But the rest was drowned in the rising pandemonium coming from all sides. Keene had no answer to offer anyway. Anything he tried to say would have sounded lame. The Kronians, too, were sitting in silence, stunned. Keene was vaguely aware of figures coming forward into the space below, jabbering, shouting, and gesticulating. Somehow, Cavan’s face materialized out of it all. “It isn’t true, Leo,” Keene said, still feeling this had to be some kind of dream. “You know it didn’t happen that way. I can’t explain it. Where do we start with something like this?”
“I don’t know either,” Cavan told him. “But I think that for the time being you need to forget any more arguing with scientists. What you’re going to need is a firm of lawyers.”
21
Until Voler’s allegations were either proved or refuted there could be no continuance under the guise of a scientific debate, and the conference was suspended until further notice. Marvin Curtiss was as bewildered by it all as Keene. It was bad enough that public attention should be so completely diverted from the original issue at this crucial juncture; but even worse was Amspace’s being implicated, calling into question the credibility and integrity of all the interests that the company was associated with. “Everything’s turned into a political show trial,” he groaned over the phone when Keene was finally able to talk to him. “It will take twenty years for this to wear off.”
Carlton Murray, the head of Amspace’s legal department, left on an afternoon flight from Texas with two of the firm’s lawyers. They would meet with Keene that evening, and the following day make arrangements for representation by the company’s Washington law firm. An outraged Catherine Zetl issued a public denial and announced her intention to sue, which raised the possibility of acting jointly. After a brief conference in a private room at the AAAS building, Gallian, for once noncommittal and subdued, told Keene to let him know what the lawyers wanted the Kronians to do after Keene met with them that evening. Gallian and the rest of the Kronians then retired to the Engleton for the remainder of the day. Keene told Vicki to expect to be effectively in charge of Protonix for a while, and then stopped by Information and Office Services in D.C. to have Shirley take care of everything there. For the sake of privacy and sanity he changed his hotel to the one that the Amspace lawyers would be checking into and forbade Shirley from revealing to anyone where he had gone. Jerry Allender offered to stick around, but Keene told him the whole business had moved way out of his field and there was little further that he would be able to do. Allender left, accordingly, on the last flight that night connecting to Corpus Christi.
The two lawyers accompanying Murray turned out to be Sally Panchard, an old hand who had been with Amspace for years, and Cliff Yeaks, a relatively new recruit from law school but bright, personable, and enthusiastic. Only when he was able to sit down with them in his room, finally removed from the frenzy that had followed him all day, was Keene able to give any real thought to what it all meant.
And what it meant was shattering. The accusations against himself, damaging as they would probably be to the public perception of the Kronians and which constituted Curtiss’s main concern, were not what bothered him. Murray was confident that Voler had carried his theatrics too far, and if the true story were as Keene maintained, systematic investigation of the facts would eventually establish it. That didn’t mean that somebody else hadn’t taken the artifacts up to the Osiris, of course. It was hard to imagine any of the others on the minishuttle being involved, but Curtiss had authorized discreet background checks of all of them as a precaution. But all kinds of official craft had been shuttling up and down between the surface and the Osiris since its arrival, so there was plenty of room for the culprit to be elsewhere.
So did Voler really believe the line he had strung together about Keene? Or had he simply seized an opportunity to derail the Kronians when a convenient set of coincidences presented themselves, knowing that he would be able to admit hastiness and extract himself later? At this stage, it didn’t really matter. What remained—unless some of the world’s foremost experts were unable to tell terrestrial rocks and the work of an ancient human culture from things that had originated in another realm entirely—was that regardless of who had taken or sent them up to the Osiris, the artifacts had come from Earth, which could only mean that the story of their being found on Rhea was a fabrication. And if that were so, then what reliance could be placed on the probe data also? That, of course, had been Voler’s real point. The rest, as likely as not, had been staged to grab some limelight for himself and embarrass Keene and Amspace at the same time.