The Centaurus

I

CALDWELL turned and as he turned his ankle received an arrow. The class burst into laughter. The pain scaled the slender core of his shin, whirled in the complexities of his knee, and, swollen broader, more thunderous, mounted into his bowels. His eyes were forced upward to the blackboard, where he had chalked the number 5,000,000,000, the probable age in years of the universe. The laughter of the class, graduating from the first shrill bark of surprise into a deliberately aimed hooting, seemed to crowd against him, to crush the privacy that he so much desired, a privacy in which he could be alone with his pain, gauging its strength, estimating its duration, inspecting its anatomy. The pain extended a feeler into his head and unfolded its wet wings along the walls of his thorax, so that he felt, in his sudden scarlet blindness, to be himself a large bird waking from sleep. The blackboard, milky slate smeared with the traces of last night’s washing, clung to his consciousness like a membrane. The pain seemed to be displacing with its own hairy segments his heart and lungs; as its grip swelled in his throat he felt he was holding his brain like a morsel on a platter high out of hungry reach. Several of the boys in their bright shirts all colors of the rainbow had risen upright at their desks, leering and baying at their teacher, cocking their muddy shoes on the folding seats. The confusion became unbearable. Caldwell limped to the door and shut it behind him on the furious festal noise.

Out in the hall, the feather end of the arrow scraped on the floor with every step. The metallic scratch and stiff rustle mixed disagreeably. His stomach began to sway with nausea. The dim, long walls of the ochre hall wavered; the classroom doors, inset with square numbered panes of frosted glass, seemed experimental panels immersed in an activated liquid charged with children’s voices chanting French, singing anthems, discussing problems of Social Science. Avez-vous une maison jolie? Oui, j’ai une maison tres jolie for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain throughout our history boys and girls (this was the voice of Pholos), the federal government has grown in prestige, power, and authority but we must not forget, boys and girls, that by origin we are a union of sovereign republics, the United God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood-the beautiful song was blindly persisting in Caldwell’s brain. To shining sea. The old baloney. He had heard it first in Passaic. Since then, how strange he had grown! His top half felt all afloat in a starry firmament of ideals and young voices singing; the rest of his self was heavily sunk in a swamp where it must, eventually, drown. Each time the feathers brushed the floor, the shaft worked in his wound. He tried to keep that leg from touching the floor, but the jagged clatter of the three remaining hooves sounded so loud he was afraid one of the doors would snap open and another teacher emerge to bar his way. In this crisis his fellow-teachers seemed herdsmen of terror, threatening to squeeze him back into the room with the students. His bowels weakly convulsed; on the glimmering varnished boards, right in front of the trophy case with its hundred silver eyes, he deposited, without breaking stride, a steaming dark spreading cone. His great gray-dappled flanks twitched with distaste, but like a figurehead on the prow of a foundering ship his head and torso pressed forward.

The faint watery blur above the side doors drew him on. Here, at the far end of the hall, through windows” exteriorly screened against vandalism, light from outdoors entered the school and, unable to spread in the viscid, varnished atmosphere, remained captured, like water in oil, above the en trance. Toward this bluish bubble of light the moth inside him drove Caldwell ’s high, handsome, compounded body. His viscera squirmed; a dusty antenna brushed the roof of his mouth. Yet also on his palate he eagerly tasted an anticipation of fresh air. The air brightened. He bucked the double doors whose dirty glass was reinforced with chicken wire. In a tumult of pain, the arrow battering the steel balusters, he threw himself down the short flight of steps to the concrete landing. In ascending these steps a child had hastily penciled FUCK on the darkly lustrous wall. Caldwell gripped the brass bar and, his mouth thin with determination beneath his pinched and frightened eyes, he pushed into the open.

His nostrils made two plumes of frost. It was January. The clear blue of the towering sky seemed forceful yet enigmatic.

The immense level swath of the school’s side lawn, pointed at the corners by plantings of pines, was, though this was winter’s heart, green; but the color was frozen, paralyzed, vestigial, artificial. Beyond the school grounds, a trolley car, gently clanging, floated up the pike toward Ely. Virtually empty- the time was eleven o’clock, the shoppers were all going the other way, into Alton -it swayed lightly on its tracks and the straw seats showered sparks of gold through the windows. Outdoors, in the face of spatial grandeur, his pain seemed abashed. Dwarfed, it retreated into his ankle, became hard and sullen and contemptible. Caldwell ’s strange silhouette took on dignity; his shoulders-a little narrow for so large a creature-straightened, and he moved, if not at a prance, yet with such pressured stoic grace that the limp was enrolled in his stride. He took the paved walk between the frozen lawn and the brimming parking lot. Beneath his belly the grimacing grilles flashed in the white winter sun; the scratches in the chrome were iridescent as diamonds. The cold began to shorten his breath. Behind him in the salmon-brick hulk of the high school a buzzer sounded, dismissing the class he had abandoned. With a sluggish digestive rumble, the classes shifted.

Hummel’s Garage adjoined the Olinger High School property, a little irregular river of asphalt separating them. Its association with the school was not merely territorial. Hummel had for many years, though not now, served on the school board, and his young red-haired wife, Vera, was the girls’ physical education instructor. The garage got much trade from the high school. Boys brought their derelict jalopies here to be fixed, and younger boys pumped up basketballs with the free air. In the front part of the building, in the large room where Hummel kept his accounts and his tattered, blackened library of spare-parts catalogues and where two wooden desks side by side each supported a nibbled foliation of papers and pads and spindles skewering up to the rusted tip fluffy stacks of pink receipts, here a cloudy glass case, its cracked top repaired with a lightning-shaped line of tire tape, kept candy in crackling wrappers waiting for children’s pennies. Here, on a brief row of greasy folding chairs overlooking a five-foot cement pit whose floor was flush with the alley outside, the male teachers sometimes-more of old than recently-sat at noon and smoked and ate Fifth Avenues and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Essick’s Coughdrops and put their tightly laced and polished feet up on the railing and let their martyred nerves uncurl while, in the three-sided pit below, an automobile like an immense metal baby was washed and changed by Hummel’s swarthy men.

The main and greater part of the garage was approached on an asphalt ramp as rough, streaked, gouged, flecked, and bubbled as a hardened volcanic flow. In the wide green door opened to admit motored vehicles, there was a little mansized door with keep closed dribblingly dabbed in blue touch-up paint below the latch. Caldwell lifted the latch and entered. His hurt leg cursed the turn needed to close the door behind him.

