“Caution over speed. Being done faster than the next man offers no service to you if you’re dead.”

    Keith considered his father’s words as he sat on his haunches at the highest level of the Stonybrook University Stadium. He sat with his back to the field where lines and neatly trimmed grass had long ago fostered a small copse of trees which had sprung up in the sheltered confines of the concrete and steel, rushing to grab the most sunlight among their siblings. Standing with eyes cast out toward the campus, he spied movement in all its forms.

    A branch swayed too far and impacted a widow, setting it resonating over and over. One day soon it would shatter. Grasses as tall as a man’s chest swayed in the breeze, displaying vectors of wind and flow as clearly as a computer simulation. Green leaves rustled and squirrels jumped, but not one person walked across the vacant roads and overgrown sidewalks reclaimed by nature since the Fall.

    “Two years.” The words evaporated on the wind.

    Seven hundred days ago, he had stood where he stood now. Then, he had always traveled in the light of day, but his confidence had grown since Mom and Dad had passed. Dad had died three years ago, and the trying times between hadn’t afforded him the freedom to return more than once. He had come to rescue knowledge, and find textbooks to guide him for the years to come. Like everyone he had relied on the digital age, but information at everyone’s fingertips died when the last trickle of information dripped out from the corpse of the internet.

    “Take on resources you don’t know you need, so that when emergencies come, you are prepared,” Dad had said.

    Books hadn’t topped his agenda years before. He’d needed time to establish his home, find his patterns in the seasons of survival, be sure he could endure, but then he turned his attention to bigger questions. Why? Why and how had any of this happened? For that he had needed books, but he’d only taken the minimum.

People had proven useless to him. Everyone had surrendered to the truth of the new world order. Fact followed belief? He nearly spit on the ground at the idea. Fact followed fact. They just didn’t understand the facts anymore, but he could figure it out with time and resources. Resources he could uniquely wield. For others, computers didn’t power on, electricity’s flow was strangled, gasoline could no longer drive engines, and gunpowder exploded with irregular cascades of energy. His hand unconsciously found the nine-millimeter pistol at his side.

    He wore physics like a protective blanket. For him, everything worked, only the infrastructure had collapsed.

    Librarians had stored away old textbooks, so that their knowledge might be preserved. Safer in their metal and concrete warehouses than he could replicate, he left most books untouched that last trip, two years ago, taking only the old texts he needed. One or two on each topic, for different perspectives. It wasn’t easy to teach yourself a master’s degree-worth of science. He couldn’t afford to make mistakes that would go unnoticed for weeks or even months without teachers or fellow students to check on him. Calculations had to be perfect, every time, triple checked from front to back.

    Room for error in the post Fall world was a thin line indeed, and that applied as much to his attempt to discover the truth as his survival mechanisms.

Rationalism carried him only so far though through the last few years. The time for empiricism had come. He regretted the need for electronics and lab equipment. He had reveled in some small way in the years of pure calculation and theoretical pondering, but in the new world, he needed more data to test his ideas, and data needed equipment. There may have been other places to retrieve some of it, but he knew these labs.

    Ten minutes passed, and the sun began its slow arc toward the horizon, passing beyond the rooftops, casting long shadows that raced across the fields and saplings. Alone on his old campus, Keith made his way down to ground level, carefully picking a path along the vine-covered stairs. Pedaling his bike and attached cart off toward the physics building at a carefully measured pace, he chided himself for forgetting to bring a pair of tarps to cover his haul. A crystal-clear sky gave no indication of rain, but preparedness equaled survival. When he dismounted, he added to his checklist for future trips.

    The front doors to the building stood an inch ajar. Public places had closed abruptly, when the services they had needed to survive dried up. Private companies may have locked up on their last days, heading home to wait out issues with supply chains never to be resolved, but schools, hospitals, government centers, died one appendage at a time, until finally, as the great poet had said, they went out with a whimper.

    Keith strained his ears in the darkened hall before reaching for his light.

The flashlight, set to a wide beam, bathed swaths of the hallways and classrooms of the first floor. Down the hall, a startled raccoon scurried away, and instinct drove Keith’s hand to pistol in a smooth motion, pointing it at the commotion. He took five breaths, counted out slowly, to return his heart rate to normal, and holstered his weapon.

    The old department office, just ahead at the turn of the corridor, still retained its brass bell on the front desk. Specks of green had corroded the surface slowly with the years.

