The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction

closed his eyes. He knew the way well enough to grope his way inside and back out again.
Back at the telescope, he started tracking. He didn’t need to wait for his eyes to adapt. The saying, ‘the journey is the destination,’ was almost never true, but now it applied. The telescope’s tube turned briskly at first, then more and more slowly in the desired direction. Peter knew approximately where the galaxy should be, and the control app seemed to agree with him. Clever app, he thought.
But then the telescope stuttered again and abruptly stopped. Crap. The error yesterday had been no accident. He looked at the smartphone screen. Tracking worked via pattern recognition. The app used known star positions to analyze what the telescope was seeing, and then used that data to calculate which direction it needed to move the field of view. This was a pretty reliable mechanism.
Errors could occur temporarily if any unexpected objects interfered with the pattern recognition. However, the usual suspects, such as manmade Earth satellites, were already calculated by the program based on their known orbits. So the problem would have to be an unknown object that shone in roughly the same place yesterday as it was shining today. Did such a thing even exist? Peter looked through the telescope. His eyes had not completely adapted yet, and he could not recognize any special features.
He mirrored the telescope image onto the smartphone and analyzed it in a special program that knew all the star charts. It couldn’t find any additional celestial bodies, either—a pity, actually. He could have been lucky enough to find a new comet. He would have named it Franziska, which would please his wife.
A puzzle. He restarted the tracking, and this time, too, it got stuck just before the destination. Was the mechanism defective? He let the program search for NGC 1788, the ‘Cosmic Bat’ Nebula, located near the belt stars of Orion. The telescope obeyed the app’s commands, and finally it pointed to Orion’s belt. Peter looked in the eyepiece to confirm that NGC 1788 was actually in his sight.
“Alexa, track IC 342,” he said.
One last attempt. For a moment, it looked as if he would be successful, but then the telescope juddered to a halt again. But why? Maybe the solution to the riddle was in there. He pressed the shutter release, and the camera took a series of photographs of what the telescope was currently seeing.
Peter carried the instrument back into the hallway. His fingers felt frozen stiff, so he warmed them on the heater in the kitchen. He wondered if he should go to sleep, but he wasn’t tired, so he fetched his notebook computer from the study. From there, he accessed the telescope’s memory, retrieved the last images, and instructed the software to superimpose them.
The result was not recognizably different from the individual exposures—there was no object hiding in one shot that only became visible after he’d stacked several exposures. There was no unusual object whatsoever. Everything looked the same as it had looked for billions of years, when the youngest of the stars born in this section of the sky glowed.
It was a mystery. Fortunately, he was not the only amateur astronomer in the world. He registered in an online forum for like-minded people and posed his problem. The answers were not very helpful. Someone recommended that he have his telescope cleaned, another blamed it on the software, and a third suggested that he try a different target. So he sent an e-mail to the manufacturer of the tracking software. The answer came immediately. The hotline was taking a well-deserved break over the weekend, and they would contact him again on Monday.
Crap. He couldn’t get any further. Peter didn’t like going to bed with unresolved problems, but he had no choice at the moment. He stripped down to his underwear, lay down on the sofa, and pulled the blanket up to his chin.

February 22, 2026 – Passau
“Good morning, Peter,” Franziska greeted him.
She was always in such a good mood in the early morning that it was almost unbearable.
“Shit. Is it tomorrow already?” he mumbled, pulling the covers over his head.
“Look. It snowed!”
What? He straightened up with a jerk. He hoped he’d carried the telescope into the house!
“Did I?” he asked.
“Don’t worry. It’s in the hallway.”
Franziska had understood his question immediately, the beauty of such a long relationship. It would not have been the first time he’d forgotten his telescope outside. Peter wanted to lie down again, but a pain shot up his back. Not this, too?
“Oh, is it pinching again?” asked Franziska.
It must be obvious to her. Peter nodded.
“You should join me in my exercises. They’re good for back pain,” said his wife.
“They’re good at helping you.”
“They would help you, too. You’d just have to try it once.”
He waved it off. “Don’t bother. I don’t have the energy for that right now.”
Franziska sat down on the sofa and stroked his thigh. “What’s bothering you? You seem particularly grumpy this morning.”
Grumpy? Me? Impossible. “Nothing,” he said.
“Come on. There’s something going on.”
Franziska wouldn’t take no for an answer, so he might as well tell her. “On the telescope, the tracking no longer works, but it’s only for one, very specific target.”
“Ah, I can imagine how that would bug you. I’m sure you’ve already ruled out all possible sources of error.”
“You bet. It might actually just be another bug in the software.”
“A bug that only occurs on a specific target?”
“It’s not like I tested that many other targets.”
“How many have you tried?”
“Two.”
Actually, it had been only one other destination. But something told him the problem only occurred at IC 342.
“I see,” said Franziska.
“You’re right. I could try a few other targets,” he replied.
“But I didn’t say anything. Although, you’re probably right.”
“It’s just a feeling, but I’m sure it has to do with that particular target.” A feeling. In other circumstances, he would have made fun of it, but unfortunately he had