The Centaurus

“A thousand thousand thousand” Caldwell a

“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 spi

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 a