A deep warm darkness was lit by sparks. The floor of the grotto was waxed black by oil drippings. At the far side of the long workbench, two shapeless men in goggles caressed a great downward-drooping fan of flame broken into dry drops. Another man, staring upward out of round eyes sockets white in a black face, rolled by on his back and disappeared beneath the body of a car. His eyes adjusting to the gloom, Caldwell saw heaped about him overturned fragments of automobiles, fragile and phantasmal, fenders like corpses of turtles, bristling engines like disembodied hearts. Hisses and angry thumps lived in the mottled air. Near where Caldwell stood, an old potbellied coal stove bent brilliant pink through its seams. He hesitated to leave its radius of warmth, though the thing in his ankle was thawing, and his stomach assuming an unsettled flutter.

Hummel himself appeared in the doorway of the workshop. As they walked toward each other, Caldwell experienced a mocking sensation of walking toward a mirror, for Hummel also limped. One of his legs was smaller than the other, due to a childhood fall. He looked hunched, pale, weathered; the recent years had diminished the master mechanic. The Esso and Mobilgas chains had both built service stations a few blocks away along the pike, and now that the war was over, and everybody could buy new cars with their war-work money, the demand for repairs had plummeted.

“George! Is it your lunch already?” Hummel’s voice, though slight, was expertly pitched to pierce the noise of the shop.

As Caldwell answered, a particularly harsh and rapid series of metallic clashes sprang up in the air and flattened his words; his voice, thin and strained, seemed to hang hushed in his own ears. “No, Jesus, I have a class right now.”

“Well what is it then?” Hummel’s delicate gray face, bleached by spots of silver bristle, alerted timidly, as if anything unexpected had the power to hurt him. His wife had done that to him, Caldwell knew.

“Lookit,” Caldwell said, “what one of the damn kids did to me.” He put his injured foot up on a severed fender and lifted his trouser leg.

The mechanic bent over the arrow and touched the feathers tentatively. His knuckles were deeply ingrained with grime, his touch silken with lubricant. “Steel shaft,” he said. “You’re lucky the tip went clean through.” He signaled and a little tripod on wheels came rattling by itself across the bumpy black floor. Hummel took from it a pair of wire cutters, the type that has an elbow hinge on one jaw to give extra leverage. As the string of a helium balloon slips from a child’s absentminded fingers, so fear set Caldwell ’s mind floating free. In his dizzy abstraction he tried to analyze the cutters as a diagram: mechanical advantage equals load over force less friction, length of lever AF (fulcrum = nut) over length FB, B being biting point of gleaming crescent jaw, multiplied by secondary mechanical advantage of accessory fulcrum-lever complex, in turn multiplied by mechanical advantage of Hummel’s calm and grimy workman’s hand, clenching action of contracting flexors and rigid phalanges five-fold, MA X MA X 5MA = titanic. Hummel bent his back so Caldwell could brace himself on his shoulders. Uncertain this was being offered and reluctant to presume, Caldwell remained erect and stared upward. The beaded boards of the garage ceiling had been painted velvet by rising smoke and spider traces. Through his knee Caldwell felt Hummel’s back shift with twitches of fitting; he felt metal touch his skin through his sock. The fender shuddered unsteadily. Hummel’s shoulders tensed with effort and Caldwell clamped his teeth upon an outcry, for it seemed the cutters were biting not into a metal shaft but into a protruding nerve of his anatomy. The crescent jaws gnashed; in a swift telescopic thrust Caldwell’s pain shot upwards; coruscated; and then Hummel’s shoulders relaxed. “No good,” the mechanic said. “I thought it might be hollow but it isn’t. George, you’ll have to come over to the bench.”

Trembling through the length of his legs, which seemed as thin and rickety as bicycle spokes, Caldwell followed Hummel and obediently set his foot up on an old Coca-Cola case the mechanic rummaged out of the sooty rubble beneath the long workbench. Trying to ignore the arrow that like an optical defect in his lower vision followed him everywhere, Caldwell concentrated on a bushel-basket full of discarded fuel pumps. Hummel pulled the chain of a naked electric bulb. The windows were opaquely spattered with paint from the outside; the walls between them were hung with wrenches aligned by size, ballpeen hammers with taped handles, electric drills, screwdrivers a yard long, intricate sprocketed socketed tools whose names and functions he would never know, neat coils of frazzled wire, calipers, pliers, and, stuck and taped here and there in crevices and bare spots, advertisements, toasted and tattered and ancient. One showed a cat holding up a paw and another a giant trying in vain to tear a patented fan belt. A card said safety first and another, taped over a window pane, protect your N N you won’t be given another pair.

Like the outpouring of a material hymn to material creation, the top of the bench was strewn with loops of rubber, tubes of copper, cylinders of graphite, threaded elbows of iron, cans of oil, chunks of wood, rags, drops, and dusty scraps of all elements. This tumble, full of tools, was raked by intense flashes of light from the two workmen down the bench. They were fashioning what looked like an ornamented bronze girdle for a woman with a tiny waist and flaring hips. Hummel put an asbestos glove on his left hand and plucked a broad scrap of tin from the heap. With the cutters he sliced into the center and, abruptly deft, cleverly folded the piece into a cupped shield, which he fitted around the arrow at the back of Caldwell ’s ankle. “So you won’t feel the heat so much,” he explained, and snapped the fingers of his un gloved hand. “Archy, could I have the torch a minute now?”

The helper, careful to keep his feet from tangling in the trailing wire, brought over the acetylene torch. It was a little black jug spitting white flame edged with green. Where the flame streamed from the spout there was a transparent gap. Caldwell locked his jaw on his panic. The arrow had been re vealed to him as a live nerve. He braced for the necessary pain.

There was none. Magically, he found himself at the center of an immense insensible nimbus. The light startled into being sharp triangular shadows all around him, on the bench, on the walls. Holding the tin shield in his gloved hand, Hummel without the protection of goggles squinted into the blazing, purring heart of Caldwell ’s ankle. His face, dead-pale and drastically foreshortened, glittered fanatically on the points of his two eyes. As Caldwell looked down, a wisp of Hummel’s tired gray hair strayed forward, shrivelled, and vanished in a whiff of smoke. The workmen watched mutely. It seemed to be taking too long. Now Caldwell was feeling the heat; the touch of tin began to boil against his leg. But by closing his eyes Caldwell could envision in the top of his skull the arrow bending, melting, its molecules letting go. Something metal and small chinked to the floor. The pressures encircling his foot lifted. He opened his eyes, and the torch went off. The yellow electric light seemed brown.

“Ronnie, could you get me a soaking wet rag?” Hummel explained to Caldwell, “I don’t want to pull it through hot.”

