CHAPTER 7
The Dead Sea, Jordan
Between them, Tallis and Sally set up thirty film dosimeters around the site.
There were a few ways to detect ionising radiation without electricity, but film dosimetry was the easiest. Usually, it was only used in places with X-ray machines—technicians wore little dosimetry badges which they gave to a lab every so often to make sure nothing dreadful was happening.
It felt shambolic, relying on them here.
A film dosimeter was a simple thing: really just a way of taking a long-exposure photograph of radioactivity.
You put a piece of film into a light-tight holder.
Then, you put windows of different materials over different parts of it: plastic, aluminium, copper, lead.
Beta particles could be slowed down by plastic; fairly sedate X-rays could get through aluminium but not through copper; gamma rays would go through anything.
Radiation would show up as dark patches on the developed film.
Conventionally they were small, but Sally had made these ones bigger. It was a big site, and they didn’t know where they were supposed to be looking. Surface area wouldn’t hurt.
Tallis stuck one on the gate in case the source was on the other side.
She paused there, because around the gate, there was writing.
It was marked onto beautiful tiles that looked like oxidised silver, the kind with rainbows across the surface that rippled when she moved her lamp, and each character was a vivid blue.
She had no idea what language it could be.
It was nothing like English or Arabic. More of a series of lines and narrow, triangle-shaped wedges.
The archaeologists had clearly been working to uncover it.
There were still paintbrushes and trowels abandoned on the ground, which was a spiky mess of those perhaps-silver tacks.
She could feel the points of them even through the soles of her boots.
After each line or so, the writing changed. There were different symbols. She tilted her head, puzzled. Different languages, that had to be. Like at the airport: EXIT THIS WAY in Arabic and English.
Or, said a little voice she had been trying to muffle since arriving: Danger, do not approach.
There was a squeak as Sally tripped over one of the thorns on those gigantic spikes in the ground, and then in a muted voice, he said, “Oh . . . fuck.”
There was a horrible moment in which she was so sure that it would be impossible to fall here without impaling yourself that she couldn’t bring herself to ask him. If she didn’t ask, if she didn’t know, it was all fine. Schroedinger’s cat. It was fine until you looked.6
“Are you all right?”
“I’ve torn my suit.”
“Okay. It’s okay,” Tallis said, trying not to sound too relieved, and ducked through the leaning spikes to reach him.
She was already pulling duct tape out of her suit pocket.
Any radiation protection offered by a suit was also offered by duct tape.
“Let’s tape you up and then go back to the top.
We’re done down here anyway, I think we’ve set up plenty of dosimeters.
” They’d need to wait at least an hour to give them time to pick anything up, probably more; there was no sense waiting down here.
“Perfect timing, honestly. Are you hurt?”
“No. These things, though,” Sally said, shaking his head.
He sounded annoyed with himself, but he let Tallis help him up.
Behind the visor, his eyes tipped up to hers, full of apology.
She was tempted to trip over just to prove she was more likely to than he was.
All through school, people had assumed she would be a magnificent athlete; in fact she was a dork with two left feet and a famous ability to throw away something crucial along with the used tea bags, to be discovered upside down in a dumpster an hour later.
“They’re horrible, aren’t they,” she said instead, because she would die if she tried to fall over on purpose in this place.
“Don’t they remind you of . . .”
“What?” she said, because the déjà vu was still gnawing.
“You know those projects all our agencies run,” he said as they began to climb the first ladder, shadows lurching like nightmares as their lamps swung, “the ones where we try to design a nuclear waste disposal bunker that’s still recognisable as a dangerous place ten thousand years from now, when all that waste is still radioactive but there’s nobody left who knows any of the languages or symbols we use now? ”
“Yes,” she said slowly, and looked back.
He was right. Those lethal spars and their thorns: they screamed Leave now.
It was exactly what nuclear agencies’ designs tried to do.
It was about making a place look frightening.
