“But your psychics,” Haggard objected, knowing that argument with Wolff was distinctly not recommended, but unable to resist, “they all turn out to be frauds eventually, quacks of the worst sort who want money or notoriety or both.”
Francis Galt wasn’t going to let that one pass. His eyes flashed dangerously behind his thick spectacles. “That’s not true! There are and have been many mediums who didn’t need money, who didn’t want, even avoided publicity, who—”
“I’ll bet they got it though,” Haggard insisted. “And suppose that there is an honest, sincere medium now and then. I can explain that. They’re psychopathic cases, victims of hallucination who deceive themselves as well as the investigators. A little thoroughgoing medical or psychiatric treatment in the right places would lay a lot of ghosts.”
“What about Lodge, Flammarion, Professor Zöllner?” Galt asked hotly. “Are you saying that investigators of that caliber were hoodwinked by mental cases?”
Haggard, noting Wolff’s stormy expression, wished that he hadn’t started this. But he stuck to his guns. “I’m afraid so,” he insisted. “They were bamboozled. Conan Doyle too. Lodge was emotionally upset by the death of his son, and they were all operating under the handicap of age, their powers of accurate observation, their logical faculties impaired. The structural degeneration of nervous cells due to senescence is—”
Galt, in his late fifties and a good score of years older than Haggard, took this as a personal thrust. “And you,” he said acidly, “couldn’t be fooled, I suppose?”
Haggard shook his head. “I won’t say that. Thurston used to mystify me when he apparently sawed a lady in two. But I never tried very seriously to dope it out. It was entertainment. Knowing how would spoil it. Besides, since it was admitted trickery, puzzling it out is not worth the effort.”
“You’re confident that you could figure out something like that though?”
Haggard smiled. “Well, it shouldn’t be nearly as difficult as trying to chart the growth processes of somatic cells in culture or tracking an enzyme to its lair.”
Galt smiled too. “You’re in for an unpleasant surprise one of these days,” he predicted. “Nature’s only mystery is her complexity. She isn’t trying to deceive you consciously as magicians or as some mediums do. It’s a big difference. A trick fools you because it utilizes some very simple laws of deception — operating principles that treacherously double-cross your logic. The more experienced a logician you are, the more formal are your thought patterns, the easier they are to short-circuit, and the harder you fall. Children, unused to formal logic, not scientists, are the magician’s most difficult audiences. You’re skeptical. Then listen!”
Galt leaned forward in his chair and placed his finger tips lightly on the table. The doctor and Wolff both heard the sound almost at once, a low rapping noise as of ghostly knuckles against wood. It had no visible source. Low at first, it came repeatedly, steady and louder.
“You’re so damned logical,” Galt challenged. “Explain that. It’s trickery.”
Haggard obviously was puzzled, but he didn’t let it disturb him greatly. “I’ll take your word for it, Galt. But, if I had you in my laboratory and if you repeated that to order under strict test conditions, I’d soon know the answer. However, I have more important things to do than—”
“Yes,” Dudley Wolff broke in heavily. “You do. Stop arguing with him, Galt. You’re right. He’d get himself a lovely headache trying to solve that one with his test tubes and galvanometers. It took us six months to find out how Kramer did it.”
Wolff turned to the doctor. “You mentioned old age a moment ago. You’ve been promising you’d do something about that. Theoretically there’s no reason a man cannot extend his life span far beyond its present limits. Parrots, some of them, reach ages of a hundred years and more; reptiles like the tortoise nearly two hundred; and some species of fishes outlive them by sixty to seventy years. Sequoia trees reach three thousand, and without showing any evidence of senile changes in tissue. Unicellular life, barring accident, is to all intents and purposes immortal. There is no convincing evidence that living tissue needs to die. But when are you going to stop working on rats, cats, and dogs and show me—”
“Tomorrow!” Doctor Haggard stood up and drew a spiral-edged notebook from his breast pocket. He dropped it on the table before Wolff. “I’m on the right track at last. I’m sure of it. The germ of the answer is there in those notes. I’ve got a serum now that—”
Wolff leafed quickly through the book scowling at the complex chemical formulas and the charts showing the comparative mortality curves of science’s old friend the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll listen to the lecture later. If it makes sense you can have what you need. Everything but time. I haven’t got much more of that to give. And just remember that from now on I’m not buying any more fine-spun theories no matter how ingenious. I can get those for nothing. I want results and I want them—”
Wolff stopped and turned toward the door. A slender, sallow-faced man had appeared there quietly. He stood just inside, a worried look on his face, his hands moving nervously. His voice was not too steady.
“Pardon me, Mr. Wolff. I must see you for a moment, privately.”
Wolff scowled. “Can’t it wait, Dunning?”
Dunning shook his head. “No, sir. It’s most urgent. It—”
Wolff stood up. He said, “Excuse me,” then crossed quickly toward the man at the door.
Albert Dunning was Wolff’s private secretary. His appearance was commonplace, so much so that he seemed to possess a curious protective coloration which enabled him to blend almost unnoticeably with the wallpaper. Few people ever looked at him twice. Those that did wondered how such a frail, anemic-looking person had ever lasted two years in the employment of a man like Wolff who used up and discarded secretaries nearly as fast as he did razor blades.
But Dunning had managed to last much longer than most. His sincere interest in and meticulous care for the firearm collection, rivaling Wolff’s own, was one reason. The others were a precise, robot efficiency and a ducklike ability to shed the Wolff insults and temper tantrums with what seemed to be the greatest of ease.
Dunning’s voice as he spoke to Wolff was low and rapid. Galt and Haggard couldn’t make out the words, but they saw the millionaire’s bushy eyebrows lift in surprise and then flatten ominously. Wolff looked around toward them.
“Back in a minute,” he said, then hurried out the door. The puffs of cigar smoke that floated in his wake were disturbed angry ones.
Dunning vanished after him as silently as one of Galt’s ghosts.
“You should investigate Dunning some time,” the doctor commented as he poured himself another drink. “I shouldn’t wonder if he’d turn out to be a zombie.”
Galt, though annoyed by what he had considered an unsportsmanlike attempt on Haggard’s part to undermine his position with Wolff, apparently had a sense of humor. He made no verbal answer, but the doctor heard the spirit knocks again, tapping softly and mockingly.
Dudley Wolff charged up the stairs toward his study. His none too steady blood pressure had been bubbling up near the danger point pretty constantly the last few days. Tonight’s events hadn’t helped the condition any. And now, a few moments after he burst in at the study door, something happened that made him boil over completely. He really exploded this time.
Chapter Three:
Bury Him Deep
Dunning’s report concerned a strange and, he thought, sinister individual who had mysteriously appeared in Wolff’s office-study on the second floor. The butler, whom Dunning had queried on his way down, denied ever admitting the man.