He paced. Wallace Johnson had finally put it all together, and it wasn’t good. The Universe was coming to an end, not figuratively, literally. And not in millions or billions or even trillions of years as most suspected but soon. Soon in an equation where soon equals a few days, a month at most. He tried going over the factors in his calculations again, but it was hard to concentrate after coming to such a conclusion; it made him itch. He wanted to tell people. He would tell them.

 

They wouldn’t believe him, but that would be their fault.

 

The final piece in Wallace’s puzzle had been revealed to him that morning. He had been adding coal to the fires in the furnace, taking his turn with the other residents of the building. The bitter cold of the day was one clue, but when wasn’t it bitter cold in New York City now? He remembered being told as a child thirty years before  scientists had once feared the Earth would be too warm – the obvious, unavoidable falseness of this was only one of many reasons scientists were tracked down and rounded up in 2053 and 2054. It was why they were extinguished in 2055. But this hadn’t led Wallace to his conclusion.

 

When he was done feeding coal into the furnace, he rooted around the basement looking for reading material. The year before he found a crate of antique Playboys including the special edition marking Hugh Heffner’s death complete with black cover and weeping bunny design. This day he found a small hoard of Scientific Americans. These were hidden behind a portion of false wall behind the furnace. They were contraband, and he knew it, but he could not stop from reading each from cover to cover even though he barely understood a word in most articles. He had, of course, never been taught a single scientific concept. What he could understand, however, confirmed his deepest fears. One article, Elegy for the Universe, explained it all in terms he understood. There was Dark Matter, there was Dark Energy, these forces flying the Universe to pieces faster and faster, killing it. The article ended by promising in some incalculable future time, the Universe would die regardless of any efforts by sentient beings, expanding to fill "the eternal darkness and limitless voids of space with stars of ice and worlds of cold."

 

That was the Eureka moment for Wallace. The world was ending, but not at some distant date. The signs were everywhere.

 

He paced. Then he developed a plan, put on his coat, put an open wrench in his pocket, and left his apartment. The first sign of impending doom lived in the apartment across from his. He knocked on the door to confirm his calculations.

 

Mrs. Wright opened the door.

 

"Wallace?" she asked squinting at him. This squint might have been a sign too, she was, after all, young, but Wallace let it slide. It wasn’t her eyes that bothered him.

 

"Yes, Mrs. Wright. I was just wondering…"

 

"Let me guess – you want to know how far along I am, right?"

 

"Yes. If it’s not a bother."

 

"Well, considering that you knock everyday to ask the same thing, it’s getting to be a bother." She saw he was not really understanding her.

 

"I just entered my eleventh month, Wallace. Ten complete months this past Saturday. Satisfied?"

 

"Yes. Thank you." Wallace walked away, and Mrs. Wright slammed the door with a sigh. She didn’t appreciate being a test subject, and Wallace understood this, but his investigation was the greatest inquiry of all time, and she was a clue he couldn’t overlook.

 

He went down the stairs to the first floor whistling to cover the fact the thought of eleven months of pregnancy unnerved him. He felt more anxious for Mrs. Wright than Mrs. Wright herself did. To him, she was proof of a universe gone awry.

On the stoop, Old Man Rivera sat on a stool, rocking back and forth and clapping his hands together, rubbing them for warmth.

 

"That you, Wally?" he asked.

 

"It’s me, Mr. Rivera."

 

"Going out to count the people again?"

 

"Not this time. I already know there are fewer than there used to be."

 

"You think so?"

 

"I know so. I’ve counted every night for months, Mr. Rivera. I’m still only in the thousands. If you extrapolate this known quantity over all the territory of New York City, you get exactly 3.9 million. You’ve seen the books, Mr. Rivera. There used to be nine million people in New York City according to the census of 2020."

 

"The last census ever," Rivera said, and he clapped his hands and rubbed them as though he were in front of a fire. "Well, you know, you only go out at night. There are more people in the daytime."

 

Wallace laughed.

