"I'm so glad you're here, Max," he said. "It is right that you share in this triumph." I could feel the tension behind his words. It was the climax of his life. He would either vindicate himself or go, disgraced, into oblivion.
He didn't have to explain any of this to me. I guess I was closer to Dr. Marsten than anyone had ever been, except his wife, of course. She had died ten years before. From that time on he lived for his work in experimental psychology. Until finally, much to everyone's shock and disbelief, he turned to parapsychology. And I worked with him against the heartbreakingly rigid demands of the scientific method.
I was only a graduate student working for my Doctor's degree at the time. A term paper I'd done had impressed Marsten and he had gotten me a scholarship. During the four years after that I was his assistant and confidant.
That is, I was until he got completely wrapped up in parapsychology, Extra Sensory Perception. At that point he abruptly dismissed me.
I knew why. I argued about it but he was adamant. He knew what experiments in a field tinged with mysticism and the supernatural might do to my scientific professional career. As it finally did to his. He didn't want to involve me.
He was ostracized, dismissed from the University as a faculty member. The scientific world depends on its open mind, within the bounds of its own techniques. But the unknown worlds of the human mind are sometimes very hard to fit into the rigid scientific disciplines and methodologies.
Rhine's experiments satisfy those who want desperately, many of them for highly personal reasons and needs, to believe in Extra Sensory Perception. It doesn't satisfy the scientific mind. Its "scientific validity," based on averages greater than those of "chance," are not adequate for the scientific method. Too many variables. But Marsten had told me he had gone much further than Rhine or his disciples. And now he'd ask me to be here for the culmination of his ten years of work.
"My theories will now be proven," he'd written me. "I want you to see the proof I shall offer on the opening of new worlds of the human mind...."
He'd published books on the subject but the world of science labeled them pseudo-science, stuff for the psychic research societies and those who take photographs of ectoplasm.
I believed in Marsten to an extent. But at the same time I doubted that he could prove his contentions. I knew he was staking everything on his faith in himself tonight. The biggest men in science—men who had respected Marsten as a scientific mind until he went off the deep end, they thought—were going to appear, allow him to use them in his experiment to prove his theories.