“You’re a damn good workman,” Caldwell said. His voice was fainter than he had expected, his praise empty of blood. He watched Ronnie, a one-eyed boy with shoulders like tummocks, take an oily rag and plunge it into a small bucket of black water standing under a far electric bulb. Reflected light bobbed and leaped in the violated water as if to be free. Ronnie handed the rag to Hummel and Hummel squatted and applied it. Cold wet dribbled into Caldwell ’s shoe and a faint aromatic hissing rose to his nostrils. “We’ll wait now a minute,” Hummel said, and remained squatting, carefully holding Caldwell ’s pants leg up from the wound. Caldwell met the stares of the three workmen-the third had come out from under the car-and smiled self-deprecatingly. Now that relief was at hand he had a margin in which to feel embarrassed. His smile made the helpers frown. To them it was as if an automobile had tried to speak. Caldwell let his eyes go out of focus and thought of far-off things, of green fields, of Chariclo as a lithe young woman, of Peter as a baby, of how he had pushed him on his Kiddy Kar with a long forked stick along the pavements under the horsechestnut trees. They had been too poor to afford a baby carriage; the kid had learned to steer, too early? He worried about the kid when he had the time.

“Now George: hold tight,” Hummel said. The arrow slid out backwards with a slick spurt of pain. Hummel stood up, his face pink, scorched by fire or flushed in satisfaction. His three moronic helpers clustered around jostling to see the silver shaft, painted at its unfeathered end with blood. Caldwell ’s ankle, at last free, felt soft, unbraced; his shoe seemed to be filling with warm slow liquid. The pain had changed color, had shifted into the healing spectrum. The body knew. The ache came now to his heart rhythmically: Nature’s breathing.

Hummel bent down and picked something up. He held it to his nose and sniffed. Then he set it in Caldwell ’s palm still piping hot. It was an arrowhead. Three-sided, so sharply pointed its edges were concave, it seemed too dainty a thing to have caused such a huge dislocation. Caldwell noticed that his palms were mottled with shock and exertion; a film of sweat broke out on his brow. He asked Hummel, “Why did you smell it?”

“Wondering if it was poisoned.”

“It wouldn’t be, would it?”

“I don’t know. These kids today.” He added, “I didn’t smell anything.”

“I don’t think they’d do anything like that,” Caldwell insisted, thinking of Achilles and Hercules, Jason and Asclepios, those attentive respectful faces.

“Where do the kids get their money? is what I’d like to know,” Hummel said, as if kindly trying to draw Caldwell ’s mind away from a hopeless matter. He held up the headless shaft and wiped the blood off on his glove. “This is good steel,” he said. “This is an expensive arrow.”

“Their fathers give it to the bastards,” Caldwell said, feeling stronger, clearer-headed. His class, he must get back.

“There’s too much money around,” the old mechanic said with wan spite. “They’ll buy any junk Detroit puts out.” His face had regained its gray color, its acetylene tan; crinkled and delicate like an often-folded sheet of foil, his face became almost womanly with quiet woe and Caldwell became nervous.

“Al, how much do I owe you? I got to get back. Zimmerman’ll have my neck.”

“Nothing, George. Forget it. I’m glad I was able to do it.” He laughed. “It isn’t every day I burn an arrow out of a man’s leg.”

“I wouldn’t feel right. I asked a craftsman to give me the benefit of his craft-” He groped toward his wallet pocket insincerely.

“Forget it, George. It took a minute. Be big enough to accept a favor. Vera says you’re one of the few over there who doesn’t try to make her life more difficult.”

Caldwell felt his face go wooden; he wondered how much Hummel knew of why Vera’s life was difficult. He must get back. “Al, I’m much obliged to you. Believe me.” There was never a way, somehow, of really getting gratitude across. You went through life in a town and sometimes loved the people in it and never told them, you were ashamed.

“Here,” Hummel said. “Don’t you want this?” He held out the arrow’s bright shaft. Caldwell had absent-mindedly slipped the point into his side coat pocket.

“No, hell. You keep it.”

“No, now what would I do with it? The shop’s full of junk as it is. You show it to Zimmerman. A teacher in our public school system shouldn’t have to put up with crap like this.”

“O.K., Al, you win. Thanks. Thank you very much.” The rod of silver was too long; it stuck up out of his side coat pocket like a car aerial.

“A teacher ought to be protected from kids like that. Tell Zimmerman.”

“You tell him. Maybe he’ll take it from you.”

“Well, he might. That’s no joke. He just might.”

“I didn’t mean it as a joke.”

“I was on the board, you know, that hired him.”

“I know you were, Al.”

“I’ve often regretted it.”

“Hell, don’t.”

“No?”

“He’s an intelligent man.”

“Yes-yes, but there’s something missing.”

“Zimmerman understands power; but he doesn’t keep discipline.” Fresh pain flooded Caldwell ’s shin and knee. It seemed to him that he had never seen Zimmerman so clearly or expressed himself so well on the subject, but Hummel, annoyingly obtuse, merely repeated his own observation. “There’s something missing.”

His sense of passing time was working on Caldwell’s bowels, making them bind. “I got to get back,” he said.

“Good luck. Tell Cassie the town misses her.”

“Jesus, she’s happy as a lark out there. It’s what she’s always wanted.”

“And Pop Kramer, how’s he?”

“Pop’s tops. He’ll live to be a hundred.”

“Do you mind the driving back and forth?”

“No, to tell you the truth I enjoy it. It gives me a chance to talk to the kid. The kid and I hardly ever saw each other when we lived in town.”

“You have a bright boy there. Vera tells me.”

“It’s his mother’s brains. I just pray to God he doesn’t inherit my ugly body.”

“George, may I tell you something?”

“Sure.”

“For your own good.”

“Say anything you want, Al. You’re my friend.”

“You know what your trouble is?”

“I’m stubborn and ignorant.”

“Seriously.”

My trouble is, Caldwell thought, my leg is killing me.

“What?”

“You’re too modest.”

“Al, you’ve hit the nail on the head,” Caldwell said, and moved to turn away.

But Hummel kept pinning him. “Your car’s holding up all right?” Until they had moved ten miles out of town, the Caldwells had done without a car. They could walk everywhere in Olinger and take the trolley to Alton. But when they bought back the old Kramer place they needed a car. Hummel had put them on to a ‘36 Buick for only $375.

“Just wonderful. It’s a wonderful car. I kick myself every day for smashing up that grille.”

“That can’t be welded, George. But the car runs all right?”

“Like a dream. I’m grateful to you, Al, don’t think I’m not.”

“That engine should be all right; the man never drove it over forty. He was an undertaker.”

