Harlow passed his hand over his eyes. With puffy, unsteady fingers he tore the plastic wrapper from two more pink, heart-shaped Pepto-Bismol tablets.

A few hundred miles to the east, in a similar office in a similar building on the campus of the Colorado Institute of Technology, Professor Leland Roach was suffering no such distress. Happily engrossed in his work, his spare and narrow-shouldered form hunched over the laptop computer on his desk, he clicked away at his latest contribution to the Southwestern Journal of Paleopathology. His own words, elegant and authoritative, blinked comfortingly into existence on the screen:

…these fecal samples were then rehydrated in an aqueous trisodium phosphate solution, resulting in the recovery of four oocysts of a parasitic protozoan identified as belonging to the genus Eimeria; most probably E. piriformis. This provocative burning…

›The steady clicking faltered, then stopped. Burning? A tic of annoyance jogged his old-fashioned, pencil-straight mustache. Leland moved the cursor back and hit the delete key. Burning vanished, to be replaced by finding. Leland consulted his notes, flexed his fingers, and hunched forward again. But further words did not appear on the screen. His thought processes had been disrupted.

He’d read Miranda’s letter when it arrived that morning, clipped a note to it instructing Eloise to make airline and lodging reservations for him, and put it out of his mind. Or so he’d thought. But now, here was burning popping up when he’d meant finding. A Freudian slip, he thought with distaste. Leland disapproved of Freudian slips as not being in accord with his notions of the way one’s mind ought to work. To his way of thinking, they represented a sort of mental disloyalty, a sneaky double cross by some perverse corner of one’s own brain. Leland prided himself on how infrequently he made such slips.