three researchers and two soldiers. You’d only manage one before the others realised, and your bones are very weak. Anyone restraining you would hurt you badly. I’m sure the forest is full of less horrible poisons that would knock someone out for a while, but I’m not a medic, so I’ve got no idea. A gun won’t do you any good; the soldiers would get it off you. Likewise anything like a home-made bomb; they know to look for that stuff. We have to get him out tomorrow, we have to take out all five of them at once, and … this is what we’ve got.’

‘And if it goes wrong and the plutonium goes critical, we’re all dead.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is there a machine that can make it do that?’ He touched his thumb to his fingers. ‘Quickly?’

‘It’s bolted down, I can’t take it from our lab. But someone here must know how to build a little mechanism like that?’

‘Someone who isn’t going to ask what we’re doing with it?’ Valery said softly. ‘I have the mechanical brain of a caterpillar, and I wouldn’t trust a single person I know here not to realise what we’re doing – the specification is too telling. This thing can’t be electrical because the radiation would fry circuitry, it has to be clockwork. Anyone here would know that if I go round asking for clockwork, I’m working with something powerfully radioactive. Which I shouldn’t be.’ He shook his head a little. ‘And I think Resovskaya’s watching me very hard. I think she hasn’t bothered with me again because she knows I have to shut up with Shenkov gone, but one step wrong, and …’

‘We’d better think of something, because the only alternative is a bleach bomb in a bucket.’

They both fell into a bleak silence.