The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction

by Brandon Q Morris

  The Beacon

  Hard Science Fiction

  Brandon Q. Morris

  Contents

  The Beacon

  Author's Note

  Resolution

  Also by Brandon Q. Morris

  A Guided Tour of Multi-Messenger Astronomy

  Glossary of Acronyms

  Metric to English Conversions

  Excerpt: Helium-3 – Fight for the Future

  The Beacon

  February 20, 2026 – Passau

  Saturn floated before his eyes in the blackness of space. The rings cast distinct shadows. The image trembled slightly. Peter held his breath, as if it were that simple to calm the planet’s shimmer. But it was already almost perfect—the image’s disturbance caused by the air movement in the atmosphere was amazingly low today. Or was it because of the new ADC? The device he’d screwed onto the telescope’s eyepiece seemed to work wonders. Why hadn’t he listen to Mark sooner? Because he’d already guessed how Franziska would react to the 200 euros missing from their joint account.

  He pushed one of the ADC’s two levers half a millimeter forward. The device’s two prisms changed their relative positions a tiny bit, and Saturn trembled a little bit less. Later, when he superimposed the many individual images he was now taking, they would combine into a fantastic snapshot.

  “Peter, will you come here?” his wife Franziska called out, using her ‘don’t leave me alone so long’ voice. She probably wanted him to switch the TV channel for her, or to fetch a spoon from the kitchen. Alexa, the household robot, supposedly didn’t listen to her.

  He looked at his watch and realized it was already close to 11 p.m. Saturn was sinking toward the horizon, and he wanted to get Neptune in the eyepiece as well! The two planets had their closest apparent approach tonight, a conjunction that would not repeat itself for many years.

  Peter sighed, which didn’t solve anything. If he didn’t go inside now, he’d have to listen to her lecture him for the rest of the evening. He rubbed his hands together. It was too cold to stay in the garden all night, and that would be the only way to escape the sermon.

  Peter covered the lens, walked around the telescope, and tripped over the third leg of the tripod, which was extended forward. “Shit!” he shouted.

  The telescope wobbled, and he was just barely able to grab hold and stabilize it. He hated to imagine if it had fallen over and landed on the hard slabs of the garden path! But even so, it was a big bummer. Getting it back in proper alignment would take him some time, time that was very precious right now. He made sure that the tripod was still stable and ran into the house.

  It took him three seconds to switch the TV to her preferred channel. All he had to do was press the button twice, which he’d shown Franziska so many times but which she always forgot. She thanked him along with a grateful look, and he couldn’t blame her for asking his help. His wife was at war with technology.

  He quickly put his shoes back on, wrapped his scarf around his neck, and ran back outside. As he left the front door, the light automatically switched on. He used the brightness to check that the telescope was standing securely. The outdoor light turned off after two minutes. He removed the lens cap, rubbed his hands, and stomped his feet so he wouldn’t feel the cold so quickly. Looking through the eyepiece was pointless until his eyes readapted.

  In the meantime, Peter looked into the sky, trying to identify a few constellations with his naked eye. Saturn and Neptune met in the constellation Aries. The famous curved line formed by Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Arietis was easy to find. They represented the head of Aries with the horns. He found the ringed planet in it as a bright star. There was no trace of Neptune, and finding that planet now would be a miracle.

  Three minutes passed. Peter imagined the light-sensitive rods in his retina busily accumulating rhodopsin, the visual pigment they needed to trigger light stimuli. Unfortunately, the adaptation to darkness took much longer than the adjustment to light. Wasn’t that somehow typical of this world? Franziska would undoubtedly disagree with him. She was a merciless optimist. “It’s great that you can enjoy the light, the good, right away,” she would say.

  But he liked the darkness better, even if it made him wait. He had always been that way. As a child, he would sometimes hide under a blanket during the day and read with the help of a flashlight because he found it so cozy. His mother would then scold him for ruining his eyes. He still didn’t need glasses, even though he was over 50!

  It was time for a try. He put his eye to the eyepiece. Maybe he’d be lucky and the telescope would have hardly moved. No such luck—he couldn’t identify the stars he was seeing, which was more to be expected. Fortunately, Saturn was so easy to spot that he could align the telescope manually.

  He worked his way up slowly. Ha! There you are again, he thought. The viewing conditions had grown worse. He readjusted the ADC, but he couldn’t get the image as stable as he’d had it just a few minutes ago. No matter. It wasn’t about Saturn alone now. He very slowly adjusted the scope until the ringed planet moved to the edge of the field of view. His new target was north by 55 arc minutes, or just under 1 degree.

  Where was Neptune? The eighth and outermost planet of the solar system must be close by. Peter systematically scanned through the field of view, and with each pass, another new faint star caught his eye. Thank you, rhodopsin. His eye had been adapting for 20 minutes now, but his vision was still not optimal. Fortunately, he possessed what Franziska lacked—patience. Without patience, astronomy would probably never have become his hobby.

