The Centaur (5 page)

“We can discuss this later, George. The children are anxious for their lesson.”

But Caldwell, frantic to explain, to be absolved, bent and lifted his trouser leg, an unhoped-for indecency that burst the class into loud hilarity. And indeed Caldwell had in his heart asked for some such response.

Zimmerman understood this. He understood everything. Though Caldwell instantly dropped the trouser leg and straightened to attention, Zimmerman continued to gaze down at his ankle, as if it were at an infinite distance from him but his eyes were infinitely percipient. “Your socks don’t quite match,” he said. “Is this your explanation?”

The class burst again. Immaculately timing himself, Zimmerman waited until he would be audible above the last trickling chuckles. “But George—George—you should not allow your commendable concern with grooming to interfere with another pedagogic need, punctuality.”

Caldwell was so notoriously a poor dresser, his clothes were so nakedly shabby, that there was rich humor even in this; though doubtless many of the laughers had been lost among Zimmerman’s elegant sarcastic turns.

The principal made a fastidious indicative gesture. “Are you carrying a lightning rod? Remarkably prudent, on a cloudless winter day.”

Caldwell groped and felt behind him the cold sleek arrow-shaft jutting from his pocket. He took it out and offered it to Zimmerman while he struggled to find the first words of his story, a story that, once known, would make Zimmerman embrace him for his heroic suffering; tears of compassion would fall from that imperious distended face. “This is it,” Caldwell said. “I don’t know which kid did it—”

Zimmerman disdained touching the shaft; palms lifted in protest, as if the bright stick were charged with danger, he took a few quick backward steps, his small feet twinkling with the athletic prowess that still lingered in them. Zimmerman’s first fame had been as a schoolboy track star. Strong-shouldered, lithe-limbed, he had excelled in all tests of speed and strength—the discus, dashes, endurance runs. “George, I
said
later
,” he said. “Please teach your class. Since the program of my morning has already been interrupted, I’ll sit in the rear of the class and make this my month’s visit. Please behave, boys and girls, as if I were not present.”

Caldwell lived in dread of the supervising principal’s monthly classroom visitations. The brief little typewritten reports that followed them, containing a blurred blend of acid detail and educational jargon, had the effect, if they were good, of exalting Caldwell for days and, if they were bad (as they nearly always seemed to be; even an ambiguous adjective poisoned the cup), of depressing him for weeks. Now a visit had come, when he was addled, in the wrong, in pain, and unprepared.

Slyly pussyfooting, Zimmerman sidled down along the blackboard. His broad checkered back was hunched in a droll pretense of being inconspicuous. He took a seat in the last row, behind the cup ears and blazing acne of Mark Youngerman. No sooner was Zimmerman settled at the end desk than he noticed that level with him, two rows away, in the last seat of the third row, Iris Osgood sat immersed in dull bovine beauty. Zimmerman slid out of his seat into the one next to her and in a little pantomime of whispers asked her for a sheet of tablet paper. The plump girl, fussed, tore off a sheet, and as he leaned over to take it the principal with a bold slide of his eyes looked down the top of her loose silk blouse.

Caldwell watched this in an awed daze. He felt the colors of the class stir under him; Zimmerman’s presence made them electric. Begin. He forgot who he was, what he taught, why he was here. He went over to his desk, put down the arrow-shaft, and picked up a magazine clipping that reminded him.
CLEVELAND SCIENTIST CHARTS CREATION-CLOCK
. Zimmerman’s face seemed huge at the rear of the room. “Behind me on the
blackboard,” Caldwell began, “is the figure five followed by nine zeros. This is five—what?”

A timid girl’s voice broke from the silence, saying, “Trillion.” Judith Lengel, that would be. She tried, but didn’t have it. Her father was one of those biff-bang real estate salesmen who expected their kids to be May Queen, valedictorian, and Most Popular just because he, old Five Percent Lengel, had made a mint. Poor Judy, the kid just didn’t have it upstairs.

“Billion,” Caldwell said. “Five billion years. This is, under our present state of knowledge, believed to be the age of the universe. It may be older; it is almost certainly at least this old. Now, who can tell me what a billion is?”

