Trick of the Light

This story is based on a Belle and Sebastian song on The Boy With The Arab Strap called Space Boy Dream.

I don’t think I’ll ever be warm again. Sometimes it’s as if my weightless spine has been replaced with a cloudy column of ice like the cores retrieved from the Artic. Those cores contain the climatic history of the Earth and the scientists that measure its change over many hundreds of thousands of years can’t have helped but notice that no matter how far back you go it never seems quite far enough.

It is easy to keep things cold in space than it is too keep things warm. The average temperature of space is staggeringly cold. Using the Kelvin temperature scale, where Zero Kelvin is the same as absolute zero , the equivalent of minus 273 degrees Celsius, you really get to understand how cold space is. Water freezes at +273 Kelvin and water boils at +373 Kelvin. If I put a thermometer in darkest space it would first have to cool off. This could take a very a while. Once it cooled off, it would read something like 2.7 Kelvin. Elton wasn’t wrong when he said it wasn’t the kind of place to raise your kids.

And then there is the darkness. Several of the crew have reported seeing things but they are surely hallucinations. Lock yourself in a dark room for two years and tell me you haven’t started seeing things. The darkness is the ultimate nihilism especially for a scientist. It’s not until you witness the nothingness, the wall, the fucking mind fucking self reflecting mirror that all the theories we learnt on Earth begin to melt away. At first you ignore it; pretend it’s like the stupid friend who’s always ready to say the wrong thing. It creeps in at first but then it tacitly nudges and shoulders past the corner of your crusty eye with the bravado of a con-artist. Confrontation is inevitable; it comes to us all out here. It is here and it makes you forget that you are not actually part of it.

The darkness inevitably makes you think about the richness of our life on Earth; shapes, colours, sounds and the wealth of possibility. How could you ever run out of things to talk or think about? In this darkness I want to say that I will never be bored again once I return, but I know that this can never be true. Because of our birthright, it is natural that our first instinct is to reject darkness. Earth has rhythms; space whistles imperceptibly and forces you to beat out your own time on any handy surface.

Out here the darkness tempts us all with its illusory embrace. The darkness is a different desert since our enemies are neither the sun nor our thirst. Our enemies are ourselves and the demons that only we can summon. Pablo’s not as stupid as he looks. “The trouble with nothing space,” we all had our names for it, “is that the only reality that means anything is in your head. I can’t wait for it to end; I mean it doesn’t even feel like we’re moving.” He is right; all we have is the gauges.

As our old theories melt a new one begins to emerge. Thomas explained it to me last night on the watch. He had been experiencing hallucinations like the rest of us only his face looked as if he'd swallowed a good deal of what he had been immersed in. I had to shake and slap him before he came round. When he did, he told me what he had seen.

“Our greatest mistake was that our theories about the Universe and the Big Bang were formulated on Earth. You get out here and it’s like bullshit, quantum fucking bullshit. There’s nothing out here, not even anything to wipe off the windshield. But then as you look it changes you and you realise that you’ve been fooled. You were looking at the darkness when you should have been looking through the darkness and you start looking harder and then harder still until…BOOM.” He clapped his thick mittened hands together. “You’ve just made something out of nothing and then it dawns on you." He paused. "That is precisely what God did.”

Thomas was exquisitely pleased with himself and secretly I was profoundly jealous of the fact that he’d got there first despite knowing that we would have all got there by ourselves eventually.

There was a tapping noise. Every event on board at the moment meant stopping to determine whether it was a real event or a hallucinatory one. No one had reported any auditory hallucinations as yet. I looked around me; no-one had entered the control module; fucking with people somehow went with the territory. It seemed to be coming from outside as if someone was tapping on the window. I got to my feet and on tip toes, carefully leant over the control desk and peered over the nose of the craft into the darkness. Something caught my eye. A solitary tiny star cracked the dark mirror below us. I brushed a magnifying tear from the glass and looked closer concentrating on the one thing in my sky that shone other than this tin can. I watched transfixed as the crack split along its vertical plane slowly at first and the light burst into the cockpit like a new dawn. I raised my gloved hand to cover my eyes and a voice came from the light.

“Hello. Is anyone there?” A gloved hand reached through the rip in the dark cloth. Someone was beside my face, I could smell whoever it was; presumably another prank from my crew. You grow to hate people you have to share oxygen with.

“Who are you, how did you get here?”

“We’re here to get you out sir. There’s been an accident. Right now we’ve got most of the factory on top of us, so we need to proceed carefully.” I was powerless as the man strapped an oxygen mask on my face. A radio cracked and the oxygen was starting to have an effect. “Yeah I’ve got one alive down here and from what I can see two dead.” I turned my head and could see that Thomas and Pablo remained locked in the darkness.