The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction by Brandon Morris (red white and royal blue hardcover TXT) 📕

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.