Chapter 6

It was while he was recovering in my bed, with me sleeping in the lounge on the fold-out couch, that my guest, Stefan, told me all he knew about the space launch. Each day he told me of a new lead that would help me in writing my biography of the spaceship. And bit by bit, I pieced the story together.

And as the story unfolded, these people, these space pioneers, began to get under my skin as if I knew them and was living the torment of their last days on Earth alongside them. To come to the decision to leave Earth for good is a lot like the decision to commit suicide. It comes from a place of real desperation, real hopelessness. I’m talking about the actual intention to die, not just a cry for help. To come to that decision often means that there’s nothing and no one on Earth left to live for. And certainly hardly anyone left for a journalist like myself to interview. Stefan, however, had names of people I could call, no one personally close to the Afrinauts though, just people involved with the planning of the launch – contractors, bigwigs, henchmen. His colleagues.

Each evening over the next few weeks, after my interviews and “detective” work, I treated Stefan’s wounds with help from the internet and a pamphlet I’d picked up at the pharmacy. It was gory stuff, but with each day he grew stronger – though even at this stage, I was wondering whether I wanted him back to full strength. There was likely a good reason, I suspected, that the government would want to take him and hide him far from society – or simply kill him. He was a man void of compassion. Though, that said, he didn’t function without some sort of sketchy moralistic code. One of the first things I noticed about him, after he woke from his first thirty-four-hour painkiller-induced sleep, was that he was intolerant of dishonesty. Not that I was setting out to lie to the man. Not at all. It was dishonesty within the semantics of language that seemed to incense him the most.

I asked him about it once, later on in his stay with me when he’d warmed to me (it was hardly warmth, more like tolerance, the way you tolerate an in-grown toenail). And he explained it like this: If untruths become part of our language – untruths that in context are intended to be interpreted as polite expressions or figures of speech – then each person is left to decide for themselves the meaning of any sentence. And when language and meaning become subjective, society breaks down. The rule of law becomes a grey area. Commands become suggestions. And how do you keep anyone, including yourself, accountable for actions based on an ambiguous language? His solution was to nip the confusion in the bud. To confront it as he saw it. It irritated me.

It was during this process of trying to squeeze a story out of Stefan that I realised that perhaps I wasn’t as mediocre a journalist as I had at first thought. In the heat of investigation – not just for an article about whether the chemicals in sunscreen are worse for you than ultraviolet light, or whether carrots really help your eyesight, but for a book about the most life-changing event of the modern era – I was willing to go to any lengths.

There’s a saying, If you lift many stones you’ll find many scorpions. Which I think means that if you keep looking for trouble you’ll find it every time. I was talking to a lot of bad people – some not so bad, but others as bad as they come – and I never once felt in any danger. I lifted loads of stones without finding a single scorpion, before I realised I’d had the hugest, meanest, most poisonous scorpion in my bed all along.

Here is the story of Charlotte and Lindy Opperman and Eugene Rademeyer and Tertius Joubert – the first four extra-planetary colonisers in humankind’s history.