OPUS 21 Read Online Free PDF

Caltech, where people think the troubles of the world began. The peeling eucalyptus trees and the long shadows on the long sidewalk. Way back in the dear, dead beryllium days--"

    "I haven't the faintest idea what you mean!"

    "Dr. Einstein," I said, "walking around under his hair. Thinking so hard he never noticed the earthquake. It was the spring of nineteen-thirty-three. Perhaps I should explain that, in those days, when they wanted to split an atom, they generally used beryllium. A common element--half as heavy as aluminum and twice as strong--but difficult to recover. Poor Dr. E! Like all the reasonable men, seemingly he cannot perceive that what he thinks of as irrational is the force I hat governs human destiny! He assumes it's just a matter of enlightening the politicians. The deification of reason--the worship of common logic--cuts off human personality from natural truth exactly as idolatry destroys the faculty of rational analysis. And for the same reason. The intellectual paragon is as blind as any pagan-in the opposite direction. But we were talking about Pasadena--"

    "Vaguely," she said.

    "I'll be more explicit, then. I was working for Paramount in that blessed era when nothing upset the world worse than a depression. A curable malady--that. Anyhow, I had a producer who lived in Pasadena. A big, reddish house on one of those irrigated buttocks that grow out of the lower mountains. Completely surrounded by thornbushes--except for the entrance gate. The first time I went there was Sunday--a nine A.M. conference--and my producer's butler served highballs right away to myself and the other writers. I shall never forget it--or ever recall a word that we said there that day. I was an animal-horror man, at the time--"

    "A what?"

    "Animal-horror man. That's what the studio boss called me. In fact, he said I was pretty young to be an animal-horror man, the first time we met."

    She drank some of her brandy and then did a disturbing thing.

    She took her pale, wavy hair in both hands and bent it back up over her head so that the curly ends fell everywhere around her face. When she did it, she looked at me in a certain way. We were both supposed to understand the gesture perfectly--and not to notice it at all. Wild horses weren't supposed to be able to drag out of us an admission of what it meant.

    "Those were not only the beryllium days, but the days of animal pictures and horror pictures. Frank Buck and Osa Johnson and Tarzan. Frankenstein. Paramount was trying to combine the grisliest features of all of them. They were making Wells's Island of Dr. Moreau --for instance. And I was doing some of the writing. Hence I was an animal-horror man--and young for it, too. Precociously animalistic and horrible.
    Remember? Cobras fought mongooses? Tigers fought pythons and other unnatural antagonists? Zebus fought gnus? My producer wanted to throw a half dozen lions into a school of big sharks--and get some red-hot close shots of the fights that would then ensue. That--I stopped. Even we ogres draw the line somewhere--and I know a good deal about sharks. The lions, if you once got the sharks hitting them, would not be fighting, as my producer imagined, but dying by mouthfuls."

    "How awful!"

    "Pasadena, it was," I reminded her. "Another conference at that big house amongst the thorns. I know the place like a book. I know the spirit of the place. You lived there?"

    She stared at the room, empty now of all but waiters and two or three pairs of murmuring people. Full, however, of Musak. Light operettas.

    "Somehow it's easier to talk to strangers," she said, "than to people you've known all your life."

    "Of course!" I replied in sober agreement--although I thought the idea was rubbish.

    "And besides," she went on, immediately contradicting herself, ''I've read your articles and books and I feel as if I knew you better than you knew yourself."

    Unlikely, I figured. But this was important to her, so I nodded. "Maybe you do--in