The Centaur by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page A

of
coöperation
, rolled life into the kingdom of certain—as opposed toaccidental—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 compromised 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 elbows blurred in patch-colored panic above the scarred and varnished desktops; 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 larger 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 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 Billy 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 Shilling had been chewing bubble-gum; now a ping-pong-ball-sized bubble, a triumph, a prodigy, issuedfrom her tongue and lips. Her eyes crossed strenuously and nearly popped themselves in