If Hummel had said that once, he had said it a thousand times. The fact seemed to fascinate him. “I’m not scared,” Caldwell said, guessing that in Hummel’s mind the car was full of ghosts. Actually, it was just an ordinary four-door sedan; there was no room to carry corpses. True, though, it was the blackest car Caldwell had ever seen. They really put the shellac on those old Buicks.

His conversation with Hummel was making Caldwell anxious. A clock in his head was ticking on; the school called to him urgently. Disjointed music seemed to be tugging at Hummel’s exhausted face. Images of loose joints, worn thread, carbon deposits, fatigued metal webbed across Caldwell’s apprehension of his old friend: Are we falling apart? In his own mind a gear kept slipping: Shellac on those old Buicks, shellac, shellac. “Al,” he protested, “I got to high-tail it. You won’t take a cent?”

“George: now not another word.” And this was the way with all these Olinger aristocrats. They wouldn’t take any money but they did take an authoritative tone. They forced a favor on you and that made them gods.

He walked toward the door but Hummel limped along with him. The three Cyclopes gabbled so loud the men turned. Archy, outpouring from his throat a noise like a butchery of birds, pointed to the floor. On the stained cement one shoe had left wet prints. Caldwell examined the injured foot; the shoe was saturated with blood. Black in the brown light, it was leaking out above the heel.

“George, you better get that tended,” Hummel said. “I will at lunch. Let it bleed itself out.” The thought of poison haunted him. “Let it flush itself.”

He opened the door and a box of cold air encased them. In stepping out, Caldwell put too much weight on the bloody foot and hopped in surprise.

“Tell Zimmerman,” Hummel insisted.

“I will.”

“No, really, tell him, George.”

“He’s helpless, Al. The kids today just aren’t the old kind; Zimmerman wants ‘em to chew us up.”

Hummel sighed. His gun-colored coveralls seemed deflated; a sprinkle of iron filings fell from his hair. “These are bad days, George.”

Caldwell’s long drawn face tweaked unusually; he was going to make a joke. He was rarely a formally humorous man. “It’s no Golden Age, that’s for sure.”

Hummel was pathetic, Caldwell decided as he walked away. Lonely devil, couldn’t stop talking, he couldn’t let you go. No need for mechanics like him anymore; everything mass-produced. Waste. If one wears out, get another. Biff. Bang. Smash ‘em up. Can only get one-eyed morons to work for him, wife sleeps all around town, Mobilgas moving in and now the rumor was Texaco too, Hummel was dead and de pressing. Sniffing the point so matter-of-factly for poison; brrough.

But as his hobbled walk toward the school building continued, and the cold flattened his threadbare brown suit against his skin, Caldwell’s heart changed tone. The garage had been warm. The man had been good to him. Had always been; Hummel was Pop Kramer’s nephew-in-law. He had been the key influence on the board when Caldwell had got the job, in the depths of the Depression, when all the olive trees died, and Ceres roamed the land mourning her stolen daughter. Where one of her tears fell, grass never grew again. The garland she was wearing turned venomous, and now poison ivy flourished by every barn. Hitherto everything in Nature had been kind to Man. Every species of berry had been gently aphrodisiac, and coming from Pelion at a canter he had spied the young Chariclo gathering watercress.

He drew near the immense orange wall. Classroom sounds like snowflakes drifted down on him. Metal tapped a brittle pane. Pholos appeared at a window, holding a window-pole, and looked down startled upon his fellow-teacher. His oblong, old-fashioned spectacles flashed in surprise beneath the neat cap of centrally parted hair. Pholos had once been a semi-pro shortstop, and the line of the cap still indented the hair above his ears, though his broad forehead was a river of middle-aged wrinkles. Caldwell tersely waved at his friend, and exaggerated his limp, as if that explained his being out of school. Though he bobbed like a ten-cent toy, it was scarcely an exaggeration; the pain in his ankle felt plaintive and forsaken after Hummel’s radiant attentions. At every other step, the hot earth climbed higher toward his knee. Caldwell gained the side door and grasped the bronze bar. Before entering, he gasped fresh air and stared sharply upward, as if in answer to a shout. Beyond the edge of the orange wall the adamantine blue zenith pronounced its un ceasing monosyllable: I.

Back inside the school, he paused, lightly panting, on the rubber mat of the landing. The lustrous yellow wall still said FUCK. Afraid of having to clatter past Zimmerman’s office on the first floor, Caldwell took the subterranean route. He went down the steps, past the boys’ locker room. The door was open; clothes were flung around in disarray and some clouds of steam loitered. Caldwell pushed through reinforced glass and entered the great basement study-hall. Through its length and width the children were unnaturally still. Medusa, who kept perfect discipline, was at the head desk. She glanced up, yellow pencils thrusting from her tangled hair. Caldwell avoided looking at her face. Head high, eyes forward, mouth in a prim determined set, he walked along the wall at his right hand. From the other side of the wall, where industrial arts were taught, arose the spurt and cry txz! aeiiii, of wood being tortured. On his left he heard the children rustle like shingle in a threatening tide. He did not look around until he had gained the safety of the far doorway. Here Caldwell turned, to see if he had left tracks. As he feared: a trail of red crescents, moons from his heel, marked his path. He pinched his lips in embarrassment; he would have to explain and apologize to the janitors.

In the cafeteria, the green-gowned women were bustling, setting out 8¢ cartons of chocolate milk, arranging trays of sandwiches bound in waxpaper, and stirring the cauldrons of soup. Tomato today. The sickly plangent odor filled the tiled volume. Mom Schreuer, a fat soul whose son was a dentist and whose apron was black beneath her bosom from leaning against the stoves, waved a wooden paddle at him. Grinning like a greeted boy, Caldwell waved back. He always felt securer among the people who staffed the school, who fed its furnaces, the janitors, the cooks. They reminded him of real people, the people of his boyhood in Passaic, New Jersey, where his father had been the poor minister of a poor church. Along the neighborhood street each man had ‘an occupation that could be simply named-milkman, welder, printer, ma son-and each house in the row wore to his eyes, in its individual nicks and curtains and flowerpots, a distinct face. A modest man, Caldwell was most comfortable in the under-reaches of the high school. It was warmest there; the steam pipes sang; the talk made sense.

The great building was symmetrical. He left the cafeteria by climbing a few steps and passing the girls’ locker room. Forbidden territory; but he knew from the tumble in the boys’ locker room that it was a male gym period, so there was no danger of blundering into the sacred. The sanctum was empty. The thick green door was ajar, exposing a strip of cement floor, a bit of tan bench, a tall segment of shut lockers under high frosted windows.

Hold!