 

"Mr. Rivera, that is an absolute impossibility. People don’t just disappear when the Sun goes down. It’s a scientific absurdity."

 

Mr. Rivera was about to clap his hands again but stopped in mid-motion.

 

"Don’t say words like that, Wally. You know what those bastards did to the world and what the world did to them: first they lied, then they died, and no one cried – you know that.

Don’t talk about those people…"

 

"I wasn’t talking about them; I know those people with their test tubes and microscopes created every resistant strain of disease. I know they were different from normal people. I just used a related word…"

 

"Anyway. No difference. Don’t worry about it. Go out and count your people."

 

"I’m not counting tonight. The world is going to end soon. I’ve got a mission."

"You gonna save the planet?"

 

"The whole Universe, Mr. Rivera. The Universe."

 

"Well, you go along and just do that, Wally," Mr. Rivera said, clapping his hands and rubbing them. "You do exactly that."

Wallace went on down the street. The mission he had in mind would be sufficient to jump-start the entire Universe, and he told himself he had to talk less and walk more if he wanted to get the job done.

 

The lack of people in the city was his greatest proof that the world was dying. He remembered thousands of students pouring out of his school as a child. He remembered tens of thousands cramming into Yankee stadium the day his father took him. The simple explanation was the death of hundreds of millions in the third and fourth world wars. He had fought in the last war; he had caused many of those deaths. He remembered firing a missile that had a trailing wire; in his dreams, the wire didn’t whip through a crowd of attackers, slashing at them left and right until the missile found its target a thousand yards past them. He could never get that wire to behave so well when he was awake. He shook his head to clear his mind. After all, he told himself, there was a chance, and not a bad one, that he could save the entire species for eons to come with the wrench in his pocket and the plan in his mind.

 

His destination was about a twenty-minute walk from his apartment. He had been there many times as a child, once with his father, and though it had been abandoned since the bombing raids of the last war, he had visited frequently.

He stopped at an intersection and stamped his feet to rid himself of cold. That, he thought, was just what the world needed, just a bit of a shock to set things aright. Just a small push to overcome growing inertial forces. He looked up at the night sky and found further confirmation of the death of the Universe.

 

"What you looking at, man?"

Wallace found the person that spoke the words, a transient, one he recognized. He had counted him before.

 

"The world is coming to an end." Wallace looked back up and the transient looked with him.

 

"You see that in the sky?" the transient asked, looking at Wallace again.

 

"Well, there are fewer stars than there used to be."

 

The transient looked up to the sky for a moment and then at Wallace again.

 

"How many were there?"

 

"When I was a boy, you could see at least a dozen."

 

"I saw a dozen last night. Did you look last night? That’s when they were really out. It’s cloudy now; that’s why they’re not there."

 

Wallace smiled at the transient. He wanted to say that it was an impossibility that the stars would just disappear from one night to the next, or that their existence might be influenced by weather conditions on Earth, but that might sound scientific, and he didn’t know this man well. He might get reported and there was work to do still. He walked on instead of commenting.

 

"It’s cloudy," the transient said to his back. "That’s why the stars aren’t out. Fool."

 

The building Wallace wanted was boarded up, but it was the home of squatters who had taken over the second story years before. They weren’t the type to care about anything that happened on the first floor, and that was where he headed. He had often squeezed past a loose piece of plywood and did the same this night.

 

He remembered the shining machine behind the counter. He remembered the man who worked it, a genius with an open wrench. It was an elegant machine with an enormous power. It made steam and noise and coffees that soothed his father’s many moods. The machine was enormous, and Wallace could remember feeling the vibrations it caused humming in his feet. This machine clearly put out much more energy than went into it. Wallace worked his way behind the counter, stood before the machine, still shiny after decades of disuse, and touched its skin. It was cold as he suspected. He remembered touching it once as a child and burning his fingertips to instant blisters. His father had cared for him then; he took Wally onto his lap and popped the blisters open then and there against the advice of the man behind the counter. His father had wrapped the fingers in his handkerchief, none too clean, and ruffled Wally’s hair. The marks on his fingers remained just barely visible. Wallace pulled his hand away. There was work to be done. If he could get this machine to work, to produce the slightest bit more energy than went into it, the Universe would be balanced again, Dark Matter and Dark Energy would be defeated, and he would be a hero though not a single other person knew it.

