Phillips allowed that he did.
“And bring me something to drink,” Wolff added. “I need it.”
Storm clouds and the rolling mutter of thunder were everywhere within the Wolff house that night. The tension that existed in the library between the two men who waited there had such a consistently high voltage that the Edison Company might have tapped it as a new source of electric power. Their views on certain fundamental subjects differed as black from white. Neither thought the other’s arguments worth a plugged nickel, and both were completely frank about saying so. A commission of international diplomatic experts would have reported the situation as hopeless.
The reason for their profound disagreement becomes obvious as soon as you know that Doctor Sydney Haggard was an experimental biologist and that Francis Galt was the director of the American Psychic Research Laboratories. Haggard, thirty-five, brisk, clinically efficient, good-looking, was a strict empiricist. He was a good example of the end result of thorough scientific training — the complete skeptic. If you made a simple conversational observation on the probable state of tomorrow’s weather, he was as likely as not to ask you to supply Weather Bureau findings reduced to mathematical formulas and plotted accurately on graph paper. He wouldn’t be convinced until you had.
Galt was an older man, lean, quick-moving, somewhat nervous. If, because some of his theories were unfamiliar, you suspected they were made of moonstuff, it was no reason to underestimate the alertness of the mind that lay behind his owlish round spectacles and sharp gray-green eyes.
He was an authority in his field too, a field that irked Doctor Haggard because it begins at the precise point where science leaves off. As Galt himself once put it, he rushes in where science fears to tread. He was a man in love with the mysterious and the unknown. Riddles and enigmas, any apparently occult phenomena, fascinated him as long as they remained unexplained. If some commonplace answer was forthcoming, he lost interest.
The warfare between these two was constant except in Wolff’s presence. They agreed then to a temporary armistice because the millionaire, though he usually loved a scrap, didn’t care for this one. They found it expedient to respect his wishes since they were both indebted to him for underwriting their researches. Patrons having Wolff’s temperament need gentle handling.
Hostilities ceased as soon as Wolff entered the library. Galt and Haggard both greeted him politely. But the doctor frowned. He noticed at once that Wolff was not exactly in a charitable mood. Angry annoyance, left over from the scene with Kathryn and myself, was still plainly evident in his voice.
He nodded brusquely at the doctor and said, “Galt is here for the week-end because he said that he had something important to report. As usual, I suspect that means more funds. You’ve evidently got something important to report too. What is it this time? Your need for a newer and bigger centrifuge or another mechanical heart?”
The startled look in the doctor’s eyes told Wolff that he had hit the mark squarely. He took a fat cigar from a box on the table and ripped off its cellophane wrapper.
Haggard, not too seriously, said, “Perhaps there is something in Galt’s telepathy after all. That’s just what I do need. Both of them. But I have progress to report also. And it is important.
Wolff was interested but not exactly enthusiastic. “I’ve heard you say that before. But you’ll have to show me. Sometimes the progress that you consider important—”
“I know, you want miracles. But a problem like this can’t be licked overnight, not with the apparatus and assistance I have now.”
Wolff’s scowl and the blue puffs of smoke that he exhaled gave him the appearance of an angry dragon. “The best biological lab in the country outside the Rockefeller Institute, and it’s not enough! All right, and this goes for you too, Galt. Suppose I do give you everything you want? I’m damned impatient. I can’t wait much longer. What guarantee can the two of you give me that you’ll get the results I want?”
Both men frowned uneasily. Wolff was being even more difficult tonight than usual. He knew as well as they did that no guarantees could be made at all. Haggard, until now, had been confident that he would get what he needed. Being a medical man, he knew why Wolff wanted those results. He had divined what few other people suspected, the fact that beneath his blustering, growling, hard-shelled exterior Dudley Wolff lived in mortal fear. His pyrotechnical outbursts of temper, his devil-take-the-hindmost business methods, even his business of munitions manufacture and his allied hobby of firearm collecting were all nothing more than a deceptive, carefully built-up defense mechanism. The sound-and-fury was a dense smoke screen that had concealed, ever since his first wife’s death at the time of Kay’s birth, a consuming inner fear. Dudley Wolff suffered acutely from an overwhelming inward terror of death.
This was the psychological mainspring that dictated most of his outward actions. It showed itself in perverse form in his manner, his work, and his hobby. It was also evident in more direct ways. Death, because he stood in frantic fear of it, fascinated him. He was filled with an abnormal curiosity to know what happened after death and tried to satisfy it by endowing the ghostly other-world researches of Francis Galt. He sought for ways and means of avoiding, or at least postponing, the inevitable by assisting the longevity experiments that were Doctor Haggard’s chief interest.
Wolff pointed his cigar at Galt’s lean, thick-spectacled face. “I gave you a psychic laboratory better equipped than Harry Price’s in London. You have all the gadgets and the best obtainable technical assistance. But what have you got to show for it? You’ve exposed several dozen fraudulent mediums, investigated a score of haunted houses, and secured some very interesting photographs of the human aura which have nothing to do with the case. You’ve found a handful of psychics whose phenomena you can’t explain — not coherently anyway. And you’ve amassed several filing cases of data on hyperesthesia, telekinesis, and the various forms of trance state. But it doesn’t add up. I still don’t know what happens when a person dies. Nearly all your evidence on that point is damned contradictory. I’m convinced that something happens. It has to. But I don’t know much more about it than Doctor Haggard here does.”
The doctor took one of the drinks which the butler offered. “I know nothing about it at all,” he said. “I strongly suspect there isn’t anything to know. You’re looking for evidence you can’t find because it isn’t there. Life is a physicochemical process and nothing more. When you throw in metaphysics, it’s pure wishful thinking.”
Galt growled irritably. “I have found evidence,” he contradicted. “Good evidence. But you won’t admit that—”
“What evidence?” Wolff cut in.
“The Zugun and the Garrett cases. They’re sound enough and they certainly appear to indicate—”
“Indicate!” Wolff snorted. “Indicate, yes. But that’s not enough!” He brought his fist down on the table. “I want proof!” He pointed his cigar at Haggard again, handling it as if it were a deadly and loaded weapon. “As for you, you’re like all the rest of the science boys. You’re an authority in your own specialized field. And the rest of the time you know just about enough to come in out of the rain. You dismiss the whole subject of psychic research as medieval nonsense without ever having bothered to take a quick look at it close up. The scientific attitude! If that’s a sample—”