Here it was, his feet frozen to this same spot of scratching cement, careless in his weariness, his eyes worn by correcting papers in the boiler room, the building growing dark, the students fled, the clocks ticking in unison throughout the empty rooms, that, climbing toward his room, he had surprised Vera Hummel, this same green door ajar, standing in view wreathed in steam, a blue towel held gracefully away from her body, her amber pudenda whitened by drops of dew.

“Why should my brother Chiron stand gaping like a satyr? The gods are not strange to him.”

“Milady Venus.” He bowed his splendid head. “Your beauty for the moment ravished me into forgetfulness of my fraternity.”

She laughed and, twisting her amber hair forward over one shoulder, indolently stroked it with the towel. “A fraternity, perhaps, your pride disdains to confess. For Father Kronos, in the shape of a horse, sired you upon Philyra in the fullness of his health; whereas at my begetting he tossed the severed genitals of Uranus like garbage into the foam.” Turning her head, she gave the negligent rope of her hair another twist. Sudden wrung water slipped along her collarbone. Her throat showed crystalline in silhouette against a red wet cloud; her near hair held the motion of running horses. With downcast eyes she displayed her profile. The pose overwhelmed Chiron; his guts became a harp. Her profession of sorrow at her barbarous birth, though its insincerity was patent, sent his tongue stammering in search of consolation.

“But my mother was herself a daughter of Oceanus,” he said, and instantly knew that, in giving her light self-abuse an answer even so delicately serious, he had presumed.

Her brown eyes blazed with a force that struck from him all consciousness of her body; that shining form became the mere mounting of her angered divinity. “Yes,” she said, “and Philyra so loathed the monster she bore that rather than suckle you she prayed to be metamorphosed into a linden tree.”

He stiffened; with her narrow woman’s mind she had cut through to the truth that would give most hurt. But in recalling to him the unforgivable woman, Venus fortified him against herself. In contemplating the legend wherein on an island so tiny it seemed glimpsed through many refracting layers of water there lay neglected a half-furred and half-membranous squid of fear that was his infant self, in contemplating this story, one among many stories save that an unrecognized image in it bore his name, Chiron had arrived as an adult at a compassionate view, framed in his experience of creatures and his knowledge of history, of Philyra as a daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, more beautiful than bright, set upon by savage Kronos who, surprised by watchful Rhea, transformed himself into a stallion and galloped free to leave his interrupted seed work its garbled growth in the belly of the innocent daughter of the sea. Poor Philyra! His mother. Wise Chiron could almost reconstruct her face as, huge in tears, it begged a heaven whose very patterns had passed away to release her from the decree, antedating even the Hundred-handed and stretching backward to a time when consciousness was mere pollen drifting in darkness, that appointed the female copulation’s field of harvest, begged this cruel heaven to forgive her the ugly fruit of an assault but dimly comprehended and shamefully de sired: it was here, on the very lip of her metamorphosis, that Chiron most clearly envisioned his mother; and when as a youth in many moods of sadness and wonder he had gone to examine linden trees, a lusty scholar newly maned, glossily fleshed yet already slightly stiffened by the prudent dignity that he had willed to protect his wound and by the pious resolve that was to make him the guardian of so many motherless, Chiron standing embraced by the tree’s wide soft shade had believed himself to discover in the tentative attitudes of the low branches and in the quiver of the heart-shaped leaves some protest, some hope of return to human form, even some delight at finding her son fully grown, which, together with his eager and exact researches into the chemistry of the lime-flower’s quiet honey, enabled him to augment his vision with the taste, odors, and touch of a pathetic, too-docile personality betrayed by a few hysterical moments into the arboreal benevolence that, had she remained human, would have been his mother’s and would have branched into words of nonsense, calm attentions, and gestures of love. Then touching his face to the bark he had spoken her name. Yet, for all his painstaking work of reconciliation, often when he contemplated the fable of his birth an infantile resentment welled up bitterly within his mature reconstruction; the undeserved thirst of his first days poisoned his mouth; and the tiny island, not a hundred yards long, on which he, the first of a race by nature reared in caverns, had lain exposed seemed the image of all womankind: shallow, narrow, and selfish. Selfish. Too easily seduced, too easily repulsed, their wills wept self-indulgently in the web of their nerves and they left their dropped fruit to rot on the shore because of a few horsehairs. So, seen through one side of the prism he had made of the tale, the taunting small-faced goddess before him was to be pitied; and through the other, to be detested. In either case Venus was reduced. In a voice grave with composure he told her, “The linden has many healing properties”: a deferential rebuke if she chose to accept it; otherwise a harmless medical truth. His long survival had not been attained without a courtier’s tact.

She studied him as she passed the towel across her body; her. skin was transparently beaded everywhere. Her shoulders were lightly freckled. “You don’t like women,” she said. It seemed to be a discovery that did not excite her.

He made no answer.

She laughed; the brilliance of her eyes, through which a lavish Otherworld had poured, turned to an opaque animal lambency and, jauntily holding the towel about her with an arm crooked at her back, she stepped forward out of the pool and touched his chest with one finger of her free hand. Behind her, the water of the pool retreated in wide rings from her disturbing motion. It lapped low banks lined with reeds and narcissus and phallic, unflowered iris; the earth beneath her narrow, veined feet was a tapestry of moss and fine grass interwoven with violets and pale wood anemones sprung from the blood of Adonis. “Now had it been I,” she said, in a voice that curled around the whorls of his mind even as her carefully revolving fingertips intertwined with the bronze fleece of his chest, “I would have been pleased to play nurse to a creature combining the refinement and consideration of a man with”-her lids lowered; her amber lashes flared on her cheeks; the plane of her face demurely shifted, and he felt her gaze include his hindquarters-”the massive potency of a stallion.” His nether half, an imperfect servant of his will, preened of itself; his hind hooves cut two fresh crescents into the spongy pondside turf.

“A combination, my lady, often cancels the best of its elements.”

For the space of her smirk she seemed a rather common young flirt. “That would be true, brother, if your head and shoulders were those of a horse, and the rest human.”

Chiron, one of the few centaurs who habitually conversed with cultivated persons, had heard this jest often before; but her powerful nearness had so expanded him that its humor pierced him afresh. His laugh emerged a shrill whinny, in degrading contrast to the controlled timbre he had assumed with the girl, as her senior, and kin. “The gods would forbid such a freak,” he stated.

The goddess became pensive. “Your trust in us is touching. What have we done to deserve our worshippers?”

“It is not what the gods do that makes us adore them,” he recited. “It is that they are.” And to his own surprise he discreetly expanded his chest, so that her hand rested more firmly on his skin. In abrupt vexation she pinched him.

“Oh, Chiron,” she said, “If only you knew them as I do. Tell me about the gods. I keep forgetting. Name them to me. Their names are so grand in your mouth.”

