The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction

he couldn’t shake the feeling that Villarroel and her colleagues had been looking in the wrong place. Maybe he’d have more success?

February 25, 2026 – Passau
Two dreary nights were behind him. Franziska had kept looking longingly at her weather app—when he couldn’t look at the stars, his mood was always a few degrees cooler than usual. Of course, his wife noticed this too, and then she took extra good care of him, which he couldn’t stand at all when he was in such a mood.
All the better that clear weather was on tap for tonight. Today was Wednesday, which meant he didn’t have to go to school until third period tomorrow. So he could stare up at the night sky as long as he wanted, or rather, as long as he could stand the cold. Earlier, the thermometer at the bathroom window read minus two degrees, but the temperature was sure to drop. He took some chemical hand warmers with him just to be on the safe side.
This time he’d put a folding chair in front of his telescope. He had also grabbed his daughter’s music stand, which she had left behind when she moved out a few years ago. It was crazy how time seemed to fly. He didn’t even remember what year that was. Now the music stand held the list he wanted to work from. He had replaced the lamp at the top of the rack with a red light so that he could read the text without sacrificing his visual adaptation.
He didn’t have to look through the eyepiece because the tracking algorithm was supposed to do the work for him. Peter had gone to Wikipedia and selected a list of the nearest stars. First he deleted all red dwarfs, because they could deceive him with flares, and lie about their actual brightnesses. Then he deleted all giant stars, because they could have actually reached the ends of their lives.
No, he wanted only quite ordinary, unremarkable stars, to which nothing happened under any circumstances. If a specimen from this category disappeared, no astronomer could persuade him that it was a natural process. Then there must be more behind it—not necessarily extraterrestrials, but at least something that science had yet to discover.
However, the list had shrunk alarmingly after the deletion of the red dwarfs. He’d never realized that the sun was mainly surrounded by such dull twinklers. Nothing of this is noticeable in the night sky, because even a red dwarf appears as a bright point. That was why he used a second program, which gave him 100,000 stars from the immediate vicinity of the sun. From this a few thousand remained, because from his meadow he could observe only those stars that appeared in the northern winter sky. That had more than halved the list, again.
Nevertheless, it could not be worked through in one evening. Peter expected it to take up to two weeks, depending on the weather. He wanted to get something out of it, too. When the telescope reached a star, he wanted to look at it and take pictures.
His smartphone buzzed when the tracking arrived at the first star: Gliese 796 in the constellation of Capricorn, also called HD 196761. The star had not yet been given a proper name. In the telescope, it appeared as a bright dot.
Peter was nevertheless impressed because he imagined the distance the light had traveled to reach his eye. It had taken 47 years, so he’d only been five years old when the photon he was observing started its journey from the surface of Gliese 796. Before that, it had struggled through the star for many thousands of years, being absorbed and emitted over and over again until, at last, it gained its freedom. Now it had accomplished its task by changing the structure of a rhodopsin molecule in his eye in such a way that it had ultimately caused a signal cascade into his brain.
He crossed off Gliese 796 from his list.


February 26, 2026 – Passau
“You want to go out there again tonight?” Franziska asked with her skeptical expression.
Peter’s conscience awoke and he immediately felt guilty. But the weather was perfectly right, a stable area of high pressure, they’d said. But who knew how long it would remain stable at these latitudes?
“I’m sure the viewing will be perfect tonight,” he said. “I’ve got this list to work off.” He waved the pages.
“You also have a wife who might be feeling as if she’s being neglected.”
She was still formulating in the subjunctive. That was a good sign, wasn’t it?
“Tomorrow we’ll go to the movies, okay?” he offered. “There’s supposed to be a great Latin American flick playing at the Studio, I saw in The Weekly.”
Franziska liked films with intellectual pretensions, and especially those that came from the Spanish-speaking world. “It’s bribery,” she replied. “But bribery works for me. You know that.”
“I’m glad.”
“I just wish you would have let me know sooner. Then I would have arranged a date with Barbara today.”
“Sorry. After all, we didn’t see each other this morning. And then—”
“You have a phone, Peter. You’re holding it in your hand. It can be useful, not only to control telescopes remotely, but also for communicating.”
Her tone was sharper than her words. She must be more upset than she admitted. Or was she jealous of his telescope?
“You’re right. I’ll remember that next time. Speaking of the phone, haven’t you been meaning to call your friend in Hanover? Biggi, I think?”
“Nice try, my dear. Now get out of here. I have a phone call to make... to Biggi.”
He’d already reached the second page, and things were progressing quickly, mainly because he was looking through the eyepiece less and less frequently... When the tracking algorithm issued a success message, that was enough for him to tick off the star. Only particularly interesting specimens were not to be skipped.
He was presently on the star HD 149026, which also