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
