He first turned up the heat. Franziska preferred the house to be warm and, if he let it cool down too much, it would take a few hours to get it back up to her comfortable zone. He himself only sought warmth when he’d been outside behind the telescope for a few hours. And then he preferred to take a hot bath.
The astral projector still stood in the middle of the room. All he’d had to do was switch it on and, shortly after startup, he was drawn into space, surrounded by Earth, Mars, and Venus, as always. The sun hung on the terrace outside the window. Unlike last time, he had forgotten to lower the blinds. The window glass reflected some of the lasers that created the hologram. As a result, a translucent version of the sun also formed inside the living room, just below the ceiling. It looked as if the ghost of a star was approaching the solar system from above the ecliptic.
That was not particularly disturbing, so Peter left it. He wasn’t interested in the solar system. Using the projector’s control app, he first called up the yellow dwarfs from his list. By pointing his finger, he forced the universe to change its shape. That was how God must feel. The planets shrank and disappeared, and many new stars revealed themselves in an irregular pattern.
Then he released the X-ray sources. A few violet spheres mingled with the yellow dwarfs, which respectfully kept their distance. There were hardly any objects radiating intensely in the X-ray range—apart from the stars themselves—in the immediate vicinity of the solar system. Their coronas were so hot that light particles with X-ray energies were emitted by thermal means, i.e., by excitation of the atoms. However, he refrained from letting the software color the stars violet as well.
The jump to the infrared was already providing much more information. A whole series of small red balls materialized around him. They were brown dwarfs and giant planets without their own suns. The difference quickly blurred. Some also kept the yellow dwarfs company by orbiting them. However, that was the exception rather than the rule, and in no way qualified as the great commonality of the surviving yellow dwarfs.
From the beginning, he did not expect anything from the gamma radiation. It simply emanated from the wrong sources. It was more than 20,000 light-years to the nearest galactic nucleus, and ordinary stars emitted gamma rays only when they were undergoing some kind of eruption. The astral projector automatically increased the scale to show the center of the Milky Way as well. Peter was caught in a whirlpool and pulled along. He realized too late that he was to blame for it, because he had stored the gamma objects.
Back to square one. Changing the scale by hand in precisely the right way was not so easy. Peter preferred to press the reset button, and when Mars and Venus were back, he faded in his yellow dwarfs again and then brought in the radio sources. A few green balls spread out in space, and a few more joined the existing stars. The effect was like the infrared, only a bit more sparing. Did this mean anything?
In any case, the radio signals were no sign of any civilization—the scientists who conducted the survey would have already determined that. So, they had some natural cause and there were many possibilities. The radio telescope that conducted the WENSS was listening at 325 MHz. Radio waves in that part of the spectrum often emanated from galactic nuclei, but that wouldn’t be true in this case.
Was that perhaps the common ground he was looking for? Peter started the spherical shell via the control app. The glittering depiction pushed its way through the living room. He stood directly in front of it. Some of the yellow dwarfs lined up perfectly on the shell. Peter examined them all individually. They didn’t look as nice and shiny yellow as they had before. He pulled one out of the shell by hand. Its color had changed because it coincided with a radio source.
Carefully he released it again, as if he held a sensitive animal in front of him. The next dwarf was also discolored, and the one after that. That could be it! Peter searched the entire shell, and in the end he had tracked down three yellow dwarfs that glowed just as golden as before. He marked them by virtually rotating them with his hand. Now they glowed red. One of the three was the sun.
What did that mean? Was our system doomed?
Take it easy, Peter. First, he had to rule out a mistake. He went through the other yellow dwarfs outside the spherical shell. About one-third were also a radio source, while the rest were not. On the spherical shell, however, the distribution was quite different—98.5 percent were active at 325 MHz, while only 1.5 percent were not, a phenomenon for which he couldn’t think of an explanation. He simply knew too little about radio sources. The best thing he could do was turn to Holinger again. She had already listened to him twice, so he might as well try a third time.
He turned off the astral projector and dropped onto the sofa. Enough for today.
06 10 14,47 -74 45 11
Gurer vf n irel cebira zrnaf,
gb xrrc gur gvzr ng gur fyrrcvat ghavp:
Bar gnxrf gur cbpxrg jngpu gb gur unaq
naq sbyybj gur unaq fgrnqsnfgyl.
Vg tbrf fb fybjyl gura, fb jryy-orunirq
yvxr n jryy-oerq furrc,
chgf sbbg va sebag bs sbbg nf shyy bs znaare
nf yvxr n Zvff bs Fnvag-Ple.
Ubjrire, vs lbh qernz lbhefrys njnl sbe n juvyr,
gur qrzher ivbyrg zbirf sbejneq
jvgu yrtf yvxr gur bfgevpu
Naq fgrnyguvyl yvxr n chzn.
Naq ntnva lbh ybbx qbja ba ure;
un, jergpu! - Ohg jung vf guvf?
Vaabpragyl fzvyvat fur znxrf ntnva
gur qnvagvrfg frpbaqf-cnf.
