Yellowcake

INCIDENT ONE

Yesterday— all my troubles seemed so far away—’ Tears prickled Georgia’s tired eyes as the memories stirred by that most haunting of all the Beatles’ compositions washed over her.

Memories of days and unforgettable nights basking in Paul’s adoration—Memories thronged with laughter and plans for their future—

Memories now the only residue of the glorious time that was theirs—

Paul had proposed marriage only three months ago and though Georgia’s staunch Catholic girlhood wrapped prison-like around her, she had so many friends at the laboratory who were happily living ‘de facto’—‘shacked up’ Paul called them—that to move in with him seemed so right to her.

They excitedly searched out an upper floor apartment in a small, quiet, modern building close enough to the lab for her latenight or weekend work, and started life together. Night and weekend shopping hours were used by Georgia to choose and plan all the items and details for the June wedding day, and even her righteous mother overcame her moral hang-ups over Georgia’s ‘ungodly’ action, assisting her daughter’s preparations with pleasure.

***

Georgia missed the message on her answering machine, and her mother tracked her down hours later, after following directions given by the lab supervisor.

Of all her mother’s memories, the most painful surely must have been, after thirty years of sharing her daughter’s joys and sorrows, that moment of trying delicately to break the news of the shocking event that would change her daughter’s self-ordered life.

Paul’s death was never a possibility to Georgia—if anything, she would have preferred to die before him so that she wouldn’t be left alone! Of course his work as a salvage diver was clearly more dangerous than most men’s occupations. He was so good at whatever he did. But a single forgetful second allowed a valve to be left open and he died a slow horrible death from asphyxiation, away from her, or anyone!!

On the long drive back from the clay-pits where she had been gathering samples for further lab tests, her mother switched on the car radio to fill the dreadful silence, and ‘Yesterday’ swamped their feelings.

***

Six months had slowly come and gone since the funeral, and Georgia had plunged into her work, wrenching clouds of sorrow apart by the sheer power of her determined personality, each time those clouds threatened to engulf her sanity.

Seven-days-a-week at the lab were not uncommon—some weeks’ work possessing her ten hours each day. The telling signs of driving herself too hard too long began to show. She became forgetful, short-tempered, irritable whilst driving, amnesic and plagued by mysterious aches and pains.

Her father found her asleep at the wheel at 2 a.m. in the garage one rainy December morning, so it was decided by them all to ask the lab director’s permission for Georgia to take her long service leave, so that her mental and physical equilibrium could, perhaps, be restored.

The director, who had been a silent observer of Georgia’s slow self-destruction, could not agree quickly enough, and that weekend she slept all Saturday through.

On encouragement by her father, who had fought in the Pacific in World War II, Georgia arranged a month’s holiday to Vanuatu, which, the travel agent assured her, was the place on earth to clear a troubled mind.

How could she have imagined the tide of coming events, waiting to carry her, further than she had ever been, from the security and order of her current lifestyle?

Ten years earlier, Georgia had earned her PhD in palaeontology at the University of Queensland, and, being an unquenchable sponge for knowledge, had ventured with a friendly crowd of fellow science students to the U of Q winter camp on a coral atoll at the edge of the Great Barrier Reef, off Australia’s east coast. There she could discover first-hand if zoological studies interested her.

Only four hours of walking on the coral wonderland convinced her to change study direction, and within two years, she gained Honours with High Distinctions—a university record time-span for the course.

Her spectacular set of credentials had attracted the attentions of the director of United Cosmetic Laboratories, and within months of Georgia’s being appointed cadet researcher, she had gravitated to personal assistant to the director, ensuring his future patronage.

Eight years of research had engendered in Georgia a familiarity with the ways of big business funding. She had often to attend seminars, to explain to financial backers the current position of research into various products—perfumes, skin creams and the like.

Client confidence in the company stemmed from confidence in Georgia!

Having developed into a striking woman, she, with the free assistance of the lab’s innermost cosmetic secrets, was able to capitalise on those natural good looks, and always managed to come away from these seminars with at least one, and on a memorable occasion, four eager males trotting at her heels, begging for morsels of her charms!

This, in fact, was how she ‘picked up’ Paul!—although they argued playfully for many an evening on just who picked up whom. Now, as she slumped in the window seat of the east-bound Boeing watching Australia slip under the port wing, she made a silent vow to herself never to let a man get so close again—the hurt was almost beyond bearing.