    Nostalgia overcame him, just for an instant, and he waited motionless in the main hall, before moving toward the stairs. A glass case showed the students, in small passport photos, two inches high. Sequestered by the roof and sheltered by the encasement, they hung by metal tacks on dried out cork unwithered by time.

    “Hey guys,” he said, looking them all over. Just past his own face, younger in years of time but decades of experience, Cole looked back at him. “When I’m around physicists I say I am a mathematician, and when I’m around mathematicians I say I’m a physicist.” He fought back a sigh. It was foolish to be nostalgic alone in a building. He forced his eyes away from his old friend’s visage.

Still, his heart wondered where Cole lived, all these years later. His mind demanded to return to the day of forced rapid goodbyes on the pier, his escape from the fire and crowds, but he forced his concentration back to the matter at hand.

    “Nostalgia serves nothing but sentimentality, and that doesn’t grow food, or solve problems,” he muttered to himself.

    The electronics lab waited on the third floor connected to the senior and graduate lab space. Everything he needed remained sealed in tight in one easy location, untouched, waited since the Fall. At least, he hoped so.

    He paused briefly at room 116. Small, if downright cluttered with desks, the blank blackboard brought back memories. Electrodynamics, his first differential equation course, and optics, all had been held in that same room. A wash of joy filled him at the memory. He missed classes. He would have been in graduate school now, maybe even almost finished with his Ph.D. He moved past 116 to the stairwell.

    Rusted push bars on the door to the main stairwell squealed, announcing his presence to anyone listening for it. Standing at the bottom of the stairs Keith froze, waiting for several long minutes for a sign anyone cared. None came. Dust motes floated down the beam of light he cast up the concrete ascent, and somewhere near the top, dove coos echoed down.

    One step at a time, each footfall placed in silence, he moved up the floors. Green tiles shone in the flashlight’s beam like they had been polished yesterday, only a hint of dust at the edges. He stared at the corner of the nearest cross hall, remembering the last time he stood in the building, talking through measurements of the speed of light with Doctor Koch. He had been a heartless stickler for detail in the lab. Keith appreciated it now, and hoped he’d retained enough of the habits buried, unused deep down. 

    Doors to the central lab waited just past the corner. Keith walked reverently in the halls, not out of fear, but respect for the intellects that once studied and worked in the building.

    His thumb pressed down on the latch to the door, which stood fast, like stone. Thirty feet down the hall, a second door led to the same two-story cavernous room, and again he was thwarted by a locked door. Weathered fingers, accustomed to the toil of gardening and exercise, prodded at the joints in the door, and felt the heft of the solid wooden entrance and metal frame set in concrete blocks.

    Suppressing the urge to jiggle the door, to try to force it, instead he calmly pressed again once time on each to be sure the lock securely held. Once confirmed, he resigned himself to the knowledge he could gain access, but not today, and not with the tools he had brought.

    He pressed his flashlight against the window, and peered in through the small glass pane. He considered trying to break through there, but the wire mesh embedded in the glass would prevent him from making headway. His investigation showed rows of oscilloscopes, handheld multimeters, wires, and drawers which he knew were filled with electronic components enough for years of tinkering. The supplies he needed remained untouched and could wait for another trip.

    “Never waste a trip. Time is the only resource anyone has.” Dad’s voice echoed in his memory.

    Keith glanced down the hall to the repair room. Someone may have been cautious enough to close the doors and lock up on the way out of the lab the last time, but repair and storage rarely warranted the same care.

Soft footfalls carried him to the second option, and luck as much as insight, found it open.

    The same monochromatic slab of black marble tabletops on wooden cabinets adorned the simple room. One megalithic center run held a half dozen scopes and meters under repair. Shelves lined the walls, similarly stocked with equipment ready for return to the lab, their calibration dates and stamps still neat and legible if now outdated.

    The light probed the room.

    Dress shoes and dress slacks stuck out from behind the far end of the center island, splayed unnaturally wide, like frog legs on a plate. Hundreds of bodies had come and gone under his scrutiny and one more didn’t strike any new fears. Keith began his inventory check. He placed a notebook on the end of the long bench, flipped it open, and added a second flashlight on the table, face up at the white and black speckled drop ceiling, to cast a broad if dim ambient light while he rummaged. He took a log of the room, returning every few moments to the notebook to ensure he didn’t forget what he planned to take, and the order. Testing the fundamentals of quantum physics in a basement wasn’t an easy task, but studying astronomy had netted him nothing. The stars and planets moved the way they were always supposed to. The answers to the Fall lay in the other direction of scale.

    Multiple trips lay in his future. He calculated the sheer volume of wire he needed, number of checkpoints, and order of the experiments he would perform. Not a wasted trip, he remembered somewhere the lab had held old Helmholtz coils. Maybe he could get his answers with a simpler build?

Keith stopped. He didn’t breathe, and for a long minute he did not dare to move his flashlight, or twitch a muscle in his body.

    The tie of hair remained bound at the back of the skull. A wide - though not quite handlebar- mustache rested on the face which stared with blank sockets at the ceiling.

    Memories of Tom Breeden and his classes flooded in, and Keith’s breathing increased rapidly and drew shallow. Pounding heartbeats resonated through his entire body setting the light in his hand vibrating. Forcing a slow breath in and out slowly,  Keith placed the second light on the table at his side, and looked down at his favorite professor, Tom Breeden. 

    “Why…” He trailed off. “I…” He stopped again. There was no man here to speak with. Tom had died years before, in a small electronics repair room.

Silence dominated the space and the squeak of a metal stool offended the resting dead when the weight of circumstance forced Keith to collapse to a sitting position, staring at the corpse. He had spoken to Tom several times a week, every week for three years. He knew the timber of his voice, and the raw kindness he exuded to every student.

    Who would have taken me seriously if not him? Would I have tried as hard without him? Keith’s mind wandered through memories.

    “Come see me during office hours or after class with any question you might have on anything,” Tom had said.

    Anything, meant anything.

    Keith didn’t take notes that first day of class. Keith had never taken notes in high school and hadn’t intended to start. He had listened with rapt attention in his first college physics class. He knew when he first walked in the door of this university that one day he would one day be a physics professor. With misplaced pride, he had approached the lecturer after class, waited for the first two students to finish their questions about basic kinematics, and then had asked Tom Breeden, his future friend, about black holes.

    “How did you tolerate me?” Keith asked out loud.

    Many professors would have offered up platitudes, or a worse told him to wait until he had more background. With a smile partially hidden beneath his mustache, Tom had looked over every calculation laid on the table in a black-and-white marbled notebook. Approximations created black holes using Newtonian methods, and insinuated that Isaac Newton should have seen the implications from escape velocity alone, regardless of his lack of quantum understanding.

    “What kind of opening salvos,” Keith said.

    These many years later, no hint of anything but joy in answering the questions echoed through time.

    Keith had managed to take four classes over four years with Tom, later learning not only had he pestered a senior professor his first day, but the head of the department. Tom had held extra office hours, with apparently endless patience for Keith’s endless questions as they studied his calculations resting on the desk piled high with disorganized books and paper. Tom had sent him away with more questions and more homework, always pointing him in new directions, with the certainty that the answers were always there, if you looked. Year later he wrote him a shining letter of recommendation to graduate school for his PhD. As graduation approached, and the department had its first physics valedictorian in Tom sounded as proud of Keith as his own father.

    Graduation day never came.

    The world collapsed instead. 

    Tom lay on the floor, no more than a corpse in a lab on an abandoned campus.

How many students even remembered he had existed?

    Tom had children, and a wife. He had a home, not far from the campus.

    “Why?” Keith whispered.

    Why were you here? Why did you die? Why didn’t you go home and have plans and back up plans? You could be alive now, doing science, together solving this mess that nature threw us. Why aren’t you here probing the mystery of new physics with me?

    Perhaps that task engaged him in his very last moments. Never a leader to sit idle behind a desk, he had pitched himself every working day into the task of running labs, and still doing science. “That digit right there,” he had said in the measurement of the mass of the electron. “That number is mine.” Tom’s Ph.D. work. Keith had joked back he owned all the numbers as a theoretical physicist.

    Tom had died making sure the lab stood ready for the next generation, the next crop of students. Death took him as he prepared things so that others could come after him, and fix what had happened.

    Keith never stopped envisioning him standing at a black board, chalk in hand, teaching the next generation. A foolish image, he chided himself. Time always passed, and he could not have remained there forever, regardless. Still the memory brought a brief smile.

    “Thank you, Tom. For everything.”

    Keith considered the room. He quietly rose from the chair, and slipped off his coat. He turned off the nearest flashlight, and slipped it into his pocket. The coat he laid out on the floor, over the mustache and ponytail. As silent as a cat, he closed his notebook and took two oscilloscopes with him, one in each hand. There were other supplies, but for those he would need to come back.

    “I’ll see you again soon, Tom,” Keith said. He blinked away tears.

    The lab served a fitting tomb for the best professor he had known.