In The Dark Light

His grandfather had lived out his childhood in a house overlooking a busy railway line. Greg lost count of the number of times he’d heard the story about the night a fire closed the line further out of town.

‘Woke up suddenly,’ Grandpa said. ‘Nine forty-three precisely. The silence woke me – should have been the Birmingham night train coming through. I couldn’t sleep after that, sat up watching the empty lines and knowing there was something wrong.’

Greg had been fascinated to hear the story as a child, moving on to boredom in his teenage years as he heard it repeated. Waking now in the permanent night, he thought of Grandpa.

The silence. He sat up in his bunk. It felt like the ship was listening to him.

‘Hello?’ he said quietly. No answer. Greg felt a shiver of relief, though he knew he was just imagining things. He clicked the light switch by his bunk, and the relief shattered. No light.

In that instant, he realised that the silence and the lack of light must mean that all electrical function had ceased. As he reached for his overalls, Greg thought of the air purifiers and woke up fully. The constant sigh of air passing through vents had stopped.

He arrived on the bridge at a trot. Commander Griff James was tapping at the keyboard, watching the blank screen.

‘What happened?’ Greg asked.

Commander James put a mug on the page to keep his place, and Greg shook his head at the sight of a Mars mission commander reading instructions from paper pages. His father had owned a few paper books, but Greg had never been allowed to touch them. After his father’s death, Greg had washed the dusty books carefully. The pages had glued themselves together and stuck fast when dry, tearing as he tried to open them. Paper was fragile. And now they were more than twenty million miles from Earth and relying on a paper book.