This swirling torment of voices and faces from her past was shredded by a lurch, as the shock of the landing wheels’ connection with Mother Earth wrenched Georgia from her muddle-headed dream-fog to the reality of a smiling cabin attendant, informing her they had arrived, and she would be in the terminal in five minutes. A tiny wave of panic washed over her. The feeling of being out of control had never been experienced, and here she was, alone in a foreign land with no advice other than to ask for a taxi ride to Le Lagon, the resort the travel agent firmly selected to ‘guarantee’ to be the medicine needed.

A sea of smiling, dark faces—beaming, in fact—alarmed and comforted her at the same instant. All was bustle, the locals shouting in Bislama. Activity and confusion forced Georgia to wonder for a moment why she had not stayed in Australia and driven to some sleepy east-coast resort town, instead of subjecting herself to this tension!

Within fifteen minutes, however, through the taxi’s rear window, she gazed upon one of the most beautiful harbours in the Pacific, and a sensation of peace flooded her tension away. A vague awareness of coming change flashed across her subconscious, but the moment was the panorama.

Georgia’s dad’s advices flowed back to her fuzzy mind. French Polynesia comprises about 180 islands in five archipelagos in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, he had told her. Éfaté is the principal island of the Vanuatu archipelago, and Port Vila is the largest town in Vanuatu.

Port Vila has been a safe landfall since recorded time, but only came to the western world’s attention when determined by the colonising British to be vital in curbing French domination of the Pacific seaways. The French presence had extended to Vila in the late nineteenth century, and a political arrangement between France and Britain in the early twentieth century saw Port Vila flourish, as a jointly ruled colonial outpost, producing copra, bananas, and now, the golden fruit of tourism.

The taxi carried her through the quaint jumble of architectural styles lining the harbour, then up the rise, and inland through the quiet residential areas.

Georgia had never been this far from mainland Australia and felt exposed and alone—almost homesick!

She grappled in her mind for schoolgirl French to ask the driver the distance, when to her surprise and delight he asked her in a deep chocolatey voice, Are you staying long?—and in perfect English! Immediately barriers fell away and she and he chatted brightly for the next five minutes until they swooped into the Porte Cochère of Le Lagon.

She was ushered into the luxury of the lobby, and quickly to her suite overlooking the lagoon, by a devastatingly handsome local lad, and, lying exhausted on the bed where she threw herself, found her thoughts running to irrepressible urges that she assumed had died with Paul.

INCIDENT TWO

The First Officer of the French frigate, Guerrière, appeared at the cell door with a flourish, unlocked it and flung it open, announcing in halting English, You are all free to go—your yacht is alongside and you must board immediately!

Not before I chew out the captain of this goddamn sardine can! bellowed Ralph Walsh, captain of the vessel, Rainbow Warrior II. You arrogant Frenchies think you’re God Almighty—well, I can tell you this will go right back to the President of the United States of America!! he shouted, just a hand-span from the First Officer’s bulging eyes.

A quiet conciliatory voice and a firm, OK, prevented escalation of this encounter—Professor Ryan Sheaffer had past experience with the French, and knew how delicate an issue was the secrecy surrounding nuclear testing on Mururoa Atoll.

He managed to steer Walsh up the companionway, out onto the blistering hot deck of the frigate, over the side, and into the relatively tiny, but much friendlier, security of their home of the past few months.

The two ships parted company in clouds of shouted abuse between crews. Ryan, armed with a stiff brandy, sought solitude atop the chain locker hatch, where he began a personal review of his life thus far.

In answer to his self-addressed mental question, ‘What in hell am I doing here?’ Ryan’s mind free-ranged back through snapshots of his teenage years: marching for Vietnam peace; night-long debates at U.C.L.A. on the negatives and positives of a materialistic society; his then-young mind being torn between an almost consuming need for thermonuclear knowledge and a growing horror of the consequential dangers unleashed by continuous nuclear testing.

At twenty-five Ryan had been chosen from some eighty applicants to head a research team funded by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The team’s task was to recommend enhanced safety measures for the USA’s sixty nuclear power stations. During this work, Ryan had disclosed to his superior his deep concern over the escalating number of reported underground tests being conducted worldwide, and suggested that some enquiry be set up to investigate.

These concerns were met with polite but firm rebuttal, intended to stop him in his tracks—however, Ryan was not a man to be easily turned from a course he felt must be pursued.

After two years of agitating for answers, right up to confrontation with his congressman, Ryan was ‘retrenched due to funding cuts’, and he realised that some publicly visible position was necessary for him to be able to gain press attention, and the coverage needed, to assist in the disclosure of various governments’ overt and covert nuclear testing.

He took tenure as assistant professor of nuclear physics at MIT and within a year had been promoted to full professor, due entirely (the Dean would tell the enquiry later) to Ryan’s exhaustive application to any and every task set him.