Obedient to her beauty, enslaved to the hope that she would drop the towel, he intoned, “Zeus, Lord of the Sky; cloud-gathering king of the weather.”

“A lecherous muddler.”

“His bride Hera, patron of holy marriage.”

“The last time I saw her she was beating her servants because Zeus had not spent a night in her bed for a year. You know how Zeus first made love to her? As a cuckoo.”

“A hoopoe,” Chiron corrected.

“It was a silly cuckoo like in a clock. Tell me some more gods. I think they’re so funny.”

“Poseidon, master of the many-maned sea.”

“A senile old deckhand. His beard stinks of dead fish. He dyes his hair dark blue. He has a chest full of African pornography. His mother was a negress; you can tell by the whites of his eyes. Next.”

Chiron knew he should stop; but he secretly relished scandal, and at heart was half a clown. “Bright Apollo,” he announced, “who guides the sun and sees all, whose Delphinian prophecies regulate our political life and through whose overarching spirit we attain to art and law.”

“That prig. That unctuous prig always talking about himself, his conceit turns my stomach. He’s illiterate.”

“Come now; this you do exaggerate.”

“He is. He looks at a scroll but his eyes never move.”

“And what of his twin Artemis, the fair huntress beloved by the very prey she dispatches?”

“Ha! She never hits them, that’s why. Tittering around the woods with a pack of Vassar freshmen whose so-called virginity not a doctor in Arcadia-”

“Hush, child!” The centaur brought his hand toward her lips and in his extremity of alarm almost did touch them. He had heard faint thunder behind him.

She backed off, startled at his presumption. Then she looked skywards over his shoulder and laughed in recognition; it was a mirthless laugh, a high heated syllable defiantly prolonged; it tightened her face across her skull and sharpened her perfect features cruelly, out of all femininity. Cheeks, brow, and throat flushed, she shouted toward Heaven. “Yes, Brother: blasphemy! Your gods, listen to them-a prating bluestocking, a filthy crone smelling of corn, a thieving tramp, a drunken queer, a despicable, sad, grimy, grizzled, crippled, cuckolded tinker-”

“Your husband!” Chiron protested, striving to keep himself in the graces of the firmament above him. His position was difficult; he knew that the indulgent Zeus would never harm his young aunt. But he might in annoyance toss his bolt at her innocent auditor, whose Olympian position was precarious and ambiguous. Chiron knew that his own intimacy with men was envied by the god, who never visited the created race except, in feathers and fur, to accomplish a rape. Indeed it was rumored that Zeus thought centaurs a dangerous middle-ground through which the gods might be transmuted into pure irrelevance. But the sky, though it had darkened, remained silent. Gratefully Chiron pursued his tactic, telling Venus, “You fail to appreciate your husband. Hephaestus is dexterous and kind. Though every anvil and potter’s wheel serves as an altar to him, he remains humble. The calamity of his fall upon Lemnos purged all dross of arrogance from his heart; though his body is bent, there is not a mean bone in it.”

She sighed. “I know. How can I love such a ditherer? Give me that mean bone. Do you think,” she asked, with the expectant and subtly condescending face of a not usually curious student, “I’m drawn to cruel men because I have a guilt complex about my father’s mutilation? I mean, I blame myself and want to be punished?”

Chiron smiled; he was not of the new school. The sky above had paled. Feeling safe, he dared a touch of impudence. He pointed out, “There is one deity you have ex empted from your catalogue.” He meant Ares, the most vicious of all.

The girl tossed her head; her orange hair flared into a momentary mane. “I know what you’re thinking. That I’m no better than the rest. How would you list me, noble Chiron? ‘A compulsive nymphomaniac’? Or, less circumspectly, ‘A born whore’?”

“No, no, you misunderstand me. I did not mean yourself.”

She paid him no heed, crying, “But it’s unfair!” She clutched the towel about her emphatically. “Why should we deny ourselves the one pleasure the Fates forgot to take from us? The mortals have the joy of struggle, the satisfaction of compassion, the triumph of courage; but the gods are perfect.”

Chiron nodded; the old courtier was familiar with the way these aristocrats blithely extolled the class that in the previous breath they had calumniated. Did the girl imagine that her petty set of jibes went near to the heart of the real case against the gods? He felt a weight of weariness; he would always be less than they.

She corrected herself. “Perfect only in our permanence. I was cruelly robbed of a father. Zeus treats me like a pet cat. His blood love is reserved for Artemis and Athene, his daughters. They have his blessing; they are not driven again and again to clasp into their loins that giant leap that for a moment counterfeits it. What is Priapus but His strength without a father’s love? Priapus-my ugliest child; worthy of his conceiving. Dionysos made me perform as if I were another boy.” She touched the centaur’s chest again, as if to reassure herself that he had not turned to stone. “You knew your father. I envy you. Had I seen Uranus’ face, heard his voice-were I not the afterthought of his desecrated corpse-I would be as chaste as Hestia, my aunt, the one god who truly loves me. And now she is demoted from Olympus, reduced to a household trinket.” The girl’s darting thought took another turn. She said to Chiron, “You know men. Why do they revile me? Why is my name a matter of jokes, why is my caricature gouged into lavatory walls? Who else serves them so well? What other god gives them with the same hand such power and such peace? Why am I blamed?”

“Your accusations, my lady, are all from yourself.”

Her flood of confession drained, she dryly mocked him, “So prudent. So wise. Good Chiron. Our scholar, our propagandist. So docile. Have you ever wondered, nephew, if your heart belongs to the man or the horse?”

He stiffened and said, “From the waist up, I am told I am fully human.”

“Forgive me. You are kind, and I repay you in divine coin.” She stooped and plucked an anemone. “Poor Adonis,” she said, idly fingering the starlike sepals. “His blood was so pale. Like our ichor.”

A gust of remembrance ruffled her hair, in whose feathery crown the moisture had evaporated. She turned her back and in half-secrecy brought the flower to her lips, and her still-damp mane dripped in sympathetic curves down flesh as white and smoothly molded as that fabled powder, the earth of Olympus, snow. Her buttocks were pink and faintly roughened; there was a golden tinge of pollen on the backs of her thighs. She kissed the flower, dropped it, and turned with a new expression-tremulous, flushed, diffuse, shy. “Chiron,” she commanded. “Make love to me.”

His great heart jarred against his ribs; he waved her back with a trembling hand. “But my lady: below the waist, I am fully animal.”

Gay, she stepped forward on violets. The towel fell. Her breasts were already tipped with desire. “Do you think you will rupture me? Do you think us women so negligible? We are weak in the arms; but strong in the thighs. Our thighs must be strong; the world is rooted between them.”