March 10, 2026 – Passau
The phone rang. He should get up. Peter turned to the other side. He should have gone to bed earlier! But the phone didn’t give up.
“Alexa, what time is it?”
“It’s 7:40.”
At this point, Franziska would have laughed out loud. You just have to turn around. The alarm clock is next to you, he imagined her saying. He even missed her criticism. But the phone didn’t give up. He crawled out of bed. Fortunately, there was a handset in the hallway on the second floor. Barefoot, he left the bedroom. The floor was cold, and the phone rang again. It had to be Amalie, the secretary. He picked it up and rasped out a greeting.
“Peter? I’m glad I caught you,” said his colleague Ava Rott, who taught the same subjects.
“Yes?”
“Oh, you don’t sound so good. I was hoping you would... I’m sorry to bother you, but—”
Peter interrupted her. “Still sick, I’m afraid.” His voice sounded hoarse without bothering to try. No wonder, with less than three hours of sleep. But he only had one more day!
“Yeah, Peter, I didn’t want to call either, but that asshole class is killing me.”
Oh, Nine C. It was only called the ‘asshole class’ among the faculty. Through some group dynamic process, an anti-authoritarian mood had taken hold with those students. No one knew what to do.
“I’m sorry about that,” he said.
“I thought they were supposed to write a class assignment on Friday. They now claim that you always gave them the solutions beforehand.”
“That’s humbug, obviously.”
“They have sheets of paper with solutions in your handwriting to prove it.”
“We went over the assignments after the classwork.”
“They claim otherwise.”
“Bullshit.”
“Peter, I have to report this. You do realize that, don’t you? But I don’t want to be the one. You’ve got to come back soon and sort it out yourself.”
Ah, so that was what it was all about. Ava wanted to get him to resume his work. How unsympathetic was that? She had no idea he was healthy.
“If you would let me sleep in—”
“Please, Peter, you have to be back on Thursday. The class is killing me.”
“Got it. Yeah, Thursday looks good.”
“Get well soon, then.”
Peter hung up. Ava blackmailing me? That’s a first.
He shivered. It must
be the cold in the hallway. He proceeded to the bathroom, sat on the toilet, and let nature take its course.
“Mr. Kraemer,” began Holinger’s new e-mail.
That sounded annoyed. He should probably leave the astronomer alone for a few days.
“Your new observations are undoubtedly interesting. However, I do not yet have a final opinion on whether they are relevant. The WENSS project, on which your data is based, concluded a quarter of a century ago.”
That was not a good counterargument. In the universe, 25 years was a fraction of a moment.
“You should also take a look at what the 325 megahertz sources they claim to have found might represent. I’m not particularly skilled in radio astronomy, but I wouldn’t think of stars, maybe more like pulsars and similar radio objects.”
That was a more significant objection. Peter took a mental note. He’d have to research this thoroughly.
“The correspondence of the radio sources to the spherical shell you defined is curious. However, I still wouldn’t rule out coincidence. Keep in mind that they don’t know the exact origin of the signals, only their direction. The sources themselves could be far, far beyond the spherical shell. So the stars you’re assigning the radio signal to aren’t necessarily the origins of the signal, they could just be on the beam path.”
That was true. But on the other hand, one could ask why all of the stars on the spherical shell were in the ray path, and those beyond the shell were not.
Holinger signed off with a terse goodbye.
Peter left the message in the inbox. He ought to be grateful that she continued to tolerate an annoying hobby astronomer like him in the first place. What did she say about the WENSS project? It scanned the sky in the 325-megahertz range. That meant the radio waves whose intensity it recorded were 92 centimeters long.
He looked up the possible sources, which the project had conveniently listed. Potential sources could be distant radio galaxies, pulsars, distant quasars, but also the ionized gas in the Milky Way disk. Well, Holinger was right. It didn’t say anything about single yellow dwarf-type stars, and all the stars he studied were way too close. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms behind his head.
Why should he necessarily be mistaken? Wasn’t it at least a possibility that the WENSS researchers could have been wrong? They were confronted by the same problem he was, and could not determine from any of the radio signals from what distance those signals reached their antennas. They measured only the signal strength, which must have been over 15 millijanskys. But a strong signal from 5 billion light-years away could cause a 15-millijansky pulse just as easily as a weak signal from 50 light-years away. The picture became clearer only if one succeeded in assigning a source in another area to the radio signal.
Peter picked carefully through the catalog compiled by the WENSS researchers. In retrospect, they had not been able to assign a known object to every source, which was not unusual. For example, pulsars were only a few tens of kilometers in size and could therefore be noticed purely by their radio emission and not optically. To establish a celestial object’s true nature, it was not enough to look at it in a single wavelength range, as was commonly done in such assessments. One needed a complete spectrum of the object, which could be as definitive as a fingerprint. Then, depending on where its radiation had its highs and lows, one could conclude the physical nature of the object.
Where would he get the radio spectra of the stars that interested him? He would have to examine at least three of them more closely, and also perhaps the three yellow dwarfs from which he found no 325-Megahertz-source. Merely writing to some scientist would not help him now. Measurement time at the large radio telescopes was valuable, and researchers had to submit requests for them months in advance.
