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Clarence now understood their excitement. He was beginning to feel it himself.

“So if you take it soon enough, it is a cure,” he said. “What happens after the twenty-four hours?”

Tim shrugged. “The crawlers need about twenty-four hours to form, find your nervous system and reach your brain. If enough of them get in, they rework your brain into the cellulose-based structures we’ve seen. At that point, it’s too late.”

Clarence looked at Margaret. “But you said Walker had hydras in her brain. Hydras can get in there?”

Margaret nodded. “They can, following the same path the crawlers do. We don’t have much evidence to go on right now, but it seems possible the hydras travel to the brain instinctually, because they are so closely related to the crawlers. But there’s a difference — the hydras don’t seem to alter brain tissue. They’re just there.”

As far as cures went, alien organisms in the brain didn’t seem all that encouraging.

“Say the crawlers get to the brain first,” Clarence said. “They start changing everything around, and then the hydras get there. What happens then?”

Margaret glanced at Tim.

“The hydras probably keep secreting their catalyst,” he said. “Since they’re on the other side of the blood-brain barrier, and so are the crawlers, any crawlers exposed to the catalyst will die. Any cellulose-based structures probably dissolve.”

“Which means what to the host?”

“Death,” Tim said. “It means death.”

For a few minutes, Clarence had dared to hope that it was all over, that if some poor soul was infected, he or she could be saved with a shot or a pill. Life didn’t work that way, it seemed. Still, at least now there was something to fight with.

“Impressive work,” Clarence said. “So what happens next?”

“Tim goes to work on genetically sequencing the hydras,” Margaret said. “He isolates the genetic code that makes the catalyst, inserts that bit of code into the genome of his yeast, and the yeast produces the catalyst.”

That sounded impossible.

“Feely, you can really do that?”

Tim shrugged. “It’s how insulin is made for diabetics. The DNA that makes insulin is inserted into bacteria, the bacteria secrete the insulin, which is harvested and purified. When the bacteria reproduce, the subsequent generations have that same inserted DNA. Boom, you have a permanent, insulin-producing population.

“The basic technology is decades old. I’ve spent the last two years inserting crawler coding into my fast-growing yeast, so at this point it’s just plug-and-play. The only question is if my yeast will survive the new coding. If so, we’ll have Saccharomyces feely producing the catalyst inside of a few hours.”

A few hours? Clarence fought down his immediate reaction. He wasn’t going to get his hopes up this fast.

“Let’s hope you’re right,” he said. “What do you need to make this happen?”

Now Tim glanced at Margaret. She looked away, looked down.

“We need to make more hydras,” she said. “And there’s only one way to do that.”