The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction

it’s whom.”
But this is all part of my dream. He didn’t say this out loud, because Franziska would only get upset about it. After all, to her it was not a dream.
“‘My darling?’ I just told you that someone else fucked me, and you call me your darling?”
This was a strange dream. About the strangest one he’d had lately. He should tell it to Franziska. Or maybe not.
“Yes. I’m still tired. Can we talk about it later?”
“Later? You want to talk to me about cheating later? Man, Peter, you can go fuck yourself! I’m getting a divorce!”
Franziska stormed out of the bedroom and slammed the door.
When he woke up, he was, at first, a little disoriented. He reached over, but the other side of the bed was empty. That’s right, Franziska was out with Greta and with that director. Only then did he notice the buzzing of the alarm clock. He pressed the ‘Off’ button. Today was Tuesday, and he had to go to school. First period. That group of students was always especially nice.
He showered, got dressed, and ate a small bowl of cereal. There was no sign of Franziska. It looked as if she hadn’t even been home yet. No need to worry. She’d probably go to school from her friend’s house.
He looked at the weather forecast. It was not supposed to rain today, so he got the bicycle out of the garage and cycled to his workplace.
As promised by the weather forecast, the sun shone in the afternoon. Peter noticed Franziska and her friend Greta when he pushed his bike behind the house. They were sitting on deck chairs, covered up, and toasting each other.
“Looks like you two are having a good time,” Peter commented.
“It’s not alcohol, just lemonade. Greta made it herself,” Franziska answered.
He put the bike down, then went over to her, and gave her a kiss. She smiled at him. He hadn’t seen her this happy in a very long time. Was that good, or was there something to worry about?
“Hello Peter,” Greta said, pulling her hand out of the blanket and waving at him.
“Do you want to join us for a bit?” Franziska asked. “The lemonade is good!”
“I have a lot of preparation to do, unfortunately,” he replied.
That wasn’t quite true. He didn’t want to end up arguing with Greta, which was what usually happened. She swore by homeopathy and was always quoting her horoscope, along with everyone else’s. She really believed that a distant star determines a person’s fate. He once explained that most of the stars around her couldn’t even know she was born yet because it took longer for the light to reach them than she had yet lived, but that didn’t affect her thinking.
“I’ll be leaving soon, too,” Greta said. “Then you’ll have your wife all to yourself again.”
“Stay a little longer,” said Franziska. “Peter doesn’t mind. Right, Peter?”
“Yes, of course. Stay. I still have lots of work to do, as I said.”
“Did you finish everything for your classes?” Franziska asked.
She had prepared the supper while he was still working, and then called him into the dining room. She had set the dining room table in white. There were even wine glasses on it. Unusual—they rarely drank wine with dinner.
“Yeah, pretty much.”
He’d finished after an hour. After that, he had thought about an optimal measurement strategy. He’d wanted to solve the problem that the telescope always needed a certain amount of time to find a certain object. The farther apart two objects were in the sky, the longer it took to slew. Peter came up with an algorithm that minimized the telescope’s path. Now all he would have to do was type in the coordinates of his test objects.
“Poor you. Haven’t you taught all of these math and physics classes at least twice now?”
“That’s true, but the performance level is very different. I have to balance that out. It would be great if they would introduce electrostimulated learning here—after all, it’s been common in China for a long time. In art and music, maybe it doesn’t play such a role, but you could adjust the performance level much better before the lessons.”
“I find the idea creepy. Imagine if knowledge had been instilled in our children without them realizing it?”
“At least then they would have learned something. But I do know what you mean. State propaganda. That may be a problem in China. But in our country? How come you have so little to do right now?”
“I just assigned projects in all the classes, so I really don’t need to show up for class,” Franziska said.
“You’ve got it good.”
His smartphone vibrated. He pulled it out, even though he knew that Franziska would find that rude, but he was waiting so anxiously for Holinger’s answer. No one else answered him at this time of day. The sender, however, was an ex-colleague. He put the phone away again.
“Come, sit down. We’ll eat,” Franziska said. She poured the wine. Then she sat, took her wine glass, and toasted him.
His phone vibrated again. Just quickly checking to see who it is... holinger@astro.u-stockholm.
“Geez, Peter!” Franziska exclaimed. “You really are impossible!”
She put her wine glass down on the table with such momentum that it clinked, and several drops splashed out.
Oh, now he’d overdone it.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just because of—”
“Because of those fucking stars, right? I almost think you’d rather look at them than me anymore.”
At least they don’t get upset when I check my mail.
Now he had to soothe Franziska. “Please just calm down, honey. I’m really sorry, and it won’t happen again.”
“I am the calm person! You don’t get it, do you? You don’t understand how humiliating it is when your own husband is more interested in the distant stars than in you.”
“That’s not the point at all. I was just checking something out, and I wasn’t distracted from you for a second. I was right here with you.”
“All the way here, with me? If you were,