“A thousand thousand?” Judy quavered. Poor little bitch, why didn’t somebody get her off the hook? Why didn’t one of the bright ones like young Kegerise speak up? Kegerise sat there with his legs all over the aisle doodling on his tablet and smiling to himself. Caldwell looked around for Peter and then remembered the kid wasn’t in this section. He came in the seventh period. Zimmerman made a notation and winked over at the Osgood girl, who didn’t know what was up. Dumb. Dumb as pure white lead.

“A thousand thousand
thousand
,” Caldwell announced. “A thousand million. That’s a billion. There are over two billion people in the world right now,” he said, “and it all began around a million years ago when some dumb ape swung down out of a tree and looked around and wondered what he was doing here.” The class laughed, and Deifendorf, one of the country boys who came in on the bus, began to scratch his scalp and armpit and make monkey chatter. Caldwell tried to overlook it because the boy was his ace swimmer. “Another place you hear billions is in the national debt,” he said. “We owe ourselves about two hundred sixty billion bucks right
now. It cost us about three hundred fifty billion to kill Hitler. Another place is with the stars. There are about a hundred billion stars in our own galaxy, which is called—what?”

“The solar system?” Judy offered.

“The Milky Way,” Caldwell said. “The solar system has just one star in it—what’s it called?”

He pointedly looked toward the rear of the class but in the corner of his eye Judy said “Venus?” anyway. The boys laughed at this; Venus, venereal, V. D. Someone clapped.

“Venus is the brightest planet,” Caldwell explained to her. “We call it a star because it looks like one. But of course the only real star we’re at all close to is—”

“The Sun,” somebody in the class said, and Caldwell never knew who it was, because he was concentrating on Judith Lengel’s dull strained face and trying to tell her without words that she mustn’t let her old man get her down. Relax, girl, you’ll get a mate. You’ll get a date and then a mate. And then you’ll rate. (It would make a good Valentine—every once in a while Caldwell got an inspiration like this.)

“Right,” he said to the class, “the Sun. Now here’s a figure.” He wrote on the blackboard 6,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000. “How would you say it?” He answered himself, “Six,” and, looping back the trios of zeros, “thousand, million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion,
sex
tillion. Six sextillion. What does it represent?” Mute faces marvelled and mocked. Again he answered himself. “The weight of the earth in tons. Now the sun,” he said, “weighs this much more.” He wrote 333,000 on the blackboard, saying, half to the class, half to the slate, “Three-three-three oh-oh-oh. Multiply it out, and you get”—
skrkk, scrak
, the chalk chipped as he carried the ones—“one nine nine eight followed by twenty-four goose eggs.” He stepped back and looked; his work sickened him.

1,​998,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000

The zeros stared back, every one a wound leaking the word “poison.” “That’s the weight of the Sun,” Caldwell said. “Who cares?”

Laughter bobbled about him. Where was he? “Some stars are bigger,” he said, stalling, “some are smaller. The next nearest star is Alpha Centauri, four light-years away. Light goes one-eight-six oh-oh-oh miles a second.” He wrote it on the blackboard. There was little space left. “That’s six trillion miles a year.” With his fingertips he erased the 5 in the age of the universe and put in a 6. “Alpha Centauri is twenty-four trillion miles away.” The pressure in Caldwell’s stomach released a bubble and he bit back a belch. “The Milky Way, which used to be thought of as the path by which the souls of the dead travelled to Heaven, is an optical illusion; you could never reach it. Like fog, it would always thin out around you. It’s a mist of stars we make by looking the long way through the galaxy; the galaxy is a spinning discus a hundred thousand light-years wide. I don’t know who threw it. Its center is in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius; that means ‘archer,’ like somebody in the lovely class before yours. And beyond our galaxy are other galaxies, in the universe all told at least a hundred billion, each containing a hundred billion stars. Do these figures mean anything to you?”

Deifendorf said, “No.”

Caldwell disarmed his impudence by agreeing. He had been teaching long enough to keep a step or two ahead of the bastards occasionally. “They don’t to me either. They remind me of death. The human mind can only take so much. The”—he remembered that Zimmerman was here; the principal’s ponderous face lifted alertly—“the heck with ’em. Let’s try to reduce five billion years to our size. Let’s say the universe is
three days old. Today is Thursday, and it is”—he looked at the clock—“twenty minutes to twelve.” Twenty minutes to go; he’d have to make this fast. “O. K. Last Monday at noon there was the greatest explosion there ever was. We’re still riding on it. When we look out at the other galaxies, they’re flying away from us. The farther away they are, the faster they’re flying. By computation, they all must have begun at one place about five billion years ago; all the billions and trillions and quadrillions squared and squared again of tons of matter in the universe were compressed into a ball at the maximum possible density, the density within the nucleus of the atom; one cubic centimeter of this primeval egg weighed two hundred and fifty tons.”

