by Hylton Smith
Henry Fellowes took the opportunity to lower the tension.
“You mention an explanation of your actions in Osaka. Any reference to the real reason for this unfortunate situation to have arisen, namely your outburst in leaving the conference, would indeed be appreciated. However, what is done is done. We can only make progress from the present. I advise all parties to retain a sense of pragmatism as well as principle. There will be unpleasantness to hurdle in reaching fairness. Let’s get that out of the way. This could all be diverted to a courtroom, with a reasonably good chance of neither side feeling they have achieved justice. Parting company on good terms may be difficult, yet the best solution. For example, Mr Delacroix, how would you respond if we wanted to make sure you didn’t have any NERO proprietary items at your home? Sir Ian, how do you see Julien’s severance package if he is willing to allow us that access without a court order? Gentlemen, you need to recover from a spat, not turn it into a vendetta. Julien has to move on to alternative employment and NERO has to regain the trust of its sponsors. Would either of you care to disagree with my analysis?”
Julien was contemplating how to offer the first olive branch, just as Volker Brandt had advised. He looked directly into the eyes of Waverly.
“I have nothing to hide, nothing whatsoever. I spoke from the heart in Osaka. I understand that there’s no way back in terms of reconciliation with my employer, so I do have to move on. I will allow a search of my home, as long as my family don’t have to be there to witness my fall from grace. If we can settle my severance amicably, I’m prepared to make another gesture which will serve to emphasise that my only motivation in Osaka was to avoid saying something which could turn out to be wrong. If you want to take up this gesture, I would need some kind of signed document certifying my voluntary disclosure. It will save you some embarrassment. I can assure you of that.”
Henry Fellowes suggested that he should take over the leadership of the way forward, knowing that the board of directors thought Waverly had acted just as precipitously as Delacroix. They were also aware of the dangers of going to court. Waverly acceded and walked out without a handshake or uttering another word. The thaw was tangible, at least for the two men remaining in the office.
Chapter 4
The deal was agreed with Henry Fellowes, albeit after a bit of shadow boxing. Julien agreed to his house being searched if NERO gave him a typed letter giving him proof of voluntarily handing over information which the Osaka people had failed to find. He insisted on highlighting the duplicate memory stick. Two sections of the document were left blank until the house search was completed, and then a box designated as - ‘Meeting minutes 1999 A10’ - was added together with Fellowes’ signature, and the date Julien had surrendered the stick to the temporary care of the NERO security men who had previously escorted him from Lyon airport. Both parties were now happy to move on to the severance package and Henry Fellowes thanked Julien for his cooperation.
“It shouldn’t have been left to you to say thanks. If Sir Ian had been more understanding of my reticence to mislead the conference, this unfortunate state of affairs would never have arisen. In voluntarily giving your guys that stick, and I think you should examine it carefully, I really had to struggle with my conscience. It was the only evidence that constituted my defence, proving that the data I was supposed to deliver was incomplete at best, but in reality, quite manipulative with the truth. Perhaps I’ve saved his career, and that grates with me, however, it’s now up to your board as to what will be done. Waverly may have got away with this if his security people in Osaka hadn’t been so keen to strip search me. The memory stick they took from me at Osaka airport is the original, the one I surrendered here is a duplicate. I never thought I’d be thankful for a NERO protocol which had to be enforced. The strip search team seemed pleased with themselves when they took the original but didn’t even ask about the copy, which was just nestling in a pocket of my jacket which they supposedly searched. I’m totally perplexed as to how they weren’t told about the copy, Waverly must have known about it, he wrote the bloody protocol. It was only when I was aboard the aircraft that I found it was still in my jacket. I could have exploited the information which is on that stick. Take a look for yourself. I guess you’ll be in touch about the severance.”
“Indeed. It may take another day to get it ready for you to sign. I’ll call you.”
Fellowes walked to the waiting company car, shaking his head as he threw his briefcase into the back seat. Julien reversed his own car from the garage and set off to see his family.
*
The air was thick with speculation when Julien rang the doorbell of Geraldine’s house, and it hadn’t been dislodged by the mandatory hugging and a few tears.
“Can you all sit down and hear me out before bombarding me with questions. By all means hit me with them once I’ve finished covering all aspects of the last two days. I’d appreciate the chance to do this my way.”
Geraldine nodded but asked if he’d like a hot cup of coffee before getting started. It was declined with an anxious smile.
“I assume you’ve all seen my exit speech from the conference and Ian Waverly’s public termination of my contract with NERO, so I don’t need to dwell on the details involved with either of those events, they can wait. I want to cover what can and cannot happen next, because the family comes first. I could probably have fought my dismissal but I chose not to. It wasn’t about money, as I’m close to pensionable age and don’t need to work if I don’t want to. I have already been offered a new position, and it is one which is very worthwhile. But, you, the family should have some input before I reply to the company. You should probably take into account that NERO may try to whitewash their errors and divert media inquisitions to me. This could disrupt your lives and I don’t want that to happen. On the other hand, I don’t want to run away from the implications which caused me to abort the conference.
