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

take about a hundred and seven minutes. After that, we can talk.”

Perfect. Franziska only needed two minutes more than he did. What a coincidence. “Then, yes?”

Peter stepped back and held the door open for her. But Franziska only laughed. It sounded like she was crying, but she contorted her face as if she were laughing. That was confusing.

“Aren’t you coming in?” he asked.

Franziska bent down as if to pick up a bag, but there was nothing there. She looked confused for a moment, then straightened up again.

“Never mind,” she said, “I don’t think you need me. You’ve never needed me.”

“That’s right, Franziska. I don’t need you. What’s wrong with that? I didn’t marry you because I need you, did I? I need a cleaning lady, but I’ll pay her, too.”

“You’re offering me money to clean for you? That’s the last straw. I should have listened to Greta in the first place. This visit was completely unnecessary.”

What was this, now? He wasn’t offering her any money! Sometimes Franziska thought in very confusing ways.

“Sorry... I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” he said.

“Take care, Peter. You won’t see me again any time soon. Too bad. I even missed you a little bit.” She turned around, started running, and disappeared around the corner of the house.

Should I run after her? entered his mind for a second. But upstairs, Thomas was waiting with the radio telescope. Surely the first data would arrive soon.

“I missed you too,” he said, but Franziska couldn’t hear him.

“The mailman took a long time,” Thomas remarked.

Peter concentrated on breathing in and out as he watched the screen. In one window, a column of measured values was being created. Another window, with a black background, showed text messages like ‘XFFTS ready for observing,’ which meant nothing to Peter. A radio telescope was much more complicated than an optical one.

During a break, Peter said, “That was my wife, not the mailman.”

“Feel free to introduce us. I’m curious. I don’t remember her one bit.”

“No, she’s gone.”

“Is she that busy? A lot of stress at work?”

“Forever.”

“Excuse me? Let me get this straight. You just separated from your wife?”

“Yes, that’s right. That’s what it looks like.”

“Hey, we can stop this right now if you have something to talk to her about.”

“Thank you, Thomas, but I would really prefer that we could finish the measurement.”

“So if you want to talk to me about it—”

“No, never mind. I prefer not to talk about it at all.”

“Well, that’s up to you. I already know why I never got involved in anything longstanding. Relationships just make you unhappy in the long run. Best to fall in love again and say goodbye after three years at the most.”

There was still nothing on the screen.

“Maybe. Why is the measurement stopping right now? Hopefully not because of me? It would be silly if we didn’t get all the data because of this story.”

“No, I explained to you that we need to change receivers every once in a while.”

“The eyepiece.”

“Exactly. In the meantime, I’m already normalizing the previous readings, which means I’m converting the data so that it becomes comparable across different receivers and I can put them side by side in a graph.”

Thomas entered commands in rapid succession. He was master of the telescope, like a pianist mastered his piano—an admirable mastery that, unfortunately, Peter felt he had not achieved in any aspect of his life.

The diagram on the screen changed its shape. What had just looked like a small hill now looked like a steep peak.

“Oh. That’s interesting,” Thomas said.

“What?”

“Let’s wait and see. We’re still at the beginning of the measurement.”

Peter looked at the clock on the edge of the screen. It was already a quarter to two. “It’s going to be tight, though, if we have to be done by three p.m.”

“Don’t worry. With all the necessary calibrations and tests, it’s always slow to get going. But it’s on task now. Twenty minutes per object—we should make it on time.”

The diagram continued to grow to the right. However, the values were steadily decreasing.

“What you’re looking at is the spectral flux density in janskys, that is, how much power is coming at us from the object in the current frequency segment per time and area. The graph plots that value versus frequency, which then gives you the radio spectrum you were looking for.”

“It seems very focused on one particular frequency.”

“Yes, Peter, and that is unusual. Normally what I would expect from an object on your list would be a rather balanced spectrum with different typical lines corresponding to some hydrogen transitions. In radio astronomy we know of so-called ‘peakers,’ which have a central mountain in the spectrum. But we are talking here about distant galaxies or quasars, where peak frequencies are around five—or even up to a hundred—gigahertz.”

The diagram had frequency labels on its x-axis. There, it only went up to 4 as the highest number indicated.

“We’re not there yet,” Peter noted.

“Well observed. We were still at about four gigahertz. But the peak at 0.418 gigahertz, that’s quite pronounced and not present in our typical gigahertz peakers. The lower the frequency of the peak, the younger the object. That’s kind of a rule of thumb.”

“And, the yellow dwarfs are likely to be a few billion years old.”

“Yes, which would be very young compared to quasars and distant galaxies. But I don’t know if that rule even matters here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know of any natural process that causes a radio peak at 418 megahertz.”

“You mean there’s a transmitter there?”

“No, Peter, I don’t mean anything specific. I’m just saying that I don’t know of any physical mechanism that would lead to emissions at 418 megahertz. But that doesn’t mean, of course, that there couldn’t be such a mechanism. And, of course, we have to rule out the possibility that we are measuring any earthly sources. LTE and 5G radio have kept us quite busy with that in recent years.”

“But they’ve been around forever, right?” asked Peter.

“Yeah, sure, we can work around