The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction by Brandon Morris (heaven official's blessing novel english .txt) 📗

and tapped ‘Visible.’ Again, the motors hummed, this time taking 22 seconds to show him a new star. ‘Visible.’ On it went. He’d written a script that afternoon that remotely controlled the tracking app. Whenever he clicked ‘Visible,’ it picked up the next star from the list and moved to it, saving him the hassle of entering coordinates.

He had gotten the idea from a sophomore while he was teaching math. Some of the girls noticed that he was often distracted, and out of curiosity, they asked him why. Of course, his personal life had no place in school, especially since his wife also taught classes there. So he told them about the missing stars and made a geometry problem out of it. In the discussion, however, they came up with the best way to test the theory, and one of the girls suggested a script.

The cell phone vibrated. He tapped ‘Visible,’ only then realizing that he’d forgotten to check the screen to see if the telescope had found a star. Bummer. But the script didn’t show him which star he might have missed. He let the telescope work. Odds were it wouldn’t have been a lost star, of all things. Unfortunately, the script could not read the screen and then press the ‘Visible’ button by itself. That would be the ultimate.

His phone buzzed again. This time he thought to check. ‘Visible.’ Buzzing motors, vibration, look through the eyepiece, ‘Visible’ button, buzzing motors, vibrating phone, check on the phone’s screen, ‘Visible.’ He tried to vary the sequence as much as possible, sometimes looking for the star on the screen and then other times through the eyepiece. He was getting tired, but it was not even midnight yet. Every clear night was precious. Franziska was away for a week. He wondered how many of those evenings the weather would cooperate.

Vibration, ‘Visible,’ buzzing motors, vibration—nothing. Nothing? Oh. He closed his eyes for a moment. The smartphone screen was running at its lowest brightness level so as not to disturb his adaptation. But for it to be completely dark? Even when he turned up the brightness, an area with only a few gray dots appeared.

He looked through the eyepiece of the telescope. There, too, he saw only black. No, wait. There, at the edge of the image, were a few points of light. Of course! He had already forgotten what he was looking for. There was nothing there, so he had finally found another star that was no longer visible.

His script had simply stopped at this point, so he saved a screenshot of the app, which also showed the coordinates. That way, he could check later which star used to be visible at that location. Then he restarted the script, and the monotony started all over.

March 7, 2026 – Passau

The rain pelted against the kitchen window. Peter poured himself a cup of coffee. Then he poured cold milk into his muesli and returned the carton to the refrigerator, sat down on the stool, and looked outside while he slowly shoveled in the milk-soaked cereal. Except for the sound of rain, it was quiet, almost too quiet, but he didn’t want to turn on the radio because it belonged to his wife. The kitchen smelled of stale cereal and overly roasted coffee. How long has Franziska been gone? It was Saturday. It seemed like a whole week to him, but it was only three days.

Good, then he could invest the weekend in his search. The crappy weather out there wouldn’t allow him to make any more observations, but this way, he finally had time to incorporate the two new finds into his theory. His spoon scraped across the porcelain, and he quickly finished his cereal. He washed out the bowl and placed it upside down in the dish drainer, as Franziska always did.

He sat in front of the computer with freshly brushed teeth. The intense scent of the toothpaste assaulted his nose. It was almost as if a blob of it had stuck to him somewhere, but he was convinced he’d rinsed it off thoroughly. Somehow, he was perceiving all smells more intensely today. Perhaps it was because he was alone. He did not want to call this state ‘loneliness.’ It was not perfect, but it was not so bad, either. Peter had always been comfortable with being alone.

But, he wasn’t alone. HD 10307 and Lambda Aurigae were with him. When HD 10307 was still shining in the sky, it could be found in the Andromeda constellation, not so far from the Andromeda Galaxy. Peter made a note, because there was an important feature. The yellow dwarf was a binary object that was orbited by the red dwarf HD 10307 B. HD 10307 A, the main sequence star, was a bit larger and brighter than the sun. Astronomers considered it promising for the origin of life, so a message had been sent in its direction in 2003.

Peter imagined the aliens there receiving a message from the Earthlings, who had long been considered violent in the universe, and thereupon they hid their sun with advanced technology so that no one from Earth got the notion to visit them. However, the radio signal would not arrive there for another 18 years, so it could not be blamed for the star’s disappearance.

Lambda Aurigae in the Auriga constellation was another piece of counter-evidence for his idea that only smaller stars could have disappeared so far, because it too was a bit bigger and brighter than the sun. Of all the stars that he deemed to have disappeared, this one most resembled our sun. Peter copied all his data into a table. He now had nine findings. He averaged one finding per night outside. If he continued like this for another week, he might reach 15. Would that be enough to impress Holinger?

He compared the data in detail. Apart from the fact that they were all sun-like stars of the spectral class