  He had been awaiting these optimal conditions! Saturn and Neptune had already had a rendezvous last year in June, but at that time the sky had been cloudy for two weeks. He had even considered taking his telescope somewhere else—if the weather forecast at home had been as bad this time, he would have looked for a better observing site, because Saturn and Neptune would not be converging again for a number of years.

  He liked the meadow behind the house. They lived on the edge of town, so sometimes the eastern horizon was a bit too bright. If he set up the telescope far enough away from the house entrance, even the occasional switching on of the lights didn’t bother him much. The neighbors had gotten used to seeing him puttering around on the lawn at night. When he had first set up the telescope, the neighbors in the house on the northern edge of the meadow had kept all their blinds down, but now no one thought of him as a voyeur.

  In a sense, however, he was indeed a voyeur—of the stars. It was great to pull away the curtain that normally hid most of the stars and the details of the planets. With his naked eye, he saw Mars, Venus, etc., only as if they were bright stars, and many of the stars escaped him entirely. The telescope revealed what the darkness and distance hid.

  The best part, however, was stacking—the joining of many individual shots. Just as in the days when photographers used to have to take their negatives into a darkroom, only then to be amazed at the success of their photographic efforts, the stacking procedure—done later on the computer—revealed to him the true representation of the planets or galaxies. Each photo contributed a few details to the final compilation, which often made it appear as if an expensive space telescope had been employed.

  But there would be time for that later. He had to track down Neptune now so that he could photograph ‘him’ again and again like a supermodel.

  There! That washed-out spot hadn’t shown up earlier. He hadn’t changed the field of view, so he had to have missed it. Peter compared the coordinates and deemed it must be Neptune. The tiny spot is shaking badly, he thought. He tried to correct the image with the ADC, but had no success. Due to Franziska’s request, he had lost half an ho
ur during which Neptune was approaching the horizon. The lower an object was above the horizon, the longer the path of its light through the Earth’s atmosphere, and the stronger the trembling fluctuations.

  No matter. He’d found Neptune. The spot was now so clear to his eyes that he was guaranteed not to lose sight of it. Hurray for the rod cells! Should he try to get some camera shots? No, he decided, it’s not worth it. He already had Neptune in his sights despite the poorer clarity. Peter zoomed out a bit to get Saturn in the field of view as well. The result was not impressive. Six years ago, at the great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, the effort had been worthwhile, but at that time, the two gas giants had come within six minutes of arc of each other.

  Peter took a few photos where Neptune and Saturn could both be seen, only as confirmation that he’d experienced this moment, that he was a witness. The pictures would not even impress a layperson. Then he lost motivation. It was noticeably cold after all, and the frigid air was making his nose run.

  But it would be a pity to stop. The conditions were perfect—no moonlight, and the city was almost dark. Should he try IC 342? It would be one of the brightest galaxies in the sky were it not obscured by the dust veils of the Milky Way’s equator. He’d tried to track it down in the past, but had failed because of the moon. IC 342 was in the Camelopardalis (Giraffe) constellation, and there were so many bright stars around it that Peter couldn’t find his way there. But he had his app on his cell phone. He didn’t dare turn on the screen because it would spoil his visual acuity, so he used voice control.

  “Alexa, track IC 342.”

  “I’m tracking IC 342,” a female voice answered from the smartphone.

  The telescope’s motors hummed, and the heavy tube moved as if by magic. In the eyepiece, stars flew through the image. Then the telescope stopped.

  Peter looked through the eyepiece. That should be IC 342... What? The motors were still twitching and the telescope still moved jerkily. The tracking seemed to be unfinished. Had the cold damaged the motors? He sure hoped not! Replacing them could be expensive, and Franziska would not be pleased.

  “Tracking canceled,” the smartphone reported.

  Peter was relieved. If it were the motors, the system would have reported damage. But this time, it was just the program’s fault. Sometimes the software got itself into a dead end. Then it helped to adjust the telescope manually and restart the tracking. All right. Peter moved the telescope toward Polaris. That was always a good starting point.

  “Alexa, track IC 342.”

  “I’m tracking IC 342.”

  Again the telescope moved, and again it stalled after a while.

  “Tracking canceled.”

  Peter tried one last time. This time he aligned the telescope manually to the center of the Milky Way, thinking maybe another starting point would help.

  “Alexa, track IC 342.”

  “I’m tracking IC 342.”

  The motors set the telescope in motion. But after a short time, it seemed, they quit trying again. The telescope moved jerkily, and finally stopped altogether.

  “Tracking canceled.”

  All right. It was time to wind down for today. Peter reassured himself that it was not his expensive telescope. The software problem should be fixable. As he walked toward the house with the heavy telescope in his arms, the light came on in their second-floor bedroom. He had to hurry. Franziska didn’t like it when he got to bed too late.

  February 21, 2026 – Passau

  The door slammed shut. Peter had been angry that Franziska 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 excus
e. 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 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.