“You heard me say, in Osaka, that if nothing was done immediately about tackling this asteroid it would very probably impact our planet in 2039. The new position I’ve been offered would require me to do just that. Eugene, you and Sophie are just beginning your lives, and I hope that maybe someday I’ll be able to play with my grandchildren. But, I also have to think about billions of living souls being extinguished if nobody is willing to acknowledge the clear danger we face in the future. It’s what we do now that will count in twelve years’ time. Eugene, you have to complete your studies, and Sophie, your talent must not be wasted; you should both follow your passion, wherever that takes you. Elise, I know how much you enjoy our life here in Lyon, and especially being so close to Geraldine. To all of you, I have to confess, it will be difficult for me to sit back and let the asteroid threat be someone else’s problem. That’s simply because I’m arrogant enough to believe I’m the best qualified person to meet this challenge from the skies. You may all have gathered then, that the position I’ve been offered is in another country. Personally, it wouldn’t matter to me if it was in the middle of the Brazilian rain forest, but I have a family, and I want to hear what you have to say. Who wants to ask the first question?”
There was an uneasy silence.
“Come on, Elise, you must have concerns.”
“I do, but I’m… unable to just list them… as if I was on the way to the supermarket. You’ve just told Gene and Sophie that they should follow their passion, and I agree with you. Maybe you’ve forgotten… I didn’t get to follow mine. Perhaps I wouldn’t have made the grade, but I wanted to be a professional dancer. Your career was the priority…the only priority, because it provided steady income and gave us the freedom to start a family. Until I know where your next position is based, I can’t even think about moving away… from the kids and Geraldine.”
“Fair point. But take your mind back to 2021 when I joined NERO. I had a more lucrative offer from another company, a privately owned organisation. I took the moral stance that a respected world body would be less political
than one at least partly driven by profit. I now know how naïve that was. The company is VB Aerospace. Volker Brandt wants me to start working on eradicating this asteroid threat as soon as possible. His headquarters are in Evry, at the Guiana Space Centre. They also have offices in Washington DC, Singapore, and Tokyo. It was originally named Arianespace, founded in 1980, and ultimately its shareholders included Airbus Safran Launchers, the French space agency CNES, and all European space companies, representing 10 European nations. But, in 2020 funding had decreased even more than that of NASA, and Volker Brandt bought the facilities, but didn’t retain all of the employees. It was the following year when he asked me to join his workforce.”
Elise’s furrowed brow preceded her outburst.
“So, we… sorry, you are talking of living in Guiana, America, Singapore or Tokyo? I’m sorry, Julien, this is all a step too far for me.”
Eugene relieved the building tension.
“How certain are you that this asteroid will crash into the Earth? Will it really kill everybody?”
“To be brutally honest, Eugene, I can’t be absolutely certain in answering either of your questions. The details to which I referred in Osaka are very important in my mind. For whatever reason, NERO didn’t allow me to tell the conference that an impact was highly likely, even after we’d discovered it had been deflected somewhere in our solar system. I was supposed to omit the fact that it passed within 22,000 km instead of the predicted 37,000, entirely due to a clash with another object, which we hadn’t predicted. Further extrapolation of this new trajectory gives a high coefficient of probability of impact in twelve years from now. As far as estimating how many people would die, it’s impossible to tell, but the odds are that it will be an extinction event. The last known threat of this type saw off the dinosaurs, but miraculously, burrowing mammals survived. That’s the dilemma, do nothing, pray, or get to work on a solution. We may not find a solution or the asteroid may have another bump before it returns.”
“In that case, Dad, somebody has to do something. If it’s you, so be it. It’s a no-brainer.”
“What do you think, Sophie?”
“I don’t really get how you calculate these things, Dad, but if you thought it was going to come by at 37,000 km and it would have but for a little bump which pushed it like, a lot closer, you have to try and stop it next time around. I don’t really want to think about it anymore.”
“Don’t ask me,” said Geraldine, “it’s your family, Julien. Whatever happens, I’ll be staying here.”
Elise turned to her husband and held his hand.
“You must do what you think best, darling. I won’t be coming with you. I’ll stay here with Geraldine, if she’ll have me. The kids won’t then have to adjust too much. They have their own apartments. That would be the way of least disruption. I’m not going to hold you back. In any case, surely there will be times when you need to be in Europe, and perhaps then… we can have… vacations, or just meet up for a short break. That’s the best I can do right now. At a different time of my life I might have come with you. I’m really sorry.”
It was decided, but not in the way he’d hoped. Julien would contact Volker Brandt in the morning. It was time to catch up with what had been happening in the lives of his family in that room. The family he was about to split up.
*
Brandt was happy with the way things had been handled with NERO. It was one less item to be concerned about.
“Look, Julien, I think it would be best if you take a flight from Paris to Washington. I’m in America right now and rather than take risks with phones and messaging, we can thrash out your remit and contract face-to-face. My people in telecommunications are already at work on the records associated with your old mobile. It’s just as well you trashed it as agreed. I’ll arrange for your open ticket to be collected by you in Paris. You’ll have to make your own arrangements to get there. Now, please make sure you bring the content of that memory stick with you, buried deep in your laptop or tablet, don’t transmit it through the ether. So, are we ok with all that?”
