by John Updike
“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 fr
om 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-”