There had been all kinds of mad ideas to make sure people in the far future had some warning about what was in the bunkers: someone had even suggested genetically modifying local cat populations so that they would glow in the event of a radiation leak.
The ideas that were less mad, though . .
. they all looked like this. They would be designed to stand for ten thousand years, and last for longer than English or Mandarin or anything else would.
The half-life of plutonium was far longer than the half-life of a language.
It was noticeably cooler, the further up they climbed. She couldn’t see why, but the difference must have been ten degrees. “I don’t know about you, but . . . I feel like someone might have put something in that tower.”
“What, though?” said Sally. “Even if that’s the doorway to a uranium mine—which geologically it can’t be, the ground is all sandstone and salt out here—it wouldn’t be radioactive enough to kill electronics. Or to hurt anyone.”
She shook her head. “I suppose we’ll know once we develop the tests.”
“Which will be soon,” Sally said, cheerful again. “I’ve brought developer for the films so we can do it here.”
“Don’t you need a darkroom for that?”
“I,” he said triumphantly, “have a dark tent.”
Up by the cars, they ran an electronic dosimeter over each other, got not even a chirp from it, peeled off the suits, and sent messages back to their respective agencies to report their progress.
Although it was cooler at ground level than it was in the pit, Tallis still thought she might die.
Once the admin was done, they sat in the tent doorway together with their lamps nestled into the salt ground and a glass bottle of Diet Coke each from a cooler filled with ice, and it was the best thing she had ever tasted.
She hated camping, but maybe that was because camping in the UK usually involved being freezing and flooded out, and spending most of your holiday huddled in the back of the car wondering how fast you could get trench foot.
But if it was like this, on the shore of a lake so salty you couldn’t drown in it, when all your problems could be solved by a cold drink . . .
Sally had delicate tattoos on his fingers—astrological symbols.
They suited him. He was one of those people who seemed like they spent much more time outdoors than in.
Probably he had a motorbike. Close to, he smelled of cigarette smoke, the savage roll-up sort that murdered you if you so much as looked at the packaging.
That shouldn’t have been good, but again, it suited him.
She realized she had been looking at him for too long and tried to take an interest in the stars. The crescent moon was honey-coloured tonight, tipped at an unfamiliar angle. She could never get used to that, the way the moon smiled more the closer to the equator you went.
“Hey, have you seen this?” he said, showing her his phone. Once you were fifty yards away from the site, electronics were fine.
It was a TikTok post. Priest turns to SALT!!
“You’re from England, aren’t you?” Sally added, as if that were desperately exotic and maybe she’d met King Arthur.
The video was convincing. Tallis replayed it. “That’s AI.”
“I don’t know, it’s on the BBC. They say the Vatican has sent someone to look into it.”
“The Vatican,” she said, scrunching her nose and wondering if somehow they had been transported back to the fourteenth century while she wasn’t looking.
“You don’t like them?” he said curiously.
“They’re the Taliban with better accountants.”
Sally started to laugh. “Oh, okay, cool cool cool. Next time I get some leave, I’ll go to Kabul for the tranquillity and wonderful cultural experiences, famously welcoming to all comers as they are there.”
She paused, marvelling that he had just—disagreed with her.
At home, more and more, even if somebody said something you thought was mad, it was becoming normal to skate past it and then meticulously never talk to that person ever again.
There were unspoken tribes at work; one half thought the other was a leftist wokey Blob, and they thought the others were crazed fascists.
They all had coffee and meetings together, and never spoke about anything except nuclear decay chains and the weather.
“Are we having a Whose Religious Nutbags Are Best competition?”
“No,” he said. “I’ve already won.”
How could you say to a man barely more than half your age that he was a revelation, without sounding as though you needed a restraining order? “Anyway, if someone really has turned to salt, then what’s the point of sending a priest? They should be sending people from Disease Control.”
“Ah . . . it says they’ve done that too, but it’s hard to do any tests because . . .” He narrowed his eyes at the text. “Because it’s in a place called . . . Huh-ree-od . . . water? And electricity doesn’t work there.”