"I really don't want another drink—"
"Then bring her some ice cream."
"—but I'll have one more." Fred nodded and went. "How did you know all that?"
I told her.
"It's Pasadena," she said. She shivered a little.
So I talked. "Pasadena. How well I know it! 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 that 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—"