Franziska tried to reassure him by describing the director as a cultured, empathetic, and intellectual person. But that didn’t help to soothe him, because that was exactly the kind of guy she was attracted to. Now the guy just needed to have curly hair, a healthy complexion, and a giant crucifix. Peter almost asked about his hair, but stopped himself in time. It might inadvertently make Franziska think about him all the more.
You fool, do you think she wouldn’t have picked up on that? He silenced his inner voice.
In any case, Franziska didn’t have a date for today. Every Sunday evening, they watched Tatort, the long-running German crime scene show, on TV. He wouldn’t be able to get out of watching it with her, even if there was a major conjunction going on up in the heavens.
Enough with the stars. Now it was time to prep for his 8th grade class, third period tomorrow. Peter closed the notebook, stood up, went to the shelf with his school supplies, and took out the folder with his preparations. He’d taught every grade level in physics, but the last time he’d had 8th graders was three years ago. That had been the class with the five mathematics geniuses, which was why he’d probably have to adjust the material a bit now. It was amazing how much a class could benefit from a few outstanding and enthusiastic students.
He sat down at the desk again, opened the folder, and read a few lines. Crap. He really didn’t feel like dealing with 8th grade level physics right now. How many times had he taught this same material? Peter leaned back in his office chair, listening. A toilet flushed somewhere. Dusk was setting in. Nothing could be heard from Franziska’s room. She was also preparing for her lessons.
Sunday afternoon was always like this. It was usually quite comfortable. At six, they would have dinner, and at eight on the dot, he would turn on the evening news. Hopefully Franziska didn’t want to change that. Maybe he should get her a bouquet of flowers again tomorrow. She’d think he was feeling guilty, but she’d be happy anyway.
Peter switched the computer back on. He could always do tomorrow’s lesson from the textbook. He couldn’t solve this conundrum alone. Surely there must be astronomers who were interested in disappearing stars? Of course, there was Villarroel and her group, but the last paper had already sounded a bit hopeless. Basically, it was always came down to a matter of finding natural causes for the fact that images from different decades sometimes showed different stars.
But that was not his problem at all. He wasn’t talking about obscure points of light on photo plates from the 1960s that couldn’t be found in photos of the same region 30 years later. It was about named stars that simply no longer shone in the sky without a previous explosion. Could there be a natural cause for this? He needed to summarize his data in an article. It was unlikely that any well-known science magazine would pick it up, but the submissions would go into peer review, so they would find their way into the hands of one or more experts. So he had a chance to have professionals look at his results. He just didn’t know anyone in the astronomy community.
To do this, however, he must be able to produce a readable text—in English. He enjoyed watching films in the original language, but writing a scientific publication was a much greater challenge. His article had to meet a minimum standard or it wouldn’t end up with an expert, but in the circular file.
Maybe he should ask Franziska, who was more talented in languages. She liked Spanish even better than English, but together they were sure to produce something readable. Or should he try a machine translation? No. Peter stood up. If he included Franziska, she would certainly better understand why this topic was so important, and not just for him.
The computer went ‘pling.’ A new message had arrived. He sat down again and opened it.
“Dear Mr. Kraemer,” it began. His name was spelled correctly, a good sign.
“The attached work made me think of you. You asked us a question the other day that fits thematically. I guess the answer now seems to be a definite ‘yes.’ I hope you have an interesting read.”
The message was not signed, but the ‘From’ field showed that it came from the SPACE editor. Peter opened the PDF attachment. It was apparently a preprint, a paper that had not yet been reviewed by a third party and had probably just been submitted to a journal with possible interest in the topic. The lead author was named Dr. Melissa Holinger, who worked at Stockholm University. That told him something. He looked up Villarroel’s first paper, and sure enough, Holinger showed up there as a co-author. Apparently she now had her own group.
Peter straightened up as he read the paper’s title, Possible explanations for the non-detectability of main sequence stars from the cosmic neighborhood of the solar system. That was it! He was not alone after all. Peter skimmed the abstract. Holinger’s astronomers had found a total of seven stars that were included in many catalogs but were no longer visible in the sky. They were Sigma Draconis, 47 Canis Majoris, and five stars in the southern sky. All were yellow dwarfs and main sequence, so they were sun-like. Ha! So he was not nuts.
Now he was annoyed because he was no longer the discoverer. He could save himself the trouble of authoring the article. He had to get in touch with Holinger. Peter opted to print out the paper. The laser printer started moving with a groan and spit out four sheets. The bulk of the document described what astronomers thought might have caused the disappearance.
The entire keynote differed markedly from Villarroel’s publications. In the old articles, the search for non-natural causes—read: for extraterrestrials—had been in the foreground, even if it was never stated explicitly. Holinger’s work, on the other hand, presupposed that there must be natural causes, and discussed which of them were possible.
