“Good, yes,” George said. They had gone over all this before but under the circumstances, George was happy to do it again. Pia tore the sheets she had written on off her legal pad, crumpled them into a ball, and threw the ball in the general direction of the trash basket. She missed. Pia began writing again, more slowly this time.

“Okay,” she said while she worked. “We do have a timeline of the infection. The onset was extremely rapid. Rothman or Yamamoto pressed the panic button and there was a medical team in the lab almost at once. I saw them arrive. Rothman and Yamamoto knew what to look out for, so from the first symptom to the medical team arriving may have been only ten minutes, at the outside. Springer showed up, and he went into the lab. Then he stayed and talked to the staff while Rothman and Yamamoto were taken directly up to the infectious disease floor and put in isolation, and treatment was started. I’d say they were there in five or six minutes. And Springer told us it was classic typhoid fever—high temperature, delirium, and so on, so it was diagnosed immediately. No delays. They got antibiotics within an hour of the initial symptoms.”

Pia had the pad on her knee.

“So Rothman and Yamamoto got all the symptoms straight off. It apparently wasn’t the usual sequence where a patient gets one symptom initially and then another a few hours later. It happened like a bolt of lightning. As far as I know, that’s not the way typhoid fever develops. Then the patients got the more ominous rebound tenderness by that evening. It’s all so speeded up.”

“You said this was a particularly virulent strain,” George said.

“True. One of the zero-gravity strains. The alpha strain. But still.”

“And you also said that Rothman’s own sensitivity studies suggested that the strain should have been knocked out by the antibiotic he was given.”

“That’s right, the chloramphenicol and later the ceftriaxone.”

“So what are you saying? Are you suggesting that it can’t have been that strain of salmonella?”

“No, I’m not. The strain had to be involved since Koch’s postulates were satisfied.”

“Meaning that they managed to grow the culture from samples taken from the patient.”

“Or by using more modern DNA techniques, yes.”

“Pia,” George complained, “you’re confusing me. What’s the bottom line here? What are you trying to say?”

“I suggested to Springer that there might be a second bacteria involved, a bacteria or a virus that was actually more virulent than the salmonella typhi and that was resistant to the antibiotics. It could explain the shockingly fast clinical course Rothman and Yamamoto experienced.”

“What was Springer’s reaction to your suggestion?”

“He went bonkers on me,” Pia said with disgust. “That was the end of the interview because he went out and called in reinforcements, meaning the dean.”