 

Wallace remembered the operations he had seen the man behind the counter perform a hundred times. He wiped off the machine even more carefully than that man had ever done; it had, after all, the dust of ages on it. He switched on several switches and clamped in several small receptacles which in former times would have held water or milk or coffee. He plugged the machine in carefully. He knew the building had power; the squatters had seen to that.

 

For a brief moment, too brief Wallace knew, the machine sprang to life. It then shut down completely. This was terrible, devastating.

 

"What are you doing here, man?"

 

Wallace spun around. There was an elderly man standing on the other side of the counter, one of the squatters. Wallace had counted him, too.

 

"The machine," Wallace said. "I’m trying to make it turn on."

 

"Why?"

 

Wallace wanted to explain the whole thing to the old man, but he knew how it would sound to him.

 

"Do you know anything about making it work? I remember seeing it work as a child, but…" 

 

"I used to run it, years ago," the man said, and Wallace remembered him for the genius who had told his father not to burst the pus bags in the diner.

 

"It needs water," the old man said. He took an old, empty coffee can that was lying in a corner and pushed aside a piece of plywood to get outside. He returned with the can filled with snow, opened a lid in the machine and poured the snow in.

 

Then he went out again and repeated this process several times. He closed the lid and motioned to Wallace to try the on switch again. He did.

 

The machine hummed and heated and shook. It began to sputter and looked like it wanted to turn off. Wallace looked to the genius. The genius shrugged.

 

"I used to have a wrench to turn the little valve next to your hand. It releases the pressure…"

 

Wallace pulled his wrench from his pocket, and the old man took it, twisting a valve, letting out a short jet of steam. He closed the valve again.

 

"Try the spigot," the old man said.

 

Wallace took the coffee can and filled it with steaming hot water. He laughed. He could hardly contain his joy. This wasn’t just hot water; it was the salvation of the world and all its inhabitants. This was turning snow to steam, no less a miracle than turning water into wine. He wanted to kiss the old man. Instead he offered him his hand to shake. The old man took it with only a little reluctance, and after a hearty shake, Wallace headed towards the opening in the plywood boarding.

 

"Hey, can I turn this off?" the old man asked.

 

"Not yet. Let it run for a little while, you know, to be on the safe side."

 

The old man shrugged.

 

"You want your wrench?"

 

"Keep it," Wallace said as he made his way out.

 

He wanted to run home, he was so elated. But he was nothing if not levelheaded. He walked quickly so as not to appear strange.

 

"The clouds moved on," the transient yelled to him from across the street. "I count seventeen stars now."

 

"Of course," Wallace yelled back. "There’ll be many more."

 

The transient looked up again as though expecting more stars to appear at that instant. Wallace hurried on.

 

He almost slipped turning the corner onto his street. There was a small crowd in front of his building with Mr. Rivera standing at the center.

 

"What’s going on?" Wallace asked.

 

"It’s Mrs. Wright. She just had a baby, a baby boy."

 

"The ambulance took her away?"

 

"Nope, an ambulance took her and the boy both. She had that kid right there in the hallway. I was gonna help her, you know with the breathing and pushing and stuff, but the boy wanted out and he got it."

 

"Was he a big child?"

 

"Wally, that kid was in there eleven months. She’s lucky he didn’t come out talking."

 

"This is great. This is what I thought would happen."

 

"I guess the population of New York is gonna be safe now, huh?"

 

"It’s more than the population of New York, Mr. Rivera. It’s the revolution of the planets, the motion of the galaxy, and the fate of the Universe, and it’s all going to be just fine now."