The Centaur by John Updike Read Free Book Online

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 anopen-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