In the lounge, Mike sat Doree firmly into a chair. "Now let's not have any tears. Just tell it the way it happened."
Doree had got control of herself. She sat straight, miserable, a little pathetic, Mike thought. She said, "Lorn McKee and Dean Talbott were Paris art collectors. Their reputations were not of the best but when they approached father he listened to them.
"They had a strange looking scroll made of papyrus. It had writing on it in an ancient script and they wanted father to translate it for them."
"Would that have made it more valuable?"
"Of course. At first father was suspicious, thinking it was some kind of a hoax. They told him the scroll had come from an Egyptian tomb but would tell him no more relative to its origination. They brought it to him because he was Terra's foremost authority in that field.
"Father discovered immediately that the scroll was genuine and very old. Papyrus was a material the ancient Egyptians used."
"And—?" Mike asked impatiently.
"He refused to translate it for them because they in turn would not tell him what they proposed to do with it. He felt it should be turned over to the proper authorities—some university—and besides, he was suspicious of the two men. So they went away and tried to get it translated elsewhere. This was impossible, so they came back and offered to sell it to father for a very low price but with the stipulation that he keep what he learned strictly to himself.
"He wanted to make the translation and was tempted because he already had a clue to its nature. He believed the scroll verified a theory long in existence on Terra relative to the extraterrestrial origination of mankind."