The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction

had arranged to meet a friend today, but... now he could devote his Saturday afternoon to troubleshooting. Surely it couldn’t be that the app failed during tracking, of all things? He switched on the telescope and put it in simulation mode. It would simply execute the control app’s commands and pretend to find the constellations in the sky where the program expected them to be.
The telescope was wirelessly connected to their home network, so he could simply speak his commands. The device’s microphone captured them and forwarded them to the Alexa AI.
“Alexa, track IC 342,” he commanded.
“I’m tracking IC 342,” she replied.
The telescope woke up. He pushed the tripod a little away from the wall so that the telescope would have a clear path in all directions. The tube moved first to the right, then upward. The direction was now approximately correct. Yesterday, this was the moment when the motors had started to jerk. This time, too, they slowed down, but they didn’t stop. The telescope approached the target in mini-steps.
“IC 342 reached,” Alexa said.
Peter checked the result on the app’s screen. A barred spiral galaxy appeared, a beautiful specimen, too beautiful to be real. The telescope generated the data itself in simulation mode, matching the time of day and geographic position. After all, it was not the first time someone had looked at the sky.
The thought that someone else had already discovered everything there was to see frustrated Peter to the point where he needed to suppress it. Franziska couldn’t understand that. She preferred to look at the sky in simulation mode. That was how he had been able to convince her to let him buy the not-so-cheap instrument in the first place. She couldn’t understand why he would rather voluntarily freeze outside at night to look at a blurry version of the same celestial object that he could view much sharper and more colorfully in simulation.
All right, it was not a hardware problem. Peter knew it was possible that the telescope might have needed to make a particular movement while tracking IC 342, but then the motion had been obstructed by some debris in one of its joints. That always happened in his own joints whenever he bent down to tie his shoes. Unlike himself, the telescope was fairly new. Perhaps it had just been a temporary problem. It wasn’t uncommon that a computer refused to do what you told it to do, and eventually it came to its senses.
The problem had not let go of him by evening. It could not and must not be that the telescope refused to work, so he had to convince himself that yesterday was a slip-up. He was lucky, because another clear, cold night was forecast.
After dinner, he carried the telescope into the unheated foyer so that it could cool down slowly.
“What are you doing, darling?” Franziska asked.
He didn’t feel like explaining the details. “I have to check something on Saturn and Neptune today.”
“But the conjunction was yesterday, right?”
“Yeah, but they’re still pretty close today, too.”
“I thought we could get a little close today. I was about to run a bath, and then...”
He bent down, checked the joints of the tripod, and considered. It was a tempting offer. The night was long. Then later, when Franziska was asleep, he could still look for IC 342. He straightened up again.
“You’re right. I’ll keep you company in the bathroom.”
Franziska rode him. Peter moaned as the bed squeaked. All at once she rolled off to one side of him. He curled up behind her and took her in the spooning position until he came. Franziska continued to tease herself until she also reached orgasm.
Breathing heavily, they lay side by side on their backs. It was beautiful. He knew it, and so did his wife. They’d been married for almost 20 years now, soon after they’d met while teaching at the Albert Schweizer High School. “Math and physics teacher, with an art and music teacher, that can’t be good,” his colleagues said at the time. But his colleagues had been wrong. He and his wife were good at tolerating each other’s weaknesses, which was probably the main thing.
Franziska sat up and looked for the duvet that had fallen off the foot end of the bed. Peter stood up and got it for her, and she thanked him.
“Don’t you want to lie down again?” she asked with a yawn.
He shook his head. “I want to correct some more classwork.”
“You liar. You just want to cheat on me with your telescope.”
He shouldn’t have even tried to make up an excuse. That didn’t work with Franziska, and now she would hold it against him for two weeks.
“You’re right again,” he said. “I need to check something out there. The telescope was acting strangely last night.”
“Well, have fun in the cold. But do me a favor and sleep on the sofa. Otherwise I won’t be able to go back to sleep.”
“Sure thing, darling.”
“Suck-up.” Franziska laughed. Of course she liked it when he called her darling. She just couldn’t admit it.
“Good night,” he said.
He knelt on the bed, bent over, and kissed her on the mouth. As he did so, his gaze fell on her breasts. Franziska was still beautiful. Maybe he should stay in bed after all.
“Good night,” she said.
No, IC 342 would not give him a moment’s peace. He got up and left the bedroom, washed up in the downstairs bathroom, dried himself, and slipped back into his clothes.
He was carrying the telescope outside when the light in the bedroom went out, leaving him in the dark. An icy wind whistled through his clothes and made him grimace as he walked through the yard. Anyone who let a little cold stop him didn’t deserve to find the answers.
After setting up and adjusting the telescope out in the meadow, he left it and went to retrieve his gloves, hat, and scarf from the hallway. Before the sensor-activated light turned on again, he quickly