Dear TIME-Reader:

PRESIDENT LEE DuBRIDGE of the California Institute of Technology once wanted to be a newsman ("But I was too scared to go up and ask the right people the right questions"), Education Editor Bruce Barton Jr. notes in this week's cover story on Caltech and its president. For several weeks, TIME newsmen on the West Coast, some of whom still have painful memories of long division, knew just how DuBridge felt. With only the hastiest preliminary cramming, they had to EDITOR BARTON ask Caltech's men of pure science the right questions.

"The nonscientific visitor," said the Los Angeles Bureau's John Koffend, "is bound to get lost, even with a guide, in an atmosphere charged with pi-mesons, v-particles, tyrosinase and halogenated cyclobutane carboxylic acid. His interpreters, the scientists themselves, are willing, but communications are difficult."

Editor Barton's task was to reduce the scientists' mysterious, often mystical communications to human equations. Fortunately, Caltech is no mere high-I.Q. trade school. It has a student body capable of perpetrating the most ingenious and energetic pranks since Frank Merriwell pitched his upshoot for Yale. And its facultymen, including Nobel laureates, cut capers and figure eights at the Pasadena ice-skating rink, whiz about the campus in sports cars at velocities somewhat under the speed of sound, raise goldfish, beat out lowdown boogie on a piano or saw a 'cello in a community string quartet. One eminent theoretical physicist turned up, ragged and happy as a native, whacking a percussion instrument in a Rio street band.

OVER in Nevada, TIME'S science expert, Associate Editor Jonathan Norton Leonard, waited for the A-bomb to go off. More than one dawn he stood on Yucca Flat in a milling mass of scientists, newsmen, civil-defense workers, military observers and state governors, just waiting. To the north, the Joshua trees stood like shaggy ghosts, and behind them lights marked the 500-ft. tower that held the bomb. Near by, TV crewmen turned their great searchlights toward the ground to warm themselves in their artificial sunlight. The desert was bitter cold, and no one seemed to have enough clothing, except, perhaps, veteran Atom-Bomb Watcher Leonard. He was encased in layers of woolens. wearing a cowboy hat with a brim curled like a potato chip.

For two weeks he commuted between the Flat and Las Vegas' luxurious Sands Hotel, while the weather changed often but never pleased the Atomic Energy Commission enough to explode the bomb. When it finally changed for the better last week, Leonard followed the AEC and civil-defense experts into the mock village to report the NATIONAL AFFAIRS story, Rehearsal for Disaster.

On the way out of gambling Las Vegas, he played one nickel in one slot machine. It was, he said, a ritual that he performs each time he goes to Nevada to watch A-bombs -- "dipping my toe in the water at a famous bath."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.