“But a goddess, and a centaur-”

“Men are reeds; they no longer fill me. Come, Chiron, don’t insult your lady. Disrobe of wisdom; you will be wiser when we rise.” She cupped her palms below her breasts and stood on tiptoe against him, so that her nipples thrust against his own, the male’s vestigial ornaments. But their chests were of unequal spans; she giggled with the game of making the double opposition, and Chiron even in his distraction saw that the problem might be expressed geometrically.

“Are you afraid?” she whispered. “How do you do it with Chariclo? Do you mount her?” His voice rose small and parched in his constricted throat. “It would be incest.”

“It always is; we all flow from Chaos.”

“It is day.”

“Good; then the gods are asleep. Is love so hideous it must hide in the dark? Do you disdain me because I’m a trollop? But as a scholar you know how after every bath I am restored to virginity. Come, Chiron, crack my maidenhead; it hampers my walking.”

More in weakness than in strength, as one would embrace in despair a fevered child, he put his arms around the wiggling girl; her body was slippery and limp with complaisant dissolution. The hollow of her back felt downy. The crest of an erection grazed his belly; a neigh seethed through his nostrils. Her arms were clenched around his withers, and her thighs, lifting weightlessly, murmured among his fore legs. “Horse,” she breathed, “ride me. I’m a mare. Plough me.” From her body issued a swift harsh scent of flowers, flowers of all colors crushed and tumbled in the earth of his own equine odor. He closed his eyes and was swimming through a shapeless warm landscape studded with red trees.

But his joints held rigid. He remembered the thunder. Zimmerman might still be in the building; he never went home. The centaur listened for a rumble upstairs, and in that moment of listening everything altered. The girl dropped from around his neck. Without a backwards look, Venus vanished into the underwood. A thousand green petals closed upon her passage. Love has its own ethics, which the deliberating will irrevocably offends. Then as now, Caldwell stood on that spot of cement alone and puzzled, and now, as then, climbed the stairs with a painful, confused sense of having displeased, through ways he could not follow, the God who never rested from watching him.

He climbed the flights of stairs to his room on the second floor. The steps seemed built for the legs of a more supple species; his clumsiness was agonizing. Each wave of pain forced his gaze tight against a section of wall where a ball point pen had looped, a varnished newel post whose bevelled cap had been torn from the glue-glazed dowel stump, a corner of the stairs in which a little black drift of dust and grit had hardened, a windowpane filmed in grease and framed in rusty mullions, a dead stretch of yellow wall. The door to his room was shut. He expected to hear turbulence through it; but there was instead an ominous quiet. His skin twitched. Had Zimmerman, detecting noise, come and taken over the class?

This fear proved justified. He pushed open.the door, and there, not two yards away, Zimmerman’s lopsided face hung like a gigantic emblem of authority, stretching from rim to rim of Caldwell’s appalled vision. With a malevolent pulse, it seemed to widen still further. An implacable bolt, springing from the center of the forehead above the two disparately magnifying lenses of the principal’s spectacles, leaped space and transfixed the paralyzed victim. The silence as the two men stared at one another was louder than thunder.

Zimmerman turned to the class; it had been tamed into alphabetical rows of combed, frightened children. “Mr. Caldwell has graciously returned to us.”

The class obediently snickered. “I think such devotion to duty should be rewarded with a mild round of applause.” He led the clapping; his cupped palms patted each other daintily. Zimmerman’s extremities were queerly small for such a massive head and torso. He wore a sports coat whose padded shoulders and broad checkered pattern emphasized the disproportion. Above the ironical applause a few boys’ smirks glinted toward Caldwell. The humiliated teacher licked his lips. They tasted charred.

“Thank you, boys and girls,” Zimmerman said. “That is quite enough.” The gentle applause abruptly stopped. The principal turned to Caldwell again; the unbalance of his face seemed that of a proud pregnant cloud tugged by a wind high in heaven. Caldwell uttered a nonsensical-syllable that was meant to be a shout of praise and adoration.

“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 Zimmer man 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 arrowshaft, 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, mil lion, billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion. Six sextillion. What does it represent?” Mute faces marveled 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, everyone 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 billion 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 billion 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 Mon day 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 Becky Davis’s shoulders were hunching, Deifendorf behind her was tickling her neck with the eraser of his pencil. Becky 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 protogalaxies, and within these, gravitational attraction condensed balls of gas that under the pressure of their own accumulating mass began to burn. So, sometime before Tues day’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,

Corycium enigmaticum

Leptothrix

Volvox.

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.”

A paper airplane shot into the air, wobbled, and sharply fell; it struck the floor of the middle aisle and became an

open-faced white flower whose baby-like yowling continued throughout the remainder of the class. Pale fluid dropped from its injured leaf and Caldwell mentally apologized to the janitors.

“Leptothrix,” he said, “is a microscopic fleck of life, whose name in Greek means ‘small hair.’ This bacteria could extract from ferric salt a granule of pure iron and, fantastic as it seems, existed in such numbers that it laid down all the deposits of iron ore which man presently mines. The Mesabi Range in Minnesota was originally put there by American citizens of which thousands would fit on a pinhead. Then, to win World War Two, we gouged, all those battleships and tanks and Jeeps and Coke machines out of it and left the poor old Mesabi Range like an old carcass the jackals had chewed. I feel awful about it. When I was a kid in Passaic they used to talk about the Mesabi Range as if she were a beautiful orange-haired lady lying up there by the Lakes.”

Not content with pencil-tickling, Deifendorf had put his hands around the Davis girl’s throat and with his thumbs was caressing the underside of her chin. Her face was growing smaller and smaller in sensual ecstasy. “Third,” Caldwell called-the undercurrent of noise in the class was rising to his lips-”the volvox, of these early citizens in the kingdom of life, interests us because he invented death. There is no reason intrinsic in the plasmic substance why life should ever end. Amoebas never die; and those male sperm cells which enjoy success become the cornerstone of new life that continues beyond the father. But the volvox, a rolling sphere of flagellating algae organized into somatic and reproductive cells, neither plant nor animal-under a microscope it looks just like a Christmas ball-by pioneering this new idea of cooperation, rolled life into the kingdom of certain-as opposed to accidental-death. For-hold tight kids, just seven more minutes of torture-while each cell is potentially immortal, by volunteering for a specialized function within an organized society of cells, it enters a com promised environment. The strain eventually wears it out and kills it. It dies sacrificially, for the good of the whole. These first cells who got tired of sitting around forever in a blue-green scum and said, ‘Let’s get together and make a volvox,’ were the first altruists. The first do-gooders. If I had a hat on, I’d take it off to ‘em.”

