Chapter 39

The horizon drew a line between itself and the sky as the glow in the east broke the darkness. Even those first few weak rays were enough to bring the landscape to life. After a night of stumbling virtually blind over thorns and rocks, Charlotte, Lindy, Eugene and Tertius suddenly felt weightless. The burden and dread and exhaustion of the night were suddenly forgotten, and they hiked on with new vigour.

The desert that stretched north of Upington had always looked to be just a flat expanse. But that was the deception that comes with owning a car, and being bound to the thin black strips of tar that join all places worth travelling to. Instead, the landscape underfoot was ridged and undulating so that at any point in a journey across it, you were either climbing a sandy incline or stopping yourself from sliding down the other side of it. And it seemed that the path that Eugene was leading them on never once ran along the spine of a ridge. It was always running ninety degrees to the natural grain of the wind-carved land.

During the night they spoke a lot. It helped to take their minds off their predicament and to keep the group together in the darkness. Lindy wanted to know more about the moon that was their ultimate destination, but neither Eugene nor Tertius could really provide much information.

“It’s not as though we can see what it looks like using a telescope,” said Tertius. “All we know is based on what we can deduce from the light it blocks when it passes in front of its sun. It has an atmosphere that contains oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide points to there being or having been some sort of vegetation on the moon. It has an approximate temperature, depending on the thickness of the atmosphere, of about twenty-five to thirty degrees. It completes one cycle around its host planet every three hours and its host planet travels around its sun in one week short of an earth year.”

“That’s a lot to deduce from a pin of light,” said Lindy.

“Ja, it is. But it leaves a lot of questions unanswered – questions I was hoping not to figure out the answers to in person.”

“Like what?”

“We don’t know what quantities of life-supporting gases exist there. Plants may have once blossomed there but may now be extinct. There might be animals there already, there might not. They could be predators. There could be diseases our bodies are unaccustomed to dealing with ...”

“Stop it,” said Eugene. “Let’s talk about something else.”

They were quiet for a minute, and then Charlotte spoke. “Tell us about the ship.”

Tertius began. “Nuclear power is the most efficient and condensed energy source we know of, and yet we’ve been unable to use it for rocket propulsion because of legislation surrounding radiation fallout issues. So NASA, for years, has been fiddling around with Mickey Mouse propulsion – nitrogen and oxygen – and it works to a degree. It gets us into space, but that technology doesn’t allow us to explore deep space. Imagine how much of the sea floor you could explore just by holding your breath? That’s how limited that technology is. Nuclear power is basically a huge scuba tank. We’re not going to visit all of the universe with it, but it puts our entire galaxy and a couple of nearby galaxies within reach, not just our solar system. And that’s a big difference. People have been advocating for the colonisation of Mars for years, but only because it’s the only planet within our reach. It’s the ultimate dead-end. I mean, look at it. It’s a poisonous, lifeless desert. Why would anyone go and live there? It’s 1960s thinking and it’s dangerously out of date. With nuclear propulsion, we don’t need to settle for our ugly sister planet. We have thousands of better options now, and the moon we’re going to is the best one we’ve found.”

Almost as though they had choreographed this talk, Eugene took over from Tertius with hardly a pause between sentences.

“The reason no one’s been able to use nuclear propulsion is that the possibility of the ship exploding in the upper atmosphere is a real one. The radiation that would be released would be immense, and depending on the elevation of the blast, it could affect every corner of the globe. We also have no idea what would happen to the ozone layer if we nuked it. But we’ve built a safety measure into our craft to stop major fallout in the atmosphere. You should have seen those head engineers sitting around that table for months, devising these crazy ways to contain the ship and its nuclear cargo should anything go wrong. Then this young guy, who was hardly even considered an engineer – a tech guy who worked on the computer network – he walks in one day with a drawing. It’s basically a huge ice-hockey puck made out of a titanium-iron alloy. And the ship and the crew and the uranium and all the important things are on one side of the plate, and on the other side is a funnel. So there’s a hole the size of a one-rand coin in the middle of this blast plate, and the blast material and detonator can be delivered through the plate and detonated on the other side without affecting the ship. So if anything malfunctions in the blast, it won’t vaporise the uranium reserves. It was just so simple. And these guys, these head engineers, couldn’t believe it. I think some of them had thought about the idea, but chose not to mention it because of how simple it was. The only issue then was to figure out how to seal the one-rand-sized hole once the detonation was underway. And that was pretty simple too.”

“Well, it’s not like it solves the issue completely,” continued Tertius. “Things can still go wrong. But if they do go wrong it’ll just be a fuck-up, not the mother and father of all fuck-ups.”

Charlotte found Tertius’s swearing peculiar. He seemed so timid, and yet he’d delivered those two swear words with real conviction.

“Tell them where we got the blast plate,” added Tertius.

“There was one guy whose father disposed of old manhole covers. So we just got loads of those. These three huge trucks came with old rusted, bent and broken manhole covers and tipped them all out on the sand.”

“Sounds pretty low-tech,” said Lindy.

“Ja, it is in some ways. That’s the beauty of it. It’s the union of the high and the low. The high-tech came in smelting those covers and making a titanium alloy.”

