“Sorry, George, I can’t make plans,” she said. “Yesterday I had to spend the entire day and come back at night to work on one of Rothman’s journal articles, and it still isn’t done. On top of that I’ll be meeting with him sometime to find out what he has in store for me for the entire month. I seriously doubt I’ll even be getting lunch.”
Pia was unhappy to see that the pesky maintenance man was still in her office. He was up the stepladder again, only facing a different direction this time. The day before, as she had worked on Rothman’s paper on one of the benches out in the lab proper, she’d noticed that he’d left at twelve and didn’t come back for four hours. At that rate she worried about him being there pestering her and keeping her from her cubbyhole for a week. Her office was small, but it was hers and she could leave her stuff spread out on the countertops, something she couldn’t do in the main lab.
Pia made enough noise dropping her bag on her tool-littered desk to ensure Vance knew she was there and not particularly happy. “Hey, you up there,” she called out.
Vance pulled his head down into the room and, seeing Pia, climbed down, smiling, rubbing his hands on a rag. “Ah, Miss Grazdani! How are you today? I missed you yesterday when I left.”
“I noticed you took a four-hour lunch. You should have told me you’d be away so long. I could have been working here in my office. Anyway, yesterday you thought you’d be finished. What’s up? How long is this going to take?”
“The job is turning out to be more difficult than I had thought. All I can really say is that I’m trying my best. As soon as I figure out what the hell is wrong, I’ll knock it right out and be outa here.”
Pia merely sighed irritably and lifted her bag.
“Miss Pia, I’ve got a surprise for you. I made an extra sandwich today for lunch, one for me and one for you. How about joining me for a bite? I make a wicked pastrami sandwich on a ciabatta roll. What do you say?”
He was smiling again. Jesus, men were so predictable. Pia glowered: Was this guy suffering from delusions? She wasn’t staying to find out nor did she want to encourage the man.
“Just hurry the hell up with the job. Please!” she snapped. As far as the sandwich offer was concerned, she didn’t even want to acknowledge it.
Pia turned and stepped back into the main lab. She put her bag on the bench area where she’d worked the previous day. But instead of jumping right in, she walked back to Marsha’s desk to find out where their leader was that morning. To her surprise, she learned that Rothman was in his office and waiting for her. Pleased, Pia hurried in through the open door. Immediately she noticed he was dealing with the same maintenance inconvenience Overhead, a number of ceiling tiles were missing and spaghetti-like wires dangled from the holes. An assortment of tools dotted one of the countertops and a few were scattered on the floor. In the corner was a stepladder leaning against the wall and the security camera was missing from its mounting.
“Good morning, Dr. Rothman,” Pia chirped. She never knew what to expect mood-wise but hoped for the best. “Marsha said you were expecting me.”
“Miss Grazdani. How do you spell ‘catheter’?” Rothman demanded, not even bothering to look up from the sheet of paper he was holding. She could tell it was part of the Lancet manuscript she’d worked on.
“C-A-T-H-E-T-E-R. Why?”
“Well, it seems you know how to spell it, so I’m wondering why you felt the need to make up an alternative version for my paper?”
Pia had worked on Rothman’s article, making several suggestions for changes in structure and rewriting one whole section she found particularly opaque. Late last night she had been in a hurry to finish, and she hadn’t run a spell check.
“One wonders what they taught you at NYU, if anything. There were several spelling errors and two grammatical ones.”
From experience, Pia knew how Rothman worked. These jabs at her spelling and grammar almost certainly meant that he had accepted her structural changes. If you lived for compliments and praise, you’d starve to death working for Rothman. Rothman took good work for granted. If you weren’t good, you didn’t last long, so the only elements worth talking about were the minor faults. Rothman twisted in his seat to face his Mac and started pecking his way around the keyboard. Pia surmised he was adding her changes to the original manuscript. Pia took a seat without being asked. If she waited to be asked, she’d be standing all day.
Pia had enjoyed laboring over the Lancet piece. Scientific writing was something she enjoyed and seemed to have a facility for. Over the previous three years, Pia had collaborated with Rothman on his salmonella studies and had even got credit as one of the authors on several. It had been exciting work. Rothman was continuing his award-winning, landmark research that he had accomplished concerning salmonella virulence, a subject for which he’d won his Nobel and Lasker prizes. Virulence was the microorganism’s ability to invade and kill its host cells, something salmonella was particularly good at. Over the years Rothman had found, classified, and defined the five pathogenicity “islands,” or areas, in the salmonella genome that encoded for various virulence-related factors such as specific toxins and antibiotic resistance, both of which had contributed to salmonella being by far the largest cause of human food-borne illness in the world. Every year salmonella caused the mortality and morbidity of countless millions of people. Every year typhoid fever alone still killed upwards of half a million people, a situation Rothman had his sights on rectifying and was coming closer to each year.
Initially when Pia first joined Rothman’s lab, she had been more interested in his newer area of research, namely stem cells, and had hoped to work with them. But he had had other ideas and wanted her to cut her teeth with his continuing salmonella work. As time passed she’d become as committed as he in the microbiological arena, fascinated by bacteria and viruses in general and salmonella in particular and the microscopic realm they inhabited. Soon she found herself reveling in the involved science while enjoying the thrill of working with one of the greatest minds on the subject. On a daily basis Pia had come to relish refining her knowledge of genetics so that she could one day make her own contribution to basic research. Gradually she had come to realize how exciting research could be and how well it fit with her personality.
Pia watched Rothman type away in front of her. The level of his concentration was truly remarkable. One minute he’d been talking with her, the next he was totally absorbed, as if she were no longer in his presence. Pia did not take any aspect of his behavior personally. After he’d confided about his Asperger’s, she’d read about the syndrome and guessed that many aspects of his personality were dictated by it, even ignoring her as he was doing at that moment. Instead of being annoyed, she thought about the content of the article she’d rewritten. It was about studies that Rothman had been doing involving salmonella typhi grown in outer space on the orbiting International Space Station. Rothman had found that growing the bacteria in a zero-gravity environment made it enormously more virulent than control bacteria grown back on earth. It was Rothman’s belief that the conditions in space somehow mimicked to a marked extent those present in the human ileum, triggering the bacteria to turn on the genes in the pathogenicity islands to produce effector proteins. Pia was one of the few people who knew that at that moment in the refrigerated storage facility inside the biosafety unit there were three strains of these enormously virulent, space-grown salmonella. She also knew that what Rothman wanted to do was to figure out how zero gravity caused these changes with the hope of learning how to turn them off, not only in space but in the human ileum as well.