From the platform so gained, Ryan was able to access hitherto unobtainable information about sites, dates and strengths of all underground testing (above-ground tests had been banned by international treaty since 1963), all monitored by the American military.

Gradually Ryan became appalled by the French abuse of such a world treasure as a Pacific atoll for their country’s nuclear experimentations. The real cost to the rapidly diminishing natural ecosystem was incalculable. He targeted this one site as the prime example of man’s arrogance and disregard of the planet, and began a running battle against intransigent Gallic bureaucracy.

The French, he discovered in his research, had, at Mururoa Atoll and surrounds, conducted 41 above-ground atomic tests prior to June 5th, 1975, and 152 below-ground atomic tests, the last being January 27th, 1996. Medical problems in the test locality, he found, had become horrendous, and were still poor, with the average age of the local residents being 51 years, as various cancers slowly took their tolls. Birth defects were still twice world average. He found that most relevant records were classified ‘Secret’ by the French government, and all former test site workers were ‘muzzled’ from discussion.

After many heated discussions (arguments?) with the Dean on this subject, Ryan was asked (told?) to take a sabbatical—partly for MIT’s image, partly for Ryan’s state-of-mind—, and, accepting the none-too-subtle request, he retired for a year of ‘inner searching’, as the Dean suggested!

Released from the bonds of the daily regimen, he quickly discovered how popular, and in demand amongst the ladies of the upwardly mobile set, was a thirty-two-year-old, financially comfortable, intelligent, well-preserved male on the loose!

For three months he partied and broke hearts on the east and west coasts, until, sated by hedonism, he hired a campervan and trekked off alone to the wilds of Oregon.

It was there he met Rick and Carmel, a couple who were three-year members of the Greenpeace organization, and who were researching the effects of acid rain on the magnificent Monterey pines. Their commitment so impressed Ryan that, within a few days of their meeting, he knew the course of his immediate future.

He joined Greenpeace then and there, and asked to become involved in the protests over French nuclear testing—his specialty.

He thus found himself here, in just two weeks from meeting Rick and Carmel! Research relative to the environmental effects of the past tests consumed his every waking (and sometimes sleeping) hour.

The crew and volunteers on Rainbow Warrior II were a mixed lot, from widely varying backgrounds, though their common passion welded them into a determined force for change. It was this determined force that the patrolling frigate had confronted, in its attempt to prevent anyone or any ship straying into French restricted areas.

Ryan and Ralph resisted the mass boarding by the Guerrière crew, and a violent scuffle, followed by arrest, caused the two to be thrown into that ship’s lockup cell while the French Guerrière captain sought instructions from his government.

France’s recent experience with Rainbow Warrior I and the Greenpeace organisation had been a sorry one for both sides. A great deal of international ill feeling had been poured over French heads on their involvement in the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior I vessel, by clandestine methods, in New Zealand.

That operation, designed more as a lesson to the world to stay clear of Mururoa Atoll, went horribly wrong, when an innocent reporter was killed in the sinking. Eventually, due primarily to press pressure, two French ‘spies’ were put to trial, sentenced, banished to a luxury tropical island as punishment, and shortly thereafter, amazing interested observers, returned to France—after serving only a small part of their sentence. French politicians had spent a great deal of airtime since those days, playing down the event and apologising to all.

The government advices received resulted in the captain’s extra caution in handling his unwanted captives, and he returned Ryan and Ralph to their yacht, accompanied by a stern threat of further action if they weren’t 200 miles west of Mururoa Atoll within twenty-four hours.

All this was something of a shock to Ryan, as he now had experienced the helplessness that the physically weak feel when faced by bullies—a new side to life for him! He reasoned that his knowledge and zeal were inefficiently combined on a mission like this, so requested of Ralph that he disembark at the next opportunity.

As Rainbow Warrior II had extensively provisioned at Tahiti, and Ralph planned to sail westward towards Australia, the next landfall would be Port Villa in Vanuatu.

Ryan was pleased with that plan, as the international airport there would enable his access to anywhere. So he settled into four weeks of collating data gained by seismic and observation results.

Thus, he added to the mounting evidence of the Greenpeace nuclear test case.

INCIDENT THREE

Will Mademoiselle be sailboarding this morning?" The seductive, practised voice of Henri nudged Georgia back to conscious awareness of the luxurious reality surrounding her, diffusing the daydream in the tropical sunburst of another Vila morning.

