Page 92 of The Half Life of Valery K

Then an hour for him to get back to the Lighthouse, another hour to wait for the checkpoints to open. He had brought his papers with him this time, and the soldiers remembered him from before and called him a silly twerp – in a fond kind of way at least.

It was stupid, to wait; but he didn’t dare try and get back into the complex through Resovskaya’s lab, in case Resovskaya herself was there. Having gone through the checkpoint, though, he was worried he had made the wrong choice. He could have lied to Resovskaya, but the soldiers could have sent the report down to the KGB office, who might then realise he had been in the forest for most of the night. Someone might come along to ask what he had been doing. He didn’t know who was in charge now that Shenkov wasn’t. There was every chance they were going to put him in a cell to see if he’d say anything interesting once he was scared enough. Which would mean that even if the demon core worked, Shenkov and the other test subjects would still be locked behind the lead doors of the inner laboratory.

Anna, who had been out and come back in the time Valery had been away, gave him a piece of plutonium in an oil capsule. She arranged to meet him by the laboratory’s front door, with a truck, at exactly one forty-five. Nanya and the villagers would be at the lab just before that. He hated plans with moving parts and too many people. As far as he could tell, including the test subjects, the villagers, Anna, the children, and him, there would be at least eighty of them.

That was if Anna came.

He thought deliriously that they were all going to die. The entire haphazard plan felt like riding a bicycle for the first time. Obviously someone was going to fall off.

But, he got the core together without any other interruption. The plutonium stayed in its oil capsule, because he didn’t dare to take it out too early. On the wall, the clock hands crept round at a fraction of their normal speed. He did paperwork. At exactly ten to one, he took the plutonium from its capsule with a pair of pliers and dropped it into the lower half of the beryllium core, where it landed with an innocent little splat.

Even after a few seconds, the underside of the hemisphere heated up. Jesus, but they really did keep weapons-grade plutonium close to criticality. He tried to imagine what an arrogant dickhead that American must have been, to prop open an almost-closed core with a screwdriver. It was hard just to force himself to touch it, never mind set the upper hemisphere into its clockwork and wind the springs. He did that while the mechanism was holding the core wide open.

‘I have a theory,’ he announced at one o’clock, with sweat slipping down his spine, ‘that there is a certain element of quantum entanglement in problems that annoy you and they have a way of sorting themselves out if you stop looking at them.’

‘You mean you’ve been defeated by an octopus toy and now you’re going to lunch?’ Resovskaya said over her glasses.

‘Yes.’ He took the key out of the clockwork to set the springs going. The mechanism ticked. To him it sounded deafening, but none of the others looked, not even the soldiers. He gazed around them all for a long moment. He had always known he was invisible, or very near to it. He had never realised just how thorough an invisibility it was. Opposite him, the door that led through to the patient rooms – cells – was shut and locked. It was a heavy vault door, twenty centimetres thick. He closed his eyes as the shapes of numbers skimmed across the front of his mind for the twentieth time. It was enough, more than enough, to keep the patients safe. Even a person bending over the beryllium sphere would have been enough to mostly shield everyone else in the room.

The ticking sang whisperingly, amplified by the hollow space inside the sphere, which was open by a good ten centimetres at the moment. He touched it. It was perhaps a degree warmer than it would have been without the plutonium inside, but nothing anyone would notice.

He set his own stopwatch going too. If Nanya’s clockwork worked, then the core would close for exactly half a second, every ten minutes. He had to make sure he timed his return well after the last blast of radiation, but with enough time before the next to get past the vault door and into the patients’ cells. The stupidest thing in the world would be to get it wrong and wander back just in time to get a thousand roentgen of gamma radiation to the chest.

This was it. If the core didn’t open again, most of the Lighthouse would be destroyed in the ensuing nuclear blast, and not even twenty centimetres of lead would help Shenkov this close to the epicentre of the explosion. There would be nothing left of anyone down here but shadows on the walls.

He turned away and started up the ladder that would lead out to the unobtrusive door behind the main biology lab.

‘Valery,’ Resovskaya said.

His lungs lithified.

‘Your wallet,’ she said tolerantly, and handed it up to him. ‘Get me a sandwich, will you? Try not to do anything peculiar to it.’

He queued up in the canteen like always. Some of the students were there too, anxious about their papers. He did his best at reassuring them all – quite honestly, because their papers were all excellent so far – and bought a cup of mushroom soup for himself and a packet of sandwiches for Resovskaya, which the canteen lady give him on a paper plate.

Nine minutes. If it was going to go wrong, if the plutonium went critical, they were going to know in the next few seconds. He stared at the sandwich on the paper plate. Maybe the last thing he saw in the world would be those dents around the outside of the plate. He had no idea how they did that; or why. There must have been some kind of vice. Someone would have had to put time and thought into making that.

‘Everything all right?’

Another student.

‘Oh – yes. Shenkov’s gone off somewhere. Normally he winds my clockwork.’

‘What a prick,’ the boy said kindly, and went away with a banana.

Ten minutes. Nothing exploded.

He sagged with relief and dropped down at the end of a table to drink the soup and read a random newspaper someone had left out. It was Truth, yesterday’s edition, because it took ages to get anything shipped here.

He hoped Anna would come.

He checked the silver watch. Nineteen minutes.

What if Anna didn’t come.

It would take four minutes to walk back. That would be two and a half minutes after the last radiation burst.

He took the sandwich and set off.