Peter rocked back and forth on his chair while reading the printed article. The argumentation was quite conclusive. After all, astronomers had found extended dark clouds in some cases where the stars used to be visible. The clouds could not be seen directly, but only through their heat radiation. The dust of which they consisted could cover the stars behind them. In the article, the researchers calculated the thickness such a cloud would have to be in order to block the light of a sun-like star, and how fast the star, cloud, and solar system would have to move in relation to each other for such an occultation to occur.
Of course, the argumentation had weaknesses, the researchers freely admit. The dark clouds they had detected could have been on the spot earlier—behind the respective star and at least partly shielded by it. They only became visible when the star went out. But Peter already suspected how the article would be received. The dark clouds came closer to a believable explanation. There was no known physical process that suddenly extinguished a sun-like star. But dark clouds existed, and more of them than had been believed before now, because they were difficult to detect.
Even more exotic explanations were possible. For two of the seven stars, the astronomers were not able to identify a dark cloud. They now suspected that the view of those stars could be obscured by a completely different phenomenon—dense clouds of dark matter. Since these interact only via gravity, they were not detectable in the infrared in the same way as dark clouds.
Hmm, hmm, hmm. Franziska could probably be reassured that his work was in vain. Others had discovered it first, and they had the better explanations. He would certainly not touch his telescope again in the next few weeks.
If only he hadn’t asked the editors! But that was unfair. It was good that it was over now. If he had put in any more work, he would only have been equally more annoyed.
22 57 27,98 +20 46 7,8
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March 2, 2026 – Passau
His good intentions didn’t last 24 hours. Franziska was still in a meeting, so he had about two hours all to himself. He lowered the living room blinds. Then he moved his astral projector into the middle of the room. The projector, a column that stood about waist-high, was another expensive purchase that had initially upset Franziska.
He was finally able to convince her that it fit well in the living room. Externally, the projector looked like a classic marble column. Franziska had placed a flower pot on it, and he now removed the pot to the table. There were shiny black spheres embedded in the sides, which were pivoted and peeked out about halfway. It looked fancy and a bit futuristic. The only ugly detail was the black cable that ran along the floor between the base and the power outlet. To hide it, they would have had to rip up the hardwood flooring and install a sub-floor conduit for a flush-to-the-floor outlet in the middle of the room. That had been too much for his wife.
Peter switched on the device by swiping his hand across the column. The projector emitted a melodic triad, the signal to start the appropriate app on the smartphone—which started, connected to the projector, and requested the starting position. Earth was preset as the starting point.
The astral projector fired up. The column grew to about head height as a narrower version sprouted upward from its center. It, too, was studded with black glass spheres.
Now came the moment that had ultimately won Franziska over. The living room transformed into a 3 by 3 by 2.5-meter section of space. Gravity remained, but Peter was immersed in a three-dimensional model of the inner solar system. Earth was at the center of the display, roughly in the middle of the column. The holographic projection, created by fast-moving lasers in the glass spheres, extended to the walls. The astral projector had been a hit on a major crowdfunding platform last year, and Peter had secured one in time. Home planetariums had been old hat ever since.
Peter walked around the Earth, meandered past Mars, pushed aside a few asteroids, and tried to shove Venus out of its orbit. The celestial bodies were clearly not to scale. A realistic representation would be unimpressive, because either the Earth would look tiny or the next planet would be somewhere past Berlin. For realism, there was always computer software. The astral projector brought the universe to life. The best thing about the device was that it tracked his movements. He could use his hand to push an asteroid off its course.
Peter could determine what happened next. If he pulled his hand back slowly, the asteroid would return to its orbit. If he gave it a strong swipe, however, it would leave its orbit. The program then simulated its new flight path around the sun.
When their two kids visited for Christmas, they’d had fun changing asteroid and comet orbits to hit the Earth. This was not easy, because you had to guess approximately where the target would be when the new trajectory of the asteroid should hit it. As a reward, the program then revealed a fancy Armageddon simulation, and the Earth was subsequently tinted brown instead of blue.
Only until the next reset, though, which would inevitably be necessary because the software still had its teething troubles. Sometimes celestial bodies got stuck or couldn’t get past each other, even though there was enough space, or a planet suddenly started to go crazy in the figurative sense.
This universe could not be a software-controlled simulation, or reality would crash much more often. Peter took the Earth in both hands and squeezed it. The globe shrank, and with it the other visible planets. He continued to squeeze. Mercury came in through the closed blind. A little more. Earth was only the size of a tennis ball when the sun finally appeared. He reduced the scale slightly more to get the sun into the room because our star was so huge.