“Sure, no problem. How long are you in the States?”
“Another week or so, why?”
“I’ll be leaving my family in Lyon when I begin working for you, and I owe them something a bit special.”
“When do you plan to travel then?”
“Well, I also have to sign off my pension transfer documentation from NERO today, and indemnification stuff about handing Fellowes’ people the memory stick. Can we say I’ll travel the day after tomorrow?”
“Fine, let me know the flight details and I’ll arrange pick up for you.”
“Thank you, will do. Look forward to meeting up again.”
Volker Brandt had made his fortune courtesy of being able to see the little picture within the big picture. A few years older than Julien, he had an instinctive ability to time the major business decisions with uncanny accuracy. He was pretty much the antithesis to the man he was about to employ, yet he felt they could work well together. He had put a considerable amount of time into honing his main weakness, delegation. He found that it worked best when subordinates felt part of the tough decisions, when in reality, Brandt perfected the art of knowing when to sow and more importantly, when to reap.
Chapter 5
April 2029
The landscape had changed dramatically since the Osaka conference. Not only had protest turned to terrorist insurgence in known hot spots, it had metastasised into mass civil unrest in hitherto peaceful regions. Climate change had lived up to its billing by causing even more mass migration. It was global conflict, but not between superpowers; rather between the actors in government and the audience on the receiving end. The audience could see through the script and the actors knew only their lines. Curiously, the march to anarchism greatly assisted VB Aerospace. They had become the only safe game in town, and Julien Delacroix was remembered as the man who broke ranks in Osaka and told it as it was. He had unwittingly become a man of the people. However, whilst Volker Brandt inherited far less interference from any remaining governing structures, Julien found the whole experience of being the fountain of hope quite a distraction.
There were two deadlines to address. The obvious one of developing a safe method of influencing the path of ‘Chocolate Orange’, as 1999 A10 had been nicknamed. Then there was the launch date of the Mars mission. 2033 was ideal when considering the distance between the planets, but if the asteroid collided with Earth, the entire manned mission could become futile. Within VB Aerospace, arguments raged as to whether the launch should be postponed by two, perhaps even three years. The major concern lay in the possibility of Earth and its entire back-up for the mission being destroyed. It was postulated that a few humans, if safely ensconced in habitat on Mars, would simply run out of the essentials of life. Oxygen, food, and of course water. Typically, Volker Brandt curtailed the clamour to reach a humane compromise.
“Of all the things I have achieved in my life, this signal achievement for mankind to step on to another planet is proving to be the most infuriating. We must decide, not procrastinate. It seems that we can’t, therefore I must. The launch will go ahead in 2033, whether or not we can prevent Chocolate Orange from destroying our world. We can’t be sure of what we will find on Mars, so we must go there. One thing I’m certain of, is that if we have to finally admit we cannot avoid an impact of this monster with Earth, there will be no shortage of volunteers to try their luck on the red planet. We can’t waste any more time debating this conundrum. Now we must divide our expertise to optimise the odds of succeeding with both tasks, instead of acting like mice in a maze. Let’s do it.”
Julien was immensely relieved, but this was only a wakeup call. Since he took up responsibility for plotting the course of Chocolate Orange, and altering its trajectory, or even destruction, he’d met with abuse from other project leaders. They claimed that his arrival was responsible for re-allocation of resource which made their objectives for the M
ars mission untenable. They also baited him with having achieved nothing with those resources. Intervention was inevitable. Unlike the unwieldy committee-style anchor of NERO, Brandt was a decisive leader. Apart from his edict to leave the launch date at 2033, he fired two of the most senior managers involved in the programme. That responsibility immediately fell into Julien’s lap. He now had no excuse for underachievement in either project.
“I expect a reaction from you and your new subordinates with respect to progress. I want to hear more answers and consequently less problems.”
All of a sudden, Guiana seemed like a very lonely place. And the stakes were raised when the news broke of Sir Ian Waverly’s resignation. Apparently, the very same video conference minutes which were on the memory stick Julien had delivered to Brandt, had been leaked to the media. There was no suspicion directed to VB Aerospace; it was considered ludicrous that Julien Delacroix would wait seventeen months to fuel some previous vendetta. Suspicion centred on current employees of NERO. Julien wondered about Henry Fellowes, and welcomed the announcement, he felt it vindicated his awkward departure from the Osaka conference, but he didn’t rule out the possibility that NERO had actually found more bad news regarding Chocolate Orange. He used this uncertainty to request all trusted observatories to join with him and compare the very latest data.
*
Eugene sailed through his graduation and was now a section leader at a respected microbiology company. He kept in touch with his father frequently; at least they always seemed to look at things through the same end of the telescope. They debated stuff rather than get into an argument. At last Julien had a successful father/son relationship, and Eugene had his own calling. Unlike his sister, he shared his father’s temperament.