He pantomimed doffing his cap and the class screamed. Mark Youngerman jumped up and his acne leaped to the wall; the paint began to burn, blistering in slowly spreading blotches above the side blackboard. Fists, claws, cocked el bows blurred in patch-colored panic above the scarred and varnished desk tops; in the whole mad mass the only still bodies were those of Zimmerman and Iris Osgood. At some point, Zimmerman had slipped across the aisle and sat on the same seat with the girl. He had his arm around her shoulders and beamed forward proudly. Iris in his hug was tranquil and inert, her eyes downcast and her dull cheeks lightly flushed.

Caldwell looked at the clock. Five minutes left, and the main part of the story all before him. “Around three-thirty this morning,” he said, “while you were still asleep in your trundle-beds, all the large phyla except the Chordata appear in advanced form. As far as the fossils tell, it happened like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Up until dawn, the most important animal in the world, spreading on the ocean floor everywhere, was an ugly thing called the trilobite.”

A boy over by the windows had sneaked a paper grocery bag into class and now, nudged by another boy, he tumbled its contents, a clot of living trilobites, onto the floor. Most were just an inch or two long; a few were over a foot in length. They looked like magnified wood lice, only they were reddish. The bigger ones wore on their ruddy cephalic shields partially unrolled condoms, like rubber party hats. As they scuttered among the scrolling iron desk-legs, their brainless heads and swishing glabellae brushed the ankles of girls who squealed and kicked up their feet so high that white thighs and gray underpants flashed. In terror some of the trilobites curled into segmented balls. As a sport the boys began to drop their heavy textbooks on these primitive arthropods; one of the girls, a huge purple parrot feathered with mud, swiftly ducked her head and plucked a small one up. Its little biramous legs fluttered in upside-down protest. She crunched it in her painted beak and methodically chewed.

Caldwell calculated that this late in the game there was nothing to do but ride the rumpus out to the bell. “By seven o’clock this morning,” he explained, and a very few smeared faces seemed to be listening, “the first vertebrate fishes appeared. The Earth’s crust buckled. The oceans of the Ordovician Age dwindled.” Fats Frymoyer leaned over and shoved little Bill Schupp off his seat; the boy, a frail diabetic, fell to the floor with a bump. When he tried to rise, an anonymous hand appeared on his head and pushed him down again. “At seven-thirty, the first plants began to grow on land. In swampy pools, lungfish learned to breathe and drag themselves across the mud. By eight o’clock, the amphibians were here. The earth was warm. There were marshlands in Antarctica. Lush forests of giant ferns rose and fell and laid down the coal deposits of our own state, for which this age is named. So when you say ‘Pennsylvanian,” you can mean either a dumb Dutchman or a stretch of Paleozoic time.”

Betty Jean Schilling had been chewing bubble-gum; now a ping-pong-ball-sized bubble, a triumph, a prodigy, issued from her tongue and lips. Her eyes crossed strenuously and nearly popped themselves in effortful concentration. But the marvelous bubble collapsed, coating her chin with a strip of pink scum.

“Insects appeared and diversified; some dragonflies had thirty-inch wings. The world grew cold again. Some amphibians went back to the sea; others began to lay their eggs on land. These were reptiles, and for two hours, from nine o’clock to eleven o’clock, as the earth grew warm again, they dominated life. Fifty-foot plesiosaurs roamed the sea, pterosaurs flapped through the air like broken umbrellas. On land, gigantic morons made the earth shake.” By prearranged signal all of the boys in the room began to hum. No one’s mouth moved; their eyes shifted here and there innocently; but the air was filled with a hovering honey of insolence. Caldwell could only swim on. “The brontosaurus had a thirty-ton body and a two-ounce brain. The anatosaurus had two thousand teeth. Triceratops had a helmet of frilled bone seven feet long. Tyrannosaurus rex had tiny arms and teeth like six-inch razors and it was elected President. It ate everything-dead meat, living meat, old bones-”

The first bell rang. The monitors stampeded out of the class; one of them stepped on the anemone in the aisle and the flower shrilly whimpered. Two boys bumped in the door way and, thrashing, stabbed each other with pencils. Their teeth gnashed; phlegm poured through their nostrils. Somehow Zimmerman had slipped Iris Osgood’s blouse and bra off and her breasts showed above her desk like two calm edible moons rising side by side.

“Two minutes left,” Caldwell shouted. His voice had grown higher in pitch, as if a peg in his head were being turned. “Keep your seats. We’ll have to take up the extinct mammals and the ice ages next period. To make a long story short, one hour ago, spreading in the wake of the flowering plants and grasses, our faithful friends the mammals took over the Earth, and one minute ago, one minute ago-”

Deifendorf had pulled the Davis girl out into the aisle and she was giggling and struggling in his long hair-speckled arms.

“-one minute ago,” Caldwell called the third time, and a handful of BBs was flung into his face. He winced and put up his right hand as a shield and thanked God his eyes hadn’t been hit. You won’t be given another pair. N N His stomach griped sympathetically with his leg. “-evolved from a tiny tree shrew, his depth-perceptive binocular vision, thumb-opposed grasping hands, and highly elaborated cerebral cortex developed in response to the special conditions of arboreal existence, evolved from a tiny tree shrew such as are presently found in Java-”

The girl’s mussed skirt was up around her waist. She was bent face down over the desk and Deifendorf’s hooves shuffled in agitation in the narrow aisle. From his sleepy careful grin he was covering her; the whole room smelled like a stable: Caldwell saw red. He picked the shining arrow-shaft from the top of his desk, strode forward through the sickening confusion of books being slammed shut, and once, twice, whipped, whipped the bastard beast’s bare back. You broke my grille. Two white stripes glowed across the meat of Deifendorfs shoulders. As Caldwell in horror watched, these stripes slowly blushed. There would be welts. The couple fell apart like a broken blossom. Deifendorf looked up with small brown eyes shelled in tears; the girl with pointed composure refluffed her hair. Zimmerman’s hand scribbled furiously in the corner of Caldwell’s eye. The teacher, stunned, returned to the front of the class. Jesus, he hadn’t meant to hit the kid so hard. He placed the steel shaft in the chalk trough. He turned, and closed his eyes, and the pain unfolded its wet wings in the red darkness. He opened his mouth; his very blood loathed the story he had told. “One minute ago, flint-chipping, fire-kindling, death-foreseeing, a tragic animal appeared-” The buzzer rasped; halls rumbled throughout the vast building; faintness swooped at Caldwell but he held himself upright, having vowed to finish.”-called Man.”