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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 isthree 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 Monday 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 Gloria Davis’s shoulders were hunching, Deifendorf behind her was tickling her neck with the eraser of his pencil. Gloria 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 sothat 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 proto-galaxies, and within these, gravitational attraction condensed balls of gas that under the pressure of their own accumulating mass began to burn. So, sometime before Tuesday’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