Tertius took over now. “The whole project was about solving one problem after another. Though we had plenty of money to spend, there were limited things we could spend it on. Especially near the beginning of the project when sanctions were still in place. So there began this culture of making do with what we could find. In that way, this spacecraft is truly African – and I’m not saying that in a bad way. This is real ingenuity. This is like that kid in Malawi who turned his windmill into a generator and started recharging people’s cellphones for a fee. Except times that by a million.”

“You’re not making me feel better about this,” said Charlotte. “You say African ingenuity and all I think of are those stories of taxi drivers using monkey wrenches instead of steering wheels.”

The other three laughed, but Charlotte hadn’t meant it as a joke.

“And what’s life on the ship going to be like?” asked Lindy. There was a sense of reassurance in her tone, as though she were asking someone what the hotel swimming pool was like, ignoring the fact that they were highly unlikely to even make it to the ship.

“It’s tight,” answered Eugene – who, being almost a foot taller and about a foot wider than Tertius, had the most authority to answer the question. “If you scratch your nose, you’ll be scratching someone else’s ear too. The cockpit is the tightest space. You couldn’t fit a fart between the four crew in there. Then there’s a main cylindrical chamber up the middle of the craft that you can only use in zero gravity. You can pass a person coming the other way, but it’s intimate. The trick there is to face outward when you pass someone, or you’ll have your face in their crotch at some point. Then off to one side is a sleeping room – also tight – and a bathroom, which is about half the size of the kind you’d find on an aeroplane. Then right up near the nose is a living space, and that’s where the crew can stretch out a bit. When you see it, you won’t think it’s big, but once you get used to it, it’ll be okay. We’ll be detonating propulsion blasts every few hours to begin with, and for those we need to be strapped into the cockpit. We’ll be in and out of those seats all the time initially. The whole cockpit capsule can move a few metres up and down in the shaft of the ship. It was designed to cushion the G-force of the acceleration. But, nonetheless, those blasts will be rough.”

“You said we’d do loads of blasts initially. Why’s that?” asked Charlotte.

“Okay, ja, good point. Now this is my area of expertise,” said Eugene. “The sooner we can get through the detonations, the faster we’ll be going and the sooner we’ll get there. So it’s important to get the first twenty acceleration blasts done relatively quickly. If we can do that it’ll cut literally months off of our travel time. We’ll be doing ten blasts a day for the first two days, and then slowing that down to one a day for a month and a half. But we can only accelerate for the first half of the trip, because we’ll need the second half of the trip to slow ourselves down, otherwise we’ll just zoom past the moon. I figured out a way to bring the craft into orbit around the host star, which means that as long as we’re not going at full speed when we get there, we can lose some of our momentum while we’re circling our new home. This will give us a chance to survey the planet and its moon, as well as allow us time to calibrate the systems for our final approach.”

“And how do we slow down?” asked Charlotte.

“We’ve got to turn the ship around, face its bum to the star and perform the same number of detonations as we did in our acceleration. Just before halfway through the trip, we’ll activate a series of tiny jet engines on the sides of the ship that will flip us over and then stabilise us again, so that our nose will be pointing back to Earth. Then we get back in the cockpit seats and blast ourselves down to a manageable speed.”

“And that blast plate will handle over a hundred nuclear explosions?”

“It’ll get out of shape, for sure. But it’s designed to. I suspect that with it bending, it’ll take some of the give away from the cockpit capsule, which means that our last few blasts are going to be the roughest.”

A moment passed in silence and then ... “Shit,” said Charlotte, and immediately a hand grabbed her arm as though to catch her mid-fall, but she hadn’t fallen.

“You okay?” came Eugene’s voice from the darkness. He was holding her tightly.

“I’m fine, I just remembered I have an outstanding library book.”

This time Charlotte had meant it as a joke, and they all laughed. But though she’d meant to lighten the mood, the idea of her outstanding library book had only come to mind because she was thinking back to a recent early morning. It was rubbish day, which forced her out of bed before 6 a.m. carrying a half-full black bag down to the street bins, and instead of curling back under the covers, she’d decided to take her book and go to a playground nearby where there was a bench. She found a homeless man using it as a bed when she arrived, and so she sat on one of the kids’ swings, rocking herself gently and reading, keeping one eye on the sleeping man in case he woke up and wanted money.

The deafening cry of a flock of startled hadedas woke the man, and he rolled himself off the bench and hobbled away down the street, leaving Charlotte alone. She remembered thinking in that moment that, despite her loneliness – which had consumed her life for the last year – she was okay. Life would be okay. And she said “Shit” there in the desert, in the darkness, because she realised that she was finally ready to get her life together, maybe move out of Kimberley to Joburg or Port Elizabeth and get a decent job and finally start internet dating. She wished that this opportunity to leave Earth had come months earlier, when she wasn’t okay with life, when cheap red wine and Betapain tablets were the only things that got her to sleep, when she’d drive aimlessly around her suburbs at night and find herself parked outside her ex-boyfriend’s house, when the pain was so strong and so real that her whole body ached. It wasn’t to say that she was okay, only that in that moment, she knew she could be.