Nighttime

The house is quiet. It’s just after midnight. Beth turned in early. She has a big meeting in the morning. I have three people coming in for interviews first thing. I can’t sleep so I head downstairs to go over their resumes. On paper they all seem solid. I make a few notes in the margins.

After a while, my eyes finally heavy, I head upstairs. Down the hall, I notice Charlie’s light is still on. It’s a school night. He should have been in bed hours ago.

I tap at his bedroom door and hear a sudden rustle of movement, then footsteps. The door opens a crack.

Even in the dim light, I am overcome. Somehow, he has taken the best parts of me and Beth and transformed them. He was always a great looking kid, wavy dark hair and deep blue eyes, generous smile. But now, at sixteen, the only word is beautiful.

Through the crack in the door, Charlie leans forward, head down, and whispers, “Dad, the sun is dying.”

His ears twitch, alert for my reaction. When he doesn’t get one, he steps back and opens the door wide. I haven’t been in his bedroom for maybe a couple of days, but it’s almost unrecognizable. Sheets of notepaper filled with writing are taped across the walls. His desk, usually meticulous, is piled high with books, drawings, and more paper. One thing that hasn’t changed is the telescope at the window, ever vigilant, aimed up high and into the night. Beth and I had gotten it for his eighth birthday. We would joke that his nose was always down in a book and now his head was in the stars.

I take a step into the bedroom. “Charlie, when you say the sun is dying, what do you mean?”

He’s always liked his hair long. It covers his eyes and folds in thick waves almost down to his shoulders. He reaches up and wipes the hair back from his forehead, thinking. It’s the same gesture he had as a boy. For just a moment I want to scoop him up into my arms and pretend it was years ago and I could hold him forever. But then he does something that surprises me. He looks me straight in the eye. Lately he’s gotten into the habit of avoiding direct eye contact, usually instead looking off somewhat to the side, to somewhere in the distance.

He breaks away and heads over to his desk. “I’ve done the work.”

He rifles through papers, picks one seemingly at random, and hands it to me. The page, torn from his school notebook, is filled with mathematical equations. Dense, they fill every line and curve into the margins. I can figure out some of it. They are computations on density, velocity, speed, temperature, spectral type. Each computation starts with strong, deliberate strokes and then trails off into symbols I can’t readily identify.

I keep hold of the paper and take a seat at the desk. Charlie starts pacing, his arms rising and falling in wide arcs as he talks.

“Alpha Centauri A. Point zero zero zero five five smaller than it was on Saturday. Tau Ceti, a G-type star just like our own sun. I’ve been studying some spectroscopic data. It’s chemical fingerprint—the balance between hydrogen and helium—is different than twelve days ago.”

I pause, considering my words carefully. “If what you say is true—”

Charlie’s stops pacing, his back tenses. I try again. “Your user group. Has anyone else noticed these anomalies?”

He shrugs. “Total silence. It’s like they don’t want to hear it, like maybe they’re afraid of the truth or of panic if people knew what was coming. I called Dr. Fillman at the Observatory, but he’s so focused on the origins of everything that he’s blind to what’s right in front of us.”

“But if—.”

“Dad, there is no if about it. Why does everyone assume the laws of physics are immutable? Everything changes, given enough time. A star’s elemental makeup, the chain reactions that have been going on for billions and billions of years, it’s always been evolving. Now, though, for some reason, it’s all changing at an exponential pace. Solar flares and sunspots I barely noticed a week ago are increasing in intensity and size. The sun, our sun, won’t become a red giant in 5 billion years. It will simply die out. No grand explosion. A whimper. Soon. Not sure how long. I need better equipment, more data. All the books, all the science, all wrong.”

Charlie suddenly stops pacing and stares at me, trying to measure whether I grasp what he is saying. But his hands become busy, fingers on one hand enfolding those on the other, releasing, tightening again. It all seems to exhaust him because suddenly his shoulders droop. He moves to a corner of the room, drops to the floor, pulls his legs up to his chest. I move to sit beside him.

He rubs at his eyes with a corner of his sleeve. “There’s not much time. Mom. We have to tell mom.”

I lean into my son, wrap an arm around him, pull him close. He tenses. A full minute passes before his shoulders relax, his breathing becomes regular. Slowly, he leans into me.

After another minute he speaks again, his voice low and shaky. “Dad, is there something wrong with me?”

There’s movement in the hallway. Beth is up. A creak as the bedroom door opens. She looks around the room, sees the disorder, then sees Charlie and me huddled together in the corner. She understands. She won’t be going to the office in the morning. Neither will I. Charlie won’t be going to school tomorrow. This, whatever this is, is bigger than the two of us. The three of us.

Beth walks over and kneels in front of me. With my free hand I reach out. She folds against me.

We remain there, Charlie curled under one arm, Beth under the other. My mind races for a bit, trying to figure out next steps. Then it, too, settles down. I take in the room. From here, on the floor, it all looks different. Charlie’s desk seems massive and immovable. The papers taped to the walls transform into a collage of color and lines and overlapping shapes.

But the telescope. It hasn’t changed. It remains pointed up at the heavens like a sentry keeping eternal watch.

And beyond the telescope there is nothing but the night sky and darkness. Hours to go until dawn.