He knew this all too well from what Thomas, a fellow student from college, had told him. In those days, Thomas had done an internship at the Dutch ASTRON, which operated various telescopes. What might have become of him? Thomas had been downright enthusiastic about astronomy, far more so than Peter, who eventually decided on a career as a science teacher. He opened a Google search to look for him. Thomas... what was his last name? Schröter! Oh, the name was a common one. There were plumbers, horsemen, surgeons, computer scientists, even a soccer player. Okay, this one must be him: a Thomas Schröter at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn.
He was about to write him an e-mail, but the personnel list even included his extension number. Wouldn’t it be easier to explain everything to Thomas on the phone? True, he’d be surprised that he hadn’t gotten in touch for so long. But if his interest in science was even half of what it was back then, Thomas would listen to him.
Peter dialed the number. It rang, but no one was there. He was about to hang up when a man answered.
“Schröter here. What’s up?”
He remembered Thomas’s voice as being higher, but then they had still been young fellows. Like himself, he must have passed the age of 50 by now.
“Hello Thomas, it’s Peter.”
“Peter?”
“Peter Kraemer.”
“Oh, that Peter! I haven’t heard from you in such a long time. What are you up to?”
“I’m a high school teacher near Munich.”
“I ended up at the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy.”
“So, should I call you Professor?”
“No, I never applied for a professorship. That would have required me to teach classes. I prefer to use my time for science.”
They brought each other up to date. Thomas had been at the institute for more than ten years and preferred to do field research and measurements, while he didn’t enjoy evaluating them as much. At one point he’d started working on his advanced degree, but then gave it up again.
“I just love standing at the meter,” he said. “But now out with it. How did I get this honor?”
With Thomas, he didn’t have to beat around the bush. “I need measurements,” Peter explained, “and that means radio spectrograms of two or three yellow dwarfs.”
“How come?” asked Thomas.
He explained his observations to him, and what he had already achieved through Holinger.
“You’re crazy,” Thomas said.
“Hmm.”
“But crazy in a good way. Honestly, only an amateur like you could come up with ideas like that.”
“Oh. That bad?”
“Honestly? Yes.”
“All right, thank you for your honest opinion. It was nice talking to you.”
“Slow down, Peter. I like crazy ideas and can understand yours very well. The discovery of the cosmic background radiation or the first pulsars also were put down to crazy ideas at first. It can be worthwhile to keep at it.”
“You’re saying that just to comfort me.”
“On the contrary. We have the Effelsberg radio telescope here at the institute, a 100-meter dish.”
“Can we get observation time there?”
“Unfortunately, that’s hopeless. The most recent application deadline was Feb. 5, and the next one isn’t until June 6. You’d have to fill out an application, which would then be considered by a committee. If you got through, you’d then have observation time in a year.”
“If.”
“Exactly. The committee doesn’t necessarily like crazy ideas.”
“So that’s it, then.”
“Absolutely not. I just looked at the observation schedule for this week. There’s nothing but a test program reserved from three to seven p.m. tomorrow, so I could sneak us in before or after.”
“Won’t you get in trouble for that?”
“No, I’m assisting some students with their projects, and as a result I’m allowed to use such off-peak times. Of course, something can always come up, but nothing should happen before tomorrow. What do you think about 1 p.m.? I’m sure we’ll be done by three.”
“But I can’t make it to Bonn by 1 p.m.”
“You don’t
have to. The radio telescope can be controlled from all over the world. I’ll give you a login, and we’ll go searching together. What frequency did you say you were looking for?”
“325 megahertz.”
“Hmm, that reaches into the low-frequency range on one side. I’d have to recommend our LOFAR. But getting slots there on short notice is pretty much impossible.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Thomas.”
“The radio telescope can give you data between 300 megahertz and 95 gigahertz, but not below 300 megahertz. So the spectrum we gain is cut off on the left. It doesn’t start at zero.”
“I can live with that. The main thing is that I get the data.”
“We also won’t be able to drive more than two objects. To get beyond 900 megahertz, I have to change receivers.”
“You have to put on a different lens, you mean, like you’d do with a telescope?”
“More likely it’s the eyepiece, but that comparison doesn’t quite fit, either.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Changing receivers like that takes a couple of minutes, and targeting another object takes time, too. You’ll have to decide by tomorrow whether you’d rather have a more compact spectrum from three objects or a wider spectrum from two.”
“Okay, I’ll think about that.”
“Fine. I’ll send you a login for my computer, and you can look over my shoulder while I work on the telescope.”
“Thanks, Thomas.”
“Thank you. I was feeling a little bored anyway.”
March 11, 2026 – Passau
Today was the day Franziska was coming home, and the day when Thomas would record the radio spectrum of three yellow dwarfs with him. Peter had been feeling rushed since morning. He’d made Ava happy by taking over the 9th grade class again. That meant he didn’t have time for lunch, because it was already quarter to one, and he just made it home. But he couldn’t keep Thomas waiting.
The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction Page 9