"Wil McCarthy - The Technetium Rush" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCarty Sarah)

For Vyas this was presumably no big deal. She was indeed studying physics
at Delhi, but she’d grown up in this neighborhood and was known here, and the
young man before her did have a certain awkward charm, a bit of money, and an
obvious taste for the calendar girls posted round on the walls. Did she really expect
the loan? Was she just kidding around? Alas for Solanki, still picking metaphorical
cottonseeds out of his sandals, it was love at first (well, second) sight. Here was
everything he’d ever dreamed of: a pretty, intelligent woman with a smart mouth and
a taste for big-city adventure. The aforementioned bill was handed over with a smirk,
and when wagered and lost, was gallantly replaced with another. And thus in five
quick minutes was the pattern of their relationship set for all that followed.

Pity him if you like. Pity them both if you must. But listen to all of it before
passing judgment; youthful innocence can turn on a heel only, and I mean only, if we
choose to allow it.

****

Jump ahead to the turn of the millennium. Stock markets were high, cash was
flowing as freely as water, and armies of young programmers in Mumbai and
Calcutta were sweeping Y2K bugs out of American and European software. Even
Kashmir was working its way toward a ceasefire, lending a dreamy (if fragile) quality
to the season.

Having completed two years of graduate school, Solanki’s darling Abha Vyas
had taken a job at the WRC or Waste Reprocessing Centre of the Kakodar Nuclear
Power Station in Jaipur, “breaking big ones into little ones,” as they say. That is,
bombarding spent uranium fuel rods with the neutron emissions from a thorium
reactor, so that massive, long-lived radioactive elements, like plutonium and
neptunium, could be broken down into short-lived ones, like radon and actinium. On
the side, she was now seeing her science-orientated poems published regularly in
Varnamala and Kavya Bharati, which paid almost nothing but which stoked her
professional reputation and, presumably, her self-esteem. Not that she needed much
help in that area.

Rakesh Solanki, meanwhile, who’d been unable to secure anything more than
temporary contract employment in his chosen field of geology, was working instead
as a forklift operator for the waste disposal firm of Joshi Bhopal, which removed
and buried the effluent from, among other places, the Kakodar Nuclear Power
Station. It is tempting to speculate that Vyas pulled in a favor somewhere to get him
the job, for union jobs were scarce in Jaipur at that time, but there’s no evidence of
it.

Solanki had of course worked with a variety of machines on his parents’ farm,
including forklifts, and was by all accounts a capable driver, well liked by his bosses
and coworkers, who consulted him sometimes for his earth-science expertise during
trenching and filling operations. According to newspaper reports, the team once
found a large green nugget of copper oxide in their Malpura dump, which Solanki
proclaimed to be “alluvial,” or washed down from higher ground. Since the
nugget—though interesting—had little monetary value, Solanki was allowed to keep