Caldwell felt as if just such a cubic centimeter had been lodged in his bowels. Astronomy transfixed him; at night sometimes when he lay down in bed exhausted he felt that his ebbing body was fantastically huge and contained in its darkness a billion stars.

Zimmerman was leaning over whispering to the Osgood girl; his percipient eyes fondled the hidden smooth curve of her dugs. His lechery smelled; the kids were catching fire; from the way Gloria Davis’s shoulders were hunching, Deifendorf behind her was tickling her neck with the eraser of his pencil. Gloria was a smutty little tramp from outside Olinger. She had a tiny white triangle of a face set in a frizzy square cushion of flesh-colored hair. Dull. Dull and dirty.

Caldwell struggled on. “The compression was so great the substance was unstable; it exploded in a second—not a second of our imaginary time, but a real second, of real time. Now—are you following me?—in our scale of three days, all Monday afternoon the air of the universe was hot and bright with radiant energy; by evening the dispersal had gone far enough so
that darkness fell. The universe became totally dark. And the dark matter—dust, planets, meteors, junk, garbage, old stones—still greatly outweighs the luminous matter. In this first night the expanding flux of universal substance broke up into immense gas clouds, the proto-galaxies, and within these, gravitational attraction condensed balls of gas that under the pressure of their own accumulating mass began to burn. So, sometime before Tuesday’s dawn, stars began to shine. Are you with me? And these stars were surrounded by rotating clouds of matter that in turn condensed. One of these was our Earth. It was cold, kids, cold enough to freeze not only water vapor but nitrogen, the carbon oxides, ammonia, and methane; around the dust motes of solid matter these frozen gases crystallized in snowflakes that drew together at first slowly but more and more rapidly; soon they were falling to the growing Earth with velocities sufficient to generate considerable heat. The cosmic snow melted and flew back into space, leaving, here, a molten mass of the mineral elements that are, in the universe itself, a minority of less than one per cent. O. K. That’s one day down and two to go. By noon of the second day, a crust had formed. It may have been basalt entirely covered by a primeval ocean; then fissures opened up, spewing liquid granite that became the first continents. Meanwhile liquid iron, heavier than lava, sank to the center, where it makes the molten core. Have any of you ever opened up a golf ball?”

He had felt the class sinking from him, like sluggish iron from the cooling crust. The golf ball woke them up a little, but not enough. A braceleted wrist paused in mid-aisle, passing a note; Deifendorf stopped tickling the Davis girl; Kegerise left off doodling; even Zimmerman looked up. Caldwell may have been imagining it, but he thought the old bull had been stroking the Osgood girl’s milky arm. In all the class,
nothing annoyed him so much as the smirk on the Davis girl’s smutty face; sensual, sly; he looked at her so intensely her purple lipstick uttered, “It’s blue,” in defense.

“Yes,” he said slowly, “a little sac of blue fluid is inside a golf ball, underneath all the rubber bands.” He forgot what the point of it was. He glanced at the clock. Twelve minutes left. His stomach kicked. He tried to ease all his weight from the tender leg; the puncture in his ankle was stinging as the blood dried. “For a whole day,” he said, “between Tuesday and Wednesday noon, the earth is barren. There is no life on it. Just ugly rocks, stale water, vomiting volcanoes, everything slithering and sliding and maybe freezing now and then as the sun like a dirty old light bulb flickered up there in the sky. By yesterday noon, a little life showed up. Nothing spectacular; just a little bit of slime. All yesterday afternoon, and most of the night, life remained microscopic.” He turned and wrote on the blackboard,

He tapped the first one and the chalk turned to a large warm wet larva in his hand. He dropped it in disgust and the class tittered. Caldwell pronounced, “Corycium enigmaticum. Carbonic remains of this primitive marine organism were found in rocks in Finland believed to be a billion and a half years old. As the name suggests, this primitive form of life remains enigmatic, but it is believed to be a calcareous blue-green algae of the type that still tints large areas of ocean.”