Pandemic Page 48

Just a pull of the trigger, one tiny motion, and his brains would splatter all over the cabin. Steve stayed oh-so-still, lest a s.h.i.+ver or a twitch make Bo Pan’s finger squeeze.

“Yes, I understand.”

The pressure against his temple went away, leaving the cool spot in its wake.

“Good,” Bo Pan said. “And your other machine, the snake, it can destroy an American ROV?”

The snake had been in the second crate. It hitched a ride on the Platypus the way a remora hitches a ride on a shark. It was made up of nine metal-sh.e.l.led sections connected together by rubber seals. Each section had a battery-powered motor inside. The nine motors worked in synchronicity to create a waving motion: the three-foot-long robot could slither across land like a snake, or swim through water like an eel.

Each metal-sh.e.l.led section also held twenty grams of C-4. If the snake swam near a threatening object, it could detonate all nine charges at once.

“Steve, I asked you a question. If it needs to, can the snake destroy an American ROV?”

Steve’s body vibrated with fear.

“Yes, of course,” he said. He wasn’t sure if it could or it couldn’t, but he wasn’t about to say that to an angry old man holding a gun. “If the snake can wrap around one of the navy’s ROVs, it can detonate and crush the thing like a tin can. But if you’re thinking of using it on the locker that holds the alien object, Bo Pan, I can’t guarantee it won’t destroy everything inside.”

Bo Pan shrugged. “The Americans will try to retrieve the container. When they do, they will open the locker for us. That is when your machine will take it. I will tell you what I want it to do. I talk, you program, understand?”

Steve turned to his computer, suddenly relieved to dive into his work, to give his brain something to think of other than Bo Pan’s gun.

THE BARRIER

Clarence sat in the observation module. He watched a monitor, trying to make sense of the video Tim and Margaret were so excited to share with him. It was time-lapse footage, two side-by-side bits of Charlie Petrovsky’s rotting flesh. Five hours compressed into fifteen seconds let Clarence immediately see a significant difference.

He looked over the console, down into the a.n.a.lysis Module where Tim and Margaret stared up at him, waiting.

“Okay, I watched it,” Clarence said. “The one on the left is rotting faster than the one on the right. What’s it mean?”

Tim turned to Margaret, half bowed, lowered his arm in a sweeping gesture: after you, madame. Margaret mocked a curtsy, which looked ridiculous in her bulky suit.

To say their mood had changed was an understatement; they thought they were on to something big.

“The sample on the left is the control,” Margaret said. “That’s Petrovsky’s tissue, getting hit hard by the black rot. The one on the right is also his tissue but was treated with a solution that contained Walker’s blood.”

Clarence glanced at the footage again. “Walker’s blood stops the black rot?”

This time Margaret turned to Tim, bowed, made the after you gesture. Tim kept form and mocked a curtsy of his own — a little better than Margaret’s, Clarence had to admit.

“Not Walker’s blood, exactly, but a chemical that’s in it,” Tim said. “I found a compound in her blood that wasn’t present in Petrovsky. We then detected that same compound in the few living hydras we have left. Ergo, the hydras make it. The compound is a catalyst that alters the black-rot process — it turns off the part that makes human bodies undergo exponential apoptosis, but it doesn’t do anything to the chemical that makes the infected tissues and microorganisms undergo their own chain-reaction decomposition.”

Clarence had to play back the words in his head to make sure he wasn’t oversimplifying what he’d heard. Could it be that straightforward?

“So it’s a cure,” he said. “It kills the infection, but leaves our tissue alone?”

Tim thought for a moment. “Sort of. It depends on how long the person has been exposed. See, the catalyst is a really big molecule. You know anything about the blood-brain barrier?”

Clarence hesitated for a moment, wondering if Tim was trying to make him look stupid in front of Margaret, but both of them seemed far too excited to be playing any games.

“No, not really.”

“Think of it like a mesh,” Margaret said. “It’s a semipermeable membrane. That means things of a certain size can penetrate it, but things larger than that size cannot. It evolved to keep circulating blood separate from the extracellular fluid” — she paused, perhaps realizing she was going too far into detail — “to keep blood and other things separated from actual brain tissue. Blood can’t go through the barrier, but oxygen diffused from blood can. So if things are small enough, they can slide through the mesh. If they’re too big, they can’t. Follow me so far?”

Clarence nodded.

Tim held out his hands wide, like he was talking about the fish that got away.

“The hydra catalyst is too large to penetrate the barrier,” he said. “So to answer your question, the catalyst first works as an inoculant — if it’s already in your system before you are exposed to the infection, any crawlers produced will die before they can reach your brain. It makes you immune. And if you’ve already been infected but the crawlers have not yet reached your brain, the catalyst can kill off those crawlers. Meaning, if you get infected right now and we get this catalyst in your system within twenty-four hours, it will probably cure you.”