It made him feel really warm. It was not the sun that warmed him, of course, but the fact that the light from the lasers that spun the hologram was naturally giving off a bit of energy to the air, and over time the room warmed up—especially where it got particularly bright from the simulated sun. Peter approached the star. It was a few centimeters taller than his own height, and although only three-quarters of it had passed through the outer wall, it was awe-inspiring. Up close, you could even see the arc-shaped flares stretching across the surface.
The rendering was extremely detailed. Everything moved much more quickly than in reality. Peter could control the passage of time in the app. He had the power and he used it, making the clock go faster and faster. Sunspots grew and then disappeared. If he turned the virtual wheel fast enough, he could observe the 11-year sunspot cycle, and he could even turn back time. He did so and arrived at 2006 and what the sun looked like when he’d met Franziska.
Bummer. He hadn’t intended to play with the astral projector. Soon Franziska would be coming home from school. If she caught him in the living room engaged in his hobby, he’d have no excuse for why he hadn’t completed tomorrow’s preparation.
Peter left the universe through the living room door and got his list, which now included the coordinates of the five missing stars in the southern hemisphere from Holinger’s list. Upon returning, he entered the numbers into the control app of the astral projector and pressed the start button.
The program calculated a new scale for the display. The sun shrank to a point where it almost disappeared. Thousands of stars whizzed through space. It was as if a gravitational quake was ripping through the local group. But everything was okay—the software just needed to calculate a new simulation that included all the stars he’d entered.
Of course, the program didn’t know that these stars were missing, which was not the point. Peter wanted to get a picture because he had a strong suspicion. He couldn’t even describe the feeling, maybe something like a hunger pang when you hadn’t eaten recently enough. The living room had grown almost dark. Peter first suspected the onset of twilight as the cause and began to be frightened by it as it was not yet that late. But, it was just not as bright in the room, because only point sources of light could be seen.
The seven missing stars were all in a radius of about 60 light-years around the Earth. Therefore, the cuboid piece of the universe in which he was standing had an edge-length of 120 light-years. Massive stars shrank to a millimeter, and that was, in actual scale, still too large. But at that scale, even smaller points of light would hardly be visible, so the astral projector did not shrink the stars any further.
Peter felt all alone. The cosmos was just so fucking empty. Here a dot, then nothing for a while, then another dot. You’d never make contact with another intelligent species. The space in between was transparent, but a wall of steel couldn’t shield better than this vast amount of nothing. It was depressing. Peter increased the scale of the stars. Now they were an inch tall, and everything looked much better. There was something like the Christmas spirit about it.
He walked around the room, stretching out his arms and spinning, and when he caught a star, it started oscillating around its position as if it were anchored by a rubber band. Peter spun faster, got down on his knees, and straightened up again, the stars frolicking around him like young dogs. The universe had gone mad, and yet it was only he who was a bit meshuga. If there was a God... did he also sometimes move through the universe like this and upset everything around him? Peter couldn’t blame him. To exist in a perfect, harmonious world must be deadly dull.
Stop! He wanted to take care of the runaways after all, so he used the app to set the center of the display to Sigma Draconis. After all, that was where it had all started. Actually, IC 342 had been the trigger, but that particular galaxy was too far away to be of any use here. The space around him moved again. The stars kept their size
but streamed to new places. It looked like they were following a secret plan, and they were. But the plan wasn’t really secret, it was formed by their coordinates in the smartphone app that anyone could download free from Google or Apple. Perhaps this also applied to his life, hmm? And, was there some app somewhere that had stored his coordinates for the next 30 to 40 years that, realistically, he still might have coming?
The universe slowed down. He caught a star disappearing into the middle of the column, presumably Sigma Draconis. It was a disadvantage of the astral projector that the most important object, which was the one in the center of the display, always became invisible. Or was that a strength? Did one recognize better what really happened if one disregarded the center of the events for a moment? You must be having one of your philosophical days again, Peter. Better solve the problem.
His subconscious was usually right when it talked to him. Enough with the philosophy, even if he didn’t know which problem was meant. Peter looked around and walked a few steps through the sea of stars. It was overwhelming. The boundaries of the living room seem to dissolve. The astral projector not only created a three-dimensional hologram in space, it also threw two-dimensional projections onto the walls, giving the impression of infinity. Peter had to be extra careful not to smack into a wall. Only the lighter colored wood of the living room door told him that he must not go further in that direction.
He could not find 47 Ursae Majoris. The star should be in the upper half of the room because the northern sky was placed there. Nonsense. He had chosen Sigma Draconis as his starting point. For a moment, Peter tried to imagine the universe from the perspective of this star. He would certainly have succeeded in the past, but now the excellent 3D representation was projected behind him. It was just so much better than what his imagination could come up with.
The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction Page 5