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been lost among Zimmerman’s elegant sarcastic turns.
    The principal made a fastidious indicative gesture. “Are you carrying a lightning rod? Remarkably prudent, on a cloudless winter day.”
    Caldwell groped and felt behind him the cold sleek arrow-shaft jutting from his pocket. He took it out and offered it to Zimmerman while he struggled to find the first words of his story, a story that, once known, would make Zimmerman embrace him for his heroic suffering; tears of compassion would fall from that imperious distended face. “This is it,” Caldwell said. “I don’t know which kid did it—”
    Zimmerman disdained touching the shaft; palms lifted in protest, as if the bright stick were charged with danger, he took a few quick backward steps, his small feet twinkling with the athletic prowess that still lingered in them. Zimmerman’s first fame had been as a schoolboy track star. Strong-shouldered, lithe-limbed, he had excelled in all tests of speed and strength—the discus, dashes, endurance runs. “George, Isaid
later
,” he said. “Please teach your class. Since the program of my morning has already been interrupted, I’ll sit in the rear of the class and make this my month’s visit. Please behave, boys and girls, as if I were not present.”
    Caldwell lived in dread of the supervising principal’s monthly classroom visitations. The brief little typewritten reports that followed them, containing a blurred blend of acid detail and educational jargon, had the effect, if they were good, of exalting Caldwell for days and, if they were bad (as they nearly always seemed to be; even an ambiguous adjective poisoned the cup), of depressing him for weeks. Now a visit had come, when he was addled, in the wrong, in pain, and unprepared.
    Slyly pussyfooting, Zimmerman sidled down along the blackboard. His broad checkered back was hunched in a droll pretense of being inconspicuous. He took a seat in the last row, behind the cup ears and blazing acne of Mark Youngerman. No sooner was Zimmerman settled at the end desk than he noticed that level with him, two rows away, in the last seat of the third row, Iris Osgood sat immersed in dull bovine beauty. Zimmerman slid out of his seat into the one next to her and in a little pantomime of whispers asked her for a sheet of tablet paper. The plump girl, fussed, tore off a sheet, and as he leaned over to take it the principal with a bold slide of his eyes looked down the top of her loose silk blouse.
    Caldwell watched this in an awed daze. He felt the colors of the class stir under him; Zimmerman’s presence made them electric. Begin. He forgot who he was, what he taught, why he was here. He went over to his desk, put down the arrow-shaft, and picked up a magazine clipping that reminded him. CLEVELAND SCIENTIST CHARTS CREATION-CLOCK . Zimmerman’s face seemed huge at the rear of the room. “Behind me on theblackboard,” Caldwell began, “is the figure five followed by nine zeros. This is five—what?”
    A timid girl’s voice broke from the silence, saying, “Trillion.” Judith Lengel, that would be. She tried, but didn’t have it. Her father was one of those biff-bang real estate salesmen who expected their kids to be May Queen, valedictorian, and Most Popular just because he, old Five Percent Lengel, had made a mint. Poor Judy, the kid just didn’t have it upstairs.
    “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