N-n-o, n-n-o. Not today, she stammered, rather wishing this charming sports organiser hadn’t caught her dozing, probably with her mouth sagging open and her limbs in disarray. She had cast lingering glances at Henri on occasions when she thought he would not be aware (as he led the more athletic in aerobics or volleyball, for example) but logic, and reason, and intelligence had always snapped her back to the practical—‘a holiday romance rarely lasts,’ she repeated to herself, and both parties simply used each other in an unrealistic situation.

Henri remained by her prone body, shielding her eyes from the bright sunlight with a muscular tanned leg.

Could I interest Mademoiselle in something less vigorous— more suited to her style? he continued, showing more than an employee’s interest in this fine-featured guest.

Georgia was suddenly wide awake, and sat up, so that she felt more in control, less threatened—‘threatened,’ she wondered, ‘is an odd way for me to feel about a man. I hope I’m not deteriorating into an old-unattached!’

Henri fell to kneel beside her, and, flashing his most beguiling smile, asked her silkily, Would Mademoiselle care to come with me in the powerboat across the lagoon to Erakor? They have a niVanuatu-operated restaurant that you’ll always remember.

This was going all too fast, and running too warm for staid Georgia! Leering at a hunk on the sand was OK, but when he made the move, she found herself going to water, like a teenager talking to her first boyfriend on the school bus.

Er, aahh, thank you for the kind offer, Henri, she mumbled, her tongue refusing to shape the words as quickly as she wanted to force them out. I-I-I want to walk by myself into town this morning, she blurted out, to visit the market, and get some mild exercise.

She found herself fabricating this story as she spoke it—‘what’s wrong with me?’ she thought. ‘I’ve been made a harmless offer by the guy a dozen other women (single or married, she guessed) would give a month’s pay for, and I’ve turned him down!’

Annoyed with herself, and unsure why she hastened to escape from an obviously rarely-turned-down Henri,—the hurt look was genuine, she thought—Georgia returned to her suite to shower and dress for the trip she never intended to make, but now felt obliged to perform.

The three or four kilometre distance separating the resort from Port Vila town is a gentle stroll through treed, residential greenery, a mixture of house qualities reflecting poor and wealthy, very little traffic, and many friendly ni-Vanuatu. By the time she had reached the top of the rise above town, she had just about used up next year’s supply of ‘good mornings’.

A perfect, clean, clear view of Port Vila harbour filled her vision again that morning. Iririki island lay mid-harbour, like the dream proposed by every South Pacific travel brochure. The jumble of architecture, inherited from mixed cultures, spread in whitewashed confusion below, and riding at anchor were at least forty vessels of all descriptions.

A wave of desire to capture, and be part of all this, came and went. Georgia, being now far too practical to follow any course, other than her thought ‘after the holiday, back to the lab,’ wandered in a fuzzy daze down the hill into the sleepy Saturday streets.

She browsed amongst the extraordinary variety of carvings, jewellery, sarongs, colourful shells and locally made artefacts on display in the market, on the park beside the harbour. The aqua blues and turquoises of the harbour waters splintered the warm sunlight, making Georgia aware of the sun’s heat on her bare head. She scolded herself for forgetting to wear the only headgear she had in her holiday luggage, a peaked cap, and searched out a hat-sales display stall. The giggly teenage girls at the sales stand spent nearly fifteen minutes deciding for her which wide-brimmed straw summer bonnet seemed to suit her features and colouring best.

Over-choice almost had forced her to give up this decision, when a quiet American male voice stopped her thought process.

If you can suffer a mere male’s advice, ma’am, he drawled, "why hide those beautiful tresses under any hat, when a sunshade will allow me to feast on the sight of the finest head of hair I’ve seen in six months?"

Georgia snapped to attention and knocked over the tiny stool and even tinier mirror the girls had provided!

Ryan, who had arrived in Vila only two days ago, was almost stupefied by boredom already, and had decided to wander along the harbour road with the eventual aim of having a beer and lunch somewhere. His roving eye had spied Georgia’s auburn locks flashing in the sunlight shafts, and, with nothing better to do, decided to watch her efforts. Swamped by the second magnetic male attention that morning, Georgia, who had never really recovered her ability to socialise with men since Paul’s tragic death, blushed intensely, and her voice became, once again, trapped in her throat.

Ryan sauntered towards her, and both had a delicious, quiet fragment of time to take a first-impression mental snapshot of each other, to file away in memory—for the times ahead.

She saw a physically-well-built man, used to the outdoors, she assessed, wearing well-worn tight denims that had seen better days, a sleeveless cotton shirt showing interesting glimpses of brown arms and torso, and, admitted Georgia to herself, the most striking feature of a full