  We study the low-energy effective field equations that couple gravity, the
dilaton, and the bulk closed string tachyon of bosonic closed string theory. We
establish that whenever the tachyon induces the rolling process, the string
metric remains fixed while the dilaton rolls to strong coupling. For negative
definite potentials we show that this results in an Einstein metric that
crunches the universe in finite time. This behavior is shown to be rather
generic even if the potentials are not negative definite. The solutions are
reminiscent of those in the collapse stage of a cyclic universe cosmology where
scalar field potentials with negative energies play a central role.
