“My name is Julie, and this is my colleague, Will. We have some microscope images we think the professor will be very interested in seeing.”
“Doctor Johansen never mentioned this to me. Do you have an appointment?”
“No, but I assure you this will only take a few minutes of his time.”
“Doctor Johansen does not see anyone without an appointment. You can leave the images here with me, and if he is interested, he will contact you.”
Julie looked at Will. He shook his head, no.
“I’m afraid we can’t do that.”
The woman sighed with annoyance. “Show me your pictures.”
Julie retrieved two prints of Will’s lymphocytes from her backpack and set them down on the least cluttered area of the desk. The assistant looked carefully over the images.
She stood abruptly, carrying one print in each hand.
“Wait here.”
Julie nodded and looked at Will. She tried to appear serious, but she could not suppress a smile. She looked back at Johansen’s assistant to give her authorization, but the Austrian woman had already disappeared.
After what seemed like an eternity, Johansen’s assistant returned with a lanky, balding, handsome gentleman of sixty in tow. The assistant handed the images back to Julie.
The man greeted them in English, flavored with a Scandinavian accent. “Hello. My name is Dr. Roger Johansen. Please, follow me.”
They followed him down a hallway and into his immense office.
“Have a seat,” said Professor Johansen, motioning to a group of vacant chairs set haphazardly around a large round table in the middle of his immense office. The remainder of the room was more reminiscent of an architect’s model city than a microbiologist’s office, with books and journals rising from the floor in stacks like skyscrapers. Several paths wove between the towers like city streets, the widest of which led to his partially occluded desk.
Main Street.
“This round table is where I hold all of our staff meetings. It is an excellent place for discerning discourse and heated discussion.”
“Very Arthurian,” Julie said.
“Indeed, except instead of Excalibur, in my laboratory I have one of the world’s most powerful bright field microscopes.”
Julie and Will chuckled, politely.
“Your names again, I’m sorry?”
“I’m Julie, and this is my colleague, Will.”
“Julie and Will. Good. You are Americans, no?”
“Yes, we are.”
“Good, I like Americans. Now, let us talk about why you are here, shall we?”
“We’re here to discuss possibilities,” Will began.
Johansen laughed, grinning ear to ear. “Possibilities. Marvelous! Did you rehearse that opening?”
Will smiled, uncertain how to respond.
“Forgive my sense of humor,” said Johansen, settling down. “Let’s take a look at the images together.”
“Of course,” Julie said. She retrieved all the pages from her backpack and spread them out across the table.
Johansen retrieved a pair of eyeglasses from his shirt breast pocket, put them on, and leaned forward to take a closer look.
“These are lymphocytes, yes?”
“Yes, except…”
“Except, this one is not a classical lymphocyte,” Johansen interrupted pointing with the tail end of his pen at the image. “What is this cell here?”
“We don’t know. Which is exactly why we’ve come to see you.”
Johansen scrutinized the pictures in silence, while they waited patiently. Then he took off his eyeglasses, folded them, and looked up.
“What else can you tell me? This is interesting, that’s for certain, but I can teach you nothing by looking at naked images. When were they taken? Do you have the blood panel that accompanies these? What was the medical condition of the subject? I can think of a thousand questions to ask you. So please, tell me, what other information can you provide?”
“These images were obtained using a scanning electron microscope on blood samples taken from a patient who demonstrates an unnatural resistance to infection. In this particular case, the patient had been exposed to live Yersinia pestis bacilli. The sample was drawn seven days after exposure to the pathogen.”
“Excuse me?” Johansen replied, practically falling out of his chair. “By patient are you referring to a nonhuman primate?”
“No.”
“Do you work with UNICEF?”
“No.”
“This patient was encountered during fieldwork of yours?”
“No. Laboratory trial.”
Johansen’s face hardened. “Young woman, are you playing games with me?”
“Absolutely not.”
“If what you are telling me is true, I should be reporting you to the police, not trying to help you with some sick experiment.”
“This is not my work. This is not my patient. I’m an oncologist, not an immunologist. I came to you because this is way out of my league. When I found your biography on the university website, I thought you might have the expertise necessary to help us.”
Johansen took a deep breath. “What you are telling me is that these images were derived from samples drawn from someone who is not your patient, enrolled in an experiment in a laboratory where you do not work, and in a field of study which you have no expertise?”
“Yes.”
Johansen smiled and looked at Will. “What is your role in all of this? Let me guess, you operated the microscope?”
“No,” Will said, “I’m the patient.”
The professor looked at Will, then at Julie, and finally back at Will. He slowly and deliberately unfolded his eyeglasses, and put them back on. “Okay. I think I see what is happening here.”
“What is that?” asked Julie.
“Either, you are both lying to me with this fantastic story — for what end I do not know — or, you are telling me the truth, and we have a bona fide mystery on our hands. From the look on your faces, I am inclined to believe the latter.”
“Professor Johansen, we come to you now at considerable risk,” Will began. “We have no one else to turn to. Nowhere else to go. There is something inside of me. Something that makes me different. I want to understand what that something is. We were hoping that with your help, I might finally be able to get some answers.”
“If you want my help, then you must agree to my conditions.”
“Which are?” asked Julie.
“First, we agree to be completely honest with each other at all times, even if the truth is unpleasant. Second, you must agree that I can include the findings in my immunology research.”
“We will agree to your conditions if you agree to one of ours,” Will said.
“Which is?”
“You agree to maintain complete and absolute secrecy about our identities and the nature of this finding.”
“Without question. I will maintain complete confidentiality at all times. You have my word.”
“Then you have mine,” Will said. He turned to Julie.
“And mine,” she added.
“Good. Where shall we begin?” asked Will.
“With a history lesson,” Johansen said with a smile. “I came to Vienna almost twenty years ago. It was the logical place for me to locate my laboratory,” Johansen explained.
“Why is that?” asked Will.
“Vienna has a rich and fascinating plague history — a dubious distinction in most people’s minds — but for my type of work, it’s perfect. Geographically, Vienna is centrally located in Europe. The Danube River flows east through the center of the city and stretches 2,800 kilometers from Germany to the Black Sea. Through most of its history, Vienna has been a crossroads in Europe.”
“A crossroads of what?”
“Trade, migration, war — the inevitable mixing and mashing of different peoples from different lands. All converging here, all carrying germs